makeasnek

Sorry you're getting downvoted to hell. You're right. Sometimes people want everything to be a conspiracy or something aside from the simpler truth which is that voters just wanted somebody different.

Cenorship-resistant protocols like ActivityPub (Lemmy, Mastodon), Nostr, Tor, I2P, and freenet solve this.

If you want cheap buying and selling of Bitcoin specifically, especially if you need access within and outside the US, Strike is amazing and cheap. Also worthy of mention here is "complex but cheap" Bisq.

Instead of fixing those issues, most other coins are just pump and dump schemes for a quick buck.

Oh agree totally on this one.

Bitcoin and many other currencies have way too many and large fluctuations in value for daily use.

If you are using it to send money from point A to point B, you can cash it out at the same price you put it in at, so fluctuation doesn't matter much. You're probably saving on bank fees and exchange risk enhanced by slow international settlement. Exchange risk is always a thing with any currency. It's gotten more stable over time and I imagine that trend will continue. Other currencies are also unstable, how has the purchasing power of the USD held up over the last 5 years? That's not to mention the billions of people not fortunate enough to live in a currency environment which is dominated by the dollar. Ask any Argentenian or Turkish person how stable their currency is compared to Bitcoin. Best case scenario, your dollar slowly loses value over time due to supply inflation. Whether or not you find it useful, more and more people find it useful every year, the transaction volume has increased reliably for 15 years. Nobody's making them use it. On the contrary, there are often hurdles educational, regulatory, and technological to using it, but they still do. Maybe on year 16 though people will finally realize it's useless and stop using it.

Bitcoin specifically is not practical for transactions in general due to cost and block size limits. Yes, lightning exists, but maybe your technology is shit if it needs a second overlay network to function.

Maybe TCP/IP is shit if we need other protocols build on top of it like SMTP. Maybe ethernet is shit if we have to design a whole nother protocol (TCP) just to make sure packets actually arive in the proper order. No. This is a weak argument. Fedwire, the system for settlement between US banks, has a equivalent transaction speed to Bitcoin's base layer. Banks don't seem to have any problem with that speed. And ten minutes is pretty dang fast to send a million dollar transaction across the globe (on main chain) or under a second (on lightning). Meanwhile, the US dollar doesn't have a built-in transfer mechanism, and the mechanisms available can be quite frustrating or expensive to work with, ask anybody whose ever had to send an international bank wire or deal with the frequent buyer return fraud on platforms like eBay. I'd sell an iPhone to somebody in (insert fraud prone country here) no problem in BTC. With PayPal? No effing way,

Check the wikipedia article, pretty neutral and factual reporting on the history. TLDR he revealed the US committing war crimes, they went after him with everything they had including planning an assassination attempt (which they never went through with). They tried to apply US law internationally to somebody who wasn't a US citizen and wasn't in the US. The UN said his detainment was illegal and torture. He's been on the run, in some embassy, or jail for over 10 years for activity other news organizations regularly and legally engage in (leaking classified documents). Various US military, intelligence, etc agency heads have testified to congress that they couldn't find a single death related to the documents he leaked, he didn't put anybody at risk, in fact, Wikileaks sent every leak to the US govt before leaking it asking them for notes on what to redact. The US refused to participate in that process.

He also revealed the DNC was trying to bury Bernie, which the DNC didn't even deny, they had to let a bunch of their top people go and do a bunch of primary reforms as a result. That's when liberals started hating Wikileaks, because the DNC emails helped get Trump elected. They say the "timing" of right before the election makes his leak partisan. But wouldn't you want that information before you vote? It is the job of wikileaks, or any journalist, to maximize the impact of information they are revealing on corruption. It's not Julian's fault the DNC was corrupt AF, all they had to do to avoid that was... not be corrupt.

There were also some sex assault allegations against him, which I tend to believe have some veracity to them however the accusers explicitly did not want him charged, it was a ploy to get him to Sweden where he would be extradited to the US. He was never even charged, only "wanted to questioning" but somehow got an interpol notice for it. His lawyers offered over a dozen times for him to be interviewed but Sweden insisted on an "in-person" interview for some reason. Curious.

Oh, and he helped save Snowden's life by getting him a flight out of China.

Read about scaling layers (L2 and L3s) it absolutely scales. You can use one L1 transaction to create a lightning channel, you can then have an infinite number of transactions in that channel between you and any partie(s) you want. All off-chain. The chain secures these transactions by being the enforcement mechanism. Just like a contract works because you can run to a court and get it enforced. The court only handles 1% of contracts ever written. Courts scale, Bitcoin scales.

It's already scaled pretty damn well.

I need something like a Spotify subscription for open source to assuage my guilt of the great value I extract for my personal use of open source.

I would love to see something like this, where I can contribute to an open source project while also contributing to all their dependencies. Maybe such a thing exists and I just haven't heard of it yet.

Look, I love privacy and I agree Bitcoin needs more of it. Many developers/OSS projects would have trouble using XMR, the off-ramps are few and far between. Bitcoin's privacy continues to get better and you can achieve significant degrees of anonymity with techniques like coinjoin etc. Lightning is pretty opaque, all the data on chain is who you opened your lightning channel with, not ANY of the transaction data between you and any other party (and remember, a single lightning channel can route payments to any other lightning user). And you can run a lightning node/wallet on an android. Long-term Bitcoin could absorb Monero's entire market cap by simply copying its privacy features into a future protocol upgrade, which I hope it does as it has with experimental protocol changes first tried on other blockchains. And the Bitcoin community seems very pro-privacy.

Monero has no functional L2 and only has "low fees" because it doesn't have the tx volume to get higher fees. Bitcoin has had a functional L2 for 5+ years now. Lightning fees are usually a penny or two per transaction, if sending large amounts, an on-chain tx is still only like $1.50 most of the time. Settlement on Monero takes minutes instead of less than a second on lightning, not that it matters for this particular use case. It doesn't have nearly the network of developers, users, or other people in the ecosystem backing it. Monero also has larger variable-sized blocks. Larger block sizes = more hardware requirements to run a node = more centralization. Bitcoin already had that debate and every other debate and chose decentralization at every turn. Monero chose bigger blocks just like Bitcoin cash did. Bigger block is not a scalable solution while remaining decentralized. No thanks. All of humanity's transactions shouldn't be stored on the blockchain for eternity, that is incredibly inefficient and needless. Nano has similar problems with design, no way to compensate those who run the infrastructure for the network, and pretty much nobody using it, and probably a massive pre-mine.

There are some fundamental problems to blockchain, digital currency, or decentralized ledgers. If you want a decentralized ledger, space is your biggest limitation. If you want more space, you get more centralization. Every other coin chose more space for "lower fees" or "faster transactions", Bitcoin chose decentralization at every possible turn (at the cost of having less space) and will continue to do so. For me, that is bar none the most important factor. And now it also has "fast transactions" and "low fees" thanks to L2s.

Love hearing from devs that donations are coming into their projects, thank you for sharing that! Contributing time and expertise is just as important thank you for your contributions 🫡🫡🫡

OpenShot went terribly for me. Cool idea but did not work. Ate hours and hours of editing by failing to export. I tried everything, even opening Github issues to figure out where the problem was. Systematically re-cut and edited and moved every clip. Still couldn't get it to export even though everything worked flawlessly in editing and previewing. Tried switching to latest, alpha, whatever, none of them could export. Absolute nightmare. Do not recommend. Eventually had to re-do everything in kdenlive.