• 3 Posts
  • 79 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 4th, 2023

help-circle





  • 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.




  • Firstly, rich people already do this with our existing currency systems. So that has to be what we’re comparing against. And nobody has done this because there’s zero benefit to doing so.

    The thing you’re talking about is a 51% attack and the answer is:

    • The cost of doing so, which continues to increase and is around a trillion dollars currently. Even if you had the money, there are very significant logistical hurdles which make it difficult and means people would see it coming a mile away. They don’t have to buy coins, they have to buy energy and equipment to turn that energy into mining and they have to keep buying energy as long as they want their attack to continue. That trillion dollar figure is for one block worth of attack (10 minutes). The longer you attack, the more the cost per block goes up too.
    • There is no benefit to doing so. The second your attack ends, the network reverts to the true “main chain”, the system is designed to be really robust

    There are only two things you can do with a 51% attack

    • “double-spend” meaning you spend the same coins twice. But if somebody is going to trade you 1 trillion dollars of stuff, they’re going to wait for more than a few blocks confirmation. The scenarios where this makes any economic sense for anybody to attempt are basically zero.
    • Delay (censor) transactions which will go through the second your attack ends

    Even if you controlled 51% of the network you cannot:

    • Spend money you don’t have the key for
    • Increase the supply beyond 21 million coins
    • Otherwise make invalid transactions

    Because all other nodes would reject your transactions as invalid.






  • 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.

  • 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.



  • 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.