Am I missing something? “Like all our services, Proton Wallet is open source so all of our security claims can be checked by the public to enhance security. We have also published the Proton Wallet security model so you can understand how Proton Wallet protects both privacy and security.”

They aren’t an intermediary. It’s a fully self-custody wallet.

It’s a self-custody wallet, they do not control the keys.

Doesn’t answer your question directly, but nostr is working on this. Nostr is an open protocol like ActivityPub (which underlies Mastodon and Lemmy). Its main use is as a twitter clone right now, but it also has a very new reddit clone and can theoretically support videos as well. And you can choose your own algorithm. Here’s all the choices I get from one of their clients, and there’s dozens of nostr clients to choose from. The cool thing is that anybody can make and publish an algorithm and you can subscribe to any algorithm. Your client does all the sorting locally.

This is not accurate. Monero offers a very high degree of privacy and anonymity. So does Bitcoin lightning, to a lesser degree. Lightning transactions don’t go on chain and are known only to: sender, recipient, and intermediate nodes, if any.

Fixed

We beat it last time.

Chat control was beat. This can be too. Contact your MEP, let them know this issue is important to you: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but it is clear that he supports and is supported[1] by Project 2025’s many authors[2] including his own press secretary and many members of his cabinet. He has, for example, called Project 2025 “our agenda”[4] and is personally mentioned hundreds of times in the document. By the Heritage Foundation’s own count, Trump already implemented a majority of their recommendations during his last term [3] and 81% of Project 2025’s authors held official appointments in his administration[5].

1. https://democrats.org/news/project-2025-is-undeniably-a-trump-driven-operation/

2 https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-project-2025-truth-social-rcna160774

3. https://www.heritage.org/impact/trump-administration-embraces-heritage-foundation-policy-recommendations

4. https://www.heritage.org/impact/heritage-analysis-trump-administrations-first-year-draws-high-profile-attention

5. https://popular.info/p/what-trump-doesnt-want-you-to-know

Bitcoin uses <1% of global electrical usage, mostly from renewables since miners must chase the cheapest electricity and renewables at off-peak times are it. They turn off during times of peak demand since they can’t afford higher-priced electricity. How do you think that compares to banks? Remittance services? All the infrastructure used to move money from point A to point B? It takes energy and even more valuable: human capital to move value around.

For reasons why Bitcoin isn’t a huge waste of energy and why it actually helps stabilize grids, increase efficiency, decrease electrical costs, and subsidizes the provision of new renewable infrastructure, see https://endthefud.org/

Cash: continues existing, providing simple, privacy-perserving, anonymous payments for the population

Governments and CBDCs: “And I took that personally”.jpeg

Gotta love to use a currency with that fluctuating value. /s

When I pay for a coffee and the shop says that I paid the equivalent of 5 cents. Then, I pay the rest and all of a sudden: I paid the equivalent of 100€.

How has your USD or EUR held up the last 5 years? Buys fewer eggs than it used to huh? Bitcoin has held up pretty damned well. Its price has gotten more stable with time, it is more stable than most national currencies already. Stability is a reflection of scale. Need perfect stability? You can use Bitcoin for payments while receiving and sending in USD or your currency of choice, just use Bitcoin as the settlement layer. Strike already does this in like 20+ countries with instant settlement times thanks to lightning. And no fees.

Fiat currency is guaranteed to lose value over time. Central banks set a target inflation rate of 2-3% per year. Bitcoin may gain or lose value over time. Choosing between a guaranteed loss of value or a potential loss/gain in value, the choice is clear for me. For 15 years in a row, holding BTC has been a better investment than holding USD.

It’s pseudonymous, with proper use, you can achieve a great deal of anonymity with it, especially now that lightning and coinjoin are things. Monero does most of that automatically, so if you want hard anonymity the easy way, use Monero. Bitcoin’s privacy continues to increase with time and is a priority for developers. An auditable supply is also crucial.

A ledger which is pseudonymous. On Bitcoin lightning, your transactions don’t go on (but are secured by) the Bitcoin ledger. Monero offers even more privacy.

“Crypto” is full of scams, you’re right about that. Bitcoin has been around for 15 years. You can use it to send money to anybody on planet earth with a phone in under a second (with lightning) for pennies in fees. It has a transparent, auditable supply. It has done this function without a single bank holiday, hack, or hour of downtime since the 2008 financial crisis, through a pandemic, wars, and attempted bans by nation states. No country controls it, there is no CEO and no board, it runs according to an open source protocol.

Bitcoin has a market cap bigger than Sweden’s GDP, currently around a trillion USD which places it in the top 20 countries by GDP. On average, every year it grows no matter whether you are measuring market cap, number of nodes, number of transactions, volume of money moved, whatever. It processes millions of transactions and moves billions of dollars of value a year. On nostr alone it has processed 2.9 million transactions over the past two months.

Bitcoin works. It’s been working. People all over the globe use it as a currency, as an asset, and as a payment method.

GNU Taler is worse for privacy than cash in many ways and intermediaries all your transactions. It’s funded by major banks and the EU, the same EU that wants Chat Control. The money in it “expires”. It’s a backdoor for a Central Bank Digital Currency, which is some dystopian shit that will enable total financial surveillance and control. https://lemmy.ml/post/17733761

#shopstr is a growing alternative which uses nostr for posting instead of Facebook. Unfortunately not as many people but I always check there first and list there preferentially. You can use any payment method with is but most people use Bitcoin lightning, which has some privacy pros and cons but certainly more private than Facebook.

Firefox user and evangelist of over a decade. Fuck Firefox for this. Condescending snake oil bullshit is what this is. There’s many ways that Firefox is objectively worse that chrome. It’s supported fewer places, it’s slower, whatever. Firefox is only good because they’re not the web browser with a monopoly and they’re a non-profit so they care about things like privacy. But for some reason, they seem determined to destroy all the goodwill that has brought them over time and push users wanting those things away. That’s like Firefox’s entire user base. I can use some other minority market share browser. Bye Felicia

Firefox user and evangelist of over a decade. Fuck Firefox for this.

Except the IMF, World Bank, Moody, Standard and Poor, etc.

They don’t trust it, they just have no other figures to work off. China has a long history of faking numbers or suddenly stopping the publishing of numbers when it can make the party look bad. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-16/china-is-hiding-more-and-more-data-from-the-rest-of-the-world

lol

Ok, be mad. A 15 year trend of growth on average no matter how you measure it: market cap, number of nodes, transaction volume, transaction capacity, etc. If you have thought Bitcoin was a scam or a bubble about to burst or whatever, you’ve been wrong 15 years in a row, maybe it’s worth reconsidering. Because it’s not just crypto bros using or investing in it now, it’s national treasures, it’s big banks and finance. But you know, on year 16 you’ll finally be proven correct, right?

Edit: oh no I mentioned China here come the tankies

They’ve been saying this for years, the problem is that none of them trust each other’s currencies or banking systems enough to do it. Nobody trusts China’s economic stats. They really, really want to get off the dollar. They meet like every year and try to figure out how. But they can’t figure out how because of that lack of trust. Meanwhile, Bitcoin (with lightning):

• trustlessly sends a transaction across the globe in under a second for pennies in fees. You don’t have to worry if “your bank trusts their bank”, Bitcoin will secure the transaction.
• Is immune from influence or corruption. China or whoever can’t make Bitcoin print extra coins for them, spend money that they don’t have the key for, or otherwise do anything it isn’t designed to do. The protocol is enforced by the network.
• All you need is a cell phone with a halfway reliable internet connection, no need for complex banking infrastructure. No single building with a bunch of money stored in it. No paying extra for your liquidity because your region is “risky”. This is a big deal for poor countries.
• It’s been doing this global transaction role for 15 years without a single bank holiday, a single hour of downtime, or a single hack. It. Just. Works.
• If your population has learned not to trust banks, for example through political instability and coups, this can help them get back into the “formal economy” as you can say “see, our corrupt government doesn’t run this money, so you can trust it more. The 1 BTC you earn today will still be 1 BTC in 5 years”.
• For <1% of global electricity usage, mostly from renewables since off-peak renewable generation is the cheapest energy around. It helps incentivize adding more renewables to the grid by ensuring there is always a buyer for any surplus supply. And it helps keeps rates lot for regular ratepayers through that same mechanism. Moving value around costs energy and human time, we just don’t see headlines like “WESTERN UNION AGAIN CONSUMING TERAWATTS A DAY OF ELECTRICITY WE’RE ALL DOOMED” because there’s nothing novel about remittance services using tons of energy and making their customers pay exorbitant fees.

Smaller countries like Ecuador are using this technology to bring Bitcoin to millions of people who don’t have access to (or don’t trust) banking infrastructure. Smaller countries can now participate in the global economy without using the USD and retain more of their sovereignty in the process. They have a plan B. And they don’t have to run their own central bank or having stable enough political/legal ifrastructure for a banking system. They just need old android phones and 3G connections.