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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Yes and no. Historically Bitcoin had no limits on transactions, but someone realized a while back that because transactions were really cheap rich people could flood the network with transactions and that would prevent legitimate people from using the network. Therefore a limit on the size of a block was imposed, which in turn meant that Bitcoin could only process 7 transactions per second in average.

    At the time that was great, if someone tried to attack the network they would quickly run out of space in the block and people wanting to do transactions had only to pay a little bit more to ensure their transactions got approved, which in turn made this attack more expensive and eventually useless.

    However in 2017 Bitcoin gained popularity, and this caused an issue, actual users were hitting that barrier of 7 transactions per second among themselves, and so users began competing with each other for space on the chain. And when that happens your coffee or VPS payment is going to get a much lower fee than what someone trading hundreds or thousands of dollars can afford. So essentially Bitcoin became only usable for large trading (you needed to pay $50 for a transaction at the time).

    Since that became prohibitive for most users, people stopped using it, and because of long confirmation times for people who still tried to use it stores stopped accepting it (some people don’t know this, but Steam and Microsoft used to accept Bitcoin payments).

    You might think the solution is simple, just increase the limit like the guy who imposed it originally said it should be done, but that created a shit storm of people claiming that that would bring all hell on earth, and the proper solution was to build a secondary chain on top of Bitcoin so you only needed to pay the high prices once (this is what the other reply to my comment is mentioning). The problem is that for miners small blocks with higher transactions fees are waaaay more profitable, so they sided up with the fuck the user mentality (and some even say that they paid people to promote that solution).

    So long story short Bitcoin is not currently usable for day-to-day purchases. Transaction prices fluctuate a lot, currently it’s “cheap” at $1.5 per transaction, but it regularly goes to 10/20 and even got to over 100 this year. So it’s no longer a currency, since no one would pay those prices to use it as currency. Bitcoin is now more of an investment than cash, it’s closer to gold in that you could use it as cash but it’s inconvenient and you’ll end up losing money.


  • The lighting network is bound to fail because it suffers from the same problem Bitcoin is solving, i.e. it only works in centralized hubs. Think about how a new user would come to Bitcoin if the LN was in full effect, they would need to spend hundreds to open a channel to a centralized hub, the more centralized the better so it can connect to more places, so they can ensure they have the funds and the connectivity to use the network, because channels can’t be increased, if he ever needs more funds than what he has he will need to close the channel and open a new one, and because channels might be used by third parties when routing through the network if he spends double that amount to create two channels to two centralized hubs he risks having their funds go from one channel to the other and having to go the long route for his own transactions.

    Also the idea that running a node is more expensive because of larger blocks is mostly nonsense, for starters the only nodes that matter are mining nodes, even if your validating node finds an issue it has no power to do anything about it. Secondly there is such a thing as pruning old blocks to reclaim space. Third the whole point of Bitcoin is that you don’t need to validate transactions because mining nodes have incentive to stay honest, and the regulators are other mining nodes who stand to gain from others dishonesty by mining the same block they did, and again, mining nodes require lots of hardware, some extra HDD for old data is cheap in comparison. Fourth, why don’t you feel the need to validate the LN? Why just validate the on-chain stuff but trust the LN? Surely you’ll want your validator Node to process all of the LN transactions to ensure they’re valid, no? Or do you trust that the LN works? And if you do why not trust that the technology the LN is built on top of also works?. Not to mention that even in poor countries the cost of a hard drive that can hold years of data is lower than a couple of transactions on the main Bitcoin network during peak times, and a lot cheaper than opening one channel on the LN that’s worth using, for example earlier this year the average transaction fee peaked at $123 https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee so of someone wanted to make a transaction that day on the Bitcoin network they would need to spend $123 extra, that is enough to get a used 8TB HDD which should hold all of the BCH Blockchain just with the cost of a single transaction.

    Long story short:

    • LN has design flaws and doesn’t work
    • Even if LN worked, on-chain transactions are better, less limited and more secure
    • Even if those design flaws could be addressed, the main chain will still become unusable due to high cost of entry unless blocks get increased
    • If blocks never get increased, popularity will be the death of Bitcoin like it happened in 2017, if someone needs to throw away hundreds of dollars just to get into the network, they’ll never do it. And because RBF people that don’t pay whatever the current tx fee is can get scammed.
    • Validator nodes serve no purpose
    • Even if they did running a validator Node on BCH is cheaper than using BTC
    • Even if validator nodes made some difference then the LN would also need one and then the amount of transactions there would increase the need of a node to higher than what would be needed for BCH (since besides regular transactions you would also need to validate on and off channel transactions).



  • But also as a general rule places don’t let you spend over 30% of your income in rent, 60K that you mentioned for a couple is £4186 per month, so the maximum rent of that hypothetical person is £1256. Which wouldn’t also allow you to rent a house like the one you showed, so it’s pointless. The house where a couple that earns 60k lives can absolutely be bought for close to 1 million (if not less). Whoever is living in a 4 bedroom house like the one you pointed out earns a lot more than 60k and so they can finance the rest.



  • I feel people still don’t understand how much a billion is. One Million dollars would still be life changing for most people here, but consider that 1 million seconds ago was 11 days ago, 1 Billion seconds ago was 31 years ago.

    To put it in another perspective, a very bad investment would yield you 0.1% monthly. This means that if a billionaire was to invest money the worst way possible, he would have to spend over 1 Million dollars per month to ever decrease his fortune.

    If you had an infinite money machine, that as long as you don’t spend more than a million per month it just keeps on growing, would you ever work? Yeah, thought so, billionaires are the same, they might have hobbies, and those hobbies might be something others consider work, but they’re not working.

    I personally believe that if a person ever gets 1 Billion dollars he should receive a letter congratulating them for winning capitalism, and informing them that any cent above 1 Billion will be taxed at 99.9999% (including investments).




  • That would be awesome, currently it’s 500GB for their cheaper option which starts at 23/year. I didn’t find an option to increase the bandwidth before completing the order. Also it needs to be deployed in NY (which would be possibly slow for me in Europe). Finally their isos are somewhat old, the latest Ubuntu they have is 20.04 (which has an EoL next year).

    All that being said, 23/year is very cheap for a VPS, and for people in the US that use less than 500GB/month that’s the best deal I’ve ever seen.



  • Should we call it X/GNU/Linux as to not downplay the work the people at Xorg put in? Also possibly Systemd/X/GNU/Linux, how about Plasma/Systemd/X/GNU/Linux, and since nowadays browsers do most of the tasks I think it’s only fair Firefox/Plasma/Systemd/X/GNU/Linux, or maybe Chromium/GNOME/Dinit/Wayland/Musl/Linux, you know what these two have in common? Just the Kernel, but you would say they’re both the same OS.

    I’m not saying GNU is not great nor am I saying that they didn’t contributed or that they’re worthless. But GNU is not special, X, Systemd, and other such components are just as essentials to Linux as GNU, and no one claims they should be added to the name of the OS.



  • Long story short, Fedora is RedHat, RedHat is mostly aimed at companies, so most random users haven’t encountered it. I used Fedora for a few months, a Friend of mine was very passionate about it, I personally didn’t find anything special about it and disliked rpm at the time, so I ended up switching back to Mint (I think it’s what I was using at the time).

    So, long story short, people are not recommending it because they’re not using it, but I know a few people who use it and swear by it, so it looks like you’re on the road to join their club, and don’t let anyone tell you you should be using any other distro, as long as you find something that works for you, that’s what matters.

    That being said have you tried Kubuntu? I feel lots of what you had issues with could be the old GNOME vs KDE argument.


  • Curiously that’s not as accurate as you might think. Different systems use memory differently, even just between different Ubuntu flavors or customizations. 1-2 crashes a week is not normal, unless it was consistently happening when you did something specific. Also, what exactly do you mean by crashing? Did you get a black screen with some error or the computer would just freeze or reboot?

    That being said I don’t think this is likely to be a hardware issue. One thing that comes to mind is maybe swap, did you had swap on Ubuntu and do you have swap on Fedora now? If Linux runs out of memory it freezes, having swap prevents it from doing so, so if you have low enough memory it’s possible that it would get filled up and freeze your system without swap (Windows has the equivalent by default)


  • In the past my wrists used to hurt, my father had carpal tunnel and I didn’t want to risk it, so I switched to a keyboard centric WM and switched to a trackball. I haven’t experienced wrist pain in years, although I think it might be mostly related to the keyboard centric WM since I went back to a mouse for gaming a while back and when my trackball broke I didn’t bother getting a new one.

    That being said trackballs are amazing for working on limited spaces or soft surfaces (e.g. a couch or bed), once I’ve gotten used to it I could work on the sofa just as efficiently as I would on a desk without extra monitors, but now my desk has two large monitors and plenty of space for the mouse, so it’s less of an issue.


  • There are a few misconceptions in your logic.

    1. Force is required to rape
    2. Erections are controllable

    Both of them are easy to disprove, but not obvious at first sight.

    For 1 consider any case where a woman might have power (not physical) over a man, e.g. blackmail, teacher, parole officer, boss, etc. Another possibility to remember are weapons or physical threats to a third party. Also you should remember that humans have a fight/flight/freeze response, so a third of humans would just freeze regardless of being able to overpower their attacker. Finally there’s also the possibility of even without any threat, even being able to think properly, and knowing that he could physically overpower a female attacker, a man might not do it for fear of legal or moral repercussions, e.g. being thought not to hit girls or believing that no one would believe that he was defending himself. In fact lots of women who get raped don’t try to fight back or escape, believing (sometimes accurately) that their attacker would worsen the offense if they did that, e.g. by killing them (even if no threat was made), it’s not uncommon for rape victims to feel ashamed and guilt about not having fought back, and by saying that men can’t get raped because they could theoretically overpower their attacker you’re indirectly saying that any woman who doesn’t fight back with all her might is not being raped either, because they could have overpowered their attacker of they tried.

    For 2, erections (and even ejaculation) are physical responses, in fact you can make a corpse get a hard on and cum (some wives do it to preserve their husbands sperm). This is no different from women getting wet or having orgasms while being raped (both of which are common), it means nothing, it’s just a physical reaction to a physical stimulus. In fact lots of victims (both men and women), especially those in abusive relationships think they deserve that because of those physiological reactions. To put it in simpler terms, saying a men can’t be raped because if they got an erection it means they wanted it is like saying that people can’t be stabbed because if they bled is because they wanted the knife.




  • I’ve recently migrated to nushell, I don’t straight up recommend it because it’s not POSIX compliant, so unless you’re already familiar with some other she’ll I would not use it.

    That being said, it’s an awesome shell if you deal with structured data constantly, and that’s something I do quite often so for me it’s a great tool.