jkepler

M'y physics prof loved his NeXT machine back in the day.

Yeah, I had a Withings semismart watch, one of their cheaper models without a screen. It integrated a pedometer, and had a dial had that would show steps taken, it moved from 0 to 100% of your goal. One had to pair it to the Withings Android app to set not just the goal for number of steps/day, but even for setting the time.

I sold it after a few months, realizing how much I missed a second hand and a glow-in-the-dark face. Also, the app had a ton of telemetry going back to Withings.

Building your own you would be in full control of the data.

> but for what it's worth, my emotional frame towards what she did is gratitude.

Sounds to me like the basic conflict here is the OP holds to expressive individualism of the sort historian Carl Trueman describes in his book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self [0]; while the commenter appears to believe that moral/ethical reality exists external to human persons, thus stealing and being an accessory to theft are wrong, regardless of one's emotional frame.

/Can/ one run mainline GNU/Linux on the Cosmo Communicator? On their website, it says Linux and Sailfish OS support are planned, but not ready yet. And, will it be pure Linux, or will it be running on top of Androids HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer)?

My understanding is that the Pinephone, Pinephone Pro, or Librem 5 are the only pure Linux phones available... and the Librem 5 is 'barely' available given the long lead time on orders.

Technically, Maemo Leste is a pure Linux option on some older handsets, but I'm not sure any of them support VoLTE, so increasingly that would mean no telephony support... depending on where one is in the world and whether they've dropped 3G and 4G non-LTE calling.

I would love to know if there's other pure Linux options.

I don't know if its still the case, but about ten years ago I took ViaRail Canada from Vancouver to Toronto. It was a four-day train ride (with a brief stopover on Bamff) and the vast majority of it was remote Canada crossing the Rockies, with no mobile network coverage.

I asked the train staff about WiFi onboard, and they said that they didn't have it and the preferred it that way. People take their train, not to get from A to B, but to disconnect and meet other people, read books, or watch the beautiful landscape going by. If people had Internet access, they'd be glued to their devices and wouldn't meet fellow travelers, and that's the magic of this line.

(They even said that their corporate management wanted WiFi in the trains so that the staff could digitize a lot of their paperwork, but the crew was resisting it because they believed it was exactly the lack of connectivity that keep people taking the train for vacation.)

Frappucinos are frivolous uses of energy. Where ought one draw the line?

Yup. Ethereum is now ruled by the riches people in that network. Sounds an awful lot like legacy financial networks that are also run by the rich.

The question is, can a truly decentralized blockchain maintain its security against all adversaries without proof of work?

You're correct that using waste methane to generate electricity for bitcoin mining is small, but its growing, which is good news. And this is significant for the climate as methane gas has a /far/ larger warming effect than CO2.

According to the IEA (International Energy Agency), acriculture, fossil fuels, and waste are the top three human sources of methane emissions (the too source, wetlands, is natural). Bitcoin mining companies have business models than can significantly mitigate the fossil fuels and landfills(waste) sources of human methane emissions. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/sources-of-me...

Actually, look at the deal Kissinger cut with the Saudis in the early 1970s, creating the petrodollar system: the US dollar became the world's reserve currency because the Saudis agreed to only accept dollars in exchange for oil.

The costs of the US 7th fleet in the Gulf and the entire military industrial complex behind it are what backs the global strength of the US dollar.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-hidden-costs-of-the-...

But why single out Bitcoin? What about all the data centers serving Netflix movies? Others might say those are excess. Consider the annual energy consumption of tumble-dryers in the USA (which uses more energy than bitcoin mining): in Europe where I live most people I know hand their clothing to dry, thus they might consider American dryers to be an excess of electric consumption.

Last time I checked, bitcoin miners have to compete for energy same as anyone else---and when energy prices rise, they move their operations to where its cheaper.

That why they're using methane gas that would have been flared by oil companies to generate electricity to mine bitcoin in the west Texas oil fields... which is net positive, because the resulting CO2 emissions are 84x less carbon-intense for the atmosphere than the flared methane would have been.

Or, there is Vespene Energy, a bitcoin mining startup helping US municipal landfill operators comply with new expensive EPA methane emissions regulations by using landfills emitted methane to generate electricity, which they then use to mine bitcoin and they share the profits with the landfill operators. The cool thing with their business model is they can simply sell the electricity to other grid customers, but the reason they often end up mining Bitcoin with the power is because the landfills are often not near cities or large areas of electricity demand.

If one takes time to research this, one would see that bitcoin miners have a strong financial incentive to find the cheapest sources of power, which are typically stranded or waste power. Bitcoin mining is improving the environment.

Actually, the Puritans left England for Holland because they were at the receiving end of violent imprisonment for holding religious convictions that differed with the Anglican church and authorities. Then they left the Netherlands because they felt that their children were becoming too Dutch.

After the Puritans founded Plymouth Bay colony, they let William Rogers (if I have his name correct) leave when he disagreed with them, and he went and founded Rhode Island... where he eventually excommunicated his own wife (so maybe he just had issues getting on with folks).

So I'm not sure what episodes of violently attacking neighbors you're speaking of.

Additionally, according to American feminist history researcher Mardi Keyes in a lecture I heard years ago, Puritan New England was the first society in the world where legally women had the full right to bring divorce suites in cases of abuse, infidelity, or neglect; 50% of the cases were brought by women (she said if you look of the court records one can see this evidence) and it was the closeness of their communities that enabled neighbors and friends to provide testimonial evidence, which often enabled women to leave dreadful marriages. This stands in stark contrast to the pejorative caricaturing of Puritans as anti-women.

What if one only buys a laptop once every three or four years? Then it would be 1/3 or 1/4 of a percent of annual salary.

I suspect you'd have to never cross a border/barrier where ID was required, and you would need to pay cash (or bitcoin) in-person for everything, as you would be cut-off from the banking system. You'd probably also be limited to earning cash in work that didn't require your nonexistent legal identity.

You took my stapler.

Thanks for this list!

Bitcoin is already thermodynamically secured by proof-of-work, as miners burn electricity for the right to add new blocks of transactions to the blockchain. The ESG crowd can criticize energy use, but human civilization flourished with abundant energy (and that energy allows building of wealth to be able to afford a clean environment for all creatures); energy use secures bitcoin.

Gold's physical characteristics tended towards centralization. Centralizing gave the institutions controlling the gold strong incentives to allow debasement of gold-backed money, as it gave those institutions handsome profits and strong political control.

Ethereum is not Bitcoin. Ethereum just showed the world Botcoin's unique value compared to Ethereum and the thousands of crypto projects so often conflated with Bitcoin.

The 2017 Bitcoin scaling wars proved that one can't simply change Bitcoin's consensus rules by majority control of the miners. I think at one point 80% of the miners were in favor of large blocks, yet they didn't have buy-in from the rest of the network participants (developers, regular users, merchants, exchanges).

Bitcoin has really robust decentralization.

Libertarians should be protesting against violence toward the unborn child... libertarianism's core principle is nonviolence towards others.

Are you familiar with https://identity.foundation/ ? Its a group of companies and developers working on decentralizing identity.

On Android, if you use AndOTP, the app allows you to easily back up all your OTP secrets to an exportable file, with optional password encryption. Trivial to then import into another phone.

SMS is bad for 2FA not because it can be spoofed, bit because of SIM-swapping attacks that let the attacker trivially take your 2FA codes from you---gaining access to your protected accounts while you're locked out. NIST recommended against using SMS for this reason in summer 2016.

The French government adopted Matrix for all their internal and inter-ministerial communications, to avoid dependence on foreign corporate products. https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/matrix_french...

Most people I know use WhatsApp (I refuse, and since I run Lineage OS without Google services I simply tell people my phone doesn't support it), Signal, or Telegram.

Actually, what you call brand recognition could be monetary adoption, as every nongovernmental money such as gold or silver had widespread adoption on their merits.

Bitcoin solved the Byzantine generals' problem in adversarial network contexts, by its innovative deployment of proof-of-work. Thus, bitcoin invented thermodynamically secured property rights, and property rights are a fundamental building block for human flourishing. Bitcoin provides a decentralized trustless source of truth, and none of the other cryptos do that because they're not nearly as widely adopted.

Bitcoin is a strong base layer that faster more anonymous payments can be based upon, such as Lightning or Liquid, and things like CoinJoin and PayJoin, which are trust less and noncustodial. You can't start with a squishly base layer and then build stable systems, but if you start with solid fundamentals, privacy and better user experiences can be built on top.

Bitcoin is also currently solving the natural gas industry's problem of flaring methane... portable mining rigs use the methane to generate electricity to provide network security to the Bitcoin network, while making natural gas extraction cleaner. Bitcoin mining is also incentivising and paying for the production of clean renewable energy on larger scales than anyone had figured how to fund. And some people use bitcoin mining to provide home heating in the winter. No other crypto is doing those things.

Accept bitcoin for your products and services, and when you run your books, look at it from the perspective of bitcoin to see if you're profitable or not, even if you legally still need to keep your books in your local government's currency. The dollars (and the other fiat currencies) inflate too quickly to be useful monetary measures.

Some of us have read Bastiat (in French!), Mises, Hayek, Rothbart, Solerno, and other "heterodox" Austrian economists, and have a better understanding of how money arises and how central bank interference in monetary and credit markets creates the boom and bust business cycles.

Bitcoin, with its Austrian hard money roots, stands head and shoulders above the crazy scammy mess of all the centralized altcoins (or "crypto" if you lile) that you right to criticize. Please don't lump real technological and computer science innovation in with a the crypto rug-pulls.

Read Rothbart's Mystery of Banking, https://mises.org/library/mystery-banking. Or Mises' Human Action.

Bitcoin mining currently consumes less that 0.2 % of global energy consumption. Smartphone use and the associated radio infrastructure use somewhere between 1% to 2% of global energy.

How much energy do central and commercial banks, auditors, accountants, corporate currency hedge trading desks, and the armies that back fiat currencies use? Way, way more than bitcoin... and they don't provide a way to pay electric grids to build out renewables the way bitcoin mining does.

Many---nearly all---altcoins are dangerously close to ponzi schemes, except bitcoin. Bitcoin stands apart as the sole protocol that's really decentralized and doesn't promise ridiculous returns.

However, given that Bitcoin is jn the process of monetizing and may become the world's base layer of money, it stands to gain a lot of value the long term compared to the melting icebergs of central bank and commercial bank created fiat currencies.

If this doesn't make sense, please read "The Bitcoin Standard" and "Inventing Bitcoin" to understand this technological advance.

One can prefer sundials to watches, but reality was changed when the watch was invented.

Can you provide a source for your statement? Nothing in the Satoshi white paper says that was the purpose, and Satoshi wasn't even sure if the project would work as digital cash, much less enable wealth transfers.