makeasnek

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GNU Taler is not your friend in c/privacy@lemmy.ml
[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

Nobody's gonna make you, unlike a CBDC.

GNU Taler is not your friend in c/privacy@lemmy.ml
[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Bitcoin's protocol has not meaningfully changed in 15 years. In terms of stability, in the crypto space, you literally cannot beat that. It will continue doing its thing so long as a few computers in the world still run the protocol. Those In those 15 years it has never been hacked, never had an hour of down time, took no bank holidays, and has fought off competition from other cryptocurrencies and attempted bans from nation states and world powers. And the supply has remained capped at 21 million coins as promised.

Ethereum is centralized AF. The majority of the supply was sold during the pre-mine, and now that "proof of ownership" runs the network, the risk of a 51% attack is significant. And in PoS systems, you get centralization of wealth over time since you are printing new currency and handing it over to people simply for already owning some, the "work" they have to do to stake is minimal. Unlike in PoW systems, once a 51% attack happens, it can happen indefinitely there there is no imposed cost after the start of the attack. Bitcoin has no pre-mine and has been issued fairly and transparently. The majority of Eth's nodes are hosted in one of like three corporate datacenters because the hardware required to run a full node has gotten ridiculous. You can say it's "secure enough" or "decentralized enough", but not that it's "more secure" or "more decentralized" than Bitcoin, because it simply isn't. Their L2s are an absolute mess, some of them are incredibly centralized, Polygon last I checked had 15 nodes controlling the entire network. Meanwhile, you can run a full Bitcoin node on a laptop from 10 years ago and a lightning node on an Android phone. All while still being able to settle a transaction in under a second for a penny in fees with lightning.

Once you start to look at all these coins aside from Bitcoin, all of them, of the ones that aren't outright scams, have traded decentralization (and therefore security) for transaction speed. Now that Bitcoin lightning is out and mature, transaction speed and chain capacity is no longer the limiting factor. Those other coins have no reason to exist.

Monero is cool, its main pitch is privacy. Bitcoin's privacy continues to get better, I expect that trend to continue. Bitcoin has a conference like every month, there is a massive pool of dev talent and funding. Lightning was released 5+ years ago, Monero doesn't even have an L2 and without an L2 it cannot scale, and there's not even an L2 in the developer roadmap. You can't put everything on chain forever, and the bigger the chain gets, the more centralized it becomes, period. With no L2, transactions are slow and fees will increase as blockspace competition increases. Lightning can make transactions in under a second for pennies in fees since fees are not tied directly to blockspace.

GNU Taler is not your friend in c/privacy@lemmy.ml
[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (13 children)

Stablecoins are the worst of crypto and central banking combined.

  • They are centralized, even more centralized than central banks since they are run by a single company not an board appointed by an elected government
  • They can rug you at any time
  • They only have value because they are "pegged" to a certain currency and the "backing" must exist to maintain that peg.
  • Their source of the backing is often "trust me bro"
  • Even if the backing was solid, market shocks and other problems can reduce the value of that backing, leading to them being insolvent and the stablecoin losing its value. And guess what, it wasn't insured!
  • They are often poorly regulated or unregulated entirely, so you have no reason to trust their claims and probably can't seek any real remedy if they are lies
  • They are, at best, pegging their value to a currency which is designed to lose 2-3% of its value per year due to inflation

Several of them have already collapsed spectacularly. More will in time. Avoid stablecoins.

Top paid bounty open-source plataforms ? in c/opensource@lemmy.ml
Top paid bounty open-source plataforms ? in c/opensource@lemmy.ml
GNU Taler is not your friend in c/privacy@lemmy.ml
[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Can you imagine, if we gave people rights?! Like free speech? Or the right to not have their house raided by the government without cause? My god they'd probably abuse those too! We should take them all away just to be safe :p

GNU Taler is not your friend in c/privacy@lemmy.ml
[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

Please show me the crypto that just has the stability needed to be used as day-to-day currency

Bitcoin is already more stable than most national currencies and gets past the issue where you have to trust a central bank to correctly regulate the production of currency. Ask anybody in Argentina, Turkey, or Zimbabwe how much they trust their national currency. You can use Bitcoin as an everyday currency without holding onto it, plenty of people do this, particularly since it's simply better for international transactions than many alternatives. Bitcoin gets more stable with time as more people use it.

All currencies experience volatility. People in some countries are very lucky to have a "stable" currency to use. But due to its inflationary nature, currencies like the EUR and USD are designed to lose value over time. 2-3% per year in good years. How had the purchasing power of that currency held up in recent years? Because Bitcoin has held up pretty well. Volatility has many sources, not all of which can be controlled. Bitcoin fixes the total supply in circulation which helps control at least one of those variables. If I have to pick between a currency that is guaranteed to lose value and a currency which may gain or lose value, the choice is pretty clear to me.

Not even accounting for ease of use, wide adoption etc., which none of them have,

Bitcoin's user base, transaction volume, total market cap, number of full nodes etc, on average trend have increased or improved year after year for 15 years. You can send money to anybody on planet earth with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees. And it's as easy to use as Venmo. The dollar can't do that, it needs a crazy complex series of international agreements and banks to make happen and it's expensive and slow. Nobody's making people use Bitcoin, in fact, there are often some hurdles to doing so, but they choose to because they see some value in doing so. But who knows, maybe on year 16 you'll finally be right and people will finally realize it's useless and stop using it!

GNU Taler is not your friend in c/privacy@lemmy.ml
[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (17 children)

If only there was some other technology that came along that could :(

Privacy, Identity and Payment in the Next Generation Internet [GNU Taler presentation] in c/privacy@lemmy.ml
[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Your other points aren’t really valid if you ever want to convert Bitcoin to something that isn’t Bitcoin

A. I don't, I'd rather use Bitcoin for everything. Year after year, for fifteen years, that has gotten easier as the network has continued to grow and exchange rate stability has increased.

B. Then it would equally apply to Monero or any other cryptocurrency

Bitcoin lightning changes Bitcoin's whole privacy situation. Lightning transactions don't go on chain and confirm in under a second for pennies in fees.

so things like having control of your money, needing ID, and trusting centralized entities (sure, exchanges plural) are a huge part of Bitcoin.

I believe you mean a huge part of the existing banking system and markets. None of that is Bitcoin, Bitcoin can operate just fine without any of it.

GNU Taler is not your friend in c/privacy@lemmy.ml
[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

CBDCs are coming whether you like it or not and a GNU Taler based payment system is currently our best mitigation strategy against them.

The best mitigation strategy is to refuse to use them and to point out when systems, like Taler, are actively working to further their introduction of use. Using your national currency is mandatory to pay taxes, it's not mandatory for anything else in most countries. We have the option to opt out, just like we do with every other privacy-attacking technology. Assuming it's inevitable is how they win.

GNU Taler is not your friend in c/privacy@lemmy.ml
[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You people realize that most crypto is even less private? Every transaction ever can be viewed by everyone, forever, by design.

There's some truth to this but it's also not really the case.

  • Each address is pseudononymous even in original Bitcoin.
  • Bitcoin lightning transactions are completely opaque to the network, they are never on-chain. At this point, there are vastly more transactions on lightning than on-chain. They confirm instantly and are known only to your node, the receiver's wallet, and intermediary nodes (if any). Lightning inherits security from the main chain while giving you sub-second transaction confirmation times.
  • Monero exists, coinjoin (Bitcoin) exist, changing addresses and having multiple wallets exists, liquidity swaps exist. The chain analysis game is getting harder and more complex every year.
Threat Modelling 101 in c/privacy@lemmy.ml
[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

tbh this should be pinned

101
The Large Hadron Collider - Europe's Crown Jewel of Physics Research and One of the Largest International Scientific Collaborations (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by makeasnek@lemmy.ml to c/europe@lemmy.ml
3 comments fedilink
 

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerators with a 27km circumference with over 9,000 magnets that can generate 9 billion collisions per second. It first started up on 10 September 2008, and remains the latest addition to CERN’s accelerator complex. The LHC consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way.

It sits on the border between France and Switzerland 100m underground and is run by CERN, an international scientific collaboration with 23 different member states: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom.

There is even a !boinc@sopuli.xyz project where you can contribute your computer's spare computational power to analyzing the huge mass of data this project generates, no PhD required! Each year of operation generates approx 30 petabytes of data, equivalent to 1.2 million bluray disks.

https://home.cern/resources/faqs/facts-and-figures-about-lhc

May peace and science always triumph over war and ignorance 🕊️

57
My favourite OSS: BOINC (volunteer your computational power to science!) (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by makeasnek@lemmy.ml to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
15 comments fedilink
 

I want to let you all know about what I think is one of the coolest yet most under-appreciated FOSS tools out there, it's called BOINC lemmy at !boinc@sopuli.xyz . The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing has been around for decades and has delivered teraflops of computing to scientists on a daily basis for absolutely free.

BOINC has been used to map the universe, detect asteroids, search for aliens (remember seti@home?), fight cancer, and publish hundreds of scientific papers. The world's largest particle accelerator (large hadron collider at CERN) even has a project you can compute for, who knows, you may find a new subatomic particle! Anybody with a computer, raspberry pi, or android can contribute their CPU or GPU to the cause and pick which projects they want to contribute to. You don't need to be computer savvy or have a PhD to run it.

One of the awesome things about BOINC is that any scientists with interesting research can instantly access massive amounts of computational power for free. They don't need time on a supercomputer or institutional backing, all they need is an interesting research concept and a spare laptop to run the server on.

I have been running BOINC for many years and find it very gratifying, I love getting to see the results. Hell, it even heats my house in the winter! If you have electric heat such as electric baseboards or space heaters (NOT heat pumps since they are >100% efficient), you can heat your house with computers and spend the exact same amount as your normal heat bill but also get science done in the process. Every watt of electricity you use in your house turns into heat. A blender is just as efficient at turning electricity into heat as a space heater. It sounds counter-intuitive, but ask your grade school physics teacher and you'll find that the conservation of energy is not a controversial topic in physics. If you are spending 50W on a space heater, you could instead dump that 50W into your computer. You pay for and get 50W of heat either way, but only the computer does science along the way.

1
[US] #STANDWITHCRYPTO Day of Legislative Action. Take 2 minutes to e-mail your representative! (www.standwithcrypto.org)
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5626873

This is a day created to make representatives more aware that their constituents care about crypto and want to assert their freedom to use it. Pro-crypto lobbying group is asking people to ask their reps to support the The Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act which pretty much everybody in crypto agrees is a good bill for removing legislative ambiguity around crypto.

-14
[US] #STANDWITHCRYPTO Day of Legislative Action. Take 2 minutes to e-mail your representative! (www.standwithcrypto.org)
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5626873

This is a day created to make representatives more aware that their constituents care about crypto and want to assert their freedom to use it. Pro-crypto lobbying group is asking people to ask their reps to support the The Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act which pretty much everybody in crypto agrees is a good bill for removing legislative ambiguity around crypto.

-13
[US] #STANDWITHCRYPTO Day of Legislative Action. Take 2 minutes to e-mail your representative! (www.standwithcrypto.org)
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5626873

This is a day created to make representatives more aware that their constituents care about crypto and want to assert their freedom to use it. Pro-crypto lobbying group is asking people to ask their reps to support the The Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act which pretty much everybody in crypto agrees is a good bill for removing legislative ambiguity around crypto.

1786
A moment of appreciation for a man who is undoubtedly the world's most successful promoter of Lemmy and the fediverse (lemmy.ml)
 

A man who grabbed our concept of a centralized internet by the balls and squeezed it so hard that the Lemmy’s user count 65xed in a 3 months period. Thank you for your service

1
Under what conditions would you be OK with ads on your lemmy instance? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by makeasnek@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
90 comments fedilink
 

I'll start:

  • Some significant portion of funds go towards development of the Lemmy software. 80%? Rest goes to lemmy instance hosting.
  • Ads are reasonable and non-intrusive (no popups etc)
  • People can still browse w/ an adblocker

I personally would gladly turn off my adblocker if I knew the ads were supporting development. Hell, I might even click a few!

17
15 years ago today, the global banking system collapsed. And the savings of everyday people were raided to save it. Satoshi created Bitcoin so it would never happen again. (lemmy.ml)
 

I wish more people knew about Bitcoin's connection to the bank bailouts. Bitcoin unfortunately does not have the best brand ambassadors. This week is a great opportunity to tell your friends about it, because it matters.

The 2008 bank bailouts were a major motivator behind the creation of Bitcoin. The first block ever mined even contains a reference to it: The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. During the bank bailouts, the government just printed a bunch of money and gave it to the banks, around 700 billion USD. They did this because it was politically expedient, well really because they had to or the whole damned system would collapse. And the 99% ended up paying for the mistakes of the 1%. All of us were made to pay for the mistakes of a very small, incredibly powerful and wealthy segment of society who made reckless investment decisions. People lost their homes, their jobs, their livelyhoods, their savings, and yet not a single one of those bankers went to jail. Instead, they took the bailout money and gave themselves extravagant bonuses. Yet the problem is not new, throughout history, every nation that has ever failed, has had their currency end in hyperinflation. The temptation to print money is too strong. Perhaps it is something that should not be entrusted to politicians or even humans at all.

Satoshi, in his wisdom, created a system by which no new money could ever be printed. No corruptible, tempted authority could use it to turn on the money printer and rob entire generations of their wealth or force them to pay for wars they did not support. He made a currency which cannot be corrupted and cannot be hacked, with 99.9% uptime, with instant transfers across borders. It is neutral technology open to anybody with a phone or a computer and access to the internet. Which is much less than you need to open a bank account. Bitcoin doesn't care about your credit history, or whether or not you can provide a reliable mailing address. Bitcoin doesn't close on weekends and will never charge you exorbitant fees to use your own money. You never have to wait days for a payment to clear. Bitcoin puts you in charge of your money and nobody else. And it makes sure nobody can print away its value.

But then a bunch of people came along selling get-rich-quick schemes based on crypto technology, and everybody goes "crypto bad". Satoshi gave a gift to the world. He didn't stick around to get rich off it, he didn't use it for celebrity, he just made Bitcoin and disappeared. Thank you Satoshi for your gift to the world.

1
FindTheMag v 3.0 released (BOINC stats tool) (github.com)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by makeasnek@lemmy.ml to c/boinc@sopuli.xyz
0 comments fedilink
 

FindTheMag is a powerful tool which for getting stats from your BOINC client. It is open source and runs on Linux/MacOS/Windows. This version is pretty much a top-down rewrite of all the code.

It will show you things like credit/hr for each project, which can be helpful for figuring out which of your crunching rigs is most efficient at which project. You can also use it to resume/suspend BOINC based on room temperature. This tool is mainly used by Gridcoin crunchers to find the most profitable project, but even if you just use BOINC it's a good stats tool to have in your arsenal.

This new release comes with a number of enhancements and all existing users are encouraged to upgrade.

Changes:

  • Massive stability improvements, particularly when communicating with BOINC client. This should eliminate pretty much every crash condition encountered by FTM 2 users.
  • Fix a number of bugs in stats calculation and output
  • Table printed to user is now more useful and you can customize various aspects of it
5
Today I am releasing version 3.0 of FindTheMag, a Gridcoin mining tool (github.com)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by makeasnek@lemmy.ml to c/crypto@lemmy.ml
1 comments fedilink
 

FindTheMag is a powerful tool which helps you find the most profitable BOINC projects to mine/crunch. It is open source and runs on Linux/MacOS/Windows. FTM can also directly control your BOINC !boinc@sopuli.xyz client, giving you more control over the crunching process than BOINC typically gives you.

Context: Gridcoin !gridcoin@lemmy.ml is a CPU and GPU-mineable cryptocurrency which has you process data for scientific research projects instead of calculating hashes. Finding the most profitable BOINC project can be tricky because every BOINC project awards credit differently, all hardware achieve different levels of efficiency on each project, and you must calculate the credit:magnitude ratio for any given project. Gridcoin is the most ASIC-resistant coin in existence.

This new release comes with a number of enhancements and all existing users are encouraged to upgrade.

Changes:

  • Massive stability improvements, particularly when communicating with BOINC client. This should eliminate pretty much every crash condition encountered by FTM 2 users.
  • Fix a number of bugs in stats calculation and output
  • Table printed to user is now more useful and you can customize various aspects of it
6
Livestream Recording: CDC experts consider and vote on new COVID vaccines (ACIP meeting) (www.youtube.com)
1
BOINC 7.24.1 Release (boinc.berkeley.edu)
 

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/3236767

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/3236620

The 7.24.1 version of the BOINC client software has been released for Windows, OSX, and Android. Download it here: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php.

Release notes:

  • improve implementation of CPU throttling
  • the default value for the "suspend_if_no_recent_input" pref is 0, not 60
  • if sched request fails, show the scheduler URL (that might be the problem)
  • Show alert if idle time to resume computing is greater than idle time to suspend computing
  • ignore old prefs sent by projects or AM
  • avoid overscheduling CPUs in presence of MT jobs
  • Manager: computing prefs dialog bug
  • Manager: Add button in event log to display only alerts (errors)
  • Manager: Improve consistency of control labels and accelerators
  • Manager: Show native names for language options, and only those for which translations are available
  • Android: if suspend because of battery heat or charge, don't resume for at least 5 minutes.
  • Mac: Support Dark Mode in Advanced View
  • Mac: Add standard command-comma shortcut for Preferences menu item
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