Elon is a grifter, no doubt about it. But to minimize SpaceX's achievements in pushing the envelope of human space exploration is folly. Yes, spend my tax dollars getting us back into space. It's a million times better use of my money than invading foreign countries for no good reason.

So the dogecoin con artist is getting billions in government subsidies to launch massive rockets that do nothing more than blow up in the sky... And this is somehow a brave and heroic achievement and not just blatant theft because he's convinced TV viewers that these rockets will somehow take humanity to Mars. Do I have this right?

Thought experiment:

How can we 10X the number of bitcoin nodes running in a distributed, trustless way?

Turnkey software solutions make it easy for people to set up a node but the hardware is often overpriced and overhyped, while the software provides a central point of capture (What do you do if your Raspbery Pi Node Software Provider goes rogue and auto-updates all their users to an evil fork?)

So I’m toying with the idea of mad market devices with the bitcoin software burned into the hardware in a write-once way. Nodes can’t be upgraded remotely since it’s basically an ASIC for a particular version of the consensus model.

But how can you trust the hardware to truly be write-once and/or not have a backdoor? How can you allow updates for auxiliary software like Tor and Electrum?

Thoughts?

Or is it just a solution in search of a problem?

People that have bluechecks on x.com are now banned from Nostr.

But also: The ACLU used to defend Nazi’s right to free [hate] speech while simultaneously decrying their speech as abhorrent, because the 1st Amendment was that important to that organization at the time. I think it would be good to get back to that. To be super clear: Nazis are narrow-minded bigots. I don’t support them at all. I think they should all se the error of their ways and reform like a few have.

But the idea of the ACLU supporting the rights of even that sort of speech should be held up as the golden standard of free speech.

We have to protect the free speech of even the outliers at either extreme of the bell curve. As soon as we start truncating the tails of that curve, where does it stop?

Let the record show I’m also very impressed with what Mr. Connolly said during his initial time speaking on camera around the three hour mark.

I’m going to start by saying I assume I’m ignorant, naive, making bad assumptions, or just being dumb. I’m probably wrong and I hope I am.

Can someone explain how the the #fedimint decentralization model is supposed to resist coercion or threats of violence? Because I don’t get it

Apologies if this comes across as a straw man, but my understanding of it is that in the fedimint paradigm:

1. It will only be safe to join a fedimint that’s local (and therefore subject to “Proof of fist” if they try to rug you)

2. It will only be safe to join a fedimint run by people you know personally

3. Fedimints an are envisioned to serve as tools for onboarding and scaling small rural communities, especially in the global south.

Now let’s say there’s a remote town of 500 people, and 5 people run the mint for that town. Everyone in the town who uses the mint (which is almost everyone) knows who those 5 people are and more or less where they live and that they hold the keys for most of the community’s BTC. This is necessary for proof of fist and the threat of social censure in the case of bad behavior.

What stops some warlord or bandit group or dictator from just showing up with AK47s, coercing the names of the mint runners from the first few people they encountered, and then kicking down their doors and demanding the bitcoin at gunpoint? If it were rural America, then the citizens would have the guns to defend themselves, but that isn’t the case in most places. If it was in America, then the citizens would have some confidence that the government wouldn’t use outright violent coercion to discover the names of the mint runners or seize the mint’s bitcoin. There would be some rule of law in place. But again, most people don’t have such assurances or rights.

So that’s my question/ skepticism:

How does fedimint work to protect people’s (that is, a community’s) bitcoin in places where property rights and rule of law are more suggestions than anything else?

I want it to work, I just see it being pretty fragile against violent coercion IF IT’S LOCAL and IF the mint runners are PERSONALLY KNOWN to the mint users.

This is something I’ve heard very little discussion of. I hope there’s a good answer because my understanding is that fedimint was conceptualized by people focused on the global south, so they should have some idea of the challenges faced, but I just don’t understand how a mint is supposed to be resistant to violence when the runners are easily identified and located.

I am not all that familiar with Fedimint myself. but wouldn't what you describe apply to pretty much everything? We cannot provide a software solution to a hardware problem.

No matter the money form or technology, an armed band of bringands stronger than a community will always be capable of robbing them of things of value.

One can come up with elaborate schemes like time locks and temporarily prohibiting local access, but as long as you have access to people and you can coerce them to do pretty much anything. There is no money technology, that can fix that.

AFAyiK, it's a separate issue, that needs to be handled separately.

I’m going to start by saying I assume I’m ignorant, naive, making bad assumptions, or just being dumb. I’m probably wrong and I hope I am.

Can someone explain how the the #fedimint decentralization model is supposed to resist coercion or threats of violence? Because I don’t get it

Apologies if this comes across as a straw man, but my understanding of it is that in the fedimint paradigm:

1. It will only be safe to join a fedimint that’s local (and therefore subject to “Proof of fist” if they try to rug you)

2. It will only be safe to join a fedimint run by people you know personally

3. Fedimints an are envisioned to serve as tools for onboarding and scaling small rural communities, especially in the global south.

Now let’s say there’s a remote town of 500 people, and 5 people run the mint for that town. Everyone in the town who uses the mint (which is almost everyone) knows who those 5 people are and more or less where they live and that they hold the keys for most of the community’s BTC. This is necessary for proof of fist and the threat of social censure in the case of bad behavior.

What stops some warlord or bandit group or dictator from just showing up with AK47s, coercing the names of the mint runners from the first few people they encountered, and then kicking down their doors and demanding the bitcoin at gunpoint? If it were rural America, then the citizens would have the guns to defend themselves, but that isn’t the case in most places. If it was in America, then the citizens would have some confidence that the government wouldn’t use outright violent coercion to discover the names of the mint runners or seize the mint’s bitcoin. There would be some rule of law in place. But again, most people don’t have such assurances or rights.

So that’s my question/ skepticism:

How does fedimint work to protect people’s (that is, a community’s) bitcoin in places where property rights and rule of law are more suggestions than anything else?

I want it to work, I just see it being pretty fragile against violent coercion IF IT’S LOCAL and IF the mint runners are PERSONALLY KNOWN to the mint users.

This is something I’ve heard very little discussion of. I hope there’s a good answer because my understanding is that fedimint was conceptualized by people focused on the global south, so they should have some idea of the challenges faced, but I just don’t understand how a mint is supposed to be resistant to violence when the runners are easily identified and located.

I’m going to start by saying I assume I’m ignorant, naive, making bad assumptions, or just being dumb. I’m probably wrong and I hope I am.

Can someone explain how the the #fedimint decentralization model is supposed to resist coercion or threats of violence? Because I don’t get it

Apologies if this comes across as a straw man, but my understanding of it is that in the fedimint paradigm:

1. It will only be safe to join a fedimint that’s local (and therefore subject to “Proof of fist” if they try to rug you)

2. It will only be safe to join a fedimint run by people you know personally

3. Fedimints an are envisioned to serve as tools for onboarding and scaling small rural communities, especially in the global south.

Now let’s say there’s a remote town of 500 people, and 5 people run the mint for that town. Everyone in the town who uses the mint (which is almost everyone) knows who those 5 people are and more or less where they live and that they hold the keys for most of the community’s BTC. This is necessary for proof of fist and the threat of social censure in the case of bad behavior.

What stops some warlord or bandit group or dictator from just showing up with AK47s, coercing the names of the mint runners from the first few people they encountered, and then kicking down their doors and demanding the bitcoin at gunpoint? If it were rural America, then the citizens would have the guns to defend themselves, but that isn’t the case in most places. If it was in America, then the citizens would have some confidence that the government wouldn’t use outright violent coercion to discover the names of the mint runners or seize the mint’s bitcoin. There would be some rule of law in place. But again, most people don’t have such assurances or rights.

So that’s my question/ skepticism:

How does fedimint work to protect people’s (that is, a community’s) bitcoin in places where property rights and rule of law are more suggestions than anything else?

I want it to work, I just see it being pretty fragile against violent coercion IF IT’S LOCAL and IF the mint runners are PERSONALLY KNOWN to the mint users.

This is something I’ve heard very little discussion of. I hope there’s a good answer because my understanding is that fedimint was conceptualized by people focused on the global south, so they should have some idea of the challenges faced, but I just don’t understand how a mint is supposed to be resistant to violence when the runners are easily identified and located.