Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • As Bitcoin has grown, transactions have become slow

    Except for Bitcoin Lightning Network:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network

    Bitcoin is always being diluted

    It’s also constantly getting un-diluted by people losing their keys.

    Current estimates put the “lost coins” at around 25% of the total. That is twice as many as there are left to mine.

    it is possible that transaction fees will need to be raised to compensate miners.

    That’s been the plan from the beginning.

    Mining halving has been defined with a rough estimate of adoption, volume, and technological advances. It’s why Lightning Network was developed, and why Ethereum has switched to a Proof-of-ownership mining scheme.

    The estimate is rough and quite inflexible, which has lead to cyclic fluctuations around the period of halvings… but from a long term perspective, it has been working reasonably well for the first 10% of Bitcoin’s starting period.


  • This is a fancy way to say that it is slower unless you pay higher fees.

    My bank takes:

    • 24-48 hours for 0€, only in the EU, up to 15k€
    • 5 minutes for 0.50% (min 1.25€), only in the EU, up to 900€
    • 48-120 hours for 0.70% (min 35€), international, up to 20k€

    So my bank is also “slower unless you pay higher fees”… or “slower even with higher fees”… and on top of that, it has an amount cap.

    Meanwhile, on Bitcoin Lightning (https://1ml.com/statistics):

    • Median Base Fee: $0.000617

    fork the network and update it if they had 50%+1

    No. There are 3 components to Bitcoin: Miners, P2P nodes. and coin owners.

    • Getting 1 miner and 1 P2P node, allows forking… and getting kicked off the network.
    • Getting >50% of mining power, allows a chance at double-spending some own coins.
    • Getting 100% of miners AND/OR 100% of P2P nodes, allows taking over the network.
    • Getting an owner’s key, allows full access to the coins tied to that key.

    Neither of those are impossible, some are just easier and have a higher ROI than others.

    The tax and identity layers have to be added on top. They are not built-in.

    Same as with cash.

    Yes, this is one of the selling points of Bitcoin vs. Banks, in an age where cash is getting phased out.

    The opposite, is also a selling point of “OpenSource Money with Taxes built-in” vs. Bitcoin.

    Pick whichever side you prefer.




  • From the first 15 min of the edited video: that FUTO boss is an embarrassment, good on Rossman to get him to change things.

    I don’t really want to watch the remaining hour, after someone says things like:

    • He didn’t follow the discussions back in the 2000s
    • OSI didn’t hijack the “open source” definition
    • Less than 1000 people would care
    • Asked his programmers, and they didn’t care

    I call BS. Weak excuses.

    There is a reason people say “FLOSS” instead of “Open Source”. There is a reason Stallman says what he says. There is a reason you can tell apart who understands what’s going on, by whether they understand the differences or not.


    A quick reminder:

    • Free - as in beer, not as in freedom
    • Libre - as in freedom
    • Open Source - you can see the source code

    Stallman created the GPL to allow people to see (open) and change (libre) the code (source)… then “pay forward” that freedom, in echange for being able to charge money (non-free) for their contributions.

    He often referred to it as simply “Open Source”… which turned out to be a mistake. Very soon (as in pre-1990), it became clear that there were two more competing camps for the “Open Source” definition:

    • Academia - people who got paid anyway, whether they saw a penny from their software or not
    • Business - who wanted to get as much money as possible, for as cheap as possible

    Both those camps aligned with licenses where developers gave up all their rights, but anyone could very easily take them back and claim as their own (“closing” the software). Famous examples are Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.

    The “Open Source Initiative” was created to gatekeep the “Open Source” definition, by keeping a list of licenses that were “OSI compliant”. A side effect of that gatekeeping, was erasing the understanding of the terms “Free” and “Libre” from the public’s minds.

    Plenty more than “1000 people” understood what was going on, and were against OSI, seeing it as an EEE move from the Business camp.

    People new to it, started using the term “open source” (as per OSI) without a care, only to later realize the Business camp was taking advantage of them… [surprised Pikachu face]


    This FUTO boss is not young or inexperienced, he’s a Business-man who, not surprisingly, decided to use a license with a closing clause, that he used the chance to call “Open Source” by exploiting people’s lack of understanding.



  • does the artist using this new tool control which images it was trained on? Do they even know? Can they even know?

    I’ve spent every summer vacation in my teens traveling Europe with my parents, going to every church, monument, art museum, cave, etc. available. I had no control over the thousands upon thousands of images I was trained on. I definitely don’t know which images I’ve seen and which not, and would have a really hard time knowing.

    If I now make a painting, am I less of an artist for it?

    We’ve had a ton of advances in inspiration. Artists constantly get inspired by the works of those before them, whether to repeat or to break up with previous styles. Nowadays you can even do it online… which is exactly what all these AIs have done.