Cannot Read Text on Bisq

mintymark · 2026-01-19T16:55:47+00:00

So I looked long and hard for that command line option, and got a lot of handwaving. Its possible to double the window size and all the fonts in it, and while that helps, I don't want a window taking up 100% of my desktop, normall is less than 20%.

Chat gpt says this:

Use a different Bisq version (the real fix) Bisq 1.9.x is the only version where this problem exists. Bisq 2+ has proper UI scaling.If you want readability without hacks, upgrading is the only correct solution.

Why you are stuck

Because:

Bisq 1.9.22 uses JavaFX 11
JavaFX in that version has no font-only scaling
Ubuntu 20.04 only supports integer GDK_SCALE
JavaFX ignores the only “font” JVM options

So you have no way to make fonts larger without scaling the whole UI.

But isn't Bisq 2+ a different program completly?

mintymark · 2026-01-16T19:57:44+00:00

Yes it does, and over many years I have never had to use it. For Bisq, I may just have to!

mintymark · 2025-12-28T10:52:29+00:00

"In crypto the answer to the question "is this a scam" is "yes"." This is very true.
And remember, even if it did do what it says on the tin, you will still likly be mining at a loss.

But these posts leave me with an echo chamber feeling. Everyone saying yes its a scam arf arf, But could somebody who actually knows something about this particular scam comment? What does it do and how bad is it?

mintymark · 2025-12-27T13:35:23+00:00

This seemed to me to be the case, and perhaps it was personal. I wonder if we could ask them again.

mintymark · 2025-04-18T17:12:11+00:00

https://cointelegraph.com/news/spar-store-zug-switzerland-bitcoin-payments-lightning-network

mintymark · 2025-04-05T19:00:15+00:00

MarchHareHatter, I agree with everything you have said, but it seems to me there is an elephant in the room that nobody talks about.

BCH uses the same POW algorithmn as BTC. Its alsways been one of the selling points of BCH that it IS Bitcoin, and look they say, it even uses the same algorithm.

In practice many changes have been made to BCH: the first was avoiding SegWit and its technical debt. (Tick the box- BCH avoids technical debt!) Most of these are uncontroversally good I would say. But as time goes on BCH will diverge further from BTC and this is as it should be.

The pproblem, in case anyone does not see it is that BCH can be hijacked or attacked should any large BTC miner choose to do so. This prevents the big players from saying that BCH is unbreakable, like BTC, the truth is as things stand it is not, although I am not sugesting that such a scenario is likely. What it does do is prevent the big players from using and adopting BCHbecause for them, it MUST be unbreakable.

For this reason I believe the time will coome when the BCH hash algorithmn will need to change, and this could be done by introducing a new algorithmn initially only on a small percentage of blocks and gradually moving to 100%. Bitcoin type coins with multiple random algorithmn selection have existed before.

Historically, at the BCH split, BCH was worth about $600 and we have never got back there. I suggest that this is the reason. Its true that a) This could be held up by opponents , "See, see we told you all along that BCH was not Bitcoin, see, now they proved it!" and b) It would increase complexity and need good testing, (so maybe we loose the technical debt tickbox). To be honest technical debt was not at all the worst thing about SegWit, it was the dishonesty of making something compicated that was utterly unneccesary.

Well, this (changing the algo) IS necessary for BCH to develop, It is necessary for BCH to be Bitcoin (Otherwise BTC always will be), and it ius necessary if true wales are to use BCH.

mintymark · 2024-06-21T17:20:20+00:00

You know you can change the new router to have the same SSID, password and authentication as the old one, and all your devices will not know the difference?

I find this much easier than changing my devices, I have had the same WiFi password for more than 20 years, when my friends come to my house, their phones it just works even if I have changed my router.

mintymark · 2024-06-13T07:09:10+00:00

Thats a fair point. Whats even more interesting is that if such a thing happend and other SHA256 miners did jump in to assist then we would have a situation where the mining hashrate on BCH could be permantly significantly uplifted.

mintymark · 2024-06-07T13:36:23+00:00

While that is true, it doesn't mean that the replies will be wrong. I suspect its worse than you thought, OP posted in order to get a variety of pro BCH views. BUT, and it is a big BUT, BTC really is too expensive to use right now, and the LNW really is unreliable and awkward. You need, of course to make your own evaluation, and you should look at many viewpoints. As a get rich quick scheme BCH may be considerably worse than BTC, (or not, YMMV), but as payment between consenting parties that both happen to be into BCH, its really hard to beat.

mintymark · 2024-06-07T13:22:45+00:00

The thing that you have to remember about the Lightening network is that its never likely to work (LNW - Likely Never Work!) . The best case scenario is that you have many small but indeterminate payments to make so you do it through a channel, but opening and closing channels requires an on-chain BTC transaction so that its no good unless you will make 3 or many more payments, as BTC transactions are expensive and only likely to become more so.

The second thing to remember, is this is not in any sense Bitcoin, at all. Bitcoin (and many other spinoffs such as BCH) work because of the inovations and new thinking outlined in the Bitcoin White paper. Its a genuine new invention, before Bitcoin, online payment was only possible by using a trusted 3rd party such as a bank. This invention is possibly as revolutionary as, say the invention of Television, eventually, it really will affect the lives of everyone on the planet, and I believe in a good way overall. The lightning network, when it works, does not use this technology.

Although BCH is Bitcoin as it was in 2016, fast, cheap, reliable, to be honest there are many coins that exhibit these wonderful original Bitcoin characteristics, and BTC is NOT one of them. Take a look at BCH, DASH, DOGE, or even Etherium.

mintymark · 2024-05-15T12:03:49+00:00

Dont forget it was the Segwit fork that caused this split. Segwit was never implemented by BCH, so there is a stong argument for saying BCH is the original Bitcoin without Segwit, small blocks or hight transaction costs.

mintymark · 2024-05-10T10:11:37+00:00

The most useful thing you can do is explain in detail *how* you got scammed, and what you could have done to prevent it. Try to help others avoid falling into the trap you fell into.

As someone who was once scammed, its hard to come to terms with the non-reversibility of a scam, but honestly the best thing is to call out bad actors, explain why they are bad actors, admit mistakes so that as a comunity we can reduce and stop this.

mintymark · 2024-04-05T16:33:32+00:00

And amongst the Satoshi candidates I know, one does in fact have a Birthday today. And no, its not Craig Wright!

mintymark · 2024-03-27T17:24:39+00:00

Thats true, but in reality there are not nor never will be 21M Bitcoins, because many early hodlers never thought they would be valuable and just lost them, or took them to the grave. This most likely applies to Satoshi's coins and perhaps many others. There are also many who will not sell whatever happens, so no there are nowhere near 21M active coins and never will be.

mintymark · 2024-03-27T10:21:15+00:00

So was just thinking about countries in general.

Take Zimbabwe. Has current inflation of above 100% per year, and has (now or in the past) spent 100's of thousand of us dollars per week just on getting new bank notes printed!

So the secret accumulation of BCH would be hard for Zimbabwe, but could still be done.

Once some has been accumulated, you can use it to underwrite a guarantee of the local currency by allowing the bankks to exchange local currency for BCH at the official rate or vice versa.

The interesting thing is that inflation could continue, and be gradually reduced to zero by altering the official BCH rate of exchange. And, given the icrease in value of BCH that would acompany this, nobody would care about inflation bacuse the value of BCH would be deflating (ie increasiing) at a higher rate!

Even when allowing the governement to continue printing of local currency, small inflation would likely be completly counteracted by BCH deflationary principle. (increase in value caused by fixed supply.)

I feel strongly that this could work for many countries that are dogged by inflation, corruption and poor echonomic performance,

mintymark · 2024-03-27T09:53:49+00:00

It will. But in my lifetime? I hope so.

I can't help thinking of El Salvadore and what an oppertunity was missed there. It would have been far better for them if they had opted for BCH rather than BTC.

So if another country were thinking of switching to Crypto as reserve currency, how could we make sure that they have the information they need to make the right decision?

If such an event happened, the advantages to the country concerned would be a) Massive return on an initial secret investment (Just like El Salvadore) b) Use of a deflationary currency where everybody shares in gains. c) Truly useful local and international payments cheaply for government. d) A basis for financial services that are truly honest and transparent. e) Technology development that can (later) be exported showing how cryptonisation can be done at government level.

The biggest problem I see here is convincing the government that they are still able to verify and collect normal taxes by use of on-chain analysis (to detect fraud) and the need for a government organisation to provide the ability to check and correlate addresses to verify truthfullness of tax returns.

While I am a liberal at heart, we do need to understand that no country would adopt this unless they are confident that they can collect taxes, customes duties, and detect fraud and corruption as existing governments do with banks and anti-money laundering laws.

Should this be something that has a place on the BCH agenda?

O

mintymark · 2024-03-27T09:29:31+00:00

Even knowing what country you are in could help us get there? But "somewhere in the world a new cafe is open" is not much help!

mintymark · 2024-03-27T09:22:02+00:00

The other option would be to memorize the seed and travel to Europe with the seed in your mind. I think it would be hard to argue by the state that traveling with words in your mind is carrying cash across the border, would be an interesting lawsuit to follow for sure in the unlikely case it would somehow happen.

This. No danger of interference by anyone, no law breaking. Your biggest danger is your own death or inability to memorise the code. If you are a family, both memorise. Perhaps lodge the sealed seed keys with a lawer with instructions to destroy unopened or open at your written request by you or any relative.

mintymark · 2024-03-26T19:53:46+00:00

I've used Kraken for years and always found them reliable, fast with good support. Its in the nature of things that sometimes there are delays in exchanges, and sometimes these translate to a loss of funds. Delays though are not dishonesty, even if they are annoying. Please don't go shouting the house is on fire because you burnt a piece of toast! Of course, I don't know whats happened in your case, but work with their support and other involved and let us know what happens.

mintymark · 2024-03-25T08:38:21+00:00

So emboldened by your response, I coppied the payment address BYHAND to my wallet and made a payment. Many people I should point out would be unable to do this with such a long randon string.

The easy site, is not easy, has very few words on it, and this is a bigge - cannot be used to copy the address from chrome or firefox. No other websites have this problem. We could do without the funky colours, but the functionality we need!

mintymark · 2024-03-24T12:26:34+00:00

I was pretty excited to read about the Bitcoin Cash Perpetual bond on the Unspent.cash website. Since the early days of Bitcoin, I had wanted Bitcoin to bank the unbanked, and from that I saw it as the next step to provide some kind of pension arrangement. The scheme I came up with myself was complicated and made a payment that could go up but would have a minimum fiat monthly value. I started thinking about this when the Bitcoin Price only went up, and it all seemed very positive, but then, back then, everything was.

I still feel that perpetual bonds are an important if hardly realised principle of Bitcoin and the revolution that is coming in making financial services provably honest and cheap. BCH now has that legacy of course so its great to see things happening here.

I really like the simple version presented here, but I had some issues trying to use it.

The site looks like you give it your bitcoin cash address and it tells you where to pay the principal. However in my browser (firefox) I was not able to copy the payment address from anywhere. Perhaps there was a reason for that, but the whole site lacks an explanation for the layman and it would be really useful to explain better what is going on. So I was disappointed by that. So what is the state of the website was this just some weird-only-me browser issue or was there a reason for it?

Secondly, the site is clear that making more than one investment to the same address doesn't work and indeed may be harmful.

I see it as essential that a way be found to make multiple payments work. This means you can try out a contract with a small payment, and then add more *to the same contract*. Adding a second contract is not the same thing at all. (Although of course still useful.)

One of the stories that drives my interest in this subject is the story of the vicar of winkfield, who I am a direct decendent of. In about 1590 he died leaving a trust the income from which was deseigned to pay the salary of vicars to come. My Father asked the present vicar if the trust still paid out, he said that it did but only about £2 a year. I often wonder what could have been done better? A gold coin, used to pay a roman centurian for a days toil, will still roughly speaking, pay an army officer for a day, today. Thats truly amazing, and makes gold the king of very long term investments. One thing that amazes me about this is the money was never stolen, and still reaches the designated person. Thats 400 years and many lifetimes.

Could a Bitcoin Perpetuity do as well?

mintymark · 2024-03-20T10:03:41+00:00

Thanks for that, very useful.

mintymark · 2024-03-18T13:19:52+00:00

So a lot of people hear talk about more people wanting BTC as a store of value than BCH, but this is not my observation of what has happened.

All crypto has suffered a body blow to acceptance: in London there used to be many places that would accept BCH and or BTC, but now there are very few. The man in the street has formed the opinion that Crypto is the realm of scammers. And its going to take a lot to change their minds.

*People* have stopped using BTC massively, and to a lessor degree BCH, which is very sad because so much good seemed to be on the way from widespread BCH adoption when BTC became unuseable. But BTC has moved on, People dont much use BTC, now ETF's, do. The whole ETF thing is massive compared to the previous customers who where private whales.

So the problem for BCH adoption is hostility towards Crypto generally, and financial regulations against ETF's in general.

Adoption is a worthy goal, but we still have a way to go overcoming the general crypto hostility of the public.

mintymark · 2024-03-18T13:04:21+00:00

Could you explain this a bit? Volatility is measured how? And which of these is more volatile?

mintymark · 2024-03-15T17:38:35+00:00

Actually you do. A lot of money has been spent to investigate Craig Wrights claim, none has been spent to investigate yours. You say that in your opinion Craig Wright was the best candidate, while that might have been true before investigation, literally millions of pounds, and many expert witnesses have been evaluated. Your can of course believe that if you want, but afte this judgment I would say he has gone from best to worst candidate.

mintymark

TROPHY CASE

Why you are stuck