makeasnek

How has the purchasing power of your USD held up over the last 5 years? Because BTC has done pretty damned well. And your BTC still represents the same portion of supply as it always did. BTC is already more widely used and more stable than most national currencies. Unlike fiat currency, it isn't designed to lose value over time to inflation of the supply.

Here's how much USD, Gold, and BTC it takes to buy a house in the US over time.

click for full image

UN Special Rapporteur on Torture - “[charges against Julian are an] abuse of judicial processes aimed at pushing a person into a position where he is unable to defend himself”

Amnesty International - “The US government’s unrelenting pursuit of Julian Assange for having published disclosed documents that included possible war crimes committed by the US military is nothing short of a full-scale assault on the right to freedom of expression.”

Freedom of the Press Foundation: “The indictment of Mr. Assange threatens press freedom because much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely—and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do. Journalists at major news publications regularly speak with sources, ask for clarification or more documentation, and receive and publish documents the government considers secret. In our view, such a precedent in this case could effectively criminalize these common journalistic practices”

The Guardian: “The US should never have brought the case against the WikiLeaks founder. This attack on press freedom must be rejected.”

New York Times: “The new charges focus on receiving and publishing classified material from a government source. That is something journalists do all the time. They did it with the Pentagon Papers and in countless other cases where the public benefited from learning what was going on behind closed doors, even though the sources may have acted illegally. This is what the First Amendment is designed to protect: the ability of publishers to provide the public with the truth.”

Yes absolutely, because any time the government can increase surveillance and control, they will. The Pirate Party is one of the few political forces in the EU fighting hard against this. Central Bank Digital Currencies will be the biggest threat to individual liberty and privacy we see in our lifetimes. In a time of global instability, these threats to our freedoms continue to compound from all over the political spectrum. People are more willing to accept some loss in freedom in the promise it will protect them from the "other side" gaining too much power or from worsening economic or other environmental conditions.

Bitcoin is a solution for those who want privacy, money, and autonomy to work hand in hand. Bitcoin offers much more robust privacy than a bank account and the degree of privacy it offers continues to improve. It's not controlled by a central bank, entity, or board of directors who can mess with the supply or have any kind of special access to your financial information. You don't need six forms of ID to use it, in fact, you don't even need one! It's truly autonomous money that separates the role of the state from the role of money.

With Bitcoin, I can send money to anybody anywhere on planet earth with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees (using Bitcoin lightning). And I can send that money to anybody even if they have an unstable banking system, no banking system at all (billions of people), or their banking system excludes them due to their gender, sexuality, or status as a political dissident. Venmo can’t do that, Paypal can’t do that, my bank can’t do that, Taler can't do that. It has a clear fiscal policy of a 21 million coin cap. It has faced attacks and attempted bans from nation states and world powers, yet it has reliably performed this function of sending money around for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, without a single hack, without a single bank holiday or failure or any kind. It has a market cap bigger than Sweden’s GDP. It is more widely adopted than most national currencies. It can’t be controlled, debased, or inflated by any corrupt central bank. It actually has use and value. You may not use it, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t get immense use out of it.

Monero is king when it comes to privacy coins though. So from a privacy perspective, that's worth looking into as well. Long-term I think Bitcoin will eat Monero for lunch since it can easily adopt the privacy technologies Monero has and the Bitcoin community is very pro privacy. Monero also lacks an L2 like lightning which means transactions are slower and more expensive and eventually fees will get ridiculous if adoption reaches parity with Bitcoin. Depending on your use case, that may or may not matter.

Nobody in this community cares about opening a tab on Lightning and needing to continually police it to make sure you don’t lose your coins

You don't have to do this. This is all automated and abstracted away in UX. I've never manually looked at any channels. There is also zero incentive for an attacker to do an attack as your describing because prevention of such attacks is automated and they have to put coins at risk to do it. In lightning's early days what you're talking about was real and true, but it's been years since that's been the case. I dismissed lightning out of hand as well and came back round to it recently and it's really matured a lot.

Other algorithms are designed to use a large amount of memory also, and memory is harder to scale than computing power.

Ultimately you are replacing one type of scale with another. At the end of the day, it's hardware, and people will buy the appropriate hardware to mine, and if you can achieve economies of scale you can mine more efficiently all other variables the same. What route they use to turn that energy into BTC is almost immaterial.

Other algorithms enforce that multiple nodes need to work in concert, and the network delays between them also enforce an additional cost.

Until a device is created that can do it without concert, then you've ended up at square one except worse because one actor can now gain a significant advantage much more than say the party who gets the new ASICs first. You can "prove work", you can't "prove network latency". Basing anything on network delays will cause clustering and centralization and is a less equitable distribution of mining power than energy can provide.

but can severely restrict where mining can happen if they think it is burning too much power and endangering other parts of the economy.

I'm not sure they want to though. Bitcoin miners are 'buyers of last resort', they're not buying power at peak demand times. They're not competing with existing electricity buyers. They're helping grids over-provision renewables and ensuring they'll have a buyer for any extra power produced during non-peak time and driving down the electric rates for their normal ratepayers since your rate is essentially cost to produce electricity/units of electricity produced and as you scale and bring in more renewables cost per unit goes down. Regulators have taken both pro and anti-mining stances, we'll see how it shakes out, but regardless, as you say, it's math and mining will still happen regardless. My money is on the grids which have 100% of produced electricity bought 100% of the time at the most efficient scale possible.

The irony of somebody on a human rights community not realizing this guy's human rights were violated because they're so blinded by partisan/nationalistic fervor. Human rights are for everybody, especially people you disagree with. Hunted and imprisoned for 14 years for allegedly violating US law, a nation he is not a citizen of and not located in. His crime? Exposing crimes of the US government and leaking classified documents, a time-honored tradition protected by the UN UDHR and US law which protects us all from corrupt government and tyranny. The documents exposed war crimes, for which nobody was ever prosecuted.

But don't take my word for it, ask these human rights defenders:

UN Special Rapporteur on Torture - "[charges against Julsin are an] abuse of judicial processes aimed at pushing a person into a position where he is unable to defend himself"

Amnesty International - "The US government’s unrelenting pursuit of Julian Assange for having published disclosed documents that included possible war crimes committed by the US military is nothing short of a full-scale assault on the right to freedom of expression."

Freedom of the Press Foundation: "The indictment of Mr. Assange threatens press freedom because much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely—and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do. Journalists at major news publications regularly speak with sources, ask for clarification or more documentation, and receive and publish documents the government considers secret. In our view, such a precedent in this case could effectively criminalize these common journalistic practices"

The Guardian: "The US should never have brought the case against the WikiLeaks founder. This attack on press freedom must be rejected."

New York Times: "The new charges focus on receiving and publishing classified material from a government source. That is something journalists do all the time. They did it with the Pentagon Papers and in countless other cases where the public benefited from learning what was going on behind closed doors, even though the sources may have acted illegally. This is what the First Amendment is designed to protect: the ability of publishers to provide the public with the truth."

They picked Hillary in 2016, not Biden. But you're right generally.