BOINC is a platform for volunteer computing. Scientists at universities around the world use it to process computationally intensive datasets (sky surveys, protein folding, etc) for FREE using the computers of volunteers. Volunteers get to contribute to cutting-edge research and put their hardware to good use. This is a major upgrade and improves packaging for Linux users. Relevant lemmy community !boinc@sopuli.xyz

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/13369741

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/13369735

Release Notes: https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/wiki/Client-release-notes#changes-in-802

Download page: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php

Report issues: https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/issues/new/choose

This is a major release that introduced a new type of applications called 'Sporadic applications'.

Details are described here: https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/wiki/Sporadic-Applications

For Android users this release should be also available soon on F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/edu.berkeley.boinc/

For Linux users on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE, currently this release is in 'alpha' channel. Soon will be available in 'stable' channel as well.

Installation instructions: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/linux_install.php

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16448198

Globally, people are losing faith in our institutions. Our financial institutions, our governments, our media, our medical systems, even democracy as a concept in many cases. And for sound reasons. Proposed upgrades to Bitcoin's protocol would enable use of the chain (and L2s) for things aside from just money. On the world's most secure document: the bitcoin ledger. It will change everything and here's why.

The root problem is that we are building systems which rely on trust and time and time again, that trust has been broken. We have to trust that the people elected or appointed to those positions will do their jobs faithfully. But, of course, like us, they are humans and fallible. Subject to stupidity, greed, misdirection, and error whether through malice or accident. Take money, for example. Money has to be trust-able, so it is entrusted, for all its faults, to the most stable and neutral institutions humanity has ever created: the state. And yet, the state often abuses that authority to print money they shouldn't leading to inflation and hyperinflation, particularly for unpopular wars of conquest. Every failed state ends in hyperinflation, because it's a tool in the state's toolbox and they will use it when they have no other options. They'll turn on that money printer if they need to. And time after time, they have. There are ways to create trustless systems, where we do not have to trust individual actors to administer them faithfully, only for them to be mostly rational actors subject to the same laws of math and physics as the rest of us. Instead, the system administers itself according to some form of protocol. Bitcoin did this for money 15 years ago, it was created by Satoshi in the wake of the nearly total collapse of the global financial system (2008 financial crisis) to create a system which could not suffer the same fate. We all had to bail the banks out because they were "too big to fail", which was true, Bernanke won a nobel prize in economics for his analysis of this and the bailouts likely prevented the worst economic period since the great depression had the entire banking system be allowed to fail. You may not know who Bernenke is, but if you were alive during this time period, you know his face, he was the guy who had to sell the bailouts to the world as an idea. The reality is, fractional reserve banking is a ponzi scheme, and had the banks failed and people realized it, it would have stopped functioning. Our debt-based world order would have collapsed. No credit could be issued to build roads or fund schools or do anything because there would be no money in the banks to use as collateral and nobody would trust it. Just like in the US great depression. You can argue it's a sneakily beautiful ponzi scheme which drives the engine of human progress if you are a die-hard capitalist, but you can't argue it's not a ponzi scheme.

The crazy thing is, Bitcoin worked. It has kept every promise it made. For 15 years, it has faithfully administered a financial system with a known, transparent, limited supply of 21 million coins which can be transferred across the globe in seconds for pennies in fees. And it has continued to grow no matter which metric you measure it by. Through pandemics, wars, international conflict, attempted bans by major world powers, tick tock, next block, the blockchain continued to function. Not a single hour of downtime, not a single bank holiday, not a single hack or breach of security or protocol. Now, it has a market cap of over 1 trillion USD, which is bigger than the GDP of Israel, the Netherlands, Turkey, or Switzerland, countries with tens of millions of people. It's been consistently over 800 billion for a while now. It moves hundreds of millions of dollars of value on the regular. I can send a transaction to anybody on the planet with a cell phone and halfway reliable internet for under a cent in under a second.

Nobody can make Bitcoin print money it's not supposed to print. Nobody can transfer money without the private key of that coin. Nobody can force the network to do anything outside of its protocol, even if they bought every Bitcoin in existence. Even if they had a trillion dollars and 1,000 people with AKs ready to die for it. It's mathematically, computationally, financially, and logistically infeasible. I think the question is, long-term, how can be we build political and social systems which are equally trustless where we don't have to put people in positions of power. Just like democracy did to monarchy in spreading power around and reducing the damage one corrupted individual could do, we can now do that again in an order of magnitude greater in the same direction towards greater democratization. Whether you're a capitalist, a communist, or a member of the federation of planets, this tech has serious promise for making your ideal global vision come true. It's a matter of setting up the system correctly and getting adoption of it. It can be used for voting systems, for the collection of taxes, for the administration of public funds, goods, and markets. It can be used for a lot more than just money. With smart contract functionality, Bitcoin will be the ledger upon which all this is built.

I'm excited to be here with all of you. We are early. Most people I know don't own any crypto. The future is coming. Thank you Satoshi for your gift to the world.

Globally, people are losing faith in our institutions. Our financial institutions, our governments, our media, our medical systems, even democracy as a concept in many cases. And for sound reasons. Proposed upgrades to Bitcoin's protocol would enable use of the chain (and L2s) for things aside from just money. On the world's most secure document: the bitcoin ledger. It will change everything and here's why.

The root problem is that we are building systems which rely on trust and time and time again, that trust has been broken. We have to trust that the people elected or appointed to those positions will do their jobs faithfully. But, of course, like us, they are humans and fallible. Subject to stupidity, greed, misdirection, and error whether through malice or accident. Take money, for example. Money has to be trust-able, so it is entrusted, for all its faults, to the most stable and neutral institutions humanity has ever created: the state. And yet, the state often abuses that authority to print money they shouldn't leading to inflation and hyperinflation, particularly for unpopular wars of conquest. Every failed state ends in hyperinflation, because it's a tool in the state's toolbox and they will use it when they have no other options. They'll turn on that money printer if they need to. And time after time, they have. There are ways to create trustless systems, where we do not have to trust individual actors to administer them faithfully, only for them to be mostly rational actors subject to the same laws of math and physics as the rest of us. Instead, the system administers itself according to some form of protocol. Bitcoin did this for money 15 years ago, it was created by Satoshi in the wake of the nearly total collapse of the global financial system (2008 financial crisis) to create a system which could not suffer the same fate. We all had to bail the banks out because they were "too big to fail", which was true, Bernanke won a nobel prize in economics for his analysis of this and the bailouts likely prevented the worst economic period since the great depression had the entire banking system be allowed to fail. You may not know who Bernenke is, but if you were alive during this time period, you know his face, he was the guy who had to sell the bailouts to the world as an idea. The reality is, fractional reserve banking is a ponzi scheme, and had the banks failed and people realized it, it would have stopped functioning. Our debt-based world order would have collapsed. No credit could be issued to build roads or fund schools or do anything because there would be no money in the banks to use as collateral and nobody would trust it. Just like in the US great depression. You can argue it's a sneakily beautiful ponzi scheme which drives the engine of human progress if you are a die-hard capitalist, but you can't argue it's not a ponzi scheme.

The crazy thing is, Bitcoin worked. It has kept every promise it made. For 15 years, it has faithfully administered a financial system with a known, transparent, limited supply of 21 million coins which can be transferred across the globe in seconds for pennies in fees. And it has continued to grow no matter which metric you measure it by. Through pandemics, wars, international conflict, attempted bans by major world powers, tick tock, next block, the blockchain continued to function. Not a single hour of downtime, not a single bank holiday, not a single hack or breach of security or protocol. Now, it has a market cap of over 1 trillion USD, which is bigger than the GDP of Israel, the Netherlands, Turkey, or Switzerland, countries with tens of millions of people. It's been consistently over 800 billion for a while now. It moves hundreds of millions of dollars of value on the regular. I can send a transaction to anybody on the planet with a cell phone and halfway reliable internet for under a cent in under a second.

Nobody can make Bitcoin print money it's not supposed to print. Nobody can transfer money without the private key of that coin. Nobody can force the network to do anything outside of its protocol, even if they bought every Bitcoin in existence. Even if they had a trillion dollars and 1,000 people with AKs ready to die for it. It's mathematically, computationally, financially, and logistically infeasible. I think the question is, long-term, how can be we build political and social systems which are equally trustless where we don't have to put people in positions of power. Just like democracy did to monarchy in spreading power around and reducing the damage one corrupted individual could do, we can now do that again in an order of magnitude greater in the same direction towards greater democratization. Whether you're a capitalist, a communist, or a member of the federation of planets, this tech has serious promise for making your ideal global vision come true. It's a matter of setting up the system correctly and getting adoption of it. It can be used for voting systems, for the collection of taxes, for the administration of public funds, goods, and markets. It can be used for a lot more than just money. With smart contract functionality, Bitcoin will be the ledger upon which all this is built.

I'm excited to be here with all of you. We are early. Most people I know don't own any crypto. The future is coming. Thank you Satoshi for your gift to the world.

I've been using lightning for a couple months now and I've read lots of incorrect or outdated information about it online. It's been a very smooth experience for me, and I want to share what I've learned.

TLDR: Using lightning with a custodial wallet (strike, cash app, etc) is as easy as using venmo. Transactions happen instantly and cost pennies, often under a single cent. Using it with a non-custodial wallet is slightly more complicated but well within the ability of the average person as nearly all the complexity has been abstracted away. Lightning scales really well.

Background:

Lightning is a scaling layer for Bitcoin that enables you to make transactions off-chain with security being provided by the base chain. Transactions confirm in under a second and the fees measure in pennies.

A fundamental problem with blockchain is that space in the blockchain is limited. If you increase the block size (number of transactions per block) or add smart contracts, the size of the chain increases. This means you need more powerful hardware and network connection to run a full node, which increases centralization. Bitcoin, at every turn, has chosen to pursue decentralization, but at the expense of higher chain fees since the limited space increases the competition for the available slots. This is why you can run a Bitcoin node on a 10 year old laptop with a 500GB hard drive but you can't run a node for other cryptos unless you have a server and a fiber connection.

Lightning was designed to enable fast off-chain transactions with much lower fees, and it does that.

How to use:

To use lightning, you need a wallet which supports it. You can use a custodial or non-custodial wallet.

Custodial wallets mean somebody else holds the keys/funds and you trust them to hold onto them. "Not your keys, not your coins" as they say. Custodial wallets are also a popular choice for buying/selling BTC since they can often connect to your bank account. Popular custodial wallets for Bitcoin lightning are Strike, Cash App, and Wallet of Satoshi. I highly suggest strike. Using a custodial wallet with lightning is as easy as using Venmo.

Non-custodial wallets mean you hold the key. If you don't write down the seed phrase it gives you and the device with your wallet dies, you will lose your key and your funds. Popular non-custodial wallets for lightning are Phoenix (mobile) and Electrum (desktop). Zeus (mobile) is great if you want more control and the ability to receive transactions while the app is closed. Non-custodial wallets can also be slightly more complex to use. I highly suggest Phoenix, I have been using it and it is awesome. Electrum is great as well, but I haven't used it for lightning.

Note: an on-chain tx is required to move any of your existing Bitcoin into lightning. Unless you bought your BTC and store it in a custodial wallet or exchange that supports lightning.

Myths:

"Lightning requires you to be constantly re-balancing channels"

• If you use a custodial wallet, you don't even have to know what a channel is, your wallet provider handles all of this. For non-custodial wallets like Phoenix, this is mostly abstracted.
• For non-custodial wallets like Phoenix, most of this is abstracted away for you.
  • If you receive a payment and don't have enough liquidity, an on-chain tx will be made which incurs an on-chain fee. Some wallets like Phoenix allow you to rent liquidity for very cheap to avoid these fees.
  • Most people receive their paycheck and then spend most of it, if you follow this pattern, your channels will stay "balanced".
  • Some background on channels: in lightning, you make a "channel" by locking up some BTC. If you lock up 1BTC in a channel, you can send up to 1BTC to anybody else. You can have basically an infinite number of transactions in a channel. Every time you send or receive BTC in a lightning channel, the "balance" of the channel is updated ie how much of the BTC in the channel belongs to you vs the other person you opened it with. When you send BTC, you open up "channel capacity" called "inbound liquidity" for somebody to send you BTC over lightning. If you don't have incoming channel capacity and somebody wants to send you BTC, you will need to do an on-chain tx to create it. It works this way to ensure security.

"Funds are easy to steal on lightning and you have to monitor everything"

• Attacks in the wild are incredibly rare because every incentive is aligned against the attacker.
• If you use a custodial wallet, you don't have to monitor anything and your funds are safe if you trust your custodian.
• If you use a non-custodial wallet, you don't have to worry about this either. Phoenix, for example, automatically uses their watchtower service. As long as your device can connect to the internet every few days, you are fine here.
• The main attack watchtowers prevent against (and really the only attack possible in lightning) is for somebody to "force close" your channel and broadcast an "old" channel state on main chain which assigns the wrong amount of BTC to you. If you watch main chain, you can dispute this state they published, get the correct amount of BTC assigned to you, plus a penalty which is charged to the attacker.
• Lightning is great for everyday spending. If you have significant funds, on-chain txes and cold storage/multi-sig are best.

"You have to make a channel for everybody you transact with"

False. Once you have a channel with anybody you can use that channel to route payments to anybody else on lightning.

"You have to keep manual backups of your channel state or you can lose your funds!"

This is true, but this is usually automated and built into the app. With Phoenix, for example, so long as you have your seed phrase you can install Phoenix on a new phone and automatically retrieve the backups made of your chain state since Phoenix's developers automatically keeps the backups. Other wallets offer similar "storage via lightning" backup options.

With custodial wallets, they do this automatically so you just have to remember your username/password.

"Lightning doesn't scale"

• Lightning scales very well. Once you create a channel, you can have essentially an infinite amount of transactions in it, all of which occur off-chain. There is enough chain space to make lightning channels for billions of people.
• This provides enough capacity for significant growth in Bitcoin's adoption
• A single on-chain tx can make a single channel. There are proposals in the works to make multiple channels with a single tx (channel factories) and other L2s like Ark and Fedimint which extend/complement lightning.

"Sure fees are low now, but as more people use it, fees will get high!"

No. The reason fees increase on main chain is because you have limited space and you must pay miners for that space. A lightning channel, once opened with a single on-chain tx, can host millions or billions of transactions. The cost to route these transactions is extremely small from a computation standpoint, there is no mining required. Space is not limited, so competition for space doesn't drive high fees.

"Lightning is centralized"

Wrong.

• Lightning uses the security of Bitcoin's L1 to secure transactions.
• Transactions are routed through a network of lightning routing nodes, there's currently at least 41,000 of them, you can run one on a Raspberry Pi.
• Routing nodes can't rug you or steal your funds. You don't have to trust those nodes to secure your BTC, that is secured by L1.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13481277

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13481220

How to contact your MEP: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/portal/en/contact

Source: https://snort.social/nevent1qqsvcedd6dg39eh6633uqqff0p9h2zqyhu3zd6kwyyhzqj7da02x4pszyqe2wpknmwkyd0t295d5ezvtaxr00ngxjtcfuct8pfvyec3snckpwqcyqqqqqqgz2f7lp

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13481220

How to contact your MEP: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/portal/en/contact

Source: https://snort.social/nevent1qqsvcedd6dg39eh6633uqqff0p9h2zqyhu3zd6kwyyhzqj7da02x4pszyqe2wpknmwkyd0t295d5ezvtaxr00ngxjtcfuct8pfvyec3snckpwqcyqqqqqqgz2f7lp

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13481220

How to contact your MEP: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/portal/en/contact

Source: https://snort.social/nevent1qqsvcedd6dg39eh6633uqqff0p9h2zqyhu3zd6kwyyhzqj7da02x4pszyqe2wpknmwkyd0t295d5ezvtaxr00ngxjtcfuct8pfvyec3snckpwqcyqqqqqqgz2f7lp

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13481220

How to contact your MEP: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/portal/en/contact

Source: https://snort.social/nevent1qqsvcedd6dg39eh6633uqqff0p9h2zqyhu3zd6kwyyhzqj7da02x4pszyqe2wpknmwkyd0t295d5ezvtaxr00ngxjtcfuct8pfvyec3snckpwqcyqqqqqqgz2f7lp

How to contact your MEP: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/portal/en/contact

Source: https://snort.social/nevent1qqsvcedd6dg39eh6633uqqff0p9h2zqyhu3zd6kwyyhzqj7da02x4pszyqe2wpknmwkyd0t295d5ezvtaxr00ngxjtcfuct8pfvyec3snckpwqcyqqqqqqgz2f7lp