I see more nuance here than you, I think.

Bitcoin's transparency is a feature and a bug.  And I think that we will see improvements to privacy on the base layer as well as transactional layers.

As to the fees complaint.  If the bitcoin base layer begins to act like the settlement layer then I see no problem with it continuing to attract miners for decades.

Currently the Block subsidy is ~265k USD worth.  @265000/2500.  Fees per transaction would only have to reach around a hundred bucks to replace that.  That is totally doable in my opinion.

Because Bitcoin is optimizing for SECURITY and not cheapness of fees, then we WILL see fees rise.  Naturally.  And since it is aiming to do other functions (like simple transactions) on layers then we will still be able to buy coffee with it, etc.

At a glance, I agree it seems counterintuitive for Bitcoin not to continue to work the way it has since the beginning...  even Satoshi said he thought we could keep fees at zero for a long time but something HAS to give.  And the way we are headed fees will go up.  This is to keep the base layer distributed as well as possible.

Monero on the other hand... the contributors have positioned it to be a low fee transactional chain so fees may not go up.  It's a bit of a catch 22 actually.  Monero, if transactions continue to grow along side bitcoin, will end up much more centralized than Bitcoin. as running nodes will become more and more difficult as we go forward.  Monero has chosen to risk some centralization  to keep fees low.

I do not see this as an X or Y scenario.  Rather I believe Monero will work along side Bitcoin.  And POSSIBLY even be Bitcoins defacto privacy layer.  Hard to say.

Lol.  You might have a point.

Could not agree more with this.

Hard to say if it happens or not.  But as a Bitcoin maxi who saw Monero as singularly unique this is the exact moment I have been waiting to see for 6 years.  Or at least it looks like the beginning of that.  Where Monero might decouple and run because of it's unique value prop.

There was a reason that between 2014-2016 THIS topic was one of the most active threads on this whole place.  And that reason was driven by the fact that a great deal of Bitcoinners saw what we saw.  That this alt coin was kind of special.

I concede that it was a alt romance like most any of them... A narrative that challenges BTC, or offers something seemingly of value.  But I hold TO THIS DAY that this narrative has only gotten stronger over the time while the others have paled.  ETH?  Is already collapsing under it's own weight.  It will be around forever probably, a playground at the edges where good ideas are worked out, and then pinned to BTC. 

But there is no way for Bitcoin to do what Monero does yet.  And it will take YEARS for Bitcoin to catch up in this regard. If it even can!

The same thing that lit this alt up back in those early days for US is going to happen with the masses too.  The herd is HERE for Bitcoin... but most of it is yet to come for Montango.




Ha!  Thanks man, yes.  Just a bad sore throat, and feeling pitiful having to isolate from my wife.  

I was "double vaxxed" But it's been a good amount of time now...  First was in Feb 20 and the second ~ May or so?

Can't say whether my experience would have been better or worse another way.  Too subjective I guess.  But i *HAVE* avoided the damn thing since at least 3/2020.  From what I have read, and come to understand this may be the best of all worlds...  Hopefully my immunity will be as strong as it can be after this. I tend to see this whole circus with a great deal of nuance.  Which I feel is horribly missing from most folks who pick a side and reinforce their biases to f1it their story. 

And it is sad that the WO has gotten so out of hand.  It's like all of us having to have a decent conversation of the insane babbling of a few people lol.

Something like this now?

Bringing some wumbo liquidity to the new Kraken node...

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

What a pathetic attempt at fighting.

I think one of the reasons you noticed this is because so far Jack has been working to help other countries and the "unbanked" in the global south.  But it is also important to tell why western economies can benefit from this.  AND the current system the whole world uses *is* kind of an American system.  For good and for bad.  The petrodollar and the 55 year old rails he is talking about.

He knows that a lot of powerful Americans will see this as a threat.  He named several of them.  And his argument is to put them in their place which is the same inclusive place he is helping the whole world come to.

Don't get too bent out of shape between America/Rest of the world.  This system is for all of us.

LOL.  A rare time I enjoy seeing a quote from someone I am ignoring.

The most amazing thing in all that is happening in the world today is this massive polarization of the extremes.

It is possible to believe that Covid was a manufactured crisis (probably a bio weapon) and still have compassion for those who have suffered from it.  Acting like it's entirely fake, is as Bob rightly points out, far left of the bell curve stuff.

I have no time to try to teach neanderthals nuance or compassion.  I have literally been feet away from another human stranger struggling to take what would be their last breaths because of the disease.  And I know two people who died from blood clots.  Neither had covid.  Both were fully vaccinated.  Both in their 40s.

It is possible to see the world in shades of grey, and to hold the tension of not knowing at the same time.  What I do know is Occam's razor forces us to understand certain things about what we are viewing which are very hard to accept.

They stole two years of my children's childhood.   They forced thousands to die... alone.  Terrified.  Without the ability to even see their loved ones at the end.

It is possible for me to want to see nooses swinging for the designers of this hellscape, but at the same time to feel compassion for people who are suffering and afraid.

I do not have time for fools, though.

Well... seems a lot of alts are popping a little bit.  But would you look at Monero?  It looks like one of the strongest of the bunch.

Seems to me the resistance will be at 0.0054?


Looking good in BTC and USD right now...

I have you on ignore.  But I took a peek since I am making myself feel better by reading all the nice things people have posted.

You REALLY are an asshole.

Meh.

Thank you!  And I merit you back 7.  Because that is a most magic of all numbers...  Together they make 10.  ...Which doesn't mean anything...  ...but ... I wanted to keep going!

TWO FUCKING YEARS!

More than that.

I left my old job in January 2020. Started the new one in Feb 2020.  It's a 100% remote position.  But part of the deal, is as a new employee I had to go into the office for 90 days before I could be let loose to be a remote employee.  Well 21 days in or so I started getting a little tired of being in a ghost office by myself.  So I asked my manager if I could work a few days from home a week.  He got back to me.  YES!  That would be fine.  Come in 2 days a week, and work from home 3 of them.

Then the email.

"As of tomorrow, do not come in any more."  It was 100% remote due to covid.  HOORAY?

You all know this story.  You have lived some version of it.

So I worked over the next years.  And I got to do some interesting stuff.  I designed the computer workflows for the vaccine clinics we stood up.  And volunteered in them.  I was careful - myself.  Doing the grocery shopping for my family.  Masking and the whole works.  I built the dashboards that showed COVID admission, treatment, and mortality for our administrators.  I was deeply in that data for quite some time.

And over that time I noticed something.

Covid was infecting HUGE amounts of people.  But considering those numbers?  It was not killing that many.

The way it went was this (and I posted this here at some point)  The majority of people that got it either never knew or felt like they had a cold and got over it without medical attention.  The majority of the remainder my have come into the hospital out of paranoia, or serious need, but were sent home to "isolate and let the damn thing take it's course".  The majority of the remainder from THAT were admitted and taken care of for a few days or a week or two and sent home all better.  Then finally the remainder excluding all the above positive outcomes were admitted to ICU.  And whatever tiny sliver of folks were left might be intubated.  

That last group?  A vanishingly small percentage.  But you did not want to be in it... because if you got to that point... well it did not typically turn out well.

But my dashboards matched the data we were almost never hearing in the mainstream news.  99.x% of people would survive this disease, just as they would a cold.  It could be a terrible disease for those who were the 0.x%.  And I would never want to take away the seriousness of that for those who have suffered, and have had loved ones die, or have died themselves.

But the all the same things are true of the FLU as well.

Covid was not really a huge threat.  The way it WAS serious was just that it was so contagious that it would produce, just because of the sheer numbers, a lot of sick people, and a certain tiny percentage of those would die.

Anyway... here we are now.  The world having set fire to itself because chicken little was SURE the sky was falling.  And it is time to build again.

Well, this weekend my inlaws were in town. We did a lot of things together.  and in the midst of it?

Yeah.  I got the damn coof.

Well... chances are quite good I have what amounts to a mild cold, and survive to see my bitcoin hoard provide security for my family.

But just in case I get intubaed and kick the bucket?  I love you guys, and I wish you all well.  Consider my lost coins a donation to you all.

This analysis seems right to me.  Kudos.

Ah.  Looks like down.  

Oh, I can't effing STAND these damn conferences.  Such an absolute circle jerk.  I am SURE good things come of them, and they are probably fun for folks that like this kind of thing...

But like everything else, Bitcoin does not care.

I have to admit... I am not done processing this news, and the concept gives me a little pause.

BUT. One thing I think many have not yet seen (gawd I sound like CSW) is the fact that the Bitcoin blockchain will continue to be the most secure distributed shared database on the earth.  And that quality gives it the unique ability to underpin these sorts of products.

One thing you often hear from the mouths of alt-coiners is that Bitcoin will not be able to pay the miners after a few more halving to remain as secure as it should.  But the tradeoffs being made imply the possibility that transactions on the base layer could become quite expensive over time.  Either that or we allow more of them, or a combination.

But what we have here is a transactional currency that is rooted in the security of the base chain.

I really wish Finney had lived to see this.  I would love to hear his thoughts on the matter.  I feel like it could be a sort of extension to what he described with his "bitcoin banks" ideas.

Is it dangerous?  Does it somehow subvert Bitcoin and give control back to the elites?  

I have no idea.  But I do know we will hear that a lot.  Tech surprises us.  This is a VERY interesting evolution in the history of Bitcoin.  i do think this is going to get the attention of a lot of very powerful people.  And the fun part is... if the Fed does not allow the dollar to be traded this way, then something else will happen instead.  They either embrace this.  Or they get steamrolled.

Seems to me we are seeing a reasonable retest of the break through the trend line here...  So which way, young bitcoin?

Also heard these rumors...

A few negative thoughts...  Apple does not let other companies take the limelight.  They lead on their significant announcements usually.  I hope this is not just Strike "partnering" with Apple to use Apple Pay via the Strike App or something like that.

But Mallers does not tend to hype small stuff that much.  There are few announcements that will live up to last year, too...

You beat me to it.

I think this is gonna kind of cause some folks some discomfort.

Well you could use any other wallet that is compatible with the seed type Cake uses... 25 word, I believe?  If so that's just about ANY wallet.  I would either start with the official wallet from getmonero.org, or the lightweight wallet "Feather".

The nice thing about feather in your case is it does not require a full node running and can use a remote node.  Might mean it's easier to sync (at the cost of some privacy).

Make sure to check your binary checksums. 

And if you need help with Cake Wallet (I do not use it) then I would contact them on twitter.  They seem to be a friendly bunch.