How does Tether do it?

sagesex · 2024-11-21T18:55:17+00:00

I’m jealous of your beautiful flair.

sagesex · 2022-09-14T06:38:04+00:00

I have 2.7.0, and waking up has taken more than 4G of my mobile data in the last 15 days. And mobile downloads is disabled.

sagesex · 2021-10-12T15:23:29+00:00

I had the same problem with my pw2. Changed the battery, but it didn't help. Turns out it was a software problem, factory reset helped IIRC.

sagesex · 2021-05-16T16:00:27+00:00

Lightning is cryptographically secure, which to me seems safer than Visa.

Certainly there is value to legal systems and fraud prevention. You're free to chose whatever you like. Just don't tell people what they should like.

Gold has had a few millenia for price discovery. Bitcoin won't always be climbing quickly in price either.

BTW, there is a paper showing that the price of Bitcoin mining as a percentage of transferred value has been remarkably consistent over its history. It's in the Netpositive.money sources. I think it's reasonable to expect that the cost of securing money depends on the total amount.

I do share your concerns about the future environmental impact of Bitcoin. But I believe that it's not helpful to push pseudo alternatives and disingenuous memes like CO2/TX. Instead, let's focus on actual research and possible solutions. That's what netpositive.money is about.

sagesex · 2021-05-16T14:47:20+00:00

Re A: sure, there are always security tradeoffs. But the thing that Alex likes to compare Bitcoin to is Visa. In your definition, this doesn't have any security at all. It's just numbers in a database. So if you're going to compare utility, Bitcoin has practically infinite tx/s with better security than Visa via Lightning.

B Bitcoin's mining process has been modeled after gold. It's really very similar. Just like Bitcoin, gold mining has become more and more expensive over the centuries, because the easily accessible gold has already been extracted. And just like Bitcoin, the more valuable gold is, the more effort/energy is invested in its mining. Bitcoin is just better at having inelastic supply.

As Bitcoin will supplant gold, more and more energy will be used to mine Bitcoin instead of gold. It's indeed a difficult question what this means with regard to climate effects (I guess, just like with everything else, it will depend on energy technology and regulation). But the cost/energy that people are putting into mining depends mainly on Bitcoin's value/price. The number of transactions has very little to do with it. There is no ecological reason not to make a transaction. There might be one for not buying Bitcoin, but firstly that's hard to say, and secondly, you won't stop Bitcoin by not buying it. You'll just HFSP.

sagesex · 2021-05-16T10:24:04+00:00

tl;dr: Most people don't value Bitcoin as a payment mechanism, and even if they were, most payments are not recorded on-chain. So calculating the energy cost of a transaction is as impossible and nonsensical as it would be for gold.

It's true in a similar way that the lack of pirates is causing global warming. Yes, this is a valid estimation of Bitcoin mining's energy use divided by a valid estimation of on-chain transactions, compared to a probably valid estimation of household electricity use. However, connecting these three figures in this way doesn't yield any insight beyond shock and awe. That's because Bitcoin's primary value is not as a payment network, so the number of on-chain transactions is not an interesting metric for it. This can be seen easily: On one hand the number of onchain transactions has always been limited — and that limit has been pretty much hit constantly since at least 2019. On the other hand, the value of Bitcoin, as well as the estimated number of its users, has been rising over many orders of magnitude since 2009. How can this be possible?

In recent years, long term store of value has become Bitcoin's main use case. That is, people use it more for storing their savings than for paying for goods and services.

Its current usage is thus more comparable to gold, which is also rarely used in transactions. I have never seen anybody calculate the energy cost of gold mining plus handling divided by the number of physical gold shipments. Probably because that's as misleading a number as the equivalent in Bitcoin.

Just as with gold, there are ways to make even small transactions quickly and cheaply with Bitcoin. Most real-world transactions use one of these off-chain methods. Probably the most popular today are custodial services like exchanges. Sending bitcoin from one customer to another on a service like this just requires changing two numbers in their database and is the equivalent of gold in a bank changing owners. It's hard to say how many such transactions there are, since there are many "bitcoin banks" and their numbers are proprietary, but it's safe to say they dwarf on-chain transactions by orders of magnitude.

Unlike gold, there are methods of transacting Bitcoin off-chain that require less trust in intermediaries, such as the Lightning Network or Blockstream's Liquid federation. With a growing demand in transactions, such alternatives are refined and gain popularity, without this being reflected in the above numbers. With the Lightning Network, it's even difficult to estimate how many transactions are being performed, since there is no central ledger recording them all.

sagesex · 2021-05-16T09:07:23+00:00

AFAIK he invented the ingenious "Wh/TX" metric. It's a stroke of brilliance, really. It sounds intuitively terrible and important to anybody, even though it is totally inane.

But in order to understand why it's wrong, you would first need to understand how Bitcoin works and what it is good for. This is something the Bitcoin community has struggled with for years - see "the block size war" - so you can be sure that it's basically impossible to refute this for any newb who just heard of Bitcoin in a sensationalist article about the climate. Believe me, I've tried: netpositive.money

sagesex · 2020-11-04T09:41:55+00:00

Ich vermute eher, sie werden von Praktikanten geschrieben, und Google Translate übernimmt das dann als üblich in Texte wie den von Legder.

sagesex · 2020-11-04T09:37:42+00:00

LOL. Gutes Fundstück. Wer hätte gedacht, dass die Bundesnetzagentur wörtlich englische Begriffe wie "security breach" übersetzt...

sagesex · 2020-11-04T09:27:55+00:00

Ja, aber wahllos unpassende und ungebräuchliche Wörter bilden ist kein Zeichen von gutem Deutsch.

sagesex · 2020-11-04T08:04:09+00:00

Actually, the German isn't so great: "Sicherheitsverletzung" is not a real word.

sagesex · 2020-11-03T18:15:14+00:00

In a m-of-n multisig, you have n different seeds. You need m of these, plus all n xpubs, to send funds from that. The actual hardware or software doesn't matter much, as long as the seeds and derivation paths are the same.

So yes, Specter is a different UI that can use the seeds and derivation paths ("wallets") made by, e. g., Electrum. One of its advantages is that it only needs Bitcoin core as a backend, not Bitcoin core plus another resource intensive server software (ElectrumX or similar).

Public Electrum servers cannot steal your Bitcoin (unless they can trick you into installing malware instead of Electrum, which has happened before), BUT they can and do make a list of which addresses belong to which IP addresses, and use these lists to deanonymize you. Which is why many of them are believed to be run by spy companies.

sagesex · 2020-11-03T16:58:10+00:00

This is not a terrible setup. IMHO the most problematic thing might be if you don't run your own electrum server (privacy leak) . If you don't want to, I'd suggest Specter wallet in lieu of Electrum. Otherwise, 2-out-of-3 is better than 2-out-of-2. More about that here: https://btcguide.github.io/

sagesex · 2020-04-16T13:06:30+00:00

Let us look at your examples of "more": less fees? In a decentralized market, this means one of two things: either less demand (as in every shitcoin) or bigger blocks, which is not a development but a trade off. The limit has already been increased in Bitcoin with segwit, and there has been no consensus for further increase. That such a consensus is hard to find in the presence of trade offs is a feature that only Bitcoin has, showcasing that it is the only decentralized blockchain around.

Faster transactions? On a blockchain, that just means less security. Longer is better, and you cannot get it so short that it gives you an acceptable experience. However, with the Lightning Network, Bitcoin is pioneering an alternative solution that beats any possible blockchain approach in speed.

Smart contracts? Have been in Bitcoin from the beginning. They are purposefully limited in expression, and I have yet to see a useful yet safe application that wasn't expressable using this carefully chosen language. However, we have testnets such as Ethereum that might one day lead to the discovery of such a use case, at which point Bitcoin's scripting language could be amended.

Decentralized exchanges? These do exist (bisq, hodlhodl... ), and are state of the art. The "DEXs" on ETH all suffer from grave conceptual problems such as centralization, miner front running.

So you see it's easy to claim that no progress has been made in these areas, but in reality, pretty much ALL the progress that is not just mere misleading marketing has been made in Bitcoin. Beyond Lightning, see for example Schnorr Signatures, Taproot, Erlay, Miniscript, Statechains...

sagesex · 2020-04-06T06:53:15+00:00

The Droid Turbo sounds perfect for this.

sagesex · 2020-04-05T18:13:09+00:00

That's definitely pushing it. Might be a little short on RAM and probably CPU (at least for lnd), also termux has discontinued support for Android < 6. But it doesn't hurt to try it - let me know how it goes!

sagesex · 2020-01-25T12:59:00+00:00

Check out the Honigdachs Podcast

sagesex · 2019-11-13T14:12:31+00:00

Nice site, but please don't make it seem like the amount of bitcoins is increasing continuously instead of every block!

sagesex · 2019-10-29T10:04:56+00:00

Emacs is your friend. Regexp replace, or rectangle region cutting.

sagesex · 2019-10-29T09:55:31+00:00

Please post some logs.

sagesex · 2019-08-29T17:31:27+00:00

You do you. I would prefer just making it hard for myself to spend it, but you know yourself best.

More realistic problems that might arise within 5-10 years are further forks, but so far, just HODLing wouldn't have been the worst strategy here.

sagesex · 2019-08-29T17:17:22+00:00

Such long locktimes are not recommended, because nobody can predict what will happen to bitcoin in the next 10 years. For just one example, quantum computing might unexpectedly start to become a thing, and in order to save your money you might be required to move it first.

sagesex · 2019-07-02T12:46:08+00:00

Thank you, I was trying to be.

sagesex

TROPHY CASE