L2 means “layer two”, in short, a way of conducting transactions “off-chain” while relying on the “base chain”/L1 for security. It helps keep chain bloat minimal.

There are various ways to do this with various trade-offs in terms of speed/privacy/cost/centralization/etc. Bitcoin’s main one is lightning (there’s also Ark), Eth has like a dozen of them most of which are super centralized but you’ve got Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Nova, etc. They all work a little differently.

Lightning’s concept is very simple: you make a “channel” on-chain by depositing funds into that smart contract which lives on-chain (1 transaction). The channel exists between you and one other party. The channel starts with a balance of 100/0 meaning all the BTC is yours (because you deposited the BTC). When you send BTC to the other party, you update the “balance” of that channel by both of you signing a thing saying it’s updated (now it’s 99/1). This happens off-chain. At any point, either of you can close the channel (on-chain) and claim any BTC that’s due to them according to the balance. In this example, you would get back 99 BTC and the other person would get 1. You can also transact with other parties by sending BTC “through” a chain of existing channels. And these transactions not only don’t require paying on-chain fees, they can also be confirmed in < 1 second because you don’t need to wait for the next block. You can have essentially infinite transactions back-and-forth in a channel, but one “side” of the channel cannot dip below 0. Almost all of this is abstracted away for the end user.

You can’t just keep increasing the block size. More block size = bigger blocks = more bandwidth and disk space to host a full node. It’s why the majority of Eth’s nodes are now hosted in one of like three corporate datacenter providers. Sure, disks keep getting bigger and more affordable but big pipes to move that much data haven’t kept up at the same pace. Bitcoin cash is now 16x Bitcoin’s original block size, and they are still calling for larger blocks to keep tx costs low. Eventually, with any block size, especially if you want to capture a good portion of humanity’s transactions, you will end up with massive competition for blockspace aka high fees.

Blockchain has a fundamental problem. If you put it on the ledger, all nodes have to store that forever. The more you put on the ledger, the bigger that ledger gets, the more resources you need to host it/participate, the more centralized your network becomes. Adding more block space is one solution, but comes at the cost of decentralization and doesn’t scale to all of humanity’s transactions let alone even just replacing SWIFT/IBAN. L2s are another solution, you get faster transfers and fees not directly coupled to chain space in exchange for slightly less trustworthiness (you may have to send a channel “back to chain” if a bad actor tries something, and you have to monitor that channel and chain to see if you need to do that, which is all handled automatically). With Bitcoin’s L2, I can send funds anywhere in under a second for pennies in fees. It actually works for buying coffee. In the space 1 transaction took on chain, I can now have billions of transactions. Not just between me and the person I opened the channel with, but between me and any other person who has coins on lightning. And you can run a lightning node on a raspberry pi or android phone. Lightning isn’t perfect, the inbound liquidity thing is annoying (though Ark and Fedimint proposals solve this in different ways), but it works really well and has been stable and usable for years. The inbound liquidity issue is being worked on as well through automated liquidity provisioning. Not perfect, but leagues ahead of Monero which has zero L2 and zero roadmap for an L2.

Tldr: Monero’s fees are low because there isn’t much competition for blockspace. And it’s slow. Because it’s all on L1. That space will run out as it scales, it’s up to Monero to decide how to solve that problem.

I agree with the thrust of what you’re saying but… Monero can’t sustain any circular economy of scale without a working L2. Blockspace is limited. Every transaction humanity makes shouldn’t be stored on chain for perpetuity. That’s silly, wasteful, and leads to centralization. An L2 solves that problem. Without an L2, as Monero’s use increases, so will fees, variable block size will hold that off for a while but not forever and not without sacrificing decentralization.

Monero has no L2 and not enough dev talent or funding to make it happen in the next few years. Its protocol is different enough from Bitcoin that pre-existing solutions like lightning can’t just be bolted onto it without significant development effort and privacy trade-offs. Meanwhile over on Bitcoin’s side, they continue to add more functionality to their chain with a massive dev pool in terms of talent and funding. And privacy does continue to improve, lightning and ark are both pretty opaque depending on how you measure it. So if Monero wants to be a significant player on par with Bitcoin and have a circular economy, it will need to step up to the plate in a major way, and it needs to do that before Bitcoin implements privacy upgrades that place it at feature parity with Monero, which is imo only a matter of time since those folks tend to be pretty pro privacy. Yes, there’s “ossification”, but protocol improvements are still happening, especially outside the bounds of the main chain protocol itself (in L2, mining protocols, etc).

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Democracy doesn’t guarantee you’ll have good options, just that you have options. The time to express the greatest degree of preference is primaries. It’s how the system works. You can be mad about that, but that’s how it works. And it’s fair, and it’s democratic, and anybody can participate in it. And every four years, like clockwork, people come out of the woodwork to complain about how their vote doesn’t matter and the two-party system is corrupt and yada yada who never even took the time to vote in the primary or downballot elections. It’s equivalent to people who complain that the president isn’t getting x done while not voting in mid-terms to secure a congress who can make sure those things actually can get done. Primaries and downballot elections are how to build a candidate’s resume and experience to run in a presidential election. Luckily for primary voters, the party doesn’t listen to these people, they respect the ballots cast by their primary voters. I don’t think they should have run Hillary, but she got the most primary votes so that’s who they ran. There is nobody to blame there but her primary voters.

The levers of power are available to people, we just have to consistently use them.

50% of people who watched the debate didn’t participate in the primaries. Most people don’t vote, and of those who do vote, most don’t participate in primaries. Nobody of consequence ran. Literally anybody could have run. They didn’t. It’s not the fault of “DNC leadership” that nobody stepped up to the plate to run.

FWIW some people did run, Biden wasn’t literally the only candidate. I had more than one candidate on my primary ballot and I voted for Biden because he had the best chance of winning the general. In fact, Biden lost the primary in American Samoa. If you swap Biden for somebody else, you’ve invalidated my primary vote. That’s just as much a threat to democracy as anything else.

If he’s such an existential threat (and he is), why the fuck are they not forcing the geriatric incompetent running on their ticket to drop out?

Because their rank-and-file voters who voted in the primary voted for him. This primary and last primary. And if you want people to leave your party in a big exodus, invalidating their primary vote is how you do that. They learned that in Bernie’s race. I voted for Biden, he wasn’t the only person to run in the primary, I’ll be damned if the “party elite” select some other candidate anyways, why even vote in the primaries at that point? May as well register for the R primary since they at least had more candidates and (so far) appear to respect their primary process so my vote would actually mean something.

One thing you’ll notice is that the venn diagram for people who complain about only having “two choices” and the people who don’t participate in primaries is nearly a perfect circle. You get an overwhelming amount of choices if you vote in every primary and every election.If you only vote once every 2 or 4 years and skip the primaries, yeah, you get two choices.

Good to see Julian free, he paid a high price for giving people access to relevant, important information about the corruption of their governments.

It’s not the right of the business, it’s the right of US citizens to consume media and information from any source they please. The Govt has no right to say “You can’t read that newspaper” or “You can’t listen to that speaker”, so they have no right to say “You can’t get information through this app”. The first amendment isn’t just about the right to speak, it’s also about the right to listen and research especially the stuff the government doesn’t want you to know about.

Because section 702 evidence isn’t showing up in court in other cases. That’s why they have an opportunity to challenge it here. They aren’t defending the nazi, they are defending all of us from being taken to court with evidence obtained without a warrant.

Separate apps more focused on privacy will always be better than RCS/SMS/whatever the mainstream option is.

It’s a shame the US govt has to try to do unconstitutional things. And that we have to keep fighting them back to preserve our basic liberties and freedoms. It’s a blessing the ACLU does it for us.

All of them. Make “banning advertising” an election platform, I’ll vote for you. Ban billboards and other forms of commercial advertising everywhere. Advertising works, nobody denies that. If you see enough ads, on average, your mind will be changed. By allowing advertising to exist, we are sanctioning widespread mind control. It sounds crazy when you say it that way, but it’s true. Advertising does not benefit the average person, it makes them buy stuff they have no native desire for. Advertising only benefits advertising agencies and their clients.

Let word-of-mouth and genuine desire for a good or service drive purchases of that good or service, not advertising, and you’ll end up with a more efficient economy where our consumer choices better invest in our shared prosperity and future.

Probably because you don’t vote in the primaries. That’s where people with more fringe ideas are located. Vote them up if they share your fringe idea. You can complain about the “system” all you want, the people who run the system were put there through primaries and generals. Learn how to use the tools available to you.

Sorry you’re getting downvoted to hell. You’re right. Sometimes people want everything to be a conspiracy or something aside from the simpler truth which is that voters just wanted somebody different.

Cenorship-resistant protocols like ActivityPub (Lemmy, Mastodon), Nostr, Tor, I2P, and freenet solve this.

That’s an awfully… interesting way of saying he lost his primary, which as an incumbent is not a particularly easy to do. Blame foreign money all you want, your voters voted for who they wanted. Primary voters are the most politically aware kind of voters, most people don’t vote, even fewer take the time to vote in primaries. Apparently those voters wanted somebody new.

Instead of fixing those issues, most other coins are just pump and dump schemes for a quick buck.

Oh agree totally on this one.

Bitcoin and many other currencies have way too many and large fluctuations in value for daily use.

If you are using it to send money from point A to point B, you can cash it out at the same price you put it in at, so fluctuation doesn’t matter much. You’re probably saving on bank fees and exchange risk enhanced by slow international settlement. Exchange risk is always a thing with any currency. It’s gotten more stable over time and I imagine that trend will continue. Other currencies are also unstable, how has the purchasing power of the USD held up over the last 5 years? That’s not to mention the billions of people not fortunate enough to live in a currency environment which is dominated by the dollar. Ask any Argentenian or Turkish person how stable their currency is compared to Bitcoin. Best case scenario, your dollar slowly loses value over time due to supply inflation. Whether or not you find it useful, more and more people find it useful every year, the transaction volume has increased reliably for 15 years. Nobody’s making them use it. On the contrary, there are often hurdles educational, regulatory, and technological to using it, but they still do. Maybe on year 16 though people will finally realize it’s useless and stop using it.

Bitcoin specifically is not practical for transactions in general due to cost and block size limits. Yes, lightning exists, but maybe your technology is shit if it needs a second overlay network to function.

Maybe TCP/IP is shit if we need other protocols build on top of it like SMTP. Maybe ethernet is shit if we have to design a whole nother protocol (TCP) just to make sure packets actually arive in the proper order. No. This is a weak argument. Fedwire, the system for settlement between US banks, has a equivalent transaction speed to Bitcoin’s base layer. Banks don’t seem to have any problem with that speed. And ten minutes is pretty dang fast to send a million dollar transaction across the globe (on main chain) or under a second (on lightning). Meanwhile, the US dollar doesn’t have a built-in transfer mechanism, and the mechanisms available can be quite frustrating or expensive to work with, ask anybody whose ever had to send an international bank wire or deal with the frequent buyer return fraud on platforms like eBay. I’d sell an iPhone to somebody in (insert fraud prone country here) no problem in BTC. With PayPal? No effing way,

Check the wikipedia article, pretty neutral and factual reporting on the history. TLDR he revealed the US committing war crimes, they went after him with everything they had including planning an assassination attempt (which they never went through with). They tried to apply US law internationally to somebody who wasn’t a US citizen and wasn’t in the US. The UN said his detainment was illegal and torture. He’s been on the run, in some embassy, or jail for over 10 years for activity other news organizations regularly and legally engage in (leaking classified documents). Various US military, intelligence, etc agency heads have testified to congress that they couldn’t find a single death related to the documents he leaked, he didn’t put anybody at risk, in fact, Wikileaks sent every leak to the US govt before leaking it asking them for notes on what to redact. The US refused to participate in that process.

He also revealed the DNC was trying to bury Bernie, which the DNC didn’t even deny, they had to let a bunch of their top people go and do a bunch of primary reforms as a result. That’s when liberals started hating Wikileaks, because the DNC emails helped get Trump elected. They say the “timing” of right before the election makes his leak partisan. But wouldn’t you want that information before you vote? It is the job of wikileaks, or any journalist, to maximize the impact of information they are revealing on corruption. It’s not Julian’s fault the DNC was corrupt AF, all they had to do to avoid that was… not be corrupt.

There were also some sex assault allegations against him, which I tend to believe have some veracity to them however the accusers explicitly did not want him charged, it was a ploy to get him to Sweden where he would be extradited to the US. He was never even charged, only “wanted to questioning” but somehow got an interpol notice for it. His lawyers offered over a dozen times for him to be interviewed but Sweden insisted on an “in-person” interview for some reason. Curious.

Oh, and he helped save Snowden’s life by getting him a flight out of China.

I need something like a Spotify subscription for open source to assuage my guilt of the great value I extract for my personal use of open source.

I would love to see something like this, where I can contribute to an open source project while also contributing to all their dependencies. Maybe such a thing exists and I just haven’t heard of it yet.