That’s an awfully… interesting way of saying he lost his primary, which as an incumbent is not a particularly easy to do. Blame foreign money all you want, your voters voted for who they wanted. Primary voters are the most politically aware kind of voters, most people don’t vote, even fewer take the time to vote in primaries. Apparently those voters wanted somebody new.

Instead of fixing those issues, most other coins are just pump and dump schemes for a quick buck.

Oh agree totally on this one.

Bitcoin and many other currencies have way too many and large fluctuations in value for daily use.

If you are using it to send money from point A to point B, you can cash it out at the same price you put it in at, so fluctuation doesn’t matter much. You’re probably saving on bank fees and exchange risk enhanced by slow international settlement. Exchange risk is always a thing with any currency. It’s gotten more stable over time and I imagine that trend will continue. Other currencies are also unstable, how has the purchasing power of the USD held up over the last 5 years? That’s not to mention the billions of people not fortunate enough to live in a currency environment which is dominated by the dollar. Ask any Argentenian or Turkish person how stable their currency is compared to Bitcoin. Best case scenario, your dollar slowly loses value over time due to supply inflation. Whether or not you find it useful, more and more people find it useful every year, the transaction volume has increased reliably for 15 years. Nobody’s making them use it. On the contrary, there are often hurdles educational, regulatory, and technological to using it, but they still do. Maybe on year 16 though people will finally realize it’s useless and stop using it.

Bitcoin specifically is not practical for transactions in general due to cost and block size limits. Yes, lightning exists, but maybe your technology is shit if it needs a second overlay network to function.

Maybe TCP/IP is shit if we need other protocols build on top of it like SMTP. Maybe ethernet is shit if we have to design a whole nother protocol (TCP) just to make sure packets actually arive in the proper order. No. This is a weak argument. Fedwire, the system for settlement between US banks, has a equivalent transaction speed to Bitcoin’s base layer. Banks don’t seem to have any problem with that speed. And ten minutes is pretty dang fast to send a million dollar transaction across the globe (on main chain) or under a second (on lightning). Meanwhile, the US dollar doesn’t have a built-in transfer mechanism, and the mechanisms available can be quite frustrating or expensive to work with, ask anybody whose ever had to send an international bank wire or deal with the frequent buyer return fraud on platforms like eBay. I’d sell an iPhone to somebody in (insert fraud prone country here) no problem in BTC. With PayPal? No effing way,

Check the wikipedia article, pretty neutral and factual reporting on the history. TLDR he revealed the US committing war crimes, they went after him with everything they had including planning an assassination attempt (which they never went through with). They tried to apply US law internationally to somebody who wasn’t a US citizen and wasn’t in the US. The UN said his detainment was illegal and torture. He’s been on the run, in some embassy, or jail for over 10 years for activity other news organizations regularly and legally engage in (leaking classified documents). Various US military, intelligence, etc agency heads have testified to congress that they couldn’t find a single death related to the documents he leaked, he didn’t put anybody at risk, in fact, Wikileaks sent every leak to the US govt before leaking it asking them for notes on what to redact. The US refused to participate in that process.

He also revealed the DNC was trying to bury Bernie, which the DNC didn’t even deny, they had to let a bunch of their top people go and do a bunch of primary reforms as a result. That’s when liberals started hating Wikileaks, because the DNC emails helped get Trump elected. They say the “timing” of right before the election makes his leak partisan. But wouldn’t you want that information before you vote? It is the job of wikileaks, or any journalist, to maximize the impact of information they are revealing on corruption. It’s not Julian’s fault the DNC was corrupt AF, all they had to do to avoid that was… not be corrupt.

There were also some sex assault allegations against him, which I tend to believe have some veracity to them however the accusers explicitly did not want him charged, it was a ploy to get him to Sweden where he would be extradited to the US. He was never even charged, only “wanted to questioning” but somehow got an interpol notice for it. His lawyers offered over a dozen times for him to be interviewed but Sweden insisted on an “in-person” interview for some reason. Curious.

Oh, and he helped save Snowden’s life by getting him a flight out of China.

Read about scaling layers (L2 and L3s) it absolutely scales. You can use one L1 transaction to create a lightning channel, you can then have an infinite number of transactions in that channel between you and any partie(s) you want. All off-chain. The chain secures these transactions by being the enforcement mechanism. Just like a contract works because you can run to a court and get it enforced. The court only handles 1% of contracts ever written. Courts scale, Bitcoin scales.

It’s already scaled pretty damn well.

Yes you are right about that :)

Would be weird to put out an appeal for donations and then pay yourself from your own wallet. He also has had plenty of non-BTC funds via various non-profits that funded legal defense though idk what their status is after 10+ years of legal defense.

I need something like a Spotify subscription for open source to assuage my guilt of the great value I extract for my personal use of open source.

I would love to see something like this, where I can contribute to an open source project while also contributing to all their dependencies. Maybe such a thing exists and I just haven’t heard of it yet.

Look, I love privacy and I agree Bitcoin needs more of it. Many developers/OSS projects would have trouble using XMR, the off-ramps are few and far between. Bitcoin’s privacy continues to get better and you can achieve significant degrees of anonymity with techniques like coinjoin etc. Lightning is pretty opaque, all the data on chain is who you opened your lightning channel with, not ANY of the transaction data between you and any other party (and remember, a single lightning channel can route payments to any other lightning user). And you can run a lightning node/wallet on an android. Long-term Bitcoin could absorb Monero’s entire market cap by simply copying its privacy features into a future protocol upgrade, which I hope it does as it has with experimental protocol changes first tried on other blockchains. And the Bitcoin community seems very pro-privacy.

Monero has no functional L2 and only has “low fees” because it doesn’t have the tx volume to get higher fees. Bitcoin has had a functional L2 for 5+ years now. Lightning fees are usually a penny or two per transaction, if sending large amounts, an on-chain tx is still only like $1.50 most of the time. Settlement on Monero takes minutes instead of less than a second on lightning, not that it matters for this particular use case. It doesn’t have nearly the network of developers, users, or other people in the ecosystem backing it. Monero also has larger variable-sized blocks. Larger block sizes = more hardware requirements to run a node = more centralization. Bitcoin already had that debate and every other debate and chose decentralization at every turn. Monero chose bigger blocks just like Bitcoin cash did. Bigger block is not a scalable solution while remaining decentralized. No thanks. All of humanity’s transactions shouldn’t be stored on the blockchain for eternity, that is incredibly inefficient and needless. Nano has similar problems with design, no way to compensate those who run the infrastructure for the network, and pretty much nobody using it, and probably a massive pre-mine.

There are some fundamental problems to blockchain, digital currency, or decentralized ledgers. If you want a decentralized ledger, space is your biggest limitation. If you want more space, you get more centralization. Every other coin chose more space for “lower fees” or “faster transactions”, Bitcoin chose decentralization at every possible turn (at the cost of having less space) and will continue to do so. For me, that is bar none the most important factor. And now it also has “fast transactions” and “low fees” thanks to L2s.

Love hearing from devs that donations are coming into their projects, thank you for sharing that! Contributing time and expertise is just as important thank you for your contributions 🫡🫡🫡

OpenShot went terribly for me. Cool idea but did not work. Ate hours and hours of editing by failing to export. I tried everything, even opening Github issues to figure out where the problem was. Systematically re-cut and edited and moved every clip. Still couldn’t get it to export even though everything worked flawlessly in editing and previewing. Tried switching to latest, alpha, whatever, none of them could export. Absolute nightmare. Do not recommend. Eventually had to re-do everything in kdenlive.

Qubes is so cool. The most under-rated Linux distro imo. Not my daily driver but a very cool concept.

I’ll start, I donate to a few regularly via Github sponsors. I like that it’s recurring. I also donate one-off to ones as I come across them, but generally donate regularly to software I use regularly, particularly if I somehow am using that software to make money. I really like the idea of a portion of my donation going to upstream libraries, though tbh I’m not confident if Github sponsors does that or not.

I mostly donate w Bitcoin, except Github sponsors since they don’t take it. I also donate to a few orgs like EFF and OpenSats which are OSS-adjacent or help OSS tools I like exist. When I see apps I like have published a new release and they announce it on nostr, I usually send them a bit via zap as well, but most apps I use aren’t on nostr.

!boinc@sopuli.xyz flatpak also needs a flatpak maintainer! Your work would help people contribute their spare computational power to scientific research. If you are passionate about fighting cancer, mapping the galaxy, etc this is an awesome way to contribute to that effort in a very force multiplying way.

Bitcoin transactions happen at the “speed of light” (~27:00) REALITY CHECK: As Bitcoin has grown, transactions have become slow. It’s in fact why many people do not accept it for purchases anymore.

Bitcoin is the same speed it’s always been. Blocks happen every 10 minutes. The transaction is transmitted at the speed of light but final settlement requires a block. Pay a high fee? Get in on the next block. Want to save on fees? Maybe it takes a few blocks for your transaction to go through. If you use Bitcoin lightning (a scaling layer built on top of Bitcoin which moves transactions off-chain but secures them on-chain), transactions take under a second for pennies in fees. Fees are much, much lower than credit card, paypal, or other similar competitors. You could send a billion dollars in a single transaction and pay $1.50 on main chain, or you could send $5 on lightning and pay <1c in fees. Lightning has been around for 5 years now, it works, I use it regularly.

Bitcoin cannot be diluted (~27:25) REALITY CHECK: Bitcoin is always being diluted until it reaches its hard limit.

The supply of Bitcoin, 21 million coins, is known and has always been known. It can’t be diluted beyond that point.

Nobody controls the network (~28:25) REALITY CHECK: If someone were to own 50% or more of the network’s compute power, they could control the network.

Nobody owns 51% of the network. Even such an actor can’t print extra BTC or force money to move without the appropriate private key. The best they can do is temporarily delay transactions while burning north of a trillion dollars in energy and equipment doing so. Which is why nobody has ever done it.

Bitcoin’s hard limit is likely very dangerous for the network (~29:00): Once the hard limit is reached, it is unclear if people will keep pumping computing power at it. If the creation of new Bitcoin is no longer allowed, it is possible that transaction fees will need to be raised to compensate miners.

Given that fees have continued to increase with time, this seems like not a problem. It’s not “dangerous”, it’s part of the design. If hashrate drops, it drops, but given that fees and hashrate have continued to grow despite continually minting less coins, it’s not really a problem.

Bitcoin’s lack of rules allow for massive amounts of fraud and prevents effective taxation (~29:25): While the video paints a cute picture of financial freedom, the reality is that Bitcoin allows for fraud on a world scale and does not allow for sales tax because of the way that anyone can have a cryptocurrency wallet without disclosing their identity.

Anybody can have a cash wallet without disclosing their identity, yet they still pay taxes. Bitcoin’s rules prevent the kind of fraud where the value of your money is printed away via supply inflation of central banks or “currency restructuring” on the global scale by the the world bank. People pay taxes because they think it’s the right thing to do and/or because the government has guns and makes them. Either way, if you run a company, if you are providing goods and services, you have a place you can send somebody with a gun and enforce those rules. All the companies currently paying taxes would keep paying taxes if they used Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is one of the most successful open source projects to have ever been created, and it gets downvoted to hell anywhere it gets brought up. 15 years of growth in network size, usage, and capability. Surviving attacks and attempted bans from nation-states. Not a single hour of downtime, not a single hack, reliably transferring money across the globe to anybody with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in seconds to minutes for pennies to dollars in fees. 100% open source and decentralized, uncorruptible, open to whoever wants to use it, the way currency should be. It’s got a market cap bigger than Sweden’s GDP and is already more reliable and widely accepted than most national currencies. Nobody can make it print money it isn’t meant to print or move money it isn’t supposed to move.

The solution is apps and protocols that put the privacy in the hands of the user, not the hands of another entity which must be “regulated” by legislative bodies that have been subject to regulatory capture. Decentralize and distribute power. Use P2P/decentralized platforms like lemmy, mastodon, nostr, freenet, etc.

I wrote an article about how using lightning works and some common misconceptions if you are interested: https://lemmy.ml/post/16397590

What if your relay goes down, are your locked coins committed into the blockchain?

Essentially yes. Basically you have a on-chain tx which opens a lightning channel. All your “transactions” occur off-chain and update that channel. The “state” of that channel is stored by you and your relay. All of this happens automatically, of course. You start a channel with 50 BTC with another user and over time the “balance” of that channel changes. When you start it, you are “putting 50 BTC into lightning” so all 50 BTC belong to you. Once you’ve sent some to another user, now 49 belong to you and 1 to them and you can receive up to 1 BTC since you have 1 BTC of space free. And you can continually update that forever, off-chain, for next to nothing in fees. When you close the channel, the BTC returns to you on-chain in the appropriate amount. So if your “relay”/lightning node/etc whatever goes down you can always close out the channel for the cost of an on-chain tx.

Aah yes, the electronic intifada, such an excellent, neutral source for reporting.

Don’t disclose all their big donors

Peter Thiel is also one of the big donors.

Many orgs don’t disclose donors, particularly those working on human rights. Imagine you are a rich person in a dictatorship who wants to improve human rights in your country, do you want your name listed on the donor registry for Amnesty International? Probably not. Amnesty, btw, sponsors the freedom forum as well alongside the city of Oslo. So Either Amnesty is in on this 4D chess you’re seeing where the far right is somehow using human rights as a cover to… give us all more privacy or something, or maybe Amnesty did their due diligence and concluded that this org is worth working with.

The article states that “Who is Halvorssen? He is best known as the founder and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, where he is listed as the lone staff member.”, yet their site lists over a dozen people. So that’s just a clearly factually inaccurate statement right there, makes me question the validity of the entire thing if they can’t get something that simple correct. https://hrf.org/about/team/

“Halvorssen is the scion of an oligarchic Venezuelan family closely linked to the political opposition that formed against recently deceased former President Hugo Chavez”

Hmm… I wonder if living under an autocrat might have made him care about human rights and free expression.

Believe it or not, people on the “far right” can care about human rights too, and can donate to human rights organizations, and that’s ok. I challenge you to find any major human rights or civil liberties organization that doesn’t have somebody “far right” or whom you otherwise disagree with strongly. Human rights is an issue that cuts across many different political ideologies. And these organizations can build tools and infrastructure to support human rights all around the globe, and do. We shouldn’t be cancelling organizations just because they got money from somebody we disagree with or even detest. What they actually do with that money should be what matters, something your accusations against this org are completely devoid of because they are actually doing good things. What they’re actually doing is advancing the cause of human rights globally.