I understand why smart chains have been stigmatized, but how is an inherently custodial ecash system any better?

Chaumian ecash requires more trust in a single party (e.g. a Cashu mint) while blockchain smart contracts can be designed to decentralize trust and distribute it to the entire network. The question is whether or not SimpleX Chat ltd. will remain a trusted party for other reasons. If the payment system can be made fully trustless, the blockchain approach has merit. Otherwise it'll be an unnecessary complication.

There's no straightforward way to resell these vouchers if I'm understanding the proposed system correctly, so they aren't useful as an investment and won't serve to raise capital for anyone.

I'm not sure this is the best solution. It does seem to solve the stated problems, but it's difficult for a lot of users to understand what it solves and why.

Use what you want. Bitcoin is resilient against both spam and censorship by design. The market is what it is and life goes on.

This only sounds like a good idea until someone you disagree with gets hold of power again.

That's right - Bitcoin won't do you a bit of good until you've got Jesus to thank for it. Money buys temporary freedom. Jesus bought eternity for us.

His actions are infuriating, but investigating citizens over a SHIRT is irrational and unconstitutional.

It's reasonable to demand that opinion be called opinion. Protection for opinion and political speech remain under the First Amendment. Presenting something provably false in the eyes of any reasonableperson as objectively true is a crime against the public. Questioning the credibility of established "facts" is both fine and necessary, but the opinion being presented shouldn't be treated as objective fact for disingenuous reasons. Essentially if this is handled correctly, it would force a bit more intellectual honesty in public discourse through the media.

There is of course room for debate as to whether or not government intervention is worthwhile. It certainly might not be. It's difficult to word the intent of such a law to target malicious propaganda without making it theoretically possible to stifle some legitimate discourse as well. On the other hand, anything disclaimed as opinion is probably untouchable anyway, as it should be.

The whole debate is mostly a nothing burger. Form your own opinion and use the software you want. Either one is better than not running a node. If you don't want jpegs in the block chain, don't propagate or mine them. If enough people agree, those transactions will cost more and sometimes fail. Market forces will deal with the rest either way. Bitcoin is working as intended.

This whole debate is mostly a nothing burger. Have your own opinion and run what you want. Market forces will do the rest.

The software individual nodes and miners choose to run should be mostly irrelevant in the long run. As long as there are miners willing to include your transactions, Bitcoin will keep working.

If this is ever not the case, Bitcoin needs to be improved. Therefore, do what you want with your own node.

The regulated services will just be shutting themselves out of the economy at that point.

It's really not that simple. Censorship and spam are both inevitable. We should be asking bigger qquestions about how Bitcoin can evolve to better resist all kinds of attacks.

For example, can we keep prices low and fair for monetary transactions while increasing the cost of spam?

Can we more effectively penalize miners or mining pools for rejecting valid transactions, driving them out of jurisdictions that demand censorship?

Can we enhance the network's resistance to 51% attacks?

There's a lot more to this than the dubious efficacy of one particular spam filter.

Ocean is now working on DATUM to further improve decentralization. It's in public beta right now.

https://ocean.xyz/docs/datum-setup

"Effectively, the White House urges FinCEN to deem *all* privacy measures in digital assets a “primary money laundering concern” under the PATRIOT Act."

I've been gradually searching through the report, but haven't been able to locate this particular recommendation yet to substantiate your claim about it. What page of the report is this on?

In other words, it may be more accurate to say that stablecoins and CBDCs are clearly different things but ultimately have similar value because they share a common vulnerability.

While there is a difference in how efficiently a government can commit acts of tyranny against users of CBDCs vs stablecoins, and I think this distinction is noteworthy under some circumstances, it's also important to make a judgement about how this affects the hard value of the asset.

I think if you're saying the soundness of a stablecoin's value is the same as that of a CBDC, you'd be absolutely correct. In both cases, 100% of the asset's value is ultimately in the hands of the state. Thus, both are only as valuable as the government in question is trustworthy. Compared to a permissionless system, this value will always be approximately zero.

The only long-term solution is to keep improving BTC's ability to resist censorship and surveillance. Government isn't a solution to financial problems. Real money is. We can't expect governments to keep their hands off. We need to ensure it's technically impossible and therefore beyond their power to go hands-on.

We also need to ban CBDCs in the United States ASAP. Other countries should follow suit if they want to call themselves free or democratic.

The client list, the real one, was probably long gone or long corrupted. We still need answers and accountability for that.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1919/text/eh

We need to ban CBDCs to limit government power. Call your senators and get this thing passed ASAP. It already passed the House.

Is it actually open source or is it just pretending by sharing outdated code?

I hope it keeps dropping. We need a strong signal and backlash to discourage further regulation of the crypto world and the potential destruction of the crypto industry in the United States.

So far it's only stablecoins, but we're on a dark path. The BTC network needs to improve its resistance to and ability to penalize malicious miners ASAP.

Stablecoins as regulated in the GENIUS act are legally subject to government surveillance, censorship, and seizure. Assets with these properties are no better than stocks, bonds, or fiat.

Non-custodial bitcoin is secure against civil asset forfeiture.

I'm sort of in the middle on this. I think their anticompetitive behavior needs to be stopped. Google should be forbidden from entering into agreements to become the default search engine and should be forbidden from making Play Services mandatory on any Android device. Beyond that, I think the problem is a bit more organic.

Most browsers use Chromium to some extent. This is mainly because it's the most secure browser engine. The flip side to this is that web standards have become such a monster that creating a secure browser is a massive undertaking almost on the level of an operating system. In the course of normal web browsing, we are constantly loading and running random code, and you'd better hope it's confined well. This high barrier to entry means few viable browser alternatives emerge and monopolies are all but inevitable.

Separating Google from Chrome might seem to solve something, and maybe it does solve something, but I don't see how it improves the situation that caused the browser monopoly to begin with.

The client-side WOT score system in #Coracle seems like such a common sense thing that I'm surprised every Nostr client hasn't rushed to implement something similar. It's simple, efficient, and does more or less what it needs to.

It looks to me like the commit you reverted was in bad faith. It appears to have been disguised as a joke in a perverse attempt to ram it through without consensus. You did the right thing.

YouTube is a metastatic cancer. Cut off its blood supply by blocking all ads. When YouTube requires all viewers to be logged in, it will slowly die in oblivion while alternatives grow rapidly.

Here's some open source software to help:

https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe

https://grayjay.app/

https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube

It wouldn't be a problem if the government would stop stealing 40% of our money.