rufusroflpunch

China banning miners strengthened the network instead of weakening it. Within a 3-6 months the hash rate totally recovered and it was more decentralized than ever.

The argument that it is easier to move a validator than a miner is a very surface level argument, honestly. The incentives of mining ensure that miners will spread to every corner of the world, in every jurisdiction, in search of cheap electricity.

Meanwhile, proof of stake validation has no such incentive. It is financialized and it even has a guaranteed yield component. Since validators are financial and not industrial like miners, they will be incentivized to locate near other financial centers, like New York and London, and they will certainly comply with sanctions and other financial practices.

Do you really think they wouldn’t turn they screw when the time came?

The idea that Proof of Stake is more secure against attack is beyond absurd, frankly. However you feel about the energy usage of proof of work consensus mechanisms, they are far more resistant to attack and centralization.

I'm referring to a payment network outside of credit card rails entirely.

I think you’re wrong. The credit card system’s days are numbered. In 5 years I think digital wallets will be common in the US, and it won’t be because of anything the government did except get out of the way.

The core devs have implemented a “difficulty bomb” in order to pressure the community to adopt their changes. If you don’t accept their hard forks you will stuck operating on a chain where you can’t mint new blocks.

It’s not quite force or coercion but it’s something close. It allows the Ethereum team to operate similar to a software company and retain tight control over the so called decentralized network.

This is a primary example of why many people argue that Ethereum operates more like a security.

Wondering the same thing myself. The entire problem with proof of stake is that the only thing in the digital realm that can be relied on as a source of objective truth is computation, hence proof of work.

How do you get verified (true) randomness without an oracle and without a connection to the analog world (proof of work)?

It would be amusing if the answer was randomness that came from a proof of work algorithm.

It's not nonsense. In the US, full-time jobs are down, people with multiple jobs are up. It's not reflected correctly in the Establishment jobs survey, which is the survey the media outlets all use when reporting jobs numbers.

Anyway, full time jobs are dropping out of the economy, but it's being offset by people taking more than one job to make ends meet. I don't know about you, but this hardly seems like a healthy situation.

Maybe I misunderstood, but I saw this on twitter: https://twitter.com/0xdev0/status/1556933551073153024

It says they blocked RPC requests from TornadoCrash, and that MM could no longer access Tornado Cash funds.

I agree, that's why I specified the ethereum ecosystem, not just the protocol. For instance, Infura and MetaMask have already blacklisted the OFAC addresses, and those services are critical to the workflows of MANY services in the ecosystem.

It would hurt it, definitely wouldn't kill it.

There's still an economy. You can use decentralized exchanges like Bisq, Robosats, etc to buy and sell Bitcoin, even if they banned every centralized exchange. You can also directly transact Bitcoin for goods and services in the underground market.

This will be a great test of how decentralized the ethereum ecosystem actually is.

It's just game theory. If banning it won't kill it (and it won't in this case), then you need to embrace it or lose out. The best they can hope for is to control the on-ramps and off-ramps.

I think the Lightning Network will be useful for this role someday. The only proof of work that ever needs to be necessarily run are on the Bitcoin network, and you can transfer Bitcoin or satoshis or fractions of a satoshi as the representative of work, instead of the doing the work directly.

The social network is dead. Long live the social network.

Love Mullvad. Wish they would hurry up on Lightning Network integration.

Peter Zeihan seems to think China is in the worst shape by far, and it's not even close.

You just trade them as dollars. In places like Lebanon, Turkey, etc many people will just use them as dollars. You can send them around in crypto wallets.

Your post demonstrates a clear lack of understanding about how Bitcoin works.

1) The Lightning Network is fine and stronger than ever. That >2 year old outdated post is meaningless. There are MANY more routing nodes than ever, and markets have sprung up that allow nodes to make profit around selling liquidity to other nodes. Lightning is bigger, better, easier and more private than ever, and it only continues to improve.

2) The Bitcoin developers do not control Bitcoin. The Bitcoin miners do not control Bitcoin. The nodes control Bitcoin. There are tens of thousands, at least, of full nodes. Bitcoin developers and miners have tried many times to change the consensus rules of Bitcoin, and have failed every time, because the node operators just wouldn't run the code.

That's because Bitcoin is actually decentralized. The Bitcoin community reached a social consensus that the protocol consensus rules were probably never going to change, and it was preferable that they not change. Instead, the majority of the effort for scaling Bitcoin has gone into building higher Bitcoin layers, such as the Lightning Network.

Also, if the Bitcoin developers cared about miner profits, they wouldn't have implemented something like SegWit which is a backward-compatible change which dramatically reduced transaction fees to miners.

The truth is, no amount of block size or block time changes will ever make a cryptocurrency scale enough to remain decentralized and be a network for ALL payments. Building in layers is a sound engineering decision, and it allows people to create a payment network like Lightning without making potentially deadly trade-offs in the base layer.

I wish it was redundant.

> pokes Luna's corpse with a stick

There's multiple things to consider with the crypto space:

1) Bitcoin: It is attempting to establish hard money standard outside of state authority. It's slow going. Takes a long time to build and educate. Currently largely treated as a store of value, but there are efforts under way to make it usable as a method of payment (the Lightning network).

2) Tether and fully backed stablecoins: These provide dollar liquidity to the crypto ecosystem. More importantly, they are a very important store of wealth for the developing world, where they want dollars but laws and capital controls prevent stunt that.

3) Shitcoin casinos: The space for degenerate gamblers.

I guess I just assumed he sold at the bottom-ish and that they had previously bought higher, though I am probably wrong.

Buy high and sell low. That’s the way to do it, right there.

I'm sure they would say the same thing about whatever nonsense you believe.

Same. I got the M1 Air earlier this year. Was worried I was too late in the product cycle, but after using it, this thing will be a beast for years to come.

Governance, no… But transaction selection?

I have Logitech MX keys and a Logitech mouse. I actually use a USB receiver personally. Much prefer it, and no AirPods issues to boot.

It needs work still but I think it is not bad. Muun, for example, is amazing and non-custodial. CashApp and Strike also have very nice and fool proof custodial options.

Edit: Stablecoins are coming to Lightning soon enough.

I think within the next couple of years, the Lightning network will become a real payments contender in the porn space.

This is a goofy response. Belief isn’t a religious word. I could write an entire treatise on Bitcoin in my comment, but no one would read it, and besides that, the audience of my comment are people already convinced of its value.