You can make as many Bitcoin addresses as you want. You can look up an addresses balance but not a wallet’s balance. It’s not as clear as you’re making it sound.

Bitcoin over Lightning is much, much more opaque, and it’s where the majority of Bitcoin transactions are now occurring. You can’t look up somebody’s balance. The only people who know about the transaction are you, the recipient, and any intermediary nodes used to forward the transaction. Privacy is continuing to improve on lightning and main chain.

deleted by creator

In the last two months, Nostr users alone (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 2.6 million tips (individual transactions) over Bitcoin lightning. In that same time period, Bitcoin main chain did around 20-40k. Most transactions are on lightning by number of transactions. Maybe not by total value moved, but lightning is pretty opaque and grants additional privacy, so it’s hard to measure for that reason.

Lightning continues to grow and get upgrades (look up BOLT12 if you are curious about the latest upgrades which bring additional privacy enhancements).

It’s open source, and it’s fully self-custody which are two important features. Having a wallet directly integrated into the e-mail client is nice, being able to send payments to other users just knowing their e-mail address instead of their public key is pretty cool. It does automatic address rotation to preserve privacy. Wish it supported lightning for cheaper/faster transactions and additional privacy but hopefully that feature comes in time.

It’s a self-custody wallet and open source. It’s regular main-chain BTC but it does automatic address rotation. Unfortunately it doesn’t support lightning, which is where the majority of Bitcoin transactions occur. Lightning offers significantly increased privacy, sub-second transactions and fees measuring in pennies.

First they came for the custodial wallets

Chat control was beat. This can be too. Contact your MEP, let them know this issue is important to you: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

Not a distro but Qubes. Incredible security and privacy out of the box. Not for everyone but absolutely one of the most interesting developments in the OS world in the past decade or two.

With whirlpool going out of biz, what coinjoin is there for btc?

There’s plenty for anybody who want to research. Coinjoin is a technique.

Doesn’t work when mempool fees are high

LN is disconnected from mempool, that’s the entire point of an L2. Your transactions don’t go on chain or in the mempool. Main chain secures the transactions, lightning stores the transactions. The main chain only stores the start and end balance of a lightning channel, that’s it.

Most people are forced/nudged into using custodial wallets

Their choice, some people will always prefer custodial options no matter how easy non-custodial ones are. LN works fine non-custodially, that’s how I use it. You move money from L1 to L2 in a single tx. Now you have a lightning channel that can have functionally unlimited transactions in it between you and anybody else on lightning. Transactions confirm in a second for pennies in fees.

LN was not designed to be a privacy tool. Bitcoiners tried to shoe-in that it is also a privacy tool

Privacy continues to enhance, look at the Bolt12 upgrades for example. But I agree, and Bitcoin can’t hold a candle to Monero’s level of privacy.

Firefox user and evangelist of over a decade. Fuck Firefox for this.

Instead of trying to clone, it may be easier to:

• Install Fedora to new drive
• Reinstall any packages you modified from base install
• Copy over your home directory including hidden directories, plus /etc

A lot of OSS projects and small non-profits? Yes. The cost to entry is “be willing to volunteer” and very few people pay that cost so basically anybody can get in. These aren’t exactly competitive positions. And if they improve the software honestly idk if they’re a shaman healer or whatever. I care about the software. As long as their energy healing garbage isn’t somehow getting into the software who cares?

deleted by creator

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.

66% doesn’t give you any more ability than 51% does. It doesn’t change the speed, it just increases the cost. There would be no reason to hit 66% to do a 51% attack.

Yes, so does a democracy. Answered here in another comment on this thread https://lemmy.ml/post/17799179/12217017

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.

Except the IMF, World Bank, Moody, Standard and Poor, etc.

They don’t trust it, they just have no other figures to work off. China has a long history of faking numbers or suddenly stopping the publishing of numbers when it can make the party look bad. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-16/china-is-hiding-more-and-more-data-from-the-rest-of-the-world

lol

Ok, be mad. A 15 year trend of growth on average no matter how you measure it: market cap, number of nodes, transaction volume, transaction capacity, etc. If you have thought Bitcoin was a scam or a bubble about to burst or whatever, you’ve been wrong 15 years in a row, maybe it’s worth reconsidering. Because it’s not just crypto bros using or investing in it now, it’s national treasures, it’s big banks and finance. But you know, on year 16 you’ll finally be proven correct, right?

Removed by mod

All versions over the past decade including the latest one