It’s not the right of the business, it’s the right of US citizens to consume media and information from any source they please. The Govt has no right to say “You can’t read that newspaper” or “You can’t listen to that speaker”, so they have no right to say “You can’t get information through this app”. The first amendment isn’t just about the right to speak, it’s also about the right to listen and research especially the stuff the government doesn’t want you to know about.

Separate apps more focused on privacy will always be better than RCS/SMS/whatever the mainstream option is.

It’s a shame the US govt has to try to do unconstitutional things. And that we have to keep fighting them back to preserve our basic liberties and freedoms. It’s a blessing the ACLU does it for us.

All of them. Make “banning advertising” an election platform, I’ll vote for you. Ban billboards and other forms of commercial advertising everywhere. Advertising works, nobody denies that. If you see enough ads, on average, your mind will be changed. By allowing advertising to exist, we are sanctioning widespread mind control. It sounds crazy when you say it that way, but it’s true. Advertising does not benefit the average person, it makes them buy stuff they have no native desire for. Advertising only benefits advertising agencies and their clients.

Let word-of-mouth and genuine desire for a good or service drive purchases of that good or service, not advertising, and you’ll end up with a more efficient economy where our consumer choices better invest in our shared prosperity and future.

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,

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.

!boinc@sopuli.xyz flatpak also needs a flatpak maintainer! Your work would help people contribute their spare computational power to scientific research. If you are passionate about fighting cancer, mapping the galaxy, etc this is an awesome way to contribute to that effort in a very force multiplying way.

Bitcoin is one of the most successful open source projects to have ever been created, and it gets downvoted to hell anywhere it gets brought up. 15 years of growth in network size, usage, and capability. Surviving attacks and attempted bans from nation-states. Not a single hour of downtime, not a single hack, reliably transferring money across the globe to anybody with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in seconds to minutes for pennies to dollars in fees. 100% open source and decentralized, uncorruptible, open to whoever wants to use it, the way currency should be. It’s got a market cap bigger than Sweden’s GDP and is already more reliable and widely accepted than most national currencies. Nobody can make it print money it isn’t meant to print or move money it isn’t supposed to move.

How to contact your MEP. We beat this bill last time, we can beat it again https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

Actually, tipping on social media posts are an excellent use for Bitcoin. I regularly tip on nostr, it works well, I wish lemmy had it too. Good luck enabling transactions that complete in under a second, globally, for less than a penny in fees, with any other system. And without requiring you to hire an absolute team of lawyers to setup accounts and manage liquidity and make deals with foreign banks to backstop that liquidity. Oh and don’t forget about counterparty risks, chargebacks, currency conversion, and long settlement times! Bitcoin solves that all magically for basically free.

!boinc@sopuli.xyz join a movement of people donating their spare CPU time to medical research

And it also shows that states can pay for things without the need to collect taxes for this, for example we saw this during COVID, when sizeable amounts of money were created to give an impulse to the economy and to the people who temporarily lost their income sources

And surely printing money doesn’t cause inflation right. Value isn’t free. If you have the same demand for a currency and increase it’s supply by 10%, it’s going to cost 10% more of that currency to buy any given item.

🫡🫡🫡🫡🫡

Nostr is an open protocol. Plenty of questionable people have contributed to Linux, I still use the OS. Tor was made by an alleged rapist. I still use Tor. Open protocols are sometimes used or made by nasty people.

Good point about the article date, but it is coming up for a vote this week https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/council-to-greenlight-chat-control-take-action-now/

Can I follow you on nostr?

These laws are being passed by politicians who generally don’t understand technology. What they will achieve is a reduction in privacy and liberty for every citizen in the EU and easier methods to clamp down on dissent. Just because it’s not technically perfect or difficult to implement fully doesn’t mean it’s not a threat. It’s one step closer totalitarianism, and what’s stopping totalitarianism is everyday people, one step at a time, battling it back.

This is well beyond my sysadmin capabilities unfortunately. This is more a proof-of-concept and would need some tweaking to be run at that kind of scale.

Yes I no longer host the site this code was designed for but the code still works and can be repurposed for anybody who wants to use it

I won’t mention here as I don’t want this post to come across as promoting cryptocurrency, but this script was originally written to protect a faucet for a cryptocurrency that does exactly this (and has been since 2012). This cryptocurrency records user contribution to various computational projects (BOINC, Folding at home, etc) and can also be used for torrent seeding or other forms of contribution. So it could be used in this manner to verify a user has contributed X amount of computation over Y time periods.

The faucet handed out coins but the problem is that users want all the free coins right? But we only want to give a few free coins to each user. So we make them do the “work” and make sure the cost of work is > value of coins, so they have no motivation to hit the faucet multiple times. This is the original purpose of the script.