Good. I don't use TikTok and never will, but the government shouldn't be able to tell you what kind of speech you listen to, what speech you make, or what platforms you use to communicate it. This is some 1984 shit. Looking forward to Trump banning every app except Truth social because we opened the door to this nonsense and all the other apps are spreading "anti-christian hate speech" or "anti-american-first propaganda". Fuck the CCP. But also fuck the government trying to restrict speech.
Your defense is "some other dictatorship does it, so that doesn't concern me?". Saying things are OK because the CCP or Putin does them is a very slippery slope.
Yes, I too would love the US president to decide which social media platforms I am allowed to legally use and who I can legally communicate with. I'm so scared China is going to, checks notes, influence my opinion that I'm willing to sacrifice my free speech rights in the process. Regulate me harder, daddy! 😍
There are ways to achieve significant privacy using Bitcoin, the protocol itself is pseudonymous, lightning in many ways enhances privacy. But you need to know what you are doing and there are many gotchas.
This is the real story IMO. The government has no business telling people they can't use certain apps for their speech. What's next? Apps which support encryption? Apps which don't support whoever the current political party is? You want Donald Trump or Joe Biden in charge of which apps you're allowed to use, really?
How come every thread I see about this topic, there is nobody who is concerned about letting the federal government dictate which apps you can and cannot use to communicate with other people? This is some 1984 shit.
Added to the sidebar @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml @Cloak@lemmy.ml @cat_programmer@lemmy.ml @haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com @dez@lemmy.ml
It did. With Bitcoin, anybody with a cell phone and halfway reliable internet access can send money globally in under a second for pennies in fees (with Bitcoin lightning). They can be their own bank without trusting any single third party. It doesn't matter if their country has secure banking infrastructure and it doesn't matter what their credit score is. There are countries on this planet where women aren't allowed to open bank accounts. Bitcoin doesn't give AF.
It has promoted and maintained the exact same fiscal policy for 15 years without a single hour of downtime or hack: a limited supply and a guarantee of your ability to transfer your coin to somebody else. No bank holidays, nobody devaluing your currency by increasing the supply. No having your savings robbed by an unstable central bank. It gives anybody in the world access to a currency that is already as stable or more stable than most national currencies. And it gives any country in the world an option aside from using USD and, inherently, losing some degree of autonomy in the process. There's a reason Ecuador and Argentina went in on it so hard.
People underestimate how big Bitcoin really is. It's market cap is 850 billion USD, that's the size of Sweden's GDP and puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. On average, it has a trend of consistent growth year after year as adoption continues to increase. It is uncensorable, the US could decide to ban Bitcoin tomorrow, a gamma ray from space could blast half of the earth out of existence, and the next block would come regardless and the network would continue to function.
It does all this for around 1% of global electricity usage, mainly from renewables and is powering a new green revolution by being a "buyer of last resort" for power grids. This makes electricity cheaper for all other users of the grid as it's able to buy power when nobody else wants it, enabling power generation facilities to not lose money during times of low demand. This also makes it easier for grids to add renewable capacity. Bitcoin is a form of energy storage in that sense. Miners don't buy power during times of peak demand for price reasons, so it doesn't take power that anybody else would be using.
Y'all should know about BOINC. It's one of the world's largest distributed computing networks used for "volunteer computing" where people donate computing time to scientific research. It's federated/permissionless/open and anybody can create a BOINC project. !boinc@sopuli.xyz
Also check out #DeSci, lots of people working on interesting incentive mechanisms to fix scientific publishing. There's a whole bunch of projects listed here http://desci.world/
Yep have done this for years. Cut a corner off a sponge each time it enters its next life phase so you can easily identity the phase it's in by the way it looks.
Digital IDs are step one to a central bank digital currency which is probably the greatest threat to individual liberty, privacy, and financial autonomy we will face in our lifetimes. Imagine a currency supply the government can manipulate at will, where the government has 100% visibility into every transactions you make big or small, where the government can print and un-print money at will or dictate where and how you spend it. And imagine when the political party you don't like is suddenly in control of this kind of power. Central banks already engage in enough shady behavior and market manipulation and if we give them this power, they will never give it back. This is a dangerous road imo. Plus, a CBDC provided a centralized database of all transactions can be hacked and leaked because that happens to all centralized databases, so now not only does the government know every transaction of yours, so does the world.
If we need the ability to do digital ID verification, there are decentralized opt-in ways to do this which don't pose these same threats of centralized control and provide a safe opt-out/safety valve mechanism if the people administering that system are not trustworthy. CBDCs provide no such alternative.