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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • That value was increased initially through usage as countries adopted ATMs and online retailers accepted bitcoin. This obviously reduced the supply due to increased demand. Then the speculators started buying it up making it even more scarce.

    It has a fixed amount. It’s normal to rise in value as it becomes more useful for either transacting, holding value, or making money through speculation. You can’t compare it to a 300 year old dollar which was unpegged from gold and has the US economy/government backing it now.

    The dollar is also manipulated, but the effects are less pronounced due to the sheer amount in circulation around the world. Some of the effects are also thrown on other economies through the Forex markets too. If bitcoin were as ubiquitous as the $, it wouldn’t be easy to manipulate either. It’s like having your own coin with only 100 physical coins in circulation. All someone has to do is buy a bunch and refuse to sell and the value rises for the uninformed.


  • No tech is perfect. And the current bitcoin is not the same as the original client. It has been modified to allow for abuse and control. The fact that we allow this to take place is more a reflection of our governments aiming to control it than any inherent property of the currency.

    Big banks would have far less control if you couldn’t print sanctioned currency to buy as much bitcoin as they want to play with the value set by sanctioned exchanges.

    I agree that bitcoin is capitalist like most monetary bills in a free market. I disagree it’s more capitalist than what we have now. It’s just being propagandized and veiled from the underlying technology to make it seem so.


  • By design, it will slowly stop inflating at the snails pace it does vs unpegged paper currency.

    A central bank regulating where money is printed and to whom it’s distributed at what contrived rates is horrifying. It’s also the default in most of the world.

    You can trade bitcoin and use it as a currency in a non-capitalist market. The fact that it has been abused and traded into stratospheric value is a result of manipulation, sanctioned exchanges, and propaganda.

    Bitcoin just allows you to write debits and credits on a distributed, verified, ledger. That’s it really. How the market is regulated is on the people, not the technology. There is nothing inherently capitalist about the technology other than allowing any individual to trade value with another in a free market manner. You would be trying to escape supply and demand dynamics to remove that “capitalist” aspect of it.

    The power draw on the other hand… the first imagining of a digital decentralized and distributed currency was bound to have some problems.



  • After decades of user interfaces and internet access, we’re making things worse rather than better.

    Someone at Microsoft realized that hardware will speed up, hiding the fact that the OS is getting bloated and riddled with code that doesn’t directly benefit the user.

    The value Windows provides isn’t great enough to deal with this state any longer. In fact, my experience shows it’s slower and just as buggy.

    We have technology available to improve experiences, let’s not mix it with profit incentives for once.






  • The problem for me is portability. Flatpak, Snap, Appimage, docker, podman, lxc, they all do the same thing, but they’re splitting the market into “servers” and “desktops”.

    We need a portable container runtime we can build from a compose file, run cli or gui apps, and migrate to a server with web app capability displaying the UI. There are too many build targets, and too much virtual market segmentation.

    Nix tries to solve the issue, but the problem is you have to use Nix.


  • I’m starting to come around to big corps running their custom enhanced versions while feeding their open source counterparts with the last gen weights. As much as I love open source, people need to eat.

    As was mentioned, if they start doing something egregious, they’re not the only game in town, and can also be forked. Love it or hate it, a big corp sponsor makes Joe six-pack feel a little more secure in using a product.


  • Thank you for the work on this extension. I understand the idea and the simplicity, and laud the work that went into it.

    Ideally, security should be composed of these visible little file connectors like you have here. They’re auditable near by definition (external calls,obfuscation,hidden exploits).

    The main issue, and a sad state of affairs today, is hardware based security devices or “enclaves”. These are all closed, and many big players lock them down.

    Ideally, the TOTP key should be stored in an enclave to reduce the chance of a key leaking. Master key is nice, but it’s still a software control on an assumed compromised system.

    With that said, isn’t the whole benefit of TOTP the human interaction? If I see one browsers request login, then the code comes from the keyboard, it’s difficult to use that code again. If there is a keylogger you get one session. When it’s stored locally, you can automate it and login from anywhere once you crack or sniff the master password.

    I really like this type of security, it’s likely the future, but the entrenched industry makes securing properly by anyone who isn’t a big player very difficult.

    Passkeys try to get around this by making them disposable per device locked in an enclave. Hardware assurance is a roadblock.




  • With immutable distros you can try a silverblue and switch to kinoite with a reboot on an already running system and it will just work and run your flatpaks. The base image it runs does not get corrupted. You cannot make changes (easily) to the base to corrupt it. Your apps and files are just an overlay or mounts on top of the system. Your machine lights on fire, if you have a network backup, it will fire up on any hardware and be the same. It’s much cleaner and allows for easy os switching.

    You could theoretically make windows work and be switchable.