I am not exactly sure how much power and what the reporting requirements are of the "emergency interim CEO John J. Ray III" , but there are various systems in which bankruptcy, fraud and mismanagement causes a company to go into a kind of trustee relationship - and surely a team of leadership is put in place to determine how to proceed, including they will likely make fresh assessments regarding the extent to which they might need the expertise of prior FTX workers/executives or if they believe that they might have people on their teams that they believe would be more suitable for any kind of transition that needs to be made.. as well as any plan that they make has to be approved by the bankruptcy judge and also giving opportunities for any of the creditors to make objections, and surely sometimes there could be some spin or some ways of selling everyone on the idea that the better course of action would be to open up, especially if they have assets that seem sufficient to operate the company and perhaps to segregate off some aspects of the business in order to create stages of opening up and including if there are assessments that they retain a sufficient amount of brand recognition and good will that the whole thing would not end up failing as a fiasco...

and surely it may be bit too early to know if what they end up doing would end up being better for the various creditors and investors.. and of course, there could be some thoughts that they have sufficient regulatory approval and some of the liability angles could come out cleaner if they are able to reopen in a somewhat successful way.. probably not as successful as Bitfinex in 2016 - but Bitfinex in 2016 did not suffer from the same degree of complications in regards to why it had shut down in the first place.. and also the bankruptcy lawyers are going to make sure that they (and their team) gets sufficiently compensated for their efforts, and they likely have experience and models in terms of ways that bankrupt companies had reopened in the past and also to be capable of assessing what resources that they have in place in order to accomplish some similar kind of success with FTX.. whether they start out with the international version or the US version or if they have some kind of way of figuring out how they would stage which products are going to be offered or discontinued and maybe the order in which they would go live - including making assets available to creditors and maybe even spinning up their own shitcoin... (or shitcoins)..   


Yes.. whether you agree with this whole matter or not, it is kind of an interesting idea that they would be proposing (and even putting resources into) such a plan to reopen.. given the level of clown show that many of us longer term bitcoiners are able to recognize from the levels of scamming and duping that was likely happening, including that it is quite likely that some people are not really being held accountable so far.. and I am referring to people in Sam's family such as his dad, mom, brother and there may well be some other connections that could be followed in terms of how much some of those insider fucktwats (including lawyers and I am not sure if John Ray is wanting to protect any of them) were involved in setting up a lot of scam entities that were purposefully designed to obfuscate and scam the flow of funds, and we likely realize that chubby vegetarian virtue-signaling hypocrite dweeb - aka Sam - was way too dopey, emotional and retarded to be able to really run or organize such an operation - which for me seems to show that he had some higher level help in setting up some of those systems, legal structures, and keeping track of the matters with any kind of hope that they would not blow up and there likely is criminal intention with those people who were involved in organizing and setting up those various systems that FTX had in place.

Of course, this is a real strange development, and it was mentioned a couple of months ago as a possibility.

One strange thing is to say possible relaunch in Q2, and we are already in Q2.

It may well not be a bad thing for the space or for the coin holders (clients).. but still I wonder if they ever would be able to accomplish some kind of a reopening that would even be as close to as successful as Bitfinex did in late 2016.. even though the Bitfinex reopening was not without controversy.

I recall also that some folks thought that MTGOX should have reopened.. and who knows?

Some thing are just messy as fuck, and I find it a bit surprising that FTX believes that it is not as messy as fuck as it seems from the outside, and the quantity of entities that were engaged in obfuscating, fraud and influence peddling seems like a broken business model, and the so far failure/refusal to conduct an independent investigation seems like there might be some covering up going on, and is the new CEO part of the limitation of damages by diverting and continuing to obfuscate what actually had happened in terms of some of the heads of decently high level folks that may still either need to roll or to be held accountable in some way for their participation in that seemingly outrageous scam project that they are wanting to reopen "the non-scammy" parts, if any.

Frequently creditors will be concerned about how to get the most money back, and maybe some regulators want to save face, but if they are trying to say that some of the aspects of the exchange was "illegal" then are they reopening as a "legal operation"?  Will there be an international division and a USA division?

The article does not give very many details, and surely seems to be quite soon to be able to launch whatever they are going to launch by this quarter.. which would be ending in June and Q3 starts on July 1.

Overall, I do not disagree with the point that you are making EarnOnVictor, which is that the amount of work that is required from a signature campaign may well be relatively low, and not require a lot of time to achieve the requirements.

However, I believe that you are incorrect in the way that you describe what is meant by passive income.

You should not feel alone, since frequently passive income is NOT described very accurately.. and of course, there are more pure forms of passive income and then other kinds of income that are "kind of like" passive income.

I would suggest that largely passive income should be considered something in which you do not have to do any work in order to receive it.. except maybe just keep track of it and move it around, but there are not any requirements on you in order to receive it.  The best kinds of passive income would be ones that flow from assets that you already own.

Signature campaigns are not passive becuae they require you to post, and there may be some other requirements from time to time, even if the requirements are not very onerous, relatively speaking.


Personally, I do agree with you that there is some value to try to earn more money during your prime earning years, if you are able to do that, and so frequently there is a certain level of ambition that a lot of people have is to build enough wealth in order that later down the road, they will not have to work as much. Of course, each of us comes to differing kinds of decisions in regards to how to spend our time in terms of building ourselves or even if we are able to build our marketable skills or if we want to try to earn money versus trying to be happy in other kinds of pursuits.

And, of course, the starting points for each of us is different too, and so from where we start will affect some of the resources that we are able to draw upon, and some people are more capable of figuring out good fits for themselves and others have regrets later in life in regards to the choices that they had made - there may well be some difficulties to earn money later in life if you have not either gained marketable skills or have not been able to accumulate capital (or sure some people already have capital from the start, so they might not have any of those kinds of wealth accumulation dilemmas.. but they still might have wealth maintenance and wealth preservation dilemmas, perhaps?). 

Well, another characteristic of that money that is in the bank, is that there is something that is not quite yours also because even if you hold that money in your grubby little hands, it loses value because it is "purposefully" denigrated in order to rob little by little from every person that holds such money.  For sure, the vast majority of normies have been trained into believing that it is normal and expected to have their money denigrated, so they hardly even believe that they deserve their money to retain its value... and surely it could take generations for bitcoin to reverse the embedded training.. and some of us have figured it out sooner than others, and realized that even if we might not go 100% into bitcoin, we should not be holding too many dollars beyond the amount that might be needed to cover our expenses.. including contemplating our how sure we are about our various cashflow sources, too.

When many of us grew up learning various fiat systems, and then we have built some trust in the institutions serving the interests of the people, and surely, even if they may be "required" to "serve the interests of the people," the system itself is lacking a sufficient amount of objectivity.. and objective standards in order to incentivize serving the interests of the people.. and so many folks in those positions to oversee fiat systems might even believe that they are doing the right thing when they uphold the ongoing denigration and exploitation of the people's purchasing power and to proclaim "that's the way it is supposed to be."....

Bitcoin may well not fix these matters over night, but many of us are recognizing and appreciating that value is flowing into bitcoin because it is sufficiently neutral and has the capacities to address the corruptions and the unsoundness of the money, even when some of the people do not actually realize it... and may be part of the reason why so many normies are slow to bitcoin and it is going to take a while for them to figure it out.. they get confused... how could it be?  how could it be?

Well you better buy some, get involved and learn about bitcoin sooner rather than later, but hey if you want to wait, then that's on you... there is ONLY so much that we can do when they are looking at the price and saying " I thought that was dead?"  "no, what is dead and dying is those systems in which your value is robbed from you little by little because they have 'design flaws.' "



I am having my doubts that Coinbase is any more lame than you for repeating that nonsense.

Of course, if they do not know your basis, they have to report it as $0... so you have to figure out whether or not you are going to count the basis as zero or if you have some other records that you believe will sufficiently suffice regarding what was your basis for those coins that you decided to sell (through Coinbase)... if you think that the basis should be the BTC price at the time that the coins came into Coinbase, then that surely sounds like a novel theory that would even be worse for Coinbase to be counting the basis of your coins like that.

Another possibility could be that they just put the basis as "unknown," and that would probably be the most accurate.


That almost comes off as a compliment, if read in context.

 

 


 


That's what I was trying to say.

Not everyone agrees about whether the current BTC price is a fair price, a suppressed price or a overly exuberant price, and that seems to be how the market works in terms of working out the disagreements and part of the reason that there tends to be a lot of volatility in the price in an asset like bitcoin.. partly because it is a new asset, and people are getting used to it.

Surely some of us realize and recognize value in bitcoin that is not seen by others, and many others (including an overwhelming number of them) actually either fail/refuse to invest into bitcoin or just end up coming into bitcoin at much later times when they realize the errors of their failure/refusal to see value in it.

We are not all going to be on the same page in regards to bitcoin, yet surely many of us recognize and realize that guys/gals who have been investing into bitcoin and accumulating bitcoin for longer periods tend to improve their material and psychological conditions as long as they do not fuck around with trading and losing their focus by either trading or trying to be overly strategic in regards to their methods of accumulating bitcoin and attempting to profit from it.

People are going to make mistakes, and not everyone can be saved from making mistakes, and there remains a certain amount of personal responsibility to learn various ways to study bitcoin, study one's self in terms of finances and psychology and also to invest into bitcoin with those learnings in mind.


Surely one of the best things is to just get started in investing and tailor a strategy towards your own circumstances, and with the passage of time, such as buying BTC over several years, whether 8 years like you mentioned or 4-10 years or longer, there are going to be various points along the way that you will be able to tailor your plan and perhaps increase or decrease the amount that you are investing into bitcoin based on your from time to time reassessments of your own personal circumstances, including accounting for whether your own circumstances have changed and/or your view of bitcoin has changed as compared with other places that you might choose to invest (hopefully not shitcoins, and if you do shitcoins, hopefully you do not over do it or get drug into some of their frequently dumb gambling (and/or affinity scamming) talking points).

Why do you sound so angry in regards to the Chivo wallet matter mendace?  Yes.. sure it is a government controlled wallet, and sure people should attempt to know the difference between any kind of wallet that is government controlled and various other bitcoin options, just as they should realize differences between holding their value inside of various custodial solutions (whether government sponsored or some other kind of third party, such as a financial institution). 

Yes, some people do not know about these matters, but they are being precluded from either finding out "what's up" or even paying attention, when the government itself is telling them that they do not need to use the Chivo wallet.

I doubt that the El Salvadorean govt is being as disingenuine as you are attempting to argue and surely losing credibility if the facts do not really back up what you are saying in terms of what governments do.. versus giving options to people that they would not otherwise have, which is to freely use (transact in, store or otherwise use) bitcoin without fear of prosecution or persecution, as is the case in some other places in which the legal status is way less clear.

If you had not noticed, El Salvador is in fact the only government in the world that has both gone as far as it has to legalize bitcoin in terms of categorizing it as legal tender, and they do not even appear to be devolving into shitcoinery, yet..... so yeah, sure there can be some reasonable assertions that the Chivo wallet was not a very good product, but it did seem to be promoted as a way to incentivize all qualified citizens to claim $30 of bitcoin (or was it $30 in dollars in order to download the Chivo Wallet?  I don't know and it really does not matter too much regarding the points that I am making) , and yeah, maybe it would have been better for individual citizens to refrain from collecting their $30 or maybe just collect their $30 and then use other forms of bitcoin or lighting network wallets?  Individuals have to weigh for themselves about what option that they want to employ, and the mere fact that they may well be "illiterate" as you claim, does not either resolve them from responsibility or automatically support your largely nonsensical claim that they were being taken advantage of... nonsense.

It should not be very difficult to understand.  If the price moves in your favor, then you make more by being able to buy early, so it remains a kind of gamble - whether the one who takes the loan has the cashflow to cover the loan or not.. Of course, no one should be taking loans if they do not have backup means to cover the servicing of the loan and the payoff amount when it comes due.

The one who does not make sure that s/he has cashflow to cover the loan in spite of the asset's performance (in this case bitcoin's price performance) is the one who is failing/refusing to adequately assess downside risk, and likely should not be employing such leveraging tools to gamble (when they might believe that they are trying to invest, but they end up employing a gambling strategy with an investment asset.. in this case bitcoin)...


The best way to start buying bitcoin is little by little (dollar cost averaging methods are really good for beginners) and to figure out your financial situation so that you manage your cashflow and other aspects of your finances and psychology, and likely the longer that you buy into bitcoin and build your investment portfolio, then the more likely you will be able to learn and to figure out ways to start to employ more sophisticated tools, such as forms of financing (such as loans or whatever other tools that you might decide to use), but even more sophisticated BTC buyers don't necessarily fuck around with those kinds of financing tools because instead of becoming rich, they get reckt because they don't know what they are doing.. or how to play bitcoin's volatility.. which is a quite difficult task.. and part of the reason that slowly buying in and learning along the way tends to be much better than getting loans.

Holy fucking shit.

You could at least try to stay on topic, and then you just invite more divergence from the topic when you cannot at least present your question in a way that is relevant to the topic.

Is that your way of saying "Happy Easter?"

If so, Happy Easter to uie-poo-ie-too-ie.

I like to use Bitcoincharts.com to try to pinpoint historical BTC price data, even though there might not have had been an exchange that had any price on Easter in 2010 as you mentioned, and even the bitcoin charts seem to NOT start to show MTGOX price information until September 2011.

Yes, you are nit-picking, and likely you are wrong too in your attempt at making a narrow perspective regarding what this thread is about since we have been talking about the essence of the subject matter that was presented in OP and also the various perspectives that forum members have on the topic, with 65 pages of thread so far...

...and surely bitcoin has already become legal tender in El Salvador, so it is not a "what if"situation, but it is a situation in which something had already happened (Such as El Salvador making bitcoin legal tender) and various reactions and perspectives on the topic, and surely we are witnessing a variety of ways in which the El Salvador's increasing adoption of bitcoin - including that it has proclaimed bitcoin as legal tender are playing out, including various reactions and ongoing developments and even whether or not El Salvador may well have any impacts on various bitcoin network effects through its outwardly friendly approach to bitcoin.

The law is not as clear as you are proclaiming it to be.  There is no world-wide law that determines what is legal, illegal, criminal, civil, even though code can have world-wide impacts.  There are also various free speech angles (defenses) and even questions of how to read intent versus outcome, and whether there are commercial purposes or communicative purposes that are facilitate through software.. Also is there self-dealing and obfuscation in regards to what is happening or not. 

I doubt that the standards are even close to as clear as you are describing them to be - even if there are proponents of various standards, and you may well take a different perspective if you are developing software, using the software or someone who is looking at enforcement of laws (such as prosecutors in various jurisdictions).

I think that it is just variations of the ongoing growth of various network effects.. and bitcoin is not exactly going to be locked into any particular matter, and even some of the old themes are going to be redone and even improved upon - or maybe even sometimes put out there as if they were original theories, and it does not completely matter, whether credit is completely given or not.. because the Lindy effect is likely playing out too in which the cornz are largely getting stronger.. repeated themes of new people coming in, and various battles, and even some folks realizing that they had previously been retarded because they "knew about bitcoin" for 10 years or longer, but then maybe ONLY start to "get it" .. and some folks are never going to get it or do enough research to figure out the difference between information and disinformation.

We cannot save everyone, but still some losers are going to have lightbulb moments and become allies and enlightened, and others are going to rage quit but then realize that they either have to unrage quit, secretly accumulate, or just outright apologize for their prior level of dumb.

Even those of us who have been in bitcoin likely continue to learn, and sometimes we help others out and other times we lock ourselves away, because we feel that "we don't got time for dat."... .and so the bitcoiners become more complex too.. and it used to be snot nosed 14 year olds, but then becomes respectable status quo or even branches of the powers that be that get involved in bitcoin, and financial institutions and probably governments getting reckt and rug pulled.. and the show goes on with BIGGER players, and hopefully any of us who are in bitcoin longer attempt to figure out and realize (and even follow through by putting into practice) that we are not going to lose too many coins along the way.

A decent number of us will likely end up dying with more coins than we should have and we might not have figured out exactly how to pass down our coins.. .. the real bitcoin, not the fake ones that are part of the ongoing manipulation effects that will not completely go away in our lifetimes, either..

Yes.. I am using IOS too.. so that is the reason that I was considering Breez, Phoenix and Blixt as the three lightning network wallets that were the closest to being self-custody.. and for sure, none of them are exactly perfect, but I still want to at least attempt to support the systems that are aspiring towards self-custody rather than having another system that is completely wall-gardened..

It seems that in Bitcoin, we need to be more conscientious regarding what we are doing as compared with other kinds of programs that we may have run in the past.. and sure of course, Apple products are already pretty damned walled gardened, so we cannot completely cover all of our tracks in terms of having potential vulnerabilities... especially those of us who cannot read or write software code or even to attempt to customize our experience through running our own lightning node. 

As far as I understand, even if Wallet of Satoshi is easy to use and has a lot of good interfaces, it seems to not even be trying to have various self-custody features.. and Anita Posch talked about those same kinds of ideas.. and I agree with her.. and the same is true with the interview with the Blixt developer that I had included earlier.. Guys like that seem to be really working on ways to make systems that try to empower bitcoin/lightning users.. even though surely there are complications, too.. in terms of how much we might need to learn in order to safeguard our transactions.

In the end, you need to do what is comfortable for you, including figuring out how much time that you want to spend learning about these kinds of matters.. and surely, I am not claiming to really know a lot - yet I am also thinking that if some of the transactions and the wallets go bad, at least I am not planning on keeping very large amounts in those various lightning network wallets.. but at the same time, I can also have some on-chain wallets that I can use to refill the lightning network wallets from time to time, if I need to... so it remains an ongoing learning process from my point-of-view.

Is that the "new" way of posting in "Engwish?"

Anyone?


Anyone?


Spoyken de engwhish in dees here paaaaoooorrrtts, no?



That's the spirit, BitcoinPsycho!!!!!!!!!

Let's go back to "our" bitcoin roots... 1982..



naaaaaiiiiiicccccce...  

I don't know about that.

"We" may well need some tumble weeds in these here parts, just to "set the mood."


Sure some of the regular posting members have changed, but I doubt that there is any significant/meaningful deterioration in the quality like the way you describe it.. but hey.. whatever..... maybe I don't really mind whatever is some of the various superficialities that might exist in the thread.. there have always been some dumb superficialities in the thread.. and we could maybe go back and look, and it might appear "more exciting" but I doubt it.. just seems exciting when looking through nostalgia, and surely some of the current members posting here (and even in other threads, using chatGBT.. those little twats)...   

Do you need a picture of a twat.. just to make you more cittttttetteeeeeeeeeeeee?   

It's true that we might have to travel to reddit or twitter or maybe even to some other interwebs cornz sources for inspiration from time to time, in order to get a few extra laughs.... .. some of those are posted here too.. but yeah, some comments on them might be good.. even if they were started by a seemingly merit farming account.. but whatever, that's my opinion.. there should be "abilities" to interact with all kinds of materials.. as long as there is some kind of connection to my lil precious.... if not, then make a connection.. Isn't everything connected to dee cornz in one way or another?  The sky is the limit!!!!!  I think.

or maybe some of the happenings are playing out on nostr.. but I have not quite figured that one out, yet... not enough hours in the day.

Your description (Franky) seems to be both out of touch with reality - in terms of ongoing progress that is being made by the lightning network - including increased adoption (network effects) and increased development, and in terms of any kinds of challenges that come towards the building (or layering) of payments that are not onchain, but can be settled/resolved with onchain.. while at the same times have a whole hell of a lot of non-stoppability in terms of being able to send value (and even communicate) in ways that are similarly powerful as onchain, but surely having some differing dynamics in terms of some of the ways that transaction costs are calculated.. but also how payments may or may not be traced... even with both quasi-public and less public (private channels in which who the fuck is going to know about the transaction?).

You frequently come off as being nearly crazy (or is it "a nutjob"?) (with your seemingly ongoing passion for your point of view to be saying that you are supposedly "pro-bitcoin" but fighting so much against various aspects of bitcoin.., derailing productive discussions (even though you might sometimes make some interesting points, but still hard to read you when so ladened with emotions and then intermingled information that does not seem to be correct or is exaggerated in ways that are more distracting than they are helpful) like a no coiner, a bitcoin naysayer, a shitcoiner, or some dweeb like that ego-driven Roger Ver who could not (and perhaps still cannot) accept that the direction of bitcoin has been going in ways that differed from his various imposition-laden fantasy-landia preferences) because you are such a negative Nancy in regards to lightning network and even your various ongoing convoluted criticisms of segwit that seem to stem from desires 2017 blocksize war discussions that Segwit had not gone live.. and/or maybe you would be somewhat happy if whatever development(s) in bitcoin would be able to reach your stamp of approval.. and surely, by now you should realize that bitcoin no doesn't work like that.. we don't even have any benevolent dictators, even if you were the smartest guy in the room.. which does not even seem to be the case based on the kinds of battles that you ongoingly want to engage...

Do you have a phone?  or maybe some ways that you might interact with others using lightning network?   You gotta be trying to get your feet wet with this shit, rather than ongoingly making theoretical (no skin in the game observations) in order to really be attempting to learn and to show us that you are genuinely trying.

You seem to be quite a bit smarter than me in regards to some of the technical aspects of both lightning network and bitcoin too.., yet I can still see that sometimes (or is it frequently?) some of your criticizms are full of shit and seeming to want to lord over in regards to making things technical when there are some bigger questions, including just mere usability matters..

Sure, I will admit that I had not really even started to feel comfortable enough to really even attempt to get into LN until recently (largely I took some more concrete steps in around July or so - even though I had been trying to keep up with some of the lightning network threads, even since late 2017 when it was first becoming more popular to discuss and perhaps even moreso when it went live in a kind of rebellious and "premature" way due to some of the then spam attacks that seemed to have had been taking place through bigblockers or shitcoiners or bitcoin naysayers.. or who really knows who? but I do recall lightning network going live..and then the spam attacks pretty quickly subsiding.. along with the mempool getting cleared out over the following weeks.. ..  hahahahaha.. what drama we have around these parts..  ).. and also until there seems to be more justifications to have alternative ways to interact with bitcoin in a way that attempts to limit the use of third parties, or at least spreads out the various third parties in ways that they are not as likely to cut us off from being able to transact in bitcoin (if we were to want to or to need to).  Part of my point is that practice likely is a good thing, but I will also admit that there are a lot of folks who I had been trying to get to use lightning network and almost the best that I can find is someone willing to transact with CashApp.. which surely is quite far from decentralized.. even though it is one of the players that includes lightning network options that are likely somewhat easy to use, even though surely not decentralized..


Yep.. part of the reason that I want to go somewhat slowly.. and just see if I am going to be able to do any of those things.. and I do like some of the power of the descriptions of the Embassy (Start9's approach towards being able to run various apps through your own node), and I have heard several interviews of one of their founders (on various bitcoin only podcasts)... but still even just looking at the website.. it seems like it could have some difficulties to run on my computer.. but then another thing to actually buy one of their computers seems like one more of the things to hall around if I am traveling or even to have someone watch it (to turn it back on or whatever) if I were to leave it in one location while I am traveling.. Just something to keep learning about and some of us less technical folks would prefer plug and play, but there are risks with plug and play too.. .. and yeah, seems to take a while to figure out some ways to have some level of plug and play and at the same time have some confidence that others are reviewing the code and the various potential backdoors.

I had been thinking of responding to your post from about a month ago (mendace), and then I kind of forgot.. and still I had been doing a bit of searching around regarding what I wanted to do next, and surely there may be some time down the road when I end up wanting to run a lightning node.. or even a kind of easy-peasy (already mostly set up lightning node), but I feel that I need to walk before I run.. including probably running an actual bitcoin node first, prior to attempting to run a lighting node (even if it might be an already set up or an easy peasy version of a lightning node)... so in some sense, each of us likely have to attempt to go with our level of comfort - including that I have some other things that I am trying to take care of in terms of both my personal life and obligations and also just some other things that I am trying to take care of in terms of some of my coin management that has to do more with main chain ideas of locations and even some joint custody relations for some of the coins.

In this other post, that I link here that I just made in the BlueWallet Discussion thread, I described that I had at least downloaded both Breez and Phoenix in order to move my BlueWallet lightning network coins over to those two wallets.. and in that post, I mention how I am considering that might add Blixt Wallet onto my experimentation with lightning network wallets later too.. perhaps? perhaps?

I am pretty sure that BlueWallet is ONLY discontinuing that they hold custody of lightning network coins, so they are ONLY getting out of the "custodial" business, and they are likely going to be continuing to allow for various ways that people are going to be able to connect BlueWallet's lightning wallet portion to the nodes of other people (just not going to be able to connect to their nodes after April 30).. so surely time is running out to move those lightning network coins off of the BlueWallet node into some other wallet - whether a temporary solution or if you might find some wallet that is more of a longer term solution that is comfortable for you.. Sure in the end, in the coming years, many of us are probably going to end up learning about various kinds of lightning network wallets and even to experiment with various kinds of lightning network wallets.. Some aspects of the lightning network wallets and even aspects of the lightning network transactions do seem to be getting easier.. or at least more popular.. and in more recent times, people don't seem to be losing their BTC as frequently through the lightning network...not that it was ever really a BIG issue, but probably no one likes to lose too many sats, even if there might be some expectation of greater risk for the sake of experimentation.

Maybe I should give an update too (at least in regards to my having had figured out where I was going to move my BlueWallet lightning network coins, and surely I did not want to use my emergency back up of either moving them to CashApp or maybe moving them back to on chain wallets, so surely my goal was to attempt to keep them in some kind of a lightning network wallet, and surely I do not claim to be any kind of technological expert, and plus I have some other things going on too, so I cannot spend a lot of time to figure out how to run a lightning network node..

But I still was trying to mostly aspire to as much self-custody as I could, and from my understanding, Wallet of Satoshi does not meet the self-custody standard.  It is almost like having a cash app wallet as your lightning wallet.. an easy peasy route but surely not in the self-custody direction.

So yeah, I had posted in the lightning network observer thread in which I was trying to compare various options and surely having some of my own limitations because I am using IOS, and so mostly considering between Breez, Phoeniz and Blixt..and so I have already downloaded and transferred some value onto Breez and Phoenix, and looking further and even downloading Blixt will likely have to come at a future date since the main developer has not actually gotten it out of Apple's Test Flight system, but he still seemed to have had been recommending that the IOS users could still feel comfortable to try it out in the Test Flight system.. so I was considering doing that at some point later down the road.  The Blixt developer (Hampua Sjöberg)  talked about various aspects of the Blixt wallet on the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast a little over a week ago.

As I wrote in my mid-March post in the lightning network observer thread, I did appreciate Anita Posch's review of the various lightning network wallets from her article that I listed in that post, and also her emphasis on the importance of getting used to self-custodial wallets rather than the easier kinds of wallets that might not be sufficiently self-custodial, from her point of view (and my agreement with that).  

Besides going to the various websites of Breez, Phoenix and Blixt (and not even claiming that I understood everything, I did also rely a bit on the comparative lighting wallets chart that was presented in DarthCoin's bitcoin Guides.

There may be some point that I am going to be able to figure out how to run some kind of a lightning node or at least something that might allow for more flexibility and control, and I did just download Bitcoin Core version v24.01 - and also Specter Desktop Version 2.0.1.. so those still seem a bit confusing for me .. but likely steps in the right direction to run regular bitcoin nodes (probably going to run it on at least two computers) seems to be stepping stones to running lightning nodes, even though I understand and appreciate that there are some lightning nodes that can come in a package and already be set up, but I think that I want to go to a computer version first. ..and work from that direction. .. even though sure, I might change my mind down the road..

Yes.. but I was not really attempting to make any point about barter, even though sometimes we can do that, and there can be a lot of advantages with various kinds of circular economy, even local trades of bitcoin... but really I was attempting to make points about how subjective value likely differs between people when they are deciding to do any kind of trade, and that is part of what incentivizes anyone to actually engage in a trade - it's largely because they personally perceive that they are getting more value out of doing the trade than they would get if they had not gotten in the trade, and a lot of times they will feel that they got surplus value out of the trade in a way that they may well have been willing to pay more for whatever thing that they got.  If parties were completely neutral and did not feel that they were getting some surplus value, they may well easily be dissuaded from going through with the trade.. If they feel somewhat neutral about the value that they are getting in their trade, then any kind of obstacle will cause them to say fuck it and abandon going through with the trade.


It is quite likely that I am not technologically sophisticated enough to understand what is going on, and perhaps I will change my mind later, but I am not quite willing to go along with your characterization of the current use of that extra space that is allowed in each transaction as "spam," merely because there might be some other more preferable ways to do it, but I think that I kind of understand what you are saying, and you are not the ONLY one saying similar things - but I am still finding it difficult to consider how what I believe to be going on right now as problematic, even though surely in the past couple of months the BTC on-chain transaction fees have been going up because the mempool has mostly been staying full in these recent times, but the transactions that go through are still being paid for - even if you seem to be of the belief that the usage of the space in those kinds of ways is getting that extra space for too cheap (which then would seem to better fit into the definition of spam)..

...but I am still not quite willing to go there.. especially if we might be saying that they are ONLY having to currently pay between 5-6 sats per vbyte for the lowest of priority transactions... or sure if they want their transactions to go through more quickly, currently they are still paying 20 sats or more per vbyte. .and so far all of the 1-2 sats per vbyte transactions are still not clearing for several weeks now... but we still are not seeing the transaction costs going straight up as many had been speculating to be occurring (or going to occur).. and what is going on currently does not really seem to fit my ideas of what I might consider spam since parties are seeming to pay for stuff that they subjectively perceive to have either current value or potentially future value, even if some others may well disagree about that value or potential value.. which again, does not seem like spam to me.. not the same kind of spam as we had in late 2017 and January 2018 in which there seemed to have had been purposeful attempts to block the BTC transactions from going through, to cause frustration with BTC transactions, to pump shitcoins and essentially seeming to engage in a kind of purposeful sabotage of the BTC blockchain in order to push bitcoin is broken narratives rather than really trying to push through transactions, which does not seem to currently be the objective with the placement of dickbuttfarts and seemingly other materials that many others do not perceive as valuable on the BTC blockchain. 

I will concede that we cannot really get into the heads of the transactors to figure out their purposes and reasons for their transactions, but I don't think that we really see any evidence that this is currently an attack on bitcoin, like you and some others are framing it to be... and perhaps from my perspective, it would be an attack to try to fix it with something that causes overly attempts at stopping what to me seems to be valid transactions within the current rules of bitcoin, even if I personally am not buying any of that crap and/or wanting to buy that crap (not saying that I might not change my mind in the future, but I am not very excited about buying shitcoins or even speculative bullshit, even though others may value it, and perhaps I may decide to change my mind later, even though I currently am more of an observer of the nonsense valuations and even the some of the attempts to rush in and to get in early with the ideas that the earlier inscribed transactions might have more value than later inscribed transactions).