Ironic for a country with no free speech rights. But Russia has historically been a scientific powerhouse, especially in mathematics and physics.

Another great reason why we need good, anonymous currency and more privacy in society. Everything’s all fine and dandy till your bank or google maps rats you out.

Yeah. Some can be setup pretty well for it. It’s more efficient compute-per-watt than any desktop or laptop computer. Just take caution w the battery, obviously. I wouldn’t suggest running it on any android unless the battery is removable or you’re ready to sacrifice that device to BOINC.

This is the real story IMO. The government has no business telling people they can’t use certain apps for their speech. What’s next? Apps which support encryption? Apps which don’t support whoever the current political party is? You want Donald Trump or Joe Biden in charge of which apps you’re allowed to use, really?

Y’all should know about BOINC. It’s one of the world’s largest distributed computing networks used for “volunteer computing” where people donate computing time to scientific research. It’s federated/permissionless/open and anybody can create a BOINC project. !boinc@sopuli.xyz

Also check out #DeSci, lots of people working on interesting incentive mechanisms to fix scientific publishing. There’s a whole bunch of projects listed here http://desci.world/

Nostr vs Mastodon on Privacy & Autonomy:

• Relay/instance admins can choose which content goes through their relay on either platform
• On nostr, your DMs are encrypted. In Mastodon, the admin of the sender and receiver can read them, as can anybody else who breaks into their server
• On nostr, a relay admin can control what goes through their relay, but they can’t stop you from following/DMing/being followed by whoever you want since you are typically connected to multiple relays at once. As long as one relay allows it, signal flows. Nostr provides the best of both worlds: moderated “public squares” according to your moderation preferences, autonomy to follow/dm/be followed by anybody you want (assuming that individual user hasn’t blocked you).
• On mastodon, your identity is tied to your instance. If your instance goes down, you lose your follow/followee list, DMs, etc. On Nostr, it’s not, so this doesn’t happen. Mastodon provides some functionality to migrate identity between instances but it’s clunky and generally requires to have some form of advanced notice.
• Both have all the same functions as twitter: tweet, reply, re-tweet, DM, like, etc.

Why I think nostr will win https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081

With nostr your data is stored in your nostr client (browser or phone app) and with each relay you connect to. The default setting is to be connected to multiple relays. So it’s much more distributed/resistant to outages. And your identity is not tied to the relay itself, so relays can go down and you don’t lose your followers/followees/DMs/etc.

Interesting. Looks clunky but solves at least some scenarios

How did new followers find you? Your username is literally username @ mastodoninstance.com. I guess you can import/export some stuff, but that all relies on your instance closing down gracefully and giving people time to migrate which is not a guarantee. I had this happen early in my mastodon experience, it was not fun. Granted, I still use mastodon, but it was annoying.

Background:

• In Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin/ActivityPub, your identity is tied to your instance. So if your instance shuts down, you lose all your followers/followees/subscriptions/DMs
• In Nostr, your identity is your public key so your relay can shut down and everything is fine since your identity isn’t tied to your relay/instance.
• BlueSky’s proposed solution to this is to have your username be yourname@somedomainyouown.com. Which requires buying a domain name, which are limited resources, costs >$10 per year, and requires manually configuring DNS records which is not fun.

BRICS nations like China are desperately trying to move off the dollar, which is a major tool of US control. The problem is, nobody trust the Yuan, the Ruble, or any of their other fiat currencies. They can’t trust each other, so the US remains the global currency hegemon. But that is a privileged position it basically only got because everybody else was blown up after the world wars. The US’s position in this area will continue to erode.

There is a fantastic overview of how the US uses the dollar to control other countries and extract trillions of dollars from them while keeping them in a cycle of debt. The Human Rights Foundation https://youtu.be/7qRWurFaUD0?list=PLe0djdakvnFb0T-oZAeF49A-EZChise4n&t=14009 and another one on how France abuses its currency influence in Africa to keep the colonial legacy alive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-u1Pjce4Lg&pp=ygUxaG93IGZyYW5jZSBjb250cm9scyBlbnRpcmUgZWNvbm9taWVzIGZyYW5jb2RvbGxhcg%3D%3D

What will replace it? My bet is on Bitcoin. A few smaller nations (Ecuador, Argentina, El Salvador) have embraced it as a way to reduce the control the US has over their economies. The blowback from the world bank, IMF etc has been very telling. They do not like the idea of a country that doesn’t want to get stuck in a cycle of debt, restructuring, and subservience to the dollar. Throughout history, countries have had to choose between minting their own currency which many lack the political stability to do, or using the currency of another country as the expense of their own sovereignty. But now there is Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a politically neutral currency that cannot be controlled by any nation state or even group of nation-states. It is immune to corruption and human error. It just works well to send money from A to B and nobody can cheat it. It’s market cap is 850 billion dollars, that puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. On par with Switzerland. Higher than sweden. Higher than Israel. Higher than vietnam.

Bitcoin’s fiscal policy is clear and predictable. 21 million coins will be minted. No more, no less. And if you have a private key, you can spend your coins. Nobody else can spend them. It has kept that promise for 15 years. 365 days a year. 7 days a week. 24 hours a day. Without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or a single hack. And there’s no reason to think it can’t keep that promise another 15. The incentives and security mechanisms built into Bitcoin the past 15 are the same it will have the next 15.

Anybody can use Bitcoin with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection. With Bitcoin lightning, you can send an international transaction in under a second for pennies in fees. No credit check required, no middlemen, no nonsense. It doesn’t matter if your country doesn’t have stable banking infrastructure or a government constantly devaluing your currency. And it does all of this with less than 1% of global energy usage, mostly from renewables, since miners tend to chase the cheapest electricity which tends to be made from renewables at off-peak hours.

As to whether or not Bitcoin is “useful” or “how useful” it is, those are opinions so we both have ours and the market has its opinion and those can be different and that’s fine. The fundamental value of Bitcoin is it’s clear unyielding fiscal policy which is has kept to for fifteen years and its network effect (the ability to send/receive txes to others and the amount of people who will willingly transact in it), same as any other currency. People speculate on other currencies, instruments, and assets as well, that’s not a feature unique to Bitcoin. But I wanted to correct one notion on fees.

The average per transaction cost of a bitcoin transaction is 4.87 USD with it having spiked to over 37 USD

I wanted to correct one notion on fees: you are talking about main chain fees there. Bitcoin lightning payments are where I’m citing “cents per transaction”. Lighting is where most transactions are moving to now, it should be used for basically all scenarios except high-value transactions and long-term storage which would justify the cost of main chain fees. Lightning uses the security provided by BTC main chain, but store transaction data off-chain. You pay one on-chain fee to lock some BTC up in a lightning channel and then you can send essentially infinite transactions between you and any other partie(s) within that channel’s provided liquidity.

Bitcoin is massively decentralized, if it’s centralized, somebody at any point could have exploited that centralization by putting a gun to the heads whomever these people are who run Bitcoin and forced them to do something against Bitcoin’s protocol or even shut it down entirely. Who are these five groups you’re talking about? Mining pools? The mining pools simply relay the results of mining activity, the second one starts acting unethically all the mining power immediately switches to another pool. The pool itself doesn’t have any mining power.

Miners are accountable to the laws of physics, math, and economy, and they must follow the Bitcoin protocol. If they spend money on energy for mining, they have to sell some of their mined BTC to cover that expense. Additionally,if, for example, if they make a block with invalid transactions, it will get rejected by the rest of the network, even if that miners somehow had 100% of the network hashpower. The only real thing somebody can do with the majority of hashpower, which to date nobody has ever been able to obtain and gets more expensive and impossible every year, is a double-spend and the amount of resources required to obtain that much hashpower are so high that there’s really no way you can feasibly use that attack to gain money because anybody accepting enough money in BTC to trade for something that valuable is going to wait for a few blocks confirmation.

While transactions are secure in a technical sense, as far as any user is concerned they are vastly less secure than traditional transactions because they inherently cannot be reversed or disputed in any way

This very much depends on your use case. Bank wires are irreversible at a protocol level, so is cash, yet they are a popular way to send money. Irreversibility increases security for many use cases. If I sell an item on facebook marketplace, I want irreversiblity. I don’t want somebody doing a chargeback or handling a return on a $5 item, and I don’t want to pay a middleman for the cost of arbitrating those kinds of decisions, so a chargeback-free system is better for me as a buyer. If I’m buying it in person, I can inspect it and clearly see whether it works for not. Oranges from someones backyard or somebody set of weightlifting weights don’t need a 30-day return policy. If I am selling iPhones online, I can’t sell iPhones to high-fraud countries due to the risk of fraudulent chargebacks. If they pay me in BTC? No problem.

If you want disputability to be part of the transaction process, use a platform that supports it and pay the extra fees associated. You can use eBay, venmo, etc. It doesn’t have to be baked into the currency because it isn’t baked into our existing currency and that works just fine.

Theft or loss of funds due to misplacement etc is a concern regardless of which currency you’re talking about, this is ultimately a problem for the legal system to sort out. You can get robbed at gunpoint whether you have Bitcoin or USD. You can forget your wallet on the bus or lose your private key. If you are so bad at keeping track of your money that this is a recurring problem for you, have a custodian like a bank do it for you. Bitcoin can be deposited with any custodian you want. Put your BTC in a multi-sig wallet and require multiple people to sign off on every transaction. USD can’t do that natively without a third-party service. Bitcoin is better at protecting against some kinds of theft or attacks and worse than others. The kind of theft done by the banking industry and a constantly inflating currency supply where your dollar’s share of the whole decreases every year is perfectly legal, yet Bitcoin protects against it perfectly with it’s non-inflationary economic policy. How much bread or USD you can buy with your BTC may change over time, but your 1 BTC will always be 1BTC of 21 million total.

It is also inherently only as reliable as ones internet connection, and in many developing nations that is no where near 100% uptime. If the power or internet go out, all access to your money does aswell, as you can’t make changes to an allways online database without acess to the internet.

So is much of modern banking and trade infrastructure, hell, some of them have entire holidays they take off where you can’t access your funds! If you have funds on main chain and your internet connection goes down, it doesn’t matter, Bitcoin doesn’t care, your funds sit on main chain and wait for you next time you come online. You can send money to people who are offline. Even if the global internet basically splits in half, as long as there is a single node to relay information between the two halves, it continues to work. If the entire globe loses electricity for a day, nothing bad happens to Bitcoin, it just turns starts up again on the next day. It is incredibly resilient to unreliable electrical and internet situations. With lightning, as long as your wallet can access the internet once every few days, you can protect against attacks which could otherwise exploit your lack of access, though they are incredibly rare in the wild.

• The problem is that we have dirty sources of energy at all. That’s the problem before you get to Bitcoin or anything else. This energy stuff is literally falling from the sky. We would have more energy than our economies would know what we do with had we utilized and invested in nuclear technology and other renewables decades ago.
• Bitcoin uses less than 1% of global energy usage. The question to ask is “Is it worth it?” and “How do competitors compare?”. How much energy is used by remittance services alone (western union)? Think of all the kiosks, all the offices, etc. How much does SWIFT or IBAN use? Bitcoin essentially solve that problem over a decade ago.
• Much of cryptos energy comes from renewables, most miners flock to renewable energy and over-provisioned grids. Why? Because it tends to be the cheapest. In fact, crypto mining can help balance demand curve on grids and subsidize the installation of new renewable energy generation which would otherwise be economically infeasible. This is particularly important in poorer countries. Demand being wildly different at different times of the day is one of the key factors stopping total decommission of fossil fuel infrastructure in many places, mining can help solve that while making sure power generation remains profitable.
• In exchange, we get the most secure, decentralized document in the world and the ability to transfer trillions of dollars of value a year. Bitcoin’s market cap is 800 billion, that puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. That’s the size of Switzerland’s GDP. Bigger than the GDP of Israel, Sweden, Vietnam, etc.
• Anybody with a cell phone and internet can access this network including the billions of people who are “unbanked” and can’t access safe, reliable banking infrastructure or currency. They can use this infrastructure to engage with the global economy. It doesn’t matter if their corrupt government doesn’t want them to, it doesn’t matter if they have a poor credit rating, it doesn’t matter if their neighborhood isn’t safe enough for a bank to operate in. It doesn’t matter if their corrupt government or the world bank constantly manipulates the currency to take away the hard earned money of their citizens. Bitcoin gives them a way to hold, spend, and save money more securely than anything else.
• Bitcoin enables you to send money internationally in under a second with fees measured in pennies. It has faithfully done this 24/7 365 days year for 15 years. It’s never been hacked, it never had to close due to a bank holiday, it’s fully open source, it has resisted attacks from nation-states, it’s never had even an hour of downtime, and it’s never changed its fiscal policy or promises.

For more analysis about bitcoin’s energy use, see this website.

If this sounds like a big number, keep in mind this is roughly 0.02% of the Bitcoin in circulation. The eventual total supply of BTC is 21 million BTC. Bitcoin’s market cap is around 800 billion USD, which puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. Next to switzerland, bigger than Norway, Sweden, Vietnam or Israel. (GDP isn’t the same as market cap, just trying to give an example for scale).

Citizenfour documentary on edward snowden. Great if you’re interested in or curious about privacy/spying/technology. Not great if you aren’t.

The Fog of War w robert mcnamara. A fascinating and honest telling of the vietnam war from one of its main architects. In it, the guy basically admins to committing war crimes. Not big on history/war documentaries, but this is one that really made an impact on me and changed the way I see the world. Not depressing or gory, at least I didn’t think it was.

Let’s goooo!

Bitcoin solves this. Clear, unambiguous, unchanging monetary policy that doesn’t constantly increase the supply and take a portion of your dollar’s value to give to anybody else. It is not aligned with any country or even block of countries and is truly the first international currency in that sense. No politician or even national or supra-national government can force Bitcoin do do anything that isn’t part of its protocol because it’s so decentralized.

It has been running 24/7 365 for 15 years without a single major security issue in the protocol or a single hour of downtime. With lightning network upgrades, transactions confirm in under a second internationally with fees 1000x less than credit cards, often under a single cent.

It is accessible to anybody in the world with a cell phone and internet access, including the billions, with a B, who don’t have access to stable banking infrastructure or local currency. No credit checks, no needing six forms of ID, no overdraft fees, no bank holidays, no middlemen, no nonsense. And it does this with less electricity than you’d think, less than 1% of global electricity usage, mostly from renewable sources as miners chase the cheapest electricity and the cheapest electricity is from renewables and over-provisioned grids.

Quite often:

• To support the site the ad is placed on
• To cost money to the ad’s sponsor if I don’t like them

This kind of functionality is something nostr does natively, but lemmy doesn’t really have a solution for this problem yet.