makeasnek

makeasnek , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

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 youtu.be/7qRWurFaUD0?list=PLe0djdakvnFb0T-oZAeF49… and another one on how France abuses its currency influence in Africa to keep the colonial legacy alive www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-u1Pjce4Lg&pp=ygUxaG93IG…

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.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

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).

makeasnek , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

They handed over their own BTC over to the government. If you have the private keys, you control the coin. If you don’t, no amount of money or guns can make that coin move thanks to math and physics. However, a $5 wrench rammed repeatedly into your head may make you divulge those private keys. Strength of encryption is rarely the weakest link in any modern cryptographic system. But that wrench used on anybody who doesn’t know the keys? Useless. It’s pretty powerful stuff in that regard.

makeasnek , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Why not? It’s a thing people can buy and sell on the open market just like stocks or futures or whatever. There are dozens of exchanges you can use all around the globe that publish their data openly, that is where average price and market cap comes from, just like a stock. Those coins being sold on exchanges and the prices they are being listed are are determined by real people (or companies or whoever) who own Bitcoin. They set the price they are willing to buy/sell at. The protocol doesn’t sell any itself, there’s not some massive reserve waiting to be sold.

If one exchange is fudging the price, that creates an arbitrage opportunity which is immediately exploited by trading bots. We are well past the point of the market price being found on exchanges somehow not being real, we passed that point like a decade ago. One can argue how real the reported trading volume is, but price per coin and therefore market cap? Nope.

A stock is a promise/asset, enforced by the legal system, saying you own part of a company. You can trade it with other people and use it to vote on shareholder resolutions. Bitcoin is a currency/asset whose ownership and system of rules is enforced by a decentralized protocol. You can trade it with other people and use it as a currency/use it to send value from one place to another. You could use stocks as a currency, of course, they’re just kind of cumbersome to use for that purpose.

re the 2 billion: Massive buys and sells change the price just like with stocks or other assets. The market cap is not the real amount you would pay if you tried to buy (or sell) all the available supply because that number is uknowable. It’s just the current value of one unit of the thing times the number of units in existence.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

True. There are some pretty good effort estimates out there, idk what they are, but there are definitely some lost keys.

makeasnek OP , 4 months ago

Let’s goooo!

makeasnek , 4 months ago

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.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

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

makeasnek , 4 months ago

Having your identity being tied to an instance is not great UX imo. Bans happen, not always for great reasons. Instances die or close up shop. Having to re-do all your subscriptions, losing your comment history, etc just because your smaller instance closes is pretty annoying and pushes people to more stable, centralized, large instances.

This is why I prefer nostr over mastodon, it’s basically the same in every key way except that your identity is not tied to your instance. I believe nostr devs are working on a reddit clone like lemmy or kbin, but it’s not done yet. Their twitter/mastodon clone is great though.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

It’s just a different protocol that makes different trade-offs, so it can’t use AP protocol. Nostr is an underlying protocol in the same way that AP is, so you can build twitter clones, reddit clones, video streaming services, etc on top of it just like you can with AP.

Nostr’s key difference IMO is where your identity lives, and nostr decided not to have it tied to a particular instance. AP decided to have it tied to an instance, that is a pretty fundamental part of the AP protocol and is the same way e-mail works.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

That’s good to know. Sounds like it doesn’t totally solve the portability issue but definitely a step in the right direction.

makeasnek OP , 4 months ago

Each federate within themselves but they don’t federate between each other. But there are “bridge” type services you can use, for example, if you want to follow a mastodon user or an RSS feed on nostr or vice versa, it’s just that they’re bolted on after the fact as opposed to being smoothly integrated with the rest of the protocol. Like having one bot which automatically re-tweets stuff from one platform to another.

makeasnek OP , 4 months ago

Nope. In terms of user diversity and people I’m interested in, Mastodon is winning hands down.

makeasnek OP , 4 months ago

This is mentioned in “other” it’s easy to miss. Both of these services essentially do the same thing different ways.

Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, etc are all built on top of activity pub which is the underlying protocol. It’s easy to understand because each “use case” of this underlying protocol has a different name. Mastodon isn’t Lemmy and Lemmy isn’t Kbin but they can all talk to each other to some degree.

In Nostr’s case, the main “use case” is tweet-like functionality but there are other functionalities like streaming video, but they’re all called “nostr” which is a bit confusing. Nostr’s tweeting interface is built on the underlying protocol called nostr which is a bit confusing.

At the end of the day, both platforms are essentially using the same underlying concept which is “we have one base protocol for passing messages around and then specific use cases like twitter clones or reddit clones are built on top of it”

makeasnek OP , 4 months ago

I really expected the crypto bro problem to be much worse than it was, perhaps it was worse before, or maybe it has something to do with which instances I’m connected to or the auto-filter? Crypto stuff often shows in “trending” for me, but has never ended up in my feed as a dm, reply, etc.

The “trending” functionality in both mastodon and nostr has been pretty lackluster imo, it’s always like “did you know FIVE WHOLE PEOPLE tweeted about #caturday”. I imagine it works well on some instances, but getting a “trending across instances” metric seems like a software engineering problem neither platform has solved well yet.

makeasnek OP , 4 months ago

Yeah absolutely. I’m sure these things will get worked out in time, I’m just glad we’re moving in the direction of federation and decentralization.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

!boinc is the final level. Using your Pi to cure cancer and identify asteroids

makeasnek , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

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.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

Love seeing content like this, just regular people talking about why Linux works for them. Kudos, enjoyed the post!

makeasnek , 5 months ago

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

makeasnek , 5 months ago

Every linux enthusiast should try Qubes at least once. The architecture is totally different, vastly more secure in many ways than most Linux distros. It’s definitely not for everybody, but if privacy and security rank high on your priority list it’s worth a look.

makeasnek , 6 months ago

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

makeasnek , 6 months ago

Personally I’m excited to see Flatpak become more widespread and usable, fixing some “rough around the edges” aspects of it. I’ve been using it quite a bit this past few months and I think it presents a really coherent, simple vision for how to do package distribution that solves a lot of pain points. The sandboxing functionality is critical and easy to use, I don’t need every app to have access to everything in my home directory.

makeasnek , 7 months ago

Heart disease is a major killer, this is excellent news! If you are effected by heart disease or know somebody who has been (or if you’re just enthusiastic about medicine), consider donating some of your computer’s idle time to DENIS@Home. You can set it to only run when your computer is idle, and it helps researchers who are working to refine electrical models of the heart. Fair warning: They don’t always have workunits available, I encourage you to check out the many other !boinc projects if you are interested. World Community Grid is another great health one, as is SiDock.

makeasnek , 7 months ago

Whenever there is a small task that will take less than a few minutes, I ask myself “When else are you going to have 80 seconds?” and usually that makes me realize I should just get it done now. Sometimes I still say “tomorrow” and reminds me to pick a specific time to do the task.

makeasnek , 7 months ago

I see a lot of people here frustrated with our two party system. I too am frustrated. Donate to FairVote to get ranked choice on the ballot in more states. Ranked choice voting allows voters to express actual preferences between more than two parties and it is a win no matter who you normally vote for. Many states have a ballot measure system that can be used to pass legislation without requiring the agreement of the state legislature. Several US states have implemented ranked choice voting already. fairvote.org

makeasnek , 7 months ago

OBS is an absolute powerhouse, an amazing example of what OSS can do

makeasnek , 7 months ago

Any joe shmoe can spin up an instance, post your personal details (or personal details they made up), and bada bing bada boom, your identity is compromised forever.

Replace “instance” with “website” and that’s how the internet works. There are avenues in the legal system to combat this, but generally people can post speech (illegal or not) very easily with the internet, having rapid, free, open communication is a net positive for society even if occasionally there are downsides.

Lemmy can’t solve doxxing or other forms of abuse any better than a centralized service can, which they don’t do particularly well as it is. What Lemmy does do it put control over what content is promoted into the hands of users and instance admins, as opposed to a few execs at Meta. If an instance has poor moderation, it will be ‘de-federated’ by other lemmy instances, which means content from their instance won’t travel across the fediverse. So in general, I think you can expect good moderation. Unlike centralized services, instance admins are not incentivized to shove polarizing content and misinformation into your feed. That pipeline of increasingly polarizing content is the root cause of many situations which involve doxxing in the first place.

makeasnek , 7 months ago

I don’t care so much if my personal info is posted to a website like kiwifarms or someone’s private blog, because those websites are harder to find in search results

So is most of Lemmy

Big companies have a desire to protect themselves from prosecution for hosting illegal activity.

So do Lemmy instance hosters, the hosting companies they use, and the other instances which federate with them.

They specifically hire people to moderate content and reduce their liability.

Once can expect lemmy instances to do this once they reach a certain size. If you don’t moderate sufficiently, you get de-federated, and your users won’t want to use your instance, so lemmy instances which want to grow will keep a handle on good moderation,

But she can run a Lemmy instance that will federate with the entire rest of the fediverse and expose her content to potentially thousands of people.

If she posts it to a lemmy community the mod that community or instance will remove it. If she hosts her own instance for the purposes of doxxing people nobody will even see the post (since it’s not getting upvoted across fedi) and other instances will de-federate.

Ultimately, if you are at high risk of doxxing, the best measures to protect yourself are mostly based not around which platforms you trust or not, but around engaging with those platforms in a way which protects your privacy. Might want to check out the surveillance self-defense guide. ssd.eff.org

makeasnek OP , 7 months ago

It’s my understanding that nostr relays can make moderation choices much like lemmy or mastodon instances do. But the scope is different. In mastodon or lemmy, if a mod takes an issue with you, they can remove you from that instance (and any followers you had following you on that instance). If a nostr relay operator doesn’t like you, they can ban you from that relay, but your followers can follow you via other relays. This is because your identity is tied to your public key, not your relay or instance.

makeasnek OP , 7 months ago

Not really. If you are a ban-worthy user on mastodon, other instances may ban your user id, or ban your entire instance if they think your instance’s mod actions aren’t enough generally. I imagine a “common blocklist” like currently exists in e-mail, mastodon, and other federated networks would emerge so that the actions of one mod can be done more-or-less automatically by mods on other relays.

E-mail is federated and much less moderated than fediverse and even though spam exists it seems like a manageable signal to noise ratio. Anti-spam tools are pretty effective.

makeasnek OP , 7 months ago

Agreed. The lack of self-hosting ability really comes down to the refusal of the wider web to upgrade away from SMTP. If you follow all the latest backwards-compatible protocols (DKMS etc) you can still get a decent outbound delivery rate.

There were many, many elegant solutions proposed to stop spam but none of them got implemented to avoid breaking backwards compatibility with SMTP. Then again, at this point, most people have moved away from e-mail to other forms of communication anyways due to e-mails problems (spam included). Unless the younger generation gets a sudden, renewed interest in e-mail, it will probably not really exist in another 50 years.

I do think blockchain will probably solve the issue of assigning senders a “spam score” universally once and for all instead of our current system which is a grab bag of blocklists plus each provider’s secret sauce. Once you have a universal blocklist every e-mail provider can use and contribute to, it becomes easy to identify most senders as “safe” and new senders will just have to spend a bit of time earning their trust.

makeasnek OP , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

It seems there would be some easy-to-implement solutions to this problem. Like having a link to an alternate account in every mastodon profile so that if your server does suddenly disappear or if a single instance bans you, your followers can seamlessly follow you to a new server. It doesn’t solve the issue of migrating all your content or your followees though, but perhaps that’s just a matter of regularly backing those things up somehow. Instances could automatically designate a “failover” instance run by another party and could automate this function as part of the sign-up process so users only had to register once.

My understanding is that in nostr, you run the same risk of “relay suddenly disappears” if you only have your content on a single relay. You don’t lose followers but you may lose people you follow. Or perhaps that is stored at the client level and not the relay level? idk

makeasnek OP , 7 months ago

You do lose your identity though. If your instance suddenly disappears you have to start from step zero. You have no followers, you follow nobody, and nobody knows you exist. By social graph I mean your connections to others which mastodon facilitates (a list of people you follow and the connection so that others follow you) plus the entirety of the content you have posted since you started your account, your DMs, etc. Losing your social graph isn’t an inconvenience, it’s losing the totality of the features mastodon gives you as a user all at once. Social media connections are important for people socially, in the job market, etc. Those connections are meaningful. On a network-wide level, it’s frustrating for users to be following people and then just have those people vanish off the face of the earth because their instance died. It’s terrible UX.

You can no longer tweet as the “old you” and as far as anybody else knows, “new you” is a different person pretending to be “old you” unless they authenticate you in some other way and that’s a major pain.

I don’t think the ultimate solution is just “pick a stable instance”. All instances will eventually experience instability or close, what happens to those users when they do? An account should be 100% portable between instances. And ideally, a somewhat automatic mechanism should be in place so that recovering from an instance loss isn’t hard.

I know this fediverse stuff is in its infancy, I know we’ll get all these problems figured out in time.

makeasnek , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Even in single instances of trust there can be advantages to using blockchain for those applications:

• Decentralization can give you better uptime/availability of those documents. If the DMVs website or authentication service goes down, documents can still be authenticated since they and/or their signatures stored in a distributed manner. The internet can go down at your bar but if you have a recent copy of a chain, you can still verify somebody’s ID.
• It can make them easier to transfer between parties, and creates a digital “paper trail” which can conform to whatever requirements one might have. For example, you could easily require several parties to sign off any time the document is moved or assigned to a new person.
• You can use those documents and their signatures with smart contracts or other decentralized apps. For example, you could sign up for an account at a bank or a platform like eBay using your NFT’d digital ID and the bank could accept it would needing to manually verify if the id “looks fake” or if your blurry phone picture is going to cut it. They don’t have to call up the government and ask them to verify it or pay some third party to match your address against their database of known people, etc.
• Maybe you need better transparency in how many documents are issued and (potentially) to whom. Voting systems, for example, are a use case for this. It could be used for shareholder governance structures, etc.
• Blockchains can enforce rules which centralized entities can’t, which is important to consider. An example of how this is useful: imagine the government has a digital ID system and it’s run in a centralized fashion, which makes sense, because they are the issuing authority right? Now imagine that centralized system gets hacked and an attacker starts printing and authenticating a bunch of fake ID requests. In the time between when this attack happens and when somebody figures it out, which could be hours to days, banks and other entities could be relying on those fake documents and potentially lose millions. An example of a rule a blockchain can enforce is “this ID issuing authority cannot issue in a single day more than 10% above it’s daily average of issuances over a six month period”, limiting the scope of an attack. One may say “Well, but blockchain can be hacked too!” which is true, but it’s less likely because the software for these networks has thousands of eyes on it whereas there may only be a couple system admins approving changes to your state-run ID database. Open source software is more secure than proprietary for this reason. Additionally, a security flaw needs to effect 51% of the network which isn’t likely to happen when you have a diversity of software versions.
• Many smart contracts need ways to protect against sybil attacks (ie one person pretending to be multiple). Quadratic funding being used for charity fundraising is a perfect example. By using credentials issued on chain by centralized authorities, they can verify a person is not multiple people. Quadratic funding is an awesome way to fund public goods.

makeasnek , 7 months ago

Nobody who is knowledgeable about crypto ever thought dogecoin was anything but a meme coin or pump and dump scheme. They would have known it offered zero benefits technologically over existing cryptos. Some may have bought it to cash in on the crazy market surrounding it, but they never thought doge was the future or anything. The people who thought that were the “i read one article and I’m a crypto expert now” crowd referenced in my original comment.

makeasnek , 7 months ago

Exactly

makeasnek , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Scams/theft: person has the wallet lost through scam or left, how do you invalidate the lost credentials or tickets.

In these examples, we are talking about credentials issued by a central authority. That authority can re-issue new credentials and invalidate old ones. Easy peasy.

If we’re talking about the risk that people have their crypto stolen in general, yes it does carry that risk same as cash. There are several strategies to mitigate this: people can park larger amounts at institutions if they want or they can use things like multi-sig wallets. You have one smaller pot of money which is your everyday spending wallet which you (or somebody who gains access to it) can spend from whenever you want, and one which is “multi-sig” meaning at least one of your trusted friends/family members/etc also has to sign off if money moves out of that account. You can have multiple people on the multi-sig wallet and set the rules for example 2 of 5 friends or what have you. You wouldn’t leave $10,000 in your phone’s mobile wallet just like you wouldn’t carry a briefcase with $10,000 in cash on the subway. Small money in your spending wallet, big money in your multi-sig.

This is similar to how one stores money normally. You have some cash in your wallet and you put the rest in a bank. In order to withdraw significant money from your bank account, the bank is going to undertake some kind of investigation to make sure it’s actually you. This might be checking your ID at the teller for example. They might also include some type of fraud guarantees where they will cover any losses you experience. That kind of a system is not incompatible with blockchain and I expect with time industries will appear to mitigate these kinds of risks from an insurance perspective.

Also, generally speaking, no system is going to completely eliminate theft and fraud. 99% of the fraud and theft committed over human history has been done using traditional currency, including the kinds of fraud that aren’t even called fraud because the “right people” are doing them like bank bailouts or market manipulation. Even highly-credentialed systems like Paypal are rife with fraud, ask any ebay seller. So we can’t expect crypto or any other technology to eliminate it either, there will always be some. The best we can do is try to find technological, social, and educational methods for reducing it.

Wallet loss: loss through any number of means: fire, incompetence, computer being destroyed, loss of account to cloud backup etc

Same risks as cash, multi-sig or institutional holdings as explained above can solve this.

Issuer need to invalidate: if tickets/credentials were purchased by fraud or an issue occurs where they need to invalidate

Same as answer 1

makeasnek , 7 months ago

I’ve never tried this distro before, but I would have to say GNU/Linux. It’s supporters are really annoying. That alone makes me never want to try it.