• more control
• more secure
• faster
• doesn't use you to collect your data

probably more, that's off the top of my head



file types are pretty universal, 99% work on Linux (.mp3, .doc, .avi etc). There'll be some high level professional apps that don't have a Linux version (e.g. Photoshop), but then you just use the Linux equivalent (for Photoshop it's GIMP)

right, there are alot of considerations to take into account (correcting the inflation rate back to 21 million target etc).

But fixing something so fundamental is important, IF there is a strong case to be made that it's broken. The inflation rate or locktimes for HTLCs don't matter if something as basic as the block interval target is the wrong value to protect against malicious chain re-orgs. Maybe it's fine, there are no problems like that in the real world today. And the more the hashrate rises, the harder that becomes.

No-one's shouting about this, to put it in perspective.

can't remember exactly who/where, but it has been suggested pretty recently to increase the target for the interval between blocks to more than 10 minutes. I'd like to hear more about the case to do so, but we can safely assume that it's unlikely to happen any time soon, as a hard fork is required. There's no unanamity about inceasing the block interval, but there certainly is about decreasing it; no-one with any credibility is suggesting it, as Litecoin and other such coins have demonstrated the problems with that approach.

I guess the simplest way is:


Bad:

• Fedora
• Centos
• Ubuntu
• Mint

Good:

• Devuan
• um, Gentoo

trouble is there aren't many non-systemd Linux distros, and Devuan is probably gonna be the most user friendly of them all (Gentoo isn't really user friendly). There must be some more I didn't mention

./configure is suggesting something to you: install pkg-config

IOW it's a bunch of marketing nonsense that has zero relationship with the infrastructure of the internet, aka web 0.0


Maybe we should look at what's being built on existing blockchains though:

• Ethereum has a bunch of scammy/dumb tokens for no apparent reason other than to justify Ethereum's existence
• Bitcoin has a nascent network of payment channels (i.e. LN), some colored coins (whatever Mastercoin change name to), a inter-exchange settlment sidechain (Liquid) and someother basic smart contracts (e.g. good behavior bonds)

maybe I'm a little unfair on ETH, there's possibly some utility in those tokens, but that's not going to change the fact that Etheruem itself is a bloated blockchain that's far more onerous to download and validate than Bitcoin's, and that that allows the developer (there is only one) to make more or less any decision he wants to.

Ethereum is pretty much snakeoil tech at this point, "oh the possibilities!" has been it's USP for the whole time it's existed

lol

so tell us again about "ad hominems on Microsoft"

most Ubuntu or Mint users aren't going to notice the kinds of bugs it has, and they're equally unlikely to appreciate the poor design philosophy behind systemd



sure, but convincing people to ditch systemd for OpenRC is one thing, getting them to configure jack audio and eudev is just more on top, it may be all too much for some people. Building up the ecosystem around well designed alternatives to invasive Red Hat products is important to keep Linux going in the direction of good quality software engineering.

Corporate software is basically attacking Linux with these bad quality system components (and in other ways too, arguably), so sure, start with yourself. But we really have to make the most convincing case to ditch this crappy stuff to those who otherwise wouldn't care.

you can't pretend Microsoft have a good reputation, or that Windows doesn't openly suck up all user data, it's a default option in Windows, labelled "Please spy on everything I do on this computer"

so why even try to defend them? why attack someone who's only informing people about platforms with zero privacy, Mr. Privacy?

that's ridiculous

this is total nonsense


the regulators simply become captured by the industry they're "regulating". People from the large dominant companies do deals with senior regulators to endorse legislation that, guess what, kills the competition, in the name of "fairness". The senior regulators get an easy, well paid job in the industry, or other perks like 1 hour speeches that pay them a whole year's salary ($250,000, that kind of salary)

all that "competition comission" stuff was simply the corporate journalism world scratching the backs of their buddies in corporate industry, and the bad news is, you fell for it

it wouldn't surprise me if the .NET framework is an epicly gigantic codebase that no one person could be reasonably expected to read and review, like 100's of thousands of LOC.

So there's not much point in saying "open source baby", the Game of Thrones books are open source and I'm still not going to read them. And more importantly, is the byte-code interpreter open source?

When you're dealing with a product from an organisation with such a bad reputation as that of Microsoft, the questions are endless, and the answers are likely to be unsatisfactory. I don't want to waste my time.


(not to mention, Microsoft are now openly collecting all user data from their Windows users, what's the point in developing privacy software for an OS that openly exploits user privacy, why even bother?)

needs more trading volume


end of bear market != start of bull market

right, price is up, but volume is low. Price must maintain a 5,500-6,500 range for a few months just to be able to say the bear market is over, let alone say a new bull market has arrived



the taproot/merkle branches update will make all scripted transactions substantially smaller, I think that's very important also.


So today, Lightning open/close tx's are ~ 20% larger than a standard 1in 2out tx. Taproot hides the unused conditions (+ sig-agg collapses 2 signatures into 1) to make them both the same size, and that's just when comparing new segwit v1 LN open/close to standard tx using segwit v1. If we instead compared to a standard tx using segwit v0 or the original encoding format, a taproot LN open/close tx is actually a few bytes smaller.


taproot also hides the fact that a script was used at all, as only the spending script is revealed (even a standard transaction is, of course, a basic spending script). So all transactions look exactly the same on chain using taproot, the only differences will be the number of inputs, number of outputs and the amounts. Most of the information is hidden, there's no such thing as a P2SH taproot address, they're identical to P2PKH addresses from the perspective of someone analysing the blockchain.


tl;dr taproot is a gigantic privacy gain as a result of it being a massive scaling improvement. Lightning on-boarding is rendered cheaper and undetectable



right, the first exchange to do this will do fantastic business. Transaction spikes happening at the same time as price spikes is nothing new, been happening since the early days. Instead, traders can have their funds ready in a channel before the spike ever happens.

Combine that with the new option to remove the per channel limit (which exchanges would really need), and the whole "micro-payments only" argument goes out the window. I can imagine exchanges using lighting exclusively; time is money when it comes to trading, so if people can move their money to exchanges in seconds instead of minutes/hours (and for orders of magnitude reduction in fees), there's no way anyone will continue to do it on-chain. Why take that risk?



there was at least 1 reported, but it could've been hot air. doesn't matter, it'll only take 1 exchange to do it and suddenly they'll all need a piece of the action. They'll risk being irrelevant in the marketplace if not.

well, I agree, except that it's precisely because people don't want to take time to learn how to write sysvinit scripts (or upstart scripts? not sure about upstart) that they end up just going with the path of least resistance and sticking with systemd (Bitcoin thankfully has some sample sysvinit/OpenRC/Upstarts scripts available here - https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/tree/0.18/contrib/init)

you can bet RedHat were thinking exactly that when they saw the first design specification for systemd. Fuck systemd, and RedHat

is it really Craig Wright doing the suing? for shame


I feel like taking an even more contrarian stance; I hope Craig wins.

It could be an important (cultural, not legal) precedent: there has to reach a point where technology becomes so sophisticated that the justice system simply cannot make accurate/meaningful judgements in cases involving such technology. I'm sure there's plenty of judgements (and perhaps even case law) that have already demonstrated as such, and that Wright's case is simply another nail in the coffin of the legal system's credibility

assuming the next bull run (which definitely hasn't started) begins in the next year, the taproot fork could be already activated

• smaller signatures (64 bytes instead of 72bytes)
• script sizes will be limited to the spending path only (so to open/close LN channels will be far smaller on-chain)
• signature aggregation

That last feature will be very important to the on-chain demand you're citing as an issue. Users scraping together every last address they have to sell will use 1 signature for the whole transaction. e.g. sending 5 addresses in 1 tx to an exchange address will be 1x64 bytes, not 5x72 bytes. Exchanges will realise even better gains, they can use far more addresses for inputs than 5 in a typical payout tx.


Exchanges are also looking into the idea of using Lightning for deposits. There's a massive incentive to get that ready in time for the next bull run, anyone running an exchange without it will be at a disadvantage in the marketplace.

And segwit will likely be far more adopted by then, segwit addresses recorded on the blokchain are steadily & constantly increasing.


So don't be upset.

money talks

so what you say doesn't actually matter, Lightning does what it does, and it does it using BTC, cheap.

you should stay away from anything even resembling market analysis/technical commentary, you consistently have zero clue. Stick to telling your cool-uncle jokes

right, and you make up your own facts

("miners broke the SHA-2 algorithm" which is demonstrably nonsense)