well, I was tailoring that rhetoric to everyone, which includes people with old versions (i.e. W7, that no longer gets MS security updates) or cracked versions.

Still, even newest Windows (is it at version 11 yet?) is still a product with:

• unknown security properties. It's not at all easy (impossible in practical terms) to know what the code in Windows does, this is not a good guarantee
• high likelihood of intentional security flaws, so that Microsoft's friends in the state surveillance offices can obtain commercial and/or state secrets from rival gangsters corporate partners
• a poor record when it comes to security for the entire ~ 40 year history of the product

the more BTC you have, the less you ought to trust Windows (or Mac), as trust is literally all you've got. With Linux or BSD, you've got the same software that's been keeping the whole internet running since the 1990's.

this can only be a problem as part of an attack on your computer. on it's own, it's not dangerous. So sure, the hacker's toolkit has widened it's range, but it doesn't matter much if you have good mitigations against OS-level attacks against stealing your private keys.

and please, can we dispel this nonsense myth about anti-virus protecting your computer? only those that do not understand anything about how anti-virus software works say this sort of thing. To keep your computer secure, use a secure OS (i.e. not Windows or macOS) and learn how to enable and use the enhanced security features in that OS (i.e. Linux or BSD). There are no shortcuts to computer security, you need to actually do some work I'm afraid

ok





if you don't care about people spying on you, then backdoors into your hardware are irrelevant



hmmm, the Chinese government openly design software and infrastructure that spies on people in China. What difference does it make if western corporations are surruptitiously surveillance software in Google phones, and that Huawei are openly publishing their software, and their intentions as to how they will use the data they collect? Is your answer "Huawei want to collect my data to use it to give them power over my life, but they're honest abusers as they informed me beforehand"?

yep.

if you believe the following...



...and you really value your private data, you may discover that GoogleLinux (i.e. Android) is not actually made with privacy in mind, and possibly too late to do anything about it. Does anyone really believe Google are spending huge amounts of money developing 9-10 versions of a highly customized version of Linux in the same number of years just because of how much they love you? Google develop Android for free, phone OEMs pay zero for to Google for using Android on their devices. Such nice guys they are!


It makes way more sense just to buy a single-board-computer and do the job yourself.

the main developers discussed it, I think either on IRC or the bitcoin-dev mailing list. All agreed (or at least, noone present back then disagreed) that reducing the lower bound for minrelayfee was a good move, and 0.1 sats/byte was suggested as the new minimum. The code governing fee estimation needed changing to accommodate that extra order of magnitude in granularity, and although the work to do so was started, it was never finished (not sure why). There's a link to the pull request in the Bitcoin github repo... I think further back in this thread (in one of my posts)

you've not once provided even a shred of evidence for this claim, despite how often you repeat it



that all sounds like total nonsense, Jetcash



I'm slightly skeptical about both of these claims, and I'm not a climate change alarmist by any stretch



provide evidence for these sensational claims. I expect you cannot link to anything credible (which isn't an endorsement of "Big Pharma" or "Big Agriculture")

this

trolling has really always been defined as "(subtle) provocation on the internet"


subtle, because if the perpetrator does not go about it subtly, then the target will not be amply provoked

so, this is you walking back your strongly stated conviction that Ross Ulbricht paid someone to kill someone else based on an unreliable testimony? Humility much?



Please stop posting, you're constantly repeating highly unreliable claims

you can confirm this by using the ethernet port of a device that you know is working over wifi, as the other possibility is that the image file you downloaded is broken somehow

tbh, you're better off with Raspbian, as the maximum number of people will know how to help you (Raspbian is probably most popular OS image for Raspis, whereas this myNode software most certainly isn't)

that's an unsubstantiated allegation


the fact that those chat logs were in any way authentic at all is impossible to prove, you're simply trusting that members of the investigating FBI team when they say "we recorded this private chat on the Silk Road website's server". It would be very easy to produce a bunch of chatlogs that never took place, there is no meaningful way to prove authenticity for such data. And the FBI have an entirely appalling record for falsifying evidence in all manner of cases, stretching back several decades


why are you repeating this allegation as if it was fact, when in reality there is no proof whatsoever? In an investigation prosecuted by a known-corrupt enforcement agency?

What you (likely) need is to set your LND node up as a Tor "Hidden Service". This will give your node a .onion IP address to connect to using your Android wallet, I don't think it's possible to make an incoming connection to a standard Tor IP. Using a tor hidden service is actually a really easy way to get a permanent & reachable IP address for any device, and for any reason.

I see you are adjusting your, frankly, rather spoilt and ungrateful attitude towards Ross Ulbricht's contribution to the Bitcoin phenomenon. I might venture that Ross wasn't at all sleazy in way, shape or form, and in fact showed a great deal of moral and principled fortitude in creating/briefly running the Silk Road website.


In fact, everyone here owes Ross a great debt of gratitude: Ross & the Silk Road proved Bitcoin as money at a crucial part of the overall story, far more so than Laszlo and the $10,000 pizzas. And certainly more than the gutless sheep who followed the herd out of pure spinless greed, who then have the temerity to administer verbal kicks to the face of those on whose shoulders they are standing.

The darkweb pioneer capitalists were heroes, and those who ride the Bitcoin train yet spit in the faces of those pioneers are no more than a bunch of cowards

Viruses are simply rogue RNA, and so cannot die because they were not alive to begin with. You're thinking of bacteria and other such germs, which are alive and so need water to survive



Very likely you are right, paper cash has been subjected to "death by a thousand cuts" for such a long time now, the most subtle technique I think being those news stories about corruption where stock footage of money counting machines is spliced into the story, sometimes even when the use of cash was not even part of the story (ironically, it's usually a story about corporate or government corruption, or both).

Cash=power, and it seems people in the corporate media are unanimous in their editorial slant that power is not something they want their audience to have.

I also understand Sphinx to have zero relationship with invoiceless lightning payments, although I've not heard anyone saying it does up until now

right

Lightning is just Bitcoin transactions that use the built-in scripting language to make a contract enforced by Bitcoin's blockchain (and then many of these contracts are daisy-chained together such that they work together as a payments network between all of the individual parties to the contracts).

so there's no reason why the same scripting language (or some new feature added to the language) cannot be used to define a different type of contract that can be used to form a different payment network that is better than Lightning. You could say that this has already happened, as there are evolved versions of the Lightning style of contract that are currently in proposal form, whether we call them Lightning 2.0 (or whatever name) is a bit meaningless really

it's very likely that this was no more than staged reality show-esque dramatics, and not any form of grandstanding. Televising this type of behavior is like throwing red meat to the more tribal oriented people living under the US regime, both Trump supporters and the anti-Trump team simultaneously. Pelosi is experienced enough to know that this is guaranteed to ratchet up the tension just that little bit more, and we ought to ask ourselves: to what end?

there are is no such concept as a tax on capital gains in Switzerland IIRC

funny how these regimes many people live under lead them to believe that the same line of "reasoning" is taken everywhere else too


darwin olympics FTW

it's easy to underestimate what the first version of Lightning channels has already done to improve BTC fungibility; using a Coinswap-like process, one can easily get most of the benefits of coinjoins/ring signatures without any of the drawbacks, and this can be done today, without any upgrades to the Bitcoin protocol. And taproot will (as you say) improve the privacy of lightning use even further (though at the on-chain level), resulting in increased fungibility of taproot based Lightning channels

correction: _you_ don't know it, but only because you're mindlessly repeating your original (frankly, superficial) point without attempting to understand a subtler counterpoint


I will be quite happy to undercut prevailing relay fee levels precisely in order to attract inbound capacity to Lightning nodes I operate, and the aggregation of all channel owners behaving the same way will distort the fee market downwards, pushing possible profit margins for all other node operators as close to zero as they can withstand. even just regular differentiation of operating costs will cause such an effect. even just the plain utility of cheap fees to send BTC will cause regular people to run nodes without profiting from relaying, the alternative is to pay far more in on-chain fees.
 
it's very simple, this is how all free markets play out, a race to the bottom. Your conception is that of a controlled market for Lightning channels, not of a free market.

---

why are you focusing on just 1 dimension of this issue, and the only dimension that can lead you to such a pessimistic overview? you're oversimplifying in a way that leads to a very poorly defined analysis. Are you ok? you're normally quite good at balancing positive and negative perspectives