Exactly.  And I think this will actually be the case.  At LEAST it will be Bitcoin's industrial strength privacy layer. I think lesser, but significant privacy will be acheived on LN and Liquid.

I am looking forward to seeing what the Samourai integration looks like in action.  From my understanding it not going to act as a marketplace, but as a way to deal with change UTXOs that have privacy problems.  If that works, I am not sure why Samourai could not shift even more traffic over to the BTC<=>XMR swaps as they will act as not only as a mixing method, but they will be an BLACK HOLE and break of the previous chain.

From my understanding whirlpool breaks deterministic links by introducing so many extra paths that they become too difficult to trace accurately for very far.  Like trying to follow a single strand of spaghetti in a colander.   This SWAP functionality will act in a completely different way and be more like a wormhole.  BTC goes in at one place, and then has NOTHING AT ALL TO DO with where it might "come out".  It causes strand of spaghetti to actually turn INTO other strands with no record of it happening.  If they were to use this method with whirlpool it would create a level of chaos and entropy that would be incredibly difficult to even begin to look at.

Obviously seeing apps that act as sort of a market will also be useful and interesting.

My thought is if moving to/from Monero becomes useful and common then two things naturally follow.

-Monero usage, transactions and most likely price, go up.
-More people begin to just PARK some of their value in XMR which naturally makes it more valuable.

There is a REASON to HOLD bitcoin -> value storage.
There is a REASON to hold ETH - > ability to take part in various scams

But the only reason currently to hold monero is privacy and speculation.  That does NOT have the same draw even though WE know it should.  This development is going to make the reasons to hold monero far more understandable.

I do not think it is clear to us all yet how much the exchanges create significant friction going into and out of Monero, as well as that being a major identity problem.  When that friction is gone, and FULL privacy is gained we just set our selves up for a significant virtuous cycle.

I think the question mark here is if Monero becomes a attractor for the most tainted of all BTC.  I have not worked out in my noggin yet the implications of that... Seems a little risky, but at the same time... risky to whom?

Interesting thing about Monero's transactions.

Few cryptocurrencies share monero's particular usage pattern.  Monero CONSISANTLY has the least transactions happen on Saturday, with the second least on Sunday.  And the cycle is almost freakishly consistently rhythmic.  BTC and ETH also follow this pattern but to a much lesser extent.  Garbage like ZCash follow a random walk based on trading.


This very clearly  demonstrates Monero is being used consistently for commerce on a limited number of platforms which influence this "weekends off" pattern.  If you were to visit WHM for example you would see that most vendors ship on M-F.

Monero is extraordinary.

This headline is annoying.  The mining rig didn't kill this poor idiot.  His own actions did.

There are more than him.  But he really does take the cake.  He has a habit of taking the most extreme position on everything.  A very black and white sort of person.

Yes.  Musk revealed two things.  He still does not understand Bitcoin really.  He has not really learned that much about BTC since kind of stubbing his toe on it.  His understanding of just about everything is rudimentary.  From one point of view this is understandable.  But from another it is really not.  He is supposed to be aspergers-geniusy. And he has OUR shoulders to stand on to understand.  Saylor had the same road and got it in months, if not weeks.

I do think one of the hardest things about understanding BTC is the tech tradeoffs and the risk involved in rebalancing them.

He made the argument that if small blocks are important then why aren't we making them smaller?  And then laughed that off as if he had made some deep point.  I think all three others mentioned that this has been something some part of the community has actually advocated for.

Thing is, I actually agree that Bitcoin could probably benefit from bigger blocks.  And in MY humble opinion we might be erring on the conservative side.

But the bottom line is it does not matter how much bigger you make them. It just will NOT scale to the whole world without changing the tradeoffs.  We could make blocks 100x bigger right now, and that would most DEFINITELY damage bitcoins decentralization, but it would barely scratch the surface for what we would need to serve even just 1 billion of the worlds population.

Among our (elite) group here we do not even agree on this topic entirely.  But Elon is not making an informed or intelligent Big Blocker argument.  Instead he just reveals that he is making assumptions that he does not understand the implications of.

He would not matter at all, if he did not matter so much   He is revered by many and wields a lot of power... so his whole DOGE sidetrack does actual real damage.  So, because of that:

Screw him.

It just seems he does not yet get that changing the fundamental limits in a cryptocurrency is not as simple as changing the air/fuel mix in a carburator. In fact I believe few really understand what an incredible balancing feat Satoshi pulled off with Bitcoin.

Jack is one of the most difficult personalities in the "scene" for me because he is such a tie-dye statist totalitarian cypherpunk etc.  LOTS of conflicting views IMHO, but that makes him interesting.  His company's compliance in the mass censorship (yes i realize this is a complex topic) of certain political views, and certain speech is very disturbing to me.  But he gets BTC *WAY* better than Musk for example.

OK.  Just started watching this B word thing...

Maybe I will edit this as I go... but impressions.

Elon is stoned as fek.  Seriously, or he just got up from a nap?
Elon triples down on "it's too slow, it's too expensive"
Elon reiterates for the 17millionth time he owns it (as does Tesla and SpaceX)
~22 Jack is such a classic bleeding heart. And I think he is right Bitcoin is going to benefit all the unbanked etc.
~24 I dig Cathie. She might have more basic strong sense than the other two. Recognises the BTC store of value being primary still.  Seems to get off on the who "crypto" thing though.  Her views on deflation are keen.
~27 Elon is pissed he's not geting a turn now.
~27 Jack touches on remittance, and bitcoins soundness and state disconnection.  Touches on Verifiability.  He obviously hangs on on Bitcoin Twitter.
~29  Elon misunderstands the concept of "scarcity".  He is attacking LN with the Money Transmittal argument.  Sounds like he's being fed by the state.  Bitcoin can't scale.  Brings up Doge, laughing and thinks it can be useful as a payment network because of   Mentions the "exchanges as a defacto layer 2" non-argument again.
~32 Moderator brings up that Elon's ideas would break decentralization.  Elon seems to think regular users do not need to run a node.  I do not believe his misunderstanding is well thought out yet.  
~34.5 Mod suggests Starlink run nodes.  
~35 Elon "invents" the idea of node as space heater.  How original.
~35.5 Elon drinks water.  He's been sounding a little dry mouthed.  he is stoned.
~36 Elon likes Doge because it is dumb and would be funny if the most entertaining outcome is the most likely one.
Elon is high.
Elon drinks more water, and wonders if he could sneak off cam for a bong hit.15
Jack falls into Elon's "fun" trap.
~38 Energy use~!  Oh boy.
~39 Elon is an self proclaimed expert on "renewable energy".
~40 Elon tacitly admits that the did not do appropriate due diligence before putting 1.5 BILLION.
~40.5 Elon says he has lots of bitcoin.
~41 Elon wants to do "more dilligence" to confirm the usage is <=50% carbon, and Tesla will resume.  Most likely they will.
~41:40 Cathie brings up the actual intelligent 2nd order argument of energy use secondary effect
~42 Elon thinks solar powered Bitcoin cant work when the sun is down, even though it is up somewhere on Earth all the time.
~43 Elon is pro nuclear
~44 Jack also shows that he understands the second order idea of stranded energy etc unlike the wunderdoof.
~45 Elon has given his very life to the Earth working on Tesla.
~48 Tesla is trying to be the good guys
~48.5  Elon has saved us from Bitcoin using bad energy and if he had not stepped in they would have just kept shoveling coal.
~49.5 Cathie shills ESG a little.  Sings Jack's hym a little on access for the unbanked and developing countries and remittances.  Mentions ES, and Tonga
~51.5 Talks about the social angle of egregious fees.
~52 she brings up the social aspect of bad government.  Props up the BTC transparency compared to the legacy systems. Compliments devs.
~53 Talks about Economic theory, Praises the DEVS in this regard. Calls them noble.
~54 Continues to praise bitcoin as noble as compared to the legacy system.
~55 BTC ethos
~56 Jack talks about supporting DEVS, and fighting the patent trolls, and open sourcing h/w design, and the DEV APIs
~58 Elon is asked about NYKNYC.  He seems to understand it. First thing I hear him say that makes sense.  He mentions that "he is a fan of decentralized finance". But like all of his other views he seems to have no nuance when it comes to custody, and key management.  And what about this stupid defacto layer two exchanges concept?
~59 Elon believes in empowering people. Golf clap.
~59.5 Elon cracks himself up with the depth of his understanding of key management.
~60 The moderator brings up multisig as a solution.
~60  Elon suggests you can just put your private key "in something that has dual access or voting access".  He obviously barely understands this topic as well.
~60.5 Mod challenges the interviewees saying the community wants to guard the users from rich people and corps.
~61 Cathie paints her company as a supporter of "democratization".  She mentions education and research given out for free to all via social media. Encourages support of the dev community.
~63 Jack wants to push for as much decentralization as possible.  Moving to non custodial solutions.  Being open source, and wants to move Twitter that direction. (Blue Sky)  Wants to support the community
~64 Elon asks if Twitter would take payments from advertisers in crypto.
~64 Jack wants to, but also want to focus on economic incentives w/o advertisers.
~65 Elon says something incomprehensible about incentives, and again scolds Jack for not yet letting advertisers pay in crypto.  He seems to have forgotten that he is against that function at his own companies.
~65.5 Jack tolerates this and answers "100%".
~66 Mod asks Elon about his companies role
~66 Elon Wants to do things that benefit people.  And "take these set of actions to make the future good"  Some crypto will make the future better.  i am thinking in terms of probabilities. Shills ETH and DOGE again.  Will have an "empowering effect". Says some anti government stuff comparing it to the biggest corporation.
~68 Cathie has some intelligent ideas about regulations around bitcoin. Talks about how explosive the growth of trade could be because of BTC.  And the idea of the hedge against inflation.  Talks about the natural migration of people to BTC, and brings up deflation again. She brings up stick buybacks and counterparty risks.
~70.5 Elon says Teslas Euro bank accounts actually have negative interest rates!  This is insane!  What could possibly help with this?
~72  Jack talks about the beauty of the BTC network, and the bad UX/UI for end users.  Wallet development is important.  Brings up Muun.  Seems to believe it is the type of UI that is great.
~73 Elon's hope for "crypto in general" is that it can improve the efficiency of the thing we call money.
~73.5 Cathie says money has powerful network effect, and revisits ESG and those aspirations. Solving the worlds problems. Says the words "blockchain" and "AI" right next to each other. Somehow the universe does not notice and destroy her.
~75  Jack wants Bitcoin to create world peace
~75 Elon laughs at that.


Elon is not important to bitcoin.  Jack probably is. Cathie seems like a competent business woman.  Sorry for the many many typos... not gonna fix em.

A pretty juicy pump for ants.  I wonder if this is speculation or inside knowledge, technical or random walk.

Will never know, really.

Higher than I am comfortable with.

The litmus test of understanding why energy use is NECESSARY for Bitcoin truly is something akin to an IQ test.

I suppose it is possible for some 170+IQ person to see another way, but I doubt it, and I am CERTAIN Musk is not that person.

As tired as I am of the wunderdoof this at least will be interesting.  Well... I kind of HOPE it's interesting.

Jack is pretty well planted as the maximallist billionaire.  In some ways I am just waiting for him to crack and do something horrible like add DOGE to the CashAPP or the like.  But I think it is WAAAAY more likely he has gotton through to Musk prior to this, and this whole thing is really damage control.  Dorsey seems to actually GET the main bits about BTC and why it is the one really important thing.   My highest hope is he has used his access to educate EM a little in the aftermath of his who mis-step into "crypto".

Anyway.  I doubt I will watch this live or anything... but I am interested to see how it turns out exactly.

Been noticing the same thing.  Has something taken the place of Bitmex?  Still trying to figure out the dynamics of this.

I gotta admit.  There wedge caused by this virus is more interesting to me than the virus itself.

The world is so polarized by it.  This leads to bad things, mark my words.

That thing is HORRIFYING/BEAUTIFUL.

I agree it was blathery.  But it was nice to get to hear the Samourai fellow.  Those guys have been so demonized by so many.  I used to judge them poorly.  I am changing to thinking they are kind of over the target.

Hmm I have worked in media for a long time.  Nano is right.  There are no ways to make something out of nothing... or after things have been stripped away to guess them back in.

But there are certainly some techniques that might get you a few millimeters in the direction you want to go.  Sharpening filters (which will also add noise and weird aliasing), and probably some out of the box "restoration" tools.  I know a LOT more about the audio side of this though.

But I BET that we will see some interesting AI type filters developed in the not too distant future that might do what you want...  I would concentrate on getting the highest quality digitized version of your source as possible...  

https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/

The universe has that one.

Yeah... maybe I should read before I post about exactly what you have already posted.

However I am going to pick a nit.  Finding the private key for a known address is not impossible.  It is entirely 100% possible.

It is, however, PRACTICALLY impossible.

That is also a phrase that people almost always use hyperbolically.  But it is the literal truth.  Is it possible to flip a coin 256 times and on the very first try hit the private key for the coinbase address in block 2 (1HLoD9E4SDFFPDiYfNYnkBLQ85Y51J3Zb1)  But of course it will not happen even in a billion billion years.

That one from the hash of all zeros is nifty.  I am surprised craig wright has not claimed that and started court cases to have it turned over to him.  I be he could use the $99.99 (how weird that that is exactly what's in it at the very moment.)

(Don't get mad at me!   I agree with you that finding one of those private keys is IMPOSSIBLE.  But my inner AKCHUALLY needs to say the word practically in front of it not too be all itchy and scratchy inside.)

I agree with BoA on this one!  Buying a single bitcoin most certainly will be worth about 60 cars one day!