You can make as many Bitcoin addresses as you want. You can look up an addresses balance but not a wallet’s balance. It’s not as clear as you’re making it sound.

Bitcoin over Lightning is much, much more opaque, and it’s where the majority of Bitcoin transactions are now occurring. You can’t look up somebody’s balance. The only people who know about the transaction are you, the recipient, and any intermediary nodes used to forward the transaction. Privacy is continuing to improve on lightning and main chain.

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In the last two months, Nostr users alone (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 2.6 million tips (individual transactions) over Bitcoin lightning. In that same time period, Bitcoin main chain did around 20-40k. Most transactions are on lightning by number of transactions. Maybe not by total value moved, but lightning is pretty opaque and grants additional privacy, so it’s hard to measure for that reason.

Lightning continues to grow and get upgrades (look up BOLT12 if you are curious about the latest upgrades which bring additional privacy enhancements).

It’s open source, and it’s fully self-custody which are two important features. Having a wallet directly integrated into the e-mail client is nice, being able to send payments to other users just knowing their e-mail address instead of their public key is pretty cool. It does automatic address rotation to preserve privacy. Wish it supported lightning for cheaper/faster transactions and additional privacy but hopefully that feature comes in time.

It’s a self-custody wallet and open source. It’s regular main-chain BTC but it does automatic address rotation. Unfortunately it doesn’t support lightning, which is where the majority of Bitcoin transactions occur. Lightning offers significantly increased privacy, sub-second transactions and fees measuring in pennies.

Not a distro but Qubes. Incredible security and privacy out of the box. Not for everyone but absolutely one of the most interesting developments in the OS world in the past decade or two.

Firefox user and evangelist of over a decade. Fuck Firefox for this.

Instead of trying to clone, it may be easier to:

• Install Fedora to new drive
• Reinstall any packages you modified from base install
• Copy over your home directory including hidden directories, plus /etc

A lot of OSS projects and small non-profits? Yes. The cost to entry is “be willing to volunteer” and very few people pay that cost so basically anybody can get in. These aren’t exactly competitive positions. And if they improve the software honestly idk if they’re a shaman healer or whatever. I care about the software. As long as their energy healing garbage isn’t somehow getting into the software who cares?

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You may want to look into Qubes, it can natively route an entire OS through Tor. Note that routing all your traffic may hurt your anonymity. For example, there what if an app on your machine reaches out to somewhere and reports the serial number of a piece of hardware and it does it through your “anonymous” Tor connection? Virtualizing that hardware can help avoid that. Think through your threat model.

All versions over the past decade including the latest one

Wow very interesting thank you! I like that it can be run side-by-side from the same profile to test it out. If search was fixed I would have never migrated so much of my e-mail to gmail.

I have used Thunderbird for years. HOWEVER:

• I don’t know why Thunderbird can’t get a reliable, functional search ability. It’s such garbage. I constantly have to delete my entire search index and start from scratch, it is immensely frustrating.
• The problems connecting to gmail are also so frustrating. Yes, they are Google’s fault but if you make an e-mail client you maybe need to add a workaround for the world’s most popular e-mail provider. It’s totally fixable because you can apply those fixes manually.

It is. Lightning transactions confirm in under a second, you can sell those instantly via an exchange. The price is not that unstable and already more stable than many national currencies. You can guarantee that they receive the same amount of BTC.

Bitcoin has collapsed like three times in the last like 7 years dawg.

If you bought 1 BTC 15 years ago, you still have 1 BTC. It has not collapsed. The price relative to USD has collapsed a few times, but the average trend is growth. Bitcoin does not guarantee any price relative to any other currency, because it can’t, all it can guarantee is a stable supply of currency. The USD, in that time period, has lost >20% of its purchasing power as well, so the USD also “crashed”.

It’s fair, I assume a lot of people are bots too, but I like lemmy because it’s mostly not bots :).

You can not send the BTC to just about anybody. Only to people with whom you have a channel open. If you want to send to anybody you need to hop through other channels using middlemen. That sounds very similar to the function of a bank.

You are right, if you want to send directly from your wallet to another user’s wallet with no middlemen, you need to have a channel open with that user, which you totally can and will save you on fees in the long-term if you transact with that person frequently. But I don’t do this because it’s un-necessary, you can also send funds to any other person on lightning via these middlemen. The middlemen don’t have custody of the funds, they can’t block/reverse/do anything with the transaction aside from just forward it along. You can choose who those “middlemen” are, they are usually selected based on the lowest expected fee. They route data around, if they are banks, then so are other Bitcoin nodes you connect to on main chain. But we don’t think of them as banks right? They just relay data around and they’re decentralized. You are right that they share a similar function of routing payments, the difference is in how they do that and who controls what parts of that process. Banks have immense power over your funds. Lightning nodes you route a payment through have none and anybody can run one.

I’m not a bot, I’m just an idiot.

It’s not instant it takes a long time until enough confirmations have been done. It’s not even clear how many confirmations are enough.

You’re thinking of main chain (which takes 10 minutes for the next block), though I would take a zero-conf transaction in any situation that isn’t moving more money than a day’s labor. A single confirmation means it made it into the next block which should be plenty for 99% of situations. If you’re selling your house, maybe a wait a 2-3 blocks to be sure. Lightning is instant and uses main chain for security but does settlement/transaction data off-chain.

Lightning network is literally a traditional bank transaction mechanism on top of bitcoin.

It’s not, you don’t need a bank to use it. Banks don’t settle instantly, banks have chargebacks, banks required six forms of ID, banks can’t reach some places, banks may discriminate. Lightning is Bitcoin. You lock up BTC in a lightning channel, you can then send that BTC to anybody via lightning, and when you close your channel, you get the appropriate amount of BTC back. You can run a lightning node on a phone, a “routing” node on a raspberry pi, it’s just as decentralized and trustless as the main chain is. You can open a channel directly w the person you’re transacting with or you can forward the transaction through other channels/nodes, all trustlessly, all instantly, all automatically. Nobody ever has custody of the funds aside from you and your intended recipient. There’s no central custodian (like a bank) you have to trust.

If you are arguing for using lightning transactions, what is the point of bitcoin in the first place?

Main chain and lightning have different use cases. Use main chain for long-term storage of funds or large transactions. Use lightning for everyday spending. Main chain secures lightning transactions. Main chain is layer one, lightning is layer two, it’s possible there will be more layers, just like SMTP is built on TCP which is built on Ethernet or whatever.

fees are huge and will only increase in the future.

Main chain fees are around $1.50 for the next block, which is still cheaper than a bank wire or other equivalent payment methods in many situations. You’re right though, they are expected to increase as adoption increases, but lightning has scaled that available blockspace several orders of magnitude. Lightning fees are <1% in almost all instances and aren’t expected to increase since they are not tied directly to main chain fees and no mining is required. A lightning transaction uses about as much CPU power as sending an e-mail. A single main chain transaction can open a lightning channel. You can have billions of transactions inside a lightning channel.

You can downvote this because you’re mad that blockchain exists, for those who don’t know the actual real life use case: Bitcoin has been around for 15 years, it is a blockchain. It has a real life use case.

I can send money, with my android phone, from my couch, in my underwear, to anybody else on planet earth who also has a phone and a halfway reliable internet connection. The transaction is not only sent, but actually settles, in under a second with Bitcoin lightning. And I pay pennies in fees. No going to the bank, no bank holidays, no paying wire fees or making sure their bank can talk to my bank. It’s just simple and instant and it works. It doesn’t matter if they are a dissident or if their country doesn’t allow women to own bank accounts, the transaction goes through anyways. In many countries, their app can also instantly convert that BTC into the currency of their choice and deposit it to their bank account. That’s assuming they have access to stable banking infrastructure, which billions of people do not.

Bitcoin has delivered on its promise of being a currency with a capped supply (21 million coins) and transaction system consistently for 15 years without a single hack, without a single hour of downtime, without a single hiccup. It just works.

You can argue that Bitcoin isn’t better than <insert local currency and transmission system>. You can argue that there are “better” solutions. But it has a clear use case. I use it on a daily basis and it has a fifteen year trend of continued growth whether you are looking at total market cap (bigger than Sweden’s GDP), number of nodes, number of transactions, whatever.

Most everything negative you’ve heard about Bitcoin is either hyperbolic or about other crypto. FTX wasn’t Bitcoin. Crypto coins collapsing or people being rugged? Not Bitcoin. For more information, FAQs, and myth-busting, check out http://bitcoin.rocks

Project 2025 wants to:

• Outlaw pornography
• Outlaw abortion
• Outlaw homosexuality
• Eliminate all major checks on presidential power. Say goodbye to the system of checks and balances
• Replace many federal workers with those who are loyal only to the president

www.defeatproject2025.org breaks it down by topic, also highly suggest John Oliver’s segment on it