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makeasnek, to politics in Dangerous Precedent': Record AIPAC Spending Helps George Latimer Defeat Jamaal Bowman
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

makeasnek, (edited ) to politics in Dangerous Precedent': Record AIPAC Spending Helps George Latimer Defeat Jamaal Bowman
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

That’s an awfully… interesting way of saying he lost his primary, which as an incumbent is not a particularly easy to do. Blame foreign money all you want, your voters voted for who they wanted. Primary voters are the most politically aware kind of voters, most people don’t vote, even fewer take the time to vote in primaries. Apparently those voters wanted somebody new.

makeasnek, (edited ) to opensource in How open source money fixes a corrupted banking system
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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,

makeasnek, to opensource in Discussion: Do you donate financially to any OSS projects?
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

makeasnek, (edited ) to opensource in Discussion: Do you donate financially to any OSS projects?
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

makeasnek, to opensource in Discussion: Do you donate financially to any OSS projects?
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

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 🫡🫡🫡

makeasnek, (edited ) to linux in Open-Source Video Editor 'OpenShot' Gets 'Game-Changer' Update
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

makeasnek, (edited ) to opensource in Discussion: Do you donate financially to any OSS projects?
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

I’ll start, I donate to a few regularly via Github sponsors. I like that it’s recurring. I also donate one-off to ones as I come across them, but generally donate regularly to software I use regularly, particularly if I somehow am using that software to make money. I really like the idea of a portion of my donation going to upstream libraries, though tbh I’m not confident if Github sponsors does that or not.

I mostly donate w Bitcoin, except Github sponsors since they don’t take it. I also donate to a few orgs like EFF and OpenSats which are OSS-adjacent or help OSS tools I like exist. When I see apps I like have published a new release and they announce it on nostr, I usually send them a bit via zap as well, but most apps I use aren’t on nostr.

makeasnek, to linux in Inkscape Flatpak is looking for a maintainer!
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

!boinc 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.

makeasnek, (edited ) to foss in How open source money fixes a corrupted banking system
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

Bitcoin transactions happen at the “speed of light” (~27:00) REALITY CHECK: As Bitcoin has grown, transactions have become slow. It’s in fact why many people do not accept it for purchases anymore.

Bitcoin is the same speed it’s always been. Blocks happen every 10 minutes. The transaction is transmitted at the speed of light but final settlement requires a block. Pay a high fee? Get in on the next block. Want to save on fees? Maybe it takes a few blocks for your transaction to go through. If you use Bitcoin lightning (a scaling layer built on top of Bitcoin which moves transactions off-chain but secures them on-chain), transactions take under a second for pennies in fees. Fees are much, much lower than credit card, paypal, or other similar competitors. You could send a billion dollars in a single transaction and pay $1.50 on main chain, or you could send $5 on lightning and pay <1c in fees. Lightning has been around for 5 years now, it works, I use it regularly.

Bitcoin cannot be diluted (~27:25) REALITY CHECK: Bitcoin is always being diluted until it reaches its hard limit.

The supply of Bitcoin, 21 million coins, is known and has always been known. It can’t be diluted beyond that point.

Nobody controls the network (~28:25) REALITY CHECK: If someone were to own 50% or more of the network’s compute power, they could control the network.

Nobody owns 51% of the network. Even such an actor can’t print extra BTC or force money to move without the appropriate private key. The best they can do is temporarily delay transactions while burning north of a trillion dollars in energy and equipment doing so. Which is why nobody has ever done it.

Bitcoin’s hard limit is likely very dangerous for the network (~29:00): Once the hard limit is reached, it is unclear if people will keep pumping computing power at it. If the creation of new Bitcoin is no longer allowed, it is possible that transaction fees will need to be raised to compensate miners.

Given that fees have continued to increase with time, this seems like not a problem. It’s not “dangerous”, it’s part of the design. If hashrate drops, it drops, but given that fees and hashrate have continued to grow despite continually minting less coins, it’s not really a problem.

Bitcoin’s lack of rules allow for massive amounts of fraud and prevents effective taxation (~29:25): While the video paints a cute picture of financial freedom, the reality is that Bitcoin allows for fraud on a world scale and does not allow for sales tax because of the way that anyone can have a cryptocurrency wallet without disclosing their identity.

Anybody can have a cash wallet without disclosing their identity, yet they still pay taxes. Bitcoin’s rules prevent the kind of fraud where the value of your money is printed away via supply inflation of central banks or “currency restructuring” on the global scale by the the world bank. People pay taxes because they think it’s the right thing to do and/or because the government has guns and makes them. Either way, if you run a company, if you are providing goods and services, you have a place you can send somebody with a gun and enforce those rules. All the companies currently paying taxes would keep paying taxes if they used Bitcoin.

makeasnek, to opensource in How open source money fixes a corrupted banking system
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

makeasnek, to opensource in Interesting OSS project: Holesail creates instant P2P tunnels between networks (like a VPN)
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

Sure, I haven’t heard of hamachi. It’s ok to have multiple tools that do the same thing

makeasnek, to opensource in Interesting OSS project: Holesail creates instant P2P tunnels between networks (like a VPN)
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

My guess is that this works similar to a Tor hidden service, where you can’t even access the open port without a key of some kind and then you can only access that specific port. It’s not the same as having a port open on your IPv4 address since from the router’s perspective it’s only an outgoing connection. Somebody portscanning you wouldn’t find that port open. Though I could be wrong.

makeasnek, (edited ) to privacy in A Rising Enforcement of Censorship
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

In a time of rising political instability and distrust of institutions, institutions will turn more and more to censorship and surveillance. We need decentralized, censorship resistant networks to fight back. is one such network, so is , , , etc. And yes, and too.

makeasnek, to politics in 88-2: Only Markey, Sanders Oppose 'Expensive, Risky' Nuclear Power Expansion
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

I’d love to see more nuclear power generation. Nuclear power is the densest form of power on earth, it’s safer than even renewables and doesn’t have the huge e-waste or energy storage problems that come with it. It’s very, very safe even compared to windmills depending on where you draw the box. I have never met anybody who actually understands nuclear power safety or waste disposal who is against it. At best, they say “renewables are currently cheaper so let’s focus there” but they’re not like “Nuclear is bad”.

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