US Media is singing from the same song sheet about the Ukraine and that has me worried. This has happened 3 times the last 20 years and all of them were disasters.
1/8
2003 was the invasion of Iraq. 2008 was the bank bailouts. 2020 was the COVID lockdowns. The track record of a unanimous media opinion is terrible. What's going on? Why is this particular issue now front and center of every news program?
2/8
It seems they're setting up this war as the scapegoat for everything. Inflation talk has been shifted to discussing gas prices. Treasury yields are back down. Even COVID restrictions are quietly being lifted everywhere.
3/8
It seems they're trying to get us into the war in some capacity so they can use it as the scapegoat for the economic pain that's coming. This is why I'm skeptical about everything I'm reading about this conflict.
4/8
Bitcoin @chris_belcher_ releases teleport, a coinswap implementation @Chris_Stewart_5 shows how DLCs can be used for subscription payments
Reckless Satoshi has created Robosats, a non-KYC p2p exchange
5/8
Lightning @voltage_cloud gives advice on failing LN payments @kerooke explains the concept of payment levels
Steven Ellis gets 1.4% on his BTC running a LN node
A paper explores LN routing for privacy
6/8
Fiat money puts a lot of pressure on efficiency because of sticky prices. People don't like paying more money even when inflation makes their money worth less.
1/8
As a result, businesses tend to get huge to get the cost savings of large scale. This has the effect of making everything really fragile. Instead of a lot of competition, we end up with only a few that can achieve that level of efficiency.
2/8
That fragility is exacerbated by inflation, which causes disruptions everywhere in the economy. Because everything is so efficient and interconnected, even a small disruption in money tends to create giant ripple effects like we saw with the supply chain.
3/8
Can we get X on Bitcoin is an eternal question, where X is a feature that's getting a lot of hype and marketing on some altcoin.
This is the wrong question because Bitcoin doesn't compete with altcoins. Altcoins' value is based on the same thing that fiat money is based on: trust in the central controllers.
This is why forked coins that have the same features don't have the same value. It's about the central controllers and not about the technical features. As a result, these features are often not well-thought out, have all sorts of vulnerabilities and don't make any sense.
Most of the third world still operates using cash and their PoS systems are manual and labor intensive. We're used to modern PoS systems which integrate inventory management and accounting reconciliation.
2/9
An upgrade to Lightning for most of these countries is a huge leap, but it can be so much more. Currently, most PoS systems essentially monetize user data.
3/9
Running an airline is tough. The economics are not favorable and weather, security threats and public health emergencies make operating at a profit really hard.
1/9
So how is it that they're still operating? They're certainly not innovating and prices haven't increased that much. So what's going on?
2/9
Airlines today make most of their money on selling airline miles, which is really a way of selling future flights for revenue now. Since they can issue miles from nothing, they're really fiat banks.
3/9
I'm in El Zonte checking out Bitcoin Beach. El Salvadorians have been, until recently, embarassed by how they've been known internationally due to the murder rate, corruption and so on.
2/9
Now they're starting to be proud, because people from all over the world are coming to their country to check out their Bitcoin integration. Bitcoiners are being treated really well here and Bitcoin is now a part of the national identity.
3/9
Proof-of-stake has been bandied about as an alternative to proof-of-work, but from a CS perspective, it doesn't solve anything.
2/
The idea is that you get signers instead of computation to achieve consensus. The problem is that to get consensus in that environment, the signers have to know which is the "right" block to sign.
3/