I read somewhere that the film is good and worth watching, but unfortunately I haven't had the chance to watch it yet. Are there any connections between Human B and Plan B?
No connection to Plan B. But there are many "Bitcoin celebrities" in the film |
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This is a recently released film(21/12/2021) that explores different areas of Bitcoin. How it's been used in different parts of the world, like Venezuela, and a bit of an explanation about what Bitcoin means to different people, and what it means to the future of the world. It's an interesting watch, more on the practical side rather than technical. Here's the website: https://humanb-film.com/en/home/Here's the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFSBWrAllzw |
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Strike is an innovative application that makes Lightning Network accessible and easy to use for everyone. What a ridiculous statement! Nevertheless, you will be shown statements like this every time you search for information about the Strike app. No, it doesn't make Lightning Network more accessible. What it does is place itself between banks and the permissionless system as another unnecessary intermediary and charges fees for unnecessary services. The Lightning Network doesn't need Strike, but Strike does need LN because it allows the people behind the app to profit off people unaware they can use the network directly without having to pay Jack Mallers or ask his permission to join and participate in case you are from a wrong country.
Of course it doesn't make the lightning network more accessible, and that was never claimed in this post, it's just a service built on top of it. The users don't even interact with bitcoin at all! The service is basically fiat transfers worldwide made cheaper. I agree that you would be better off with just native bitcoin, but that's a different story. With this service, you are able to send fiat(not bitcoin) worldwide cheaper than any other alternative. As the title of this post says, it's using the lightning network as a replacement for SWIFT, making fiat transfers cheaper. If you try to replicate this in other ways, either through transferwise, western union, etc, or even buying and selling bitcoin yourself, you're probably going to spend more money in fees than using this. Again, yes, it's better to natively use bitcoin, but if what you need to do is transfer fiat around the world, this is an innovative service that uses the lightning network to make the transfer of fiat. And yes, lightning doesn't need Strike, Strike needs lightning. That's why I found it interesting, another application built on top of lightning. |
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It is still a centralized way because of the FIAT gates unless you can spend the satoshis directly. (Not everybody is lucky enough to be an El Salvador citizen  ) Since most people will have to convert the coins to USD or their local currency, the FIAT gates will act like the swift nodes. So it doesn't actually solve much. Just an unofficial and cheaper alternative to swift which is cool as long as it lasts. Yeah, it's a temporary solution while we have fiat around the world. This is basically a worldwide fiat transfer service, streamlined. It would probably cost you more if you try to do this manually (deposit fiat into exchange in country A, buy bitcoin, send bitcoin to country B, sell bitcoin, withdraw fiat) Absolutely. Bitcoin native is of course the better way of doing things. But we're still not there yet, this is a temporary solution. Also, this is a different use case. Here you are transferring fiat. With bitcoin you would have to manually deposit your fiat into an exchange, buy bitcoin, send it, and then the person in the other country has to login to an exchange, sell bitcoin, then withdraw to their own bank. All that has a lot of costs. This application basically streamlines all that. Generally speaking converting from and to fiat costs an additional exchange fee that makes the whole process of sending money using bitcoin "extremely expensive and slow".
Yes, there is a cost in the transformation of fiat into bitcoin and back. That's probably where Strike makes some money. Still this is cheaper than western union and others. I wonder if it would ever be possible to have a system in which this exchange is basically free. The fiat part makes it very complicated. It is definitely not free.
FYI Strike charges between 0.1% to 0.3% and they set the exchange rate so it could be higher which in my experience it usually is. For example if price is $49,310 right now your buy price would be $50,100 and your sell price is suddenly $48,200 and they also charge that 0.3%. And that's the best case scenario, services like this give you worse rates if the amount is lower. For example for $10 you may get $52,500 and $46,000.
After all the company isn't offering services out of the goodness of their hearts! They are here to make profit.
Fair enough, it's probably still cheaper than the alternatives. And also, it would be even better to transfer bitcoin natively, but this is a different use case, this is a transfer of fiat worldwide through the lightning network. It's a service basically. And as I mentioned before, if you replicate this transfer of fiat manually through an exchange on each country, you will probably end up paying more than Strike. I don't know why this whole topic feels like an advertisement  You could ignore the company 100%, what I find interesting is that basically there are starting to appear applications built on top of the lightning network, that's the interesting part. This is basically worldwide transfer of fiat using lightning as the transfer layer. That's the interesting part, not the company itself. There will be other companies offering something like this anyway. |
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I just watched Jack Maller's presentation Bitcoin: Disrupting Cross Border Payments - IMF Fintech Seminar and found it very interesting. Basically Strike is using the lightning network as a way of transferring fiat money all around the world, instantly and basically for free. The concept of moving fiat through lightning is really interesting, as it's a really great use case of Bitcoin, and it's really independent of the price. An example they show is a user in the US that wants to send $10 to El Salvador. The legacy way of doing this would be something like transferwise, western union, etc. Extremely expensive and slow. Instead, what Strike does is it converts the $10 into Bitcoin, then transfers it to a wallet in El Salvador, which converts the Bitcoin back to the $10. Since there's basically no difference in price as it's almost instant, the full value gets converted into the receiving end in their preferred fiat currency, immediately. This is a game changer, specially when Strike is available in more countries. You will be able to send, for example, USD from the US to euros in The Netherlands for free, instantly. The key thing is that as a user you don't interact directly with Bitcoin. It doesn't matter if Bitcoin is up or down, you still send and receive fiat for free all around the world, instantly. You also are not selling or buying any bitcoin yourself, you're just transferring fiat. I guess exchanging into other currencies might be taxable, and that's probably why they only have El Salvador and the US as available for their clients(both use USD). Just for curiosity I checked how many SWIFT "nodes" there are, and found out that there's only about 11 thousand, much less than Bitcoin nodes out there, which are around 50k+, and also less than the ever growing lightning nodes, which are now about 17k+. These kinds of applications that are starting to run on top of lightning are extremely interesting. |
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If you want to post an image as a newbie you have two options: You can buy a copper membership from here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=credit;promoteOr you can just post it as mk4 described and ask for other member to quote you, and the image will appear in the quote. If it's reasonable someone might do it. If you're spamming no one will do it. |
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The first step would be to start using sats instead of ₿ If you're from the US, UK, Australia, NZ, and others, it might seem like there are many zeros when using sats, but that's pretty common in many countries: https://www.fiatmarketcap.com/Using sats is also usually linked with lightning usage. That means people will become more used to fast, instantaneous transfers with lightning. Businesses might start posting the price in sats and local currency in their screens, like McDonald's self checkout for example. People over time already are used to seeing the fiat prices slowly going up. It would be normal as well to see the sats price to go down. It will be a great thing to see actually. We're still not there yet, definitely. But I can imagine a world with that, where you get paid in Bitcoin, and use Bitcoin to pay for stuff. Because they're both linked of course, when you pay in Bitcoin for something, someone is getting paid in Bitcoin. And more interestingly, we already have ways to almost get there. Strike now gives people in the US and El Salvador the opportunity to get paid in Bitcoin. Basically you give the bank details from the Strike app to your employer, and set how much percentage of your salary to be converted into Bitcoin, with no extra fees. It will be a great world to live in. For now, we're in a transition phase. The Bitcoin Standard will be amazing. The earlier you hop in, the better you'll be in the future. |
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If you have a Strike account you can do that as well, with no extra fees.
Well, that's the problem... It's limited to those in the US [with the exception of a couple of states] and El Salvador [unfortunately]! ~Snipped~ Yeah, the availability is limited, but you can always sign up for the global wait list here: https://global.strike.me |
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Just a lil observation, the bitcoin code must be on some server and node is running without any stop, does bitcoin server been managed by some one
or is it that Satoshi Nakamoto put the code on server and paid the company for say 50 years or something
is it possible .. moreover if server goes down who restarts it
and if the code is committed on GitHub .. is it possible that apart from him .. does anyone else have passwords too
for managing it
without getting involved how can a code can run in server
there are few points
who pays for server .. who manages space
who manages the outage
who manages the future securities and server updates
It's all clearly explained in the conclusion of the whitepaper: (emphasis mine) We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust. We started with
the usual framework of coins made from digital signatures, which provides strong control of
ownership, but is incomplete without a way to prevent double-spending. To solve this, we
proposed a peer-to-peer network using proof-of-work to record a public history of transactions
that quickly becomes computationally impractical for an attacker to change if honest nodes
control a majority of CPU power. The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. Nodes
work all at once with little coordination. They do not need to be identified, since messages are
not routed to any particular place and only need to be delivered on a best effort basis. Nodes can
leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the proof-of-work chain as proof of what
happened while they were gone. They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of
valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on
them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism That basically answers all your questions. In particular, Bitcoin doesn't have a central server, it's all running in independent nodes. Each node can join or leave at any time, and the hardware required to do so comes from the users of the system. There are currently about 50 thousand nodes running Bitcoin. An update to the code needs to be accepted by the majority of the nodes through the consensus mechanism. |
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It's a file and Satoshi didn't even sell it which means it's meant to be distributed. Why not allow it to be distributed on BSV site too if he really is Satoshi.
So strange that the creator of BTC wants to take down the whitepaper of Bitcoin. He hasn't even proven he is the real satoshi but he already had ordered on what to do about the websites that just wanted to share the whitepaper. Craig Wright is delusional and he may really demand something terrible to Bitcoin if he'll mysteriously win the case. When all is done, it will not be safe for Bitcoin if its fate is in the hands of this guy.
Indeed, the whitepaper was released along with the initial source code, and the release was done using the MIT license, which is very permissive. Satoshi wanted to have permissive licenses in the project: If the only library is closed source, then there's a project to make an open source one.
If the only library is GPL, then there's a project to make a non-GPL one.
If the best library is MIT, Boost, new-BSD or public domain, then we can stop re-writing it.
I don't question that GPL is a good license for operating systems, especially since non-GPL code is allowed to interface with the OS. For smaller projects, I think the fear of a closed-source takeover is overdone.] |
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Check it out here: Bitcoin Fax. This is a cool project from Simon Males, an Aussie living in Europe. It was first announced in 2015, but it stopped working at the end of 2018 because of hardware issues. Now it's back and thanks to lightning the total price is very cheap. You basically just put the fax number and a pdf file and pay a fixed fee per page. It's a simple and useful project. |
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The Bitcoin whitepaper is stored in the blockchain as well so it should be well preserved. You can get it with this command: bitcoin-cli getrawtransaction 54e48e5f5c656b26c3bca14a8c95aa583d07ebe84dde3b7dd4a78f4e4186e713 true |
jq -r '.vout[].scriptPubKey.asm' | cut -c3- |
xxd -p -r | tail +9c | head -c 184292 > bitcoin.pdf
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Lately I've been reading headlines from celebrities saying that they're going to get paid in Bitcoin. If you have a Strike account you can do that as well, with no extra fees. Here's Strike's Pay Me In Bitcoin announcementIt's pretty simple really. In your Strike account you'll see a direct deposit section in your settings. Once you go there you'll see standard banking details that you can share with your employer. Once you have that setup, in the Pay Me In Bitcoin section you can just specify how much percentage of your deposits to be converted into Bitcoin automatically. That's it.  That way you will be able to automatically convert a portion of your salary into Bitcoin, without having to do anything about it, and not paying any extra fees. This is a great way of Auto-DCA. |
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Thanks for the free raffle, I'll take one spot:
74. nullama
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I think one of the issues with NFTs is that there's no real need to have a blockchain for it. Bitcoin had colored coins a long time ago, which is basically a predecessor of NFTs. There were some startups using this concept many years ago, but the largest one of them ended up shutting down in 2018, and had something very interesting to say about this idea: "In 99% of use cases we're seeing, blockchain is unfortunately a sub-optimal choice as a technology. Blockchains have many disadvantages in terms of speed, scalability, costs and user experience. Unless censorship resistance is a critical requirement (which it rarely is, especially in the enterprise blockchain space where participants all know each other), blockchain is rarely the right technological choice."
The blockchain's vaunted transparency, privacy and cryptographic security can all be achieved "quite easily" with a traditional system, Charlon went on to argue.
"In the end it was about intellectual honesty. I didn't like having to support projects that were trying to use blockchain for the sake of using blockchain, when I knew a centralized, more boring architecture would actually do a better job," he concluded. |
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While reading this list I realized we still have a long way to go. They put El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, who made Bitcoin legal tender there, created Bitcoin city, started mining with volcanic energy, etc, in the same list as Kim Kardashian who simply got paid to promote a shitcoin in an instagram post. Indeed to get Bitcoin into mainstream we need to have celebrities using it first, but of course most shitcoins are just jumping into this opportunity by paying a lot of money to have celebrities endorse them. Also, they somehow didn't put US Senator Cynthia Lummis in this list, she has disclosed bitcoin purchases worth up to $100k, and also Senator Pat Toomey, who also has invested in Bitcoin. |
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Think of a smart contract as basically an executable that you download from a website.
When you run the downloaded executable, Windows will ask for your permission to run it. If you agree to run it, the program now has access to your device, and can cause damage.
Similarly, the website with a smart contract will ask you in your wallet to get access to your coins. If you grant access to it, then that website can access your coins, and that means if there's a bug in the code, a hacker can get your coins.
Be careful, read every thing you accept in your wallet, and make sure you go to the correct websites.
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Good to remember Satoshi, who was tweaking the last few details of Bitcoin around Christmas in 2008.
Remember this and focus on being productive instead of buying useless stuff.
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This is basically what the banks, and companies like PayPal, are starting to do right now.
They are starting to offer their clients the ability to exchange their fiat for Bitcoin, held in their own system.
They're promising ease of use, but the problem is that you cannot withdraw those bitcoins into your own wallet.
In that way, banks are trying to keep relevant, because in reality you don't need the banks to hold your own bitcoin, you can just keep it in your own wallet.
Bitcoin doesn't need banks, banks need Bitcoin to keep themselves relevant.
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First, Bitcoin will never get to 100% adoption, of course. Similar to cash vs cards, not everyone is living in a cashless society, and it will never happen. People will always use cash for different reasons. Let's try to estimate where it is today. Current population is about 8 millionThere are about 800 thousand active Bitcoin addresses. Of course there are users that are not moving their coins which are not counted here, but also there are probably more than one active address per user, so those might even out. That's about 0.001% I reckon the real number is around that level, considering the whole world. |
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