Bitcoin

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/18390499

For those of you using Proton services to protect your privacy, a new feature is being rolled out which is a self-custody Bitcoin wallet. If you have a proton e-mail address, you can now send and receive Bitcoin automatically. This is in tradition with their long-standing policy of accepting Bitcoin payments for their services.

A few key points to know:

• You and only you have access to the Bitcoin, it is a self-custody wallet. You are not dependent on proton's cooperation to access your funds and they do not hold onto the funds for you.
• Proton automatically translates e-mail addresses to Bitcoin addresses. This means you can send/receive BTC to/from any Proton user by just knowing their e-mail address
• Proton does not support Bitcoin lightning. This means transactions will take an average of 10 minutes for an average fee of 75c. Hopefully they will add lightning in the future so that can drop to under a second for pennies in fees. Lightning would also enhance privacy
• Note that using Bitcoin is pseudonymous. Using it privately and anonymously requires some effort.
• Proton has also put together a good primer on Bitcoin here.

from their blog post:

Early in our journey, we experienced first-hand what it’s like being cut off from the financial system and at the mercy of large banks and institutions — an ordeal that affects millions of people across the globe. In the summer of 2014, as the original Proton Mail crowdfunding campaign was in progress, Proton had a near-death experience when PayPal froze our funds, questioned whether encryption was legal, and whether Proton had government approval to encrypt emails.

Fortunately, in that instance PayPal returned the blocked funds, and Proton was able to start the journey that we’ve been on for the past decade. However, that dangerous moment has always stayed in our minds, and we still keep a proportion of Proton’s financial reserves in Bitcoin.

Having experienced firsthand the unreliability of the traditional financial sector, building Proton Wallet is an important strategic move to make Proton more resilient and independent in the future. By enabling us and the entire Proton community to more easily adopt means of payment that deliver on the promise of financial freedom for all, we better insulate Proton from the risks posed by traditional finance.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin hasn't had a single hack or a single hour of downtime since it started 15 years ago. Decentralization is the answer.

A fun website to track the "what if"

The City of Santa Monica is making history by opening an official Bitcoin office. The city council unanimously voted to pilot the office in partnership with the nonprofit Proof of Workforce at no cost to the city.|

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17823614

In this episode we discusses the political landscape of Bitcoin, focusing on Trump's recent Bitcoin-friendly stance and its implications. We explore the need for a Democratic Bitcoin strategy, the importance of grassroots education, and how Bitcoin aligns with progressive values, emphasizing its potential for global financial inclusion and environmental benefits. In a crucial election year, these issues, and bitcoin education for everyone, including progressives and democrats, is more important than ever.

My guest today is Jason Maier. Jason is a high school math teacher, educator, and author of “A Progressive’s Case for Bitcoin.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17822508

1624227344 sats = 960k USD

All over lightning, confirming in under a second for pennies in fees

Had dinner with some boomer-age family friends tonight who shared stories about their grandparents and other relatives who survived (or didn’t survive) the holocaust.

One family, posing as Christians, managed to escape Poland to the US in 1939. They had to travel through Nazi Germany and Italy on their journey.

This family invested much of their life savings into expensive camera equipment to not raise suspicion, as they were traveling under the pretense of going on holiday.

The conversation developed into all the ways people attempted to conceal and travel with wealth as they fled their homeland. Apparently, sewing diamonds into clothing was a common tactic.

These close friends were struck to hear how Bitcoin enables the storage and transfer of wealth by simply knowing a secret number. I told them of the work @gladstein and others are doing to get Bitcoin knowledge and tools into the hands of political activists and refugees.

“Fuck You Money” is a world changing technology. Let us not lose site of what really matters here 🫡 🤙

From nostr https://njump.me/nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzpz9zcw6zpd9qyacx4xrqp50aw39vdn739cspkaqcn0j77jet82j9qyfhwumn8ghj7mmxve3ksctfdch8qatz9uq3vamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwdehhxarj9ehx2ap0qqsy98wlnfyk6ltxrgptyq6ysxhfwenseqawk08yz493yhdqsmcq4rgc787rs

"The Oslo Freedom Forum, held annually by the Human Rights Foundation, has become a worldwide cornerstone for human rights activists. This year, the 16th edition of the forum was centered around the theme "Re-claim Democracy." It brought together activists, thinkers, and leaders to discuss the challenges of rising authoritarianism and how bitcoin can support activists fighting against oppressive regimes."

Link without paywall: http://archive.today/L1n4y

Curious to hear people's stories

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16448198

Globally, people are losing faith in our institutions. Our financial institutions, our governments, our media, our medical systems, even democracy as a concept in many cases. And for sound reasons. Proposed upgrades to Bitcoin's protocol would enable use of the chain (and L2s) for things aside from just money. On the world's most secure document: the bitcoin ledger. It will change everything and here's why.

The root problem is that we are building systems which rely on trust and time and time again, that trust has been broken. We have to trust that the people elected or appointed to those positions will do their jobs faithfully. But, of course, like us, they are humans and fallible. Subject to stupidity, greed, misdirection, and error whether through malice or accident. Take money, for example. Money has to be trust-able, so it is entrusted, for all its faults, to the most stable and neutral institutions humanity has ever created: the state. And yet, the state often abuses that authority to print money they shouldn't leading to inflation and hyperinflation, particularly for unpopular wars of conquest. Every failed state ends in hyperinflation, because it's a tool in the state's toolbox and they will use it when they have no other options. They'll turn on that money printer if they need to. And time after time, they have. There are ways to create trustless systems, where we do not have to trust individual actors to administer them faithfully, only for them to be mostly rational actors subject to the same laws of math and physics as the rest of us. Instead, the system administers itself according to some form of protocol. Bitcoin did this for money 15 years ago, it was created by Satoshi in the wake of the nearly total collapse of the global financial system (2008 financial crisis) to create a system which could not suffer the same fate. We all had to bail the banks out because they were "too big to fail", which was true, Bernanke won a nobel prize in economics for his analysis of this and the bailouts likely prevented the worst economic period since the great depression had the entire banking system be allowed to fail. You may not know who Bernenke is, but if you were alive during this time period, you know his face, he was the guy who had to sell the bailouts to the world as an idea. The reality is, fractional reserve banking is a ponzi scheme, and had the banks failed and people realized it, it would have stopped functioning. Our debt-based world order would have collapsed. No credit could be issued to build roads or fund schools or do anything because there would be no money in the banks to use as collateral and nobody would trust it. Just like in the US great depression. You can argue it's a sneakily beautiful ponzi scheme which drives the engine of human progress if you are a die-hard capitalist, but you can't argue it's not a ponzi scheme.

The crazy thing is, Bitcoin worked. It has kept every promise it made. For 15 years, it has faithfully administered a financial system with a known, transparent, limited supply of 21 million coins which can be transferred across the globe in seconds for pennies in fees. And it has continued to grow no matter which metric you measure it by. Through pandemics, wars, international conflict, attempted bans by major world powers, tick tock, next block, the blockchain continued to function. Not a single hour of downtime, not a single bank holiday, not a single hack or breach of security or protocol. Now, it has a market cap of over 1 trillion USD, which is bigger than the GDP of Israel, the Netherlands, Turkey, or Switzerland, countries with tens of millions of people. It's been consistently over 800 billion for a while now. It moves hundreds of millions of dollars of value on the regular. I can send a transaction to anybody on the planet with a cell phone and halfway reliable internet for under a cent in under a second.

Nobody can make Bitcoin print money it's not supposed to print. Nobody can transfer money without the private key of that coin. Nobody can force the network to do anything outside of its protocol, even if they bought every Bitcoin in existence. Even if they had a trillion dollars and 1,000 people with AKs ready to die for it. It's mathematically, computationally, financially, and logistically infeasible. I think the question is, long-term, how can be we build political and social systems which are equally trustless where we don't have to put people in positions of power. Just like democracy did to monarchy in spreading power around and reducing the damage one corrupted individual could do, we can now do that again in an order of magnitude greater in the same direction towards greater democratization. Whether you're a capitalist, a communist, or a member of the federation of planets, this tech has serious promise for making your ideal global vision come true. It's a matter of setting up the system correctly and getting adoption of it. It can be used for voting systems, for the collection of taxes, for the administration of public funds, goods, and markets. It can be used for a lot more than just money. With smart contract functionality, Bitcoin will be the ledger upon which all this is built.

I'm excited to be here with all of you. We are early. Most people I know don't own any crypto. The future is coming. Thank you Satoshi for your gift to the world.