what if 2nd layer networks continued to function? or would the unspecified magic stop them too?

right, the allegations are that those individuals are in fact what you might call a "cat's paw" for corporate influence. these things are not easy to prove, but it's often the case that someone in that kind of position would say, quite upfront and publicly: "of course I work/worked for British Petroleum, but that in no way affects the decisions I make when assuming the role as a trustee of the group"

someone on the Guardian's board did have such a connection to HSBC in the recent past, and may still have for all I know, but the details are always alot of work with these kinds of issues.

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think of it another way: if you were one of the companies The Guardian (and various others faux-anti establishment activist organizations) unsuccessfully attacks, would you:

• directly attack them by stopping them altogether (somehow)
• infiltrate them, and then continue to attack yourself wearing an activist mask, but never do or suggest anything effective

if The Guardian wanted effective opposition to anti-democratic organizations, why have they spent so much time and effort promoting that takes away people's power in more insidious ways? corporate culture was always pushed quite voraciously by The Guardian, just with a different spin on it (as a former Guardian reader, I remember this well)

would it be a big surprise to discover that while hippy-dippy corporation are actually owned by the same handful of Wall Street asset holding mega corporations, that the exact same thing is true of the media groups that promoted the (fake) hippy-dippy corporations? I don't know, but, go figure.

that is definitely not a fact

The Guardian is funded by a "trust" company, the ownership of which was at least in part held by HSBC (Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation) recently. This is a somewhat unique ownership structure for a media organization, I believe there are appointed "trustees" who have various extraordinary rights to change how the organization is run. Presumably the trustees hold private votes as to who will replace trustees who leave the board, like cardinals in the vatican choosing the pope and suchlike.

that's not really "independent community-funded", I'm sure The Guardian will accept reader donations to make it appear that way, but the real power is in the trust that owns the Guardian media group and makes it's decisions.

yeah, ryanofsky seems a good choice, for a variety of reasons. he's been working on the project a long time, and offers thoughtful and insightful dialogue to others, both when reviewing and when his code is the subject of review.

naming no names, but there was disquiet among the "there needs to be a formal process" camp of people, which seemed to be a thinly veiled attempt to criticize the lack of support for (in essence) their choice of candidate for maintainer late last year. The same loose group seems to have noticed that creating an alternative implementation of a bitcoin node is the only meaningful recourse, evidenced by their (unsuccessful thus far) attempt to drum up support from developers to start a new project that would "fix governance problems" in the Bitcoin Core project.

it seems as if the activity around the Bitcoin Core project is gradually getting smaller than it was 2012-2017, although that's just an impression. for sure at least some developers on the project have opined that there's significant work to do, and not enough devs. regardless of whether one agrees with the direction of the project or not, that sounds to me as if they know what the direction is, they just need new talent. (FWIW, every sub-project make sense to me, with the possible exception of the v3 transactions/package relay stuff, which sounds overly complex as solutions go... but I'm undecided as of now)

how the project could possibly be helped with squabbling over meta-process bike-shedding is perhaps not such a mystery... let's just say I'm glad these people are being politely ignored

it's the typical acolyte's (or really: zealot's) approach: no level of conformance to their standards is enough

and so we all have a one-way ticket to conflict of some kind, and I'm glad to be on the side where people:

• do their own thinking
• aren't afraid to disagree
• try to live without depending too much on others
• are ideologically flexible
• are solution focused
• truly want a happy life for themselves and others
• above all: who respect the wishes of others to live their lives in their own way

...because whatever shape the disagreement takes in the end, it's pretty obvious that people who do not have such qualities will not get what they're looking for (which for sure no longer applies to all avid readers of all newspapers, not just the guardian)

it looks to me as if there are 2 key pull requests that all the remaining ones depend on. although one of those is in the secp256k library, and it constitutes the hot new-ish cryptography that provides some of the cool properties that will make these encrypted connections so difficult to fingerprint. i'd expect anything like that might take many months to get merged (it's ~6 months old as of now).

however, I'm pretty confident it's viable, the secp256k devs probably aren't wasting any time on that kind of work if it's not a serious spec/upgrade

i slightly understand this post, in that this is not the best point in time to add such a feature

but imagine some future point, when all possible optimizations to verifying old types (i.e. the types we use now) of tx's have been made, and that the new tx types are orders of magnitude faster to verify/dl

then you have this annoying wait for hours/days to sync upto, say the year 2033 (when the imaginary new tx type becomes dominant in blocks), meanwhile you're waiting for the secp256k1 slug to complete.

in a world where Bitcoin is universally used, getting "the" 2033 UTXO snapshot from someone you trust would be an incredibly common way to handle this.


tl;dr the first n years of Bitcoin blockchain is permanent, and will ~always (barring some kind of magic) be slow to verify, why not leapfrog it when you're in a hurry

maybe some other application has an API that can send commands to c-lightning nodes, but lightning-cli is the only part of c-lightning that could be used for remote access

guess how those applications achieve this trick? they're accepting commands from the remote user, then sending them to.... lightning-cli

disagree with both of you


Europol or whoever else could target:

• city of london
• malta
• paris
• zurich
• frankfurt
• talinn
• copenhagen
• luxembourg
• amsterdam

...and probably several other money laundering centers if they really wanted to (maybe city of london and zurich might be technically less feasible, but w.e.)

the only difference is that money laundering taking place through banks in those financial districts will always be conducted by the politically well-connected, and organizations such as europol only exist to pretend to target high-level sophisticated criminals, not to actually do it.

All the charities, military/intelligence agencies, churches/mosques, NGOs, think-tanks and big corporates wash their dirty money through mainstream banks, the city of london and the various offshore tax havens across the world exist exactly to facilitate high level financial criminals


think about it. what industries, providing what goods or services, does the British pound actually even represent? there's been virtually nothing to speak of being exported from the UK for decades and decades now, the British government themselves would be the first to concede that "financial services" is all they really do (weapons are the only vaguely unique thing the Brits do, and it's inherently a very limited endeavor)

and so as an organization with alot of money, what possible reason would you ever have to do any business through London (or Luxembourg, lol), a financial services center that's sole business is it's own casino complex? crime is the only conceivable answer



maybe

it'd be interesting to see exactly who would get shut down from that bunch, supposedly Tether has some quite well connected (i.e. politically) people from the US involved

with Chipmixer, it seems quite likely to me that they've been doing increasingly less volume over the years, as Bitcoin adopters are likely to be getting gradually more risk-averse, are technically adept and fast learning. You'd be nuts to use mixer web sites at almost any time, the best you could hope for was to get scammed, because the other most likely outcome was that the websites were sucking as much information out of your mixing transactions as possible (and selling the data to whoever)

chipmixer getting busted this week is possibly even a case of "good day to bury bad news", what with all the bank busts (none other than Credit Suisse is apparently teetering on the precipice as we speak...). why that timing? if you want to get everyone to pay attention to bad bad crypto, you can pick a better week for it. they've had over 5 years to bust mixing websites, and they choose this specific week?

$200 million, in actual dollars? can't help thinking Spotify paid him using Spotfiy stock for at least a little of that fee



I don't really trust Joe Rogan. mostly everyone these days know that new crypto promotions are scams, how does it help that he's getting on guests to tell people "this specific one is a scam"

it's quite similar to saying "i'll tell you the scams, which means all the other crypto schemes are _not_ scams"

which is for sure not true.

did the new CLN/c-lightning release come out yet?

once BIP324 is merged into the main version of Bitcoin, then clearnet usage will be much harder to detect (BIP324 encrypts node traffic, and does some clever stuff to prevent the handshake/establishment part of the protocol being identifiable as the bitcoin protocol)

you can run it now with the test nodes, but it's probably not such a great idea. the spec is still evolving, and there's only a handful of public nodes running it.


i would hope that other protocols might adopt similar obfuscation (maybe SSH?) as a security measure. it's apparently possible to even send the data in chunks of encrypted packets that resemble other protocols (namely, HTTPS). that would be really good for the resilience of the bitcoin network (which is one downside of using VPN or Tor: the bitcoin network is arguably slightly weakened by every node that connects through such proxies).

there's no timetable for BIP324 being merged that I'm aware of, but it's development has been in the works several (5?) years now.

i don't remember that there was an authentication part to the proposal (which is BIP324), probably not??

a web of trust system would be great, although probably difficult to get right. once the BIP324 stuff is running on the network, we will see how it evolves (pretty sure it's not the last change to node connections we'll see in bitcoin)

really, pirates say what I said? not sure about that



ok, well can we stop calling them "corporations" and "government" then? because those are just euphemisms really.

the idea is that:

• government protects fairness
• corporations protect your pocket and their workers

...except instead government and corporations protect each other, and massively bully regular people. which is not what they pretend to do.

it seems like you understand the problem, yet your solution is "play their game and be nice to them". not a very bitcoin point-of-view, is it?

if saying "go against them" makes you a pirate, isn't that better?

that's a rational question

anyone who lost their money can and will behave as irrationally as they please, and anyone in media/politics/banking who feels like it will take advantage of the situation, and instigate a "pile on"

be careful what you wish for

of all the people (which is the overwhelming majority) that still trust banks and the financial industry that could lose out from USD/banking collapse...

...some of them would blame us


it's the "cornered animal" syndrome; you've lost everything, so you've got nothing to lose by randomly lashing out at (perceived) soft targets

it's not possibly to know simply from looking at a single transaction. but if you look for patterns in the entire blockchain, and run spy nodes on the Bitcoin network, you can find out reliably who might own which addresses.

various special transaction types can be used to make the "might" part less reliable. NOT including "mixer" websites, where you basically tell the website everything and expect them not to sell that information on to others.



these privacy coins are trade-offs on the whole cryptocurrency concept, don't expect:

• speed
• low costs
• scalability
• resilience

...from those coins. maybe it's possible to get some kind of improvement of these properties in comparison to their balance in bitcoin, but it is a balance (famously observed in a phenomenon named "Zookoo's triangle")

it seems to me that there are a few challenges yet

• more network partition resistance
• obfuscating the bitcoin protocol over the public internet
• the eventual direction for additional throughput scaling

all are in the works, but they're long term projects that aren't really gradual changes. The mailing list is still busy, so I think it's safe to say that these big projects will both continue and proliferate.

but as far as the big job of getting the codebase more sensibly structured, alot of the work is now done, and many parts might now stay the same long into the future. you can see the results of that with the so-called kernel project; it probably wouldn't have been possible to start the kernel library (which is just the consensus logic factored out into a standalone library) if the codebase wasn't slowly tidied up and consolidated over time.


Marco's job was to oversee alot of that churning consolidation over the year as an expert on the c++ language. I can see how he might find now a good time to move on from maintaining, as there will be less need for that kind of role which seemed to suit him so well. he's still active on the project though, so this is more what you could call "shuffling" roles instead of "moving on" outright

if the government already steals from citizens, and corporations are cheating both the spirit and the letter of the law, then is it not the case that anyone taking property from governments or corporations is in fact reclaiming property that was taken from others unfairly in the first instance?

and isn't it one's own responsibility as an employee to understand the ethics of their employer? if your employer is a thief, it would seem strange to expect fair treatment from them in almost any circumstances.

aren't we all using cryptocurrency because government currency together with their tax system steals from regular people and gives the money to their rich friends? you seem to be advocating to behave "fairly" to an organizations which are behaving aggressively and unjustly towards you and everyone else

well, the white paper did describe "a p2p digital cash system"

and cash shares the description of your listed problems:

• initial investment required
• loss is often not recoverable

I've lost cash before. Not much, but it happened.