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’d like to see a crowdfunded rebuttal along the lines of “Greenpeace, Stop ignoring Bitcoin’s built-in incentive to build and use renewable and excess (otherwise wasted) energy”
Several problems: audio calls wouldn’t connect or ring, and video calls were… glitchy especially during the initial connection, and never did connect properly for me. I also had trouble authorizing the app to use microphone or camera for the first time in response to an incoming call. Although I DID authorize it, on both devices, so that wasn’t the problem. Things like that made me think SimpleX wasn’t ready yet. I don’t want to scare anyone away from it, definitely try it, maybe it will work for you. But it didn’t for me, to my great disappointment.🙁
I had a lot of trouble getting audio/video calls to work in SimplX on iOS, compared to Signal. Enough that I and a family member gave up on replacing Signal with it because calls were worse. I’d rather use SimpleX because the security model seems better, but I need reliable audio calls, at least.
Option 1: Crushing alternatives maliciously
Option 2: bad pattern recognition heuristics zeroed in on letter and word combinations (S(impl)EX-CHAT)
Why ascribe to malice what can be fully explained by incompetence?😂 nostr:note1psnz5lf3cm27ds9ywam6a7fncka22wt8es55hal5qtn72n0g0wdq4lh5lq
My two sats: neither is fully right. Tell your son “spend and replace” is the way. I hypothesize Bitcoiners as a group become more productive when we transfer value amongst ourselves using bitcoin, the monetary superconductor. Tell your daughter to get the desired medium of exchange in writing beforehand to avoid being bait and switched with Monopoly money.😂 nostr:note1cmeg9qf44q0ysh5gmjuetsnz2wkrq7kd9w09h5u2fz5ly6g5trgqrgkj62
If inflation is a memory leak, the bug that’s causing it is people in government having the ability to initiate money creation on demand at zero marginal cost
“Inflation is a memory leak in our civilization process”
Has anyone explored this metaphor before? It certainly isn’t for every audience, but I think anyone who knows what a memory leak is will find this a meaningful, memorable comparison that hints at both the danger and severity of the problem of left unchecked.
Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism
One of my best friends was gay (sadly he passed due to heart disease) and another very close friend of mine is in a queerplatonic relationship with her roommate/best friend, who herself has a boyfriend, so I understand and accept that sort of thing. I’m a
a sci-fi enthusiast, and philosophically a trans-humanist. I’ve read enough science fiction where both gender and sex (and even body plan) are malleable through technology or engineered biology to normalize that sort of thing in my mind.
I like to think most egalitarian society is the one where everyone is a shapeshifter, so appearance means nothing and is totally malleable, the only thing that makes you “you” is your mind.
Mostly because it’s just easier to let someone else maintain an email server than to do it yourself, isn’t it? Theoretically there’s nothing stopping you from spinning up your own email server at your own domain, but it relies on DNS registrations and there’s little incentive to do it individually. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
Hopefully paid relays will fix the incentive aspect for nostr. Also, who knows? I’m feeling a little inspired to run my own email server all of a sudden. Maybe nostr will inspire a resurgence now that it’s a lot easier to host one’s own server these days.
I grew up a strait-laced, mild mannered rule follower. I even believed in asking permission rather than seeking forgiveness. As I’ve gotten older, I find I’m becoming more of a rebel as I see the consequences of following the rules, mainly ceding power that shouldn’t be ceded, and losing freedoms that shouldn’t be lost.
I recently made the decision to jump ship over Apple’s handling of zap payments and move to android. I was actually browsing phones in the store today, although I didn’t buy one (yet). So it comes as quite an unwelcome surprise to hear that Google is about to try / is trying the same bullshit on their side of the fence in their own App Store. It all comes down to enforcement but it certainly sounds the same to me.
I say that as background to explain my current headspace.
I don’t have any interest in following rules that suit only the rulers. Fuck that.
Like he said, Android is open. They can’t enforce shit (if we sideload).
It just pisses me off that so many people are going to get frozen out of using zaps (like me currently) because of arbitrary platform rules. It also seems like a slippery slope. We’re already on nostr because we don’t like the control on other platforms, and now they want to control us here?
Fuck that. nostr:note1wdvuvj86yrtst6ulnp8guy2u49arnsg947s05jdq6rgxvcnxp6kqv9drfa
Wow! I got about halfway through it before my lunch break ended, I’ll definitely watch the rest later tonight. Excellent so far!
Just so you know, I’m switching to Android with my next phone because of Apple’s policies forcing the removal of Zaps, with Damus in particular and nostr clients in general.
To mix metaphors, it was the straw that broke the walled garden’s back.
As someone who grew immersed up in American Christian culture (and I do think “American Christianity” should be considered meaningfully distinct from global Christianity, but I digress) I can confirm that this is pretty much what it is from the inside.
I can only speak to the culture I was raised in, and it may not be representative of broader American Christianity, but I feel like it’s fairly representative of those who view “being a Christian” as a big part of their identity or sense of self. My experience involved religious private schooling from 4th-12th grade, so there was very little exposure to outside views. On one hand this makes my experience non-representative, on the other hand I feel like it let me see what the undiluted worldview looks like from the inside with very little noise to distort the signal.
The culture I was raised In indoctrinated the following ideas as facts, plain and simple, without nuance and largely unquestioned:
1. America has only flourished with God’s blessing because the majority of founding fathers and American culture historically has been predominantly Christian, despite separation of Church and State. IE, American can (and in their view, should) be “A Christian Nation” via most people being Christian, without it necessarily being a state religion
2. The devil hates this and is constantly trying to tear down the Christian culture that exists today. So I’m a real sense, they genuinely view any inroads or progress by any non-Christian faction as an actual attack, since they attribute ANY view or set of values that denies or ignores the moral norms of modern American Christianity as ENEMY ACTION by the literal devil and/or demons.
3. This leads to a mindset of American Christians being in a walled city, defending against a siege of attackers from all sides, both secular and non-Christian religious in origin.
There’s also a large degree of “purity test” mentality about what one believes and how fervently and deeply one believes it, and how much they are willing to passively/independently deviate from and/or resist wider cultural norms because of it. “Love your neighbor as yourself” gets distorted into “Convince your neighbor of the error of their ways so they can join you on the Christian lifeboat and not go to hell”.