It has always been about convenience. Cash is more difficult to carry around, split in multiple amounts, there's no history of transactions recorded if you need it, easier to lose and get stolen, change discomforts etc. It appears to be the case that these inconveniences justify the spending of billions of dollars and euros in transaction fees annually.

The West is not China. There may be similar treatment as to Chinese, but we fundamentally differ in culture.

CBDC is without doubt coming to Europe, though. This is not a conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory is that it'll be used to pause the economic activity of people based on their social media, or political preferences, which again might be attempted to happen, but I struggle to imagine the Chinese model enforced to Europeans.

How so? You said you use Coinbase. That is custodial, and yes, if so, you can't bump the fee, because of how the Coinbase software is designed. If the wallet software you use is one of the reputable open-source, then it is most likely supporting RBF or CPFP (which is not needed nowadays with Full RBF).

PS: Ignore the troll.

But not in the same sense as with democracy. Sure, it is a human fabrication, but with as much little human presence required as possible. The reliance on the people in charge is minimum. There is an absence of bribery, lobbying, and bailouts, not because those in charge adhere to absolute moral standards; no one does. Everyone has their weaknesses. The chemical reactions occurring in your brain when you wield significant power are simply too powerful to overlook.

The reason there is absence of these things, is because there is nothing to be bribed. There is nothing to be lobbied. Nothing to be bailed out. There is virtually nothing corruptible in this ecosystem as long as the incentive to secure the network surpasses the potential incentive to overthrow it -- that's the entire gamble. If we fail in that gamble, we're fucked. I cannot fathom designing a system more insusceptible to corruption than this.

Nostr is relatively new, and I'll have to agree with Peter Todd's criticism here. Coinjoins are a sensitive situation. I wouldn't attempt to use software that doesn't officially provide this functionality in a private manner. For example, in Whirlpool, you get to connect via Tor in a known coordinator, with extensively reviewed software and grasped theoretical background.

Electrum isn't advertising itself as privacy focused, and I don't want to make false claims and conclusions, so I'll wait more about this rather than endorse it.

The point is that some other miner can do it, and take their profit. That's where censorship resistance originates from. A miner dislikes a transaction? Another will mine it. A mining pool operator dislikes a transaction? Another will mine it. All big mining pools' operators dislike a transaction? Then maybe miners have to migrate elsewhere, where they get to decide these crucial policies. If they don't, then the entire game theory starts falling apart, and that is nobody's benefit but the governments'.

A smart client is not that smart if it endorses censorship that might turn up against them in the future.

Besides that. "Information is easy to spread but hard to stifle"-- Someone someone. You cannot prevent information from spreading across a peer-to-peer network. If a few pro-censorship nodes decide to blacklist addresses, the owners of the blacklisted coins can simply select to broadcast them elsewhere.

You're telling me it isn't yet tagged as funding terrorism? Literally hundreds of articles every year, and even bills, proposing regulation of some sort to prevent "further terrorism funding".

And no. Bitcoin Core isn't Bitcoin. It's simply an implementation of a Bitcoin client. An optional mix setting in QT wouldn't be that kind of a red alarm. Gaining privacy on-chain is already possible and it works fine. There would be a red alarm if we hark forked into an enforced-private cryptocurrency on a protocol level.

Yeah, as it turns out, they are not very friendly with unauthorized sellers. 

Was it Coinsbee or Bitrefill? These are probably authorized.

When selling in DEX, the buyer sends you the gift card first, so you get to verify it redeems.

I say we do what we're already doing. Writing software. When exchanges started implementing KYC, and out of nowhere taint appeared, decentralized exchanges emerged as a need. And they did because centralized exchanges were central point of failures. Today there is a daily volume of more than 2 million dollars worth of bitcoin, with over 900 trades per day, proving that it works: https://bisq.markets/.

Now, mining in a decentralized manner but with attractive conditions is what's needed.

Good news. Miners deciding the candidate block's transactions is step 1. Step 2 would be to decentralize their coordination altogether, because now the government will be hostile towards the mining pools that'll adopt this.

I've been thinking of making quite a few purchases from Amazon lately, and I remember people are selling Amazon gift cards as if they're in abundance. You can even find them as options when buying and selling bitcoin from non-KYC exchanges, and can be bought much cheaply than they're worth.

- Are these legal? I remember there was an Amazon saying that you can't sell gift cards. Do people get caught into doing that? The transaction can be made anonymously, and I wonder how Amazon can figure that out.
- Are they legit or is this a usual financial instrument used to scam people?

Closest thing we have to that is Joinmarket. You import a Bitcoin Core wallet and configure it to connect with your Bitcoin Core node. Cannot start up without Bitcoin Core running. On start up, it connects with other Joinmarket nodes which run under the same protocol.

It is like a second-layer of Bitcoin Core.

How's a 83 BTC transaction fee considered "dirty"? And why's that and not my 5000 sat fee? What is the difference?

Is it just me or is this taint shit escalating rapidly into everything? Criminal money? Tainted. Mixed with criminal money? Tainted. Mixed in general with other people's money? Tainted. Do the money originate from a non-regulated exchange? Tainted. Suspicion that the transaction fee was to launder money? Tainted.

What the hell. Stop buying taint.

So you're more or less in a dilemma between choosing to hold your coins and benefit yourself financially, or help a business and contribute to the Bitcoin ecosystem but with less financial gains potentially.

I say do what your heart tells you. If you think that selling the bitcoin is too much of a wrongdoing to yourself, then don't. If you think that the business, the people you'll get to meet and work with --the ethical satisfaction in general-- outweigh the capital appreciation over the long term, then you gotta sell.

I don't believe that the referred masses use bitcoin in the first place. To me, only someone who owns their keys can be said to truly use bitcoin.

I don't believe that the masses control the world. Maybe they did once, but not anymore. Democracy is a failure. It's just the least worse regime comparably to the rest. Or as someone had once put it, "Democracy is the worst regime, except all the others". For it to function properly, it requires strong citizen maturity and character, and that is almost never the case. Granted. It is the closest thing we have to harmoniously live alongside and, by compromises, to maintain a healthy community. But it's self-destructive, just as humans. It is inevitable at some point that social institutions will corrupt, and the people will not just turn against the corrupted institution, but to the democratic system itself.

And that is why I like Bitcoin. It is not a democracy. It requires little effort to work; and works good. It is not controlled by the masses, but by neither a tyrant. It inherits the good virtues of democracy without incorporating the extensive effort and conditions it entails. You need Internet connection and a computer. Boom, money sent overseas secured by a mechanism which converts human greed to collective benefit. The bet is that this beautiful combo can overcome human corruption, or at the very least, navigate around it.

To not talk at length, only a fraction of the userbase is the driving force of Bitcoin. Genuine users who endorse the views of state-less money, accept bitcoin and spread the word, miners who maintain the status quo, and technicians who write the code. Not weak hands. Neither regulators. It's just currently apparent that centralized entities like mining pools and exchanges are susceptible to censorship. We already acknowledge that since 2009. We move on.

That'd be the time to abandon Bitcoin for good. The day mining pools reorg the chain is the day there is nothing valuable to secure. It'd be suicidal.

Both are true. Yes, Wasabi is partnering with blockchain analysis company and buying the notion that coins are unequal, so they cannot be trusted. And yes, their software is flawed. I don't know with certainty if it's more of a back end or front end issue (probably both), but we frequently notice coinjoin reusing addresses in both inputs and outputs.

Here's another reason for not trusting Wasabi folks: they are assholes. Kruw has accused nearly every participant of a mixer signature campaign as guilty for coin theft with absolutely no evidence. nopara73 is doxxing their competitors on Twitter. Max Hillebrand is one big of a hypocrite. Any sane person reading the open letter to Wasabi team can make out they're running a clown show.

Governments want to censor bitcoin (alas), and there appears to be a mining pool which complies with that. While truly sad for the chairmen of that business, Bitcoin is censorship resistant. The game theory is still on run. They are only harming their pockets. Even in an extreme scenario where most of the hash rate is pro-censorship, there will still be a few pools which will not censor. Those will be enough for any transaction to be confirmed.

It wouldn't surprise me if this brilliant idea was proposed by an incompetent politician.

Why does that matter? Whether you intentionally or "accidentally" sent a transaction, it is very much considered a payment from a taxman perspective.

Not if that was really intentional as they say. That person could communicate with Antpool and give them their transaction in private, so the rest of the pools couldn't be aware of it. (Even though one can confirm whether that happened or not if they're logging which transactions they enter their mempool)

Um. What kind of twisted reasoning is this? Just because one such entity is funding blockchain analysis, it doesn't mean we have to treat everyone as guilty until proven otherwise. Everyone's innocent, until they are known to be working with the enemy.

There are a host variety of solutions for fungibility, from lightning and Schnorr signatures to not using coinjoin and mixing services which buy taint.

Because your identity and activities / preferences / transactions, if tied together, are worth a lot of money. I mean, not particularly yours personally, but en masse a lot. Currently, data brokers is one of the most profitable professions in the branches of informatics.

But, besides data brokers, you wouldn't tell a stranger how much money you have. Why? Because that gives away unnecessary information that can be easily exploited.