null0pointer

Yep, Bitcoin uses Proof of Work (computing power) for consensus, while some others like Ethereum use Proof of Stake (coin ownership).

Bitcoin could have achieved that goal if it had been allowed to scale. Monero uses a dynamic block size so will be able to achieve the transaction throughput if usage reaches that level. Transaction fees on Monero however are limited to a few tiers in order to make it more difficult to deanonymize transactions by fee size, so without a fork in the future (which is a normal occurrence on Monero) the fees will remain higher than Visa.

> Connect to a node that processes a million dollars worth of transactions per day

Your solution is to centralized transactions on a few large payment processor nodes?

The core problem of LN remains, which is that in order to operate a LN node you must keep it always online or risk having your coins stolen. The entire point of creating a L2 network in the first place was because Bitcoin Core decided that scaling the base layer with larger blocks would harm decentralization by making it more difficult to operate a Bitcoin node. Well anyone who has ever operated a server can tell you that maintaining near 100% uptime is a much much higher technical bar than buying a larger hard drive.

The alternative for LN users if they don't want to operate their own LN node is to give up custody of their coins to someone who does operate a node, but this goes against the core premise of cryptocurrencies.

You are never _guaranteed_ to win a race against honest block producers for any finite time horizon, even if you owned 99% of all hashing power.

A double spend via 51% isn't really feasible anyway. A double spend attack, in the simplest case, is to:

1. Pay for good or services

2. Receive delivery of the goods or services

3. Invalidate the original payment once the goods or services are no longer revokable.

For a double spend to be worthwhile the value of the scam must exceed the cost of the scam. Maintaining >50% hashing power is extremely expensive and is more and more expensive the longer you maintain it. Therefore the value of the scam must also be extremely large. For crypto transactions it's common sense to wait for more and more confirmations (additional blocks mined after the block containing the transaction) before delivering the goods or services as the size of the transaction grows. Since it's trivial to wait for N+1 confirmations as the seller of goods or services it's trivial to defend against double spends for any meaningful amount of money.

They do not use data as a decision making tool. They use data as post-hoc justification for decisions already made.

You are confusing the principle and western liberal value of freedom of speech with the first amendment, which is an implementation of the value.

I had the same feeling. Excellent work!

Camera authentication will never work because you can always just take an authenticated photo of your AI image.

If they are already collaborating with these companies then why not just have them agree to allow access to their APIs and avoid all the wasteful AI agent middleware shit?

No problem, itskarad. I’ve ordered a pallet of Cadbury Creme Eggs to your house due for delivery tomorrow morning.

It's a literary analogy, not a physical analogy.

And I disagree about the work when it comes to information. Our natural inclination as humans is to share things we find interesting. Like "check out this song" or "check out this article". I don't think this takes much work. It just happens. In this sense the information is free like the stream is free to flow through the hills.

On the flip side there is substantial effort put into impeding this free flow of information with schemes like DRM. Similar to building a dam. But once cracks form the free flow resumes.

Continuing the water analogy you could say there is also substantial effort put into building the infrastructure to make information accessible to many more people. As a library is to a city's plumbing infrastructure.

Information wants to be free (as in libre) in the same way water wants to flow downhill.