Based on the content of the linked post and the evolution of the thread here, the mod team has decided to lock this post. There is an important difference between standing up for people who are marginalized and harassment, which this thread has been more or less equating. Please deal with this topic in a more nuanced manner going forward.

Bitcoin is the same speed it’s always been. Blocks happen every 10 minutes. Pay a high fee? Get in on the next block. Want to save on fees? Maybe it takes a few blocks for your transaction to go through.

This is a fancy way to say that it is slower unless you pay higher fees.

Fees are much, much lower than credit card, paypal, or other similar competitors. You could send a billion dollars in a single transaction and pay $1.50 on main chain, or you could send $5 on lightning and pay <1c in fees. Lightning has been around for 5 years now, it works, I use it regularly.

The fees are fluctuating and can be much higher than you claim (https://decrypt.co/234446/bitcoin-fees-skyrocket-okx-exchange-burning-utxo)

While it is true you could pay lower fees if you send larger amounts, if we take your 5$ fee at face value, then any transaction below 147.35$ will have lower fees on a payment service like Stripe (3.4% for international transactions + 0.30$ per transaction).

The supply of Bitcoin, 21 million coins, is known and has always been known. It can’t be diluted beyond that point.

I did not claim otherwise.

Nobody owns 51% of the network. Even such an actor can’t print extra BTC or force money to move without the appropriate private key. The best they can do is temporarily delay transactions while burning north of a trillion dollars in energy and equipment doing so. Which is why nobody has ever done it.

Nobody currently does. However, it is my understanding that theu could fork the network and update it if they had 50%+1 of the network. It is not impossible.

Given that fees have continued to increase with time, this seems like not a problem. It’s not “dangerous”, it’s part of the design. If hashrate drops, it drops, but given that fees and hashrate have continued to grow despite continually minting less coins, it’s not really a problem.

It is a problem because people do not want to pay higher fees.

Anybody can have a cash wallet without disclosing their identity, yet they still pay taxes.

They can pay taxes but they don't have to. There is no system to know the identity and know the tax rate that should be applied using the raw bitcoin transaction method. This has to be applied using an external centralized service at best.

Bitcoin’s rules prevent the kind of fraud where the value of your money is printed away via supply inflation of central banks or “currency restructuring” on the global scale by the the world bank.

This is not fraud and it is not what I'm talking about.

People pay taxes because they think it’s the right thing to do and/or because the government has guns and makes them. Either way, if you run a company, if you are providing goods and services, you have a place you can send somebody with a gun and enforce those rules. All the companies currently paying taxes would keep paying taxes if they used Bitcoin.

The tax and identity layers have to be added on top. They are not built-in. While it is true a country can force things, it is not true they can force the bitcoin network to apply these rules. This is in fact one of the selling points of Bitcoin according to this video.

This video has seemingly no sources for its claims.

Here are some facts:

• Lyn Alden is part of "Ego Death Capital", a venture capital company around cryptocurrencies (https://egodeath.capital/team).
• Lyn Alden is the Board Director of Swan Bitcoin - a Bitcoin investment platform (https://www.swanbitcoin.com/alden/)
• Lyn Alden is not an economist (https://www.lynalden.com/about-lyn-alden/)

Here are some weird claims it makes:

• Bitcoin transactions happen at the "speed of light" (~27:00) REALITY CHECK: As Bitcoin has grown, transactions have become slow. It's in fact why many people do not accept it for purchases anymore.
• Bitcoin cannot be diluted (~27:25) REALITY CHECK: Bitcoin is always being diluted until it reaches its hard limit.
• The value of Bitcoin has only increased over time (~27:50) REALITY CHECK: The log scale is playing tricks. A linear graph would show how volatile Bitcoin has truly been.
• Nobody controls the network (~28:25) REALITY CHECK: If someone were to own 50% or more of the network's compute power, they could control the network.

Here are some things it omits:

• Bitcoin transaction fees (~28:15): Transaction fees that empower miners have also made it much less usable as a currency. The transactions fees for Bitcoin are so high that credit card fees are actually more reasonable.
• Bitcoin's hard limit is likely very dangerous for the network (~29:00): Once the hard limit is reached, it is unclear if people will keep pumping computing power at it. If the creation of new Bitcoin is no longer allowed, it is possible that transaction fees will need to be raised to compensate miners.
• Bitcoin's lack of rules allow for massive amounts of fraud and prevents effective taxation (~29:25): While the video paints a cute picture of financial freedom, the reality is that Bitcoin allows for fraud on a world scale and does not allow for sales tax because of the way that anyone can have a cryptocurrency wallet without disclosing their identity.

Genuinely, this is Bitcoin propaganda.

Taiwan is not recognized by most countries.

Because of the Chinese Civil War (which technically never ended), both the government of Taiwan (under the name "Republic of China") and Beijing (under the name "People's Republic of China" claim to be the 'real China'. At some point in time, most people recognized the Republic of China as the legitimate government of China, however, as the situation stagnated and the relevance of China became more important, most countries now recognize the People's Republic of China as the legitimate government of China.

As for the NATO question - no, no such rule exists and nobody would want such a rule because it is a defence pact.

The answer is yes.

Yeah, either that or [any]. I don't know why people would be offended.

Also, did you mean enby? I just realised you said nimby (not in my back yard) which is not quite the same thing lol

I know there are MSCs to make sure more data is e2ee like reactions.

As for anyone putting that in their platform pitch, it seems the closest was the representative of Gematik, the German Health service though most platform pitches are rather vague in details. You can read all of the candidates (do note that not all candidates were elected so do double check) https://matrix.org/governing-board/elections/2024/

I've seen a lot of people specify (any) or a combination in those cases but it is theoretically true, yes. (I don't think that's true here though)

Do you care to elaborate?

I can't tell what you're trying to say honestly.

It sounds like you are more concerned with the matrix.org homeserver than matrix itself.

No. The foundation also has massive influence in how the clients and protocol develop. These tools that I'm talking about are not built-in for matrix, they're largely exclusive to instance admins through mjolnir or require the usage of bots. This is not a good state of affairs.

Matrix.org homeserver will eventually go away for personal use, this is the plan for the future.

I don't believe this is true. I've never read such a thing.

The bullet points you listed are all currently able to be realized on any self-hosted homeserver.

Not every room or space will be hosted by someone self-hosting their server. I find it kind of appalling that this would be the solution. It's certainly not what I've heard from people working on projects around moderation.

well the statistic you show does make it clear that little people expressed interest in moderation and/or trust & safety.

As for how I relate cisnormativity and the demographics of the board, I feel that people who may have no experience with harassment may not prioritize the construction of moderation tools.

On the technical side, I've expanded here in another comment here.

I've personally heard that Mjolnir works not great when it comes to admin things but the biggest problem that I'm aware is that Mjolnir does not really solve the problem for individuals with their rooms and spaces to moderate. I believe Draupnir (https://github.com/the-draupnir-project/Draupnir) is trying to help with this particular flaw with Mjolnir.

One of the other things in terms of T&S is that it is my understanding that the team is too small and the tooling to handle the reports of abuse on matrix.org are not good enough.

As for mod tools more concretely, I think that people who are admins of rooms or spaces should have the following abilities:

• Clearer moderation roles
• More interaction between permissions in rooms and spaces
• Filters for slurs
• Blocking homeservers (in case of abuse)
• Reports that actually go to them

It should be noted that I'm not very familiar with the tools on matrix as I largely have little trust in my ability to moderate there.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to evangelize Lemmy on reddit, and one of the most common criticisms is the possibility of defederation and getting cut off from major communities.

Frankly, if this is a concern to people and I believe it does concern some, they should not use federated platforms as this will always happen.

We know that Lemmy slowly bled tens of thousands of users in the months following the reddit API exodus as users drifted back to reddit. Although it’s impossible to know how many of those users were annoyed by the defederation drama, I think it’s safe to say that the number wasn’t zero.

The steep decline in active users on Beehaw in the months following the decision is probably the best source of hard evidence supporting my claim.

You're saying that the decline in active users on Beehaw is a result of these defederations while simultaneously acknowledging that Lemmy as a whole lost users. Maybe it is true, maybe it is not. I could not make such a claim with this information.

Do keep in mind that 11.6% of people chose to not answer that question so this 75% is not a very accurate metric. Not only that but ~35% of people declared to not come from the United States. I will also mention that our goal is not to reach an average that is close to a country's demographics - we expect a bigger than average amount of people to be from a minorised group.

We could, that was something I had personally looked at but it is quite a bit of effort for nothing if there is no big split.

It would be possible to keep up with Lemmy's API changes though it would certainly help if Lemmy's API was actually versioned.

My personal opinion on this is that we should probably take an allowlist approach to federation to be able to be more proactive about instances that could be threats for Beehaw.

I think we've managed to keep our culture to some degree through stronger moderation when it comes to out-of-instance users and making use of defederations.

That said, I wish we had more flexible federation options, such as for example, letting our users interact with certain instances without letting people from those instances interact in ours.

Yeah.. seems like a baserow bug. It renders fine on Firefox mobile. Not sure if it'd work in Desktop mode in Chromium browsers - worth a try for those with this issue.

Images aren’t federated through ActivityPub so I don’t really see how deleting media is supposed to work.

Yes, they are. Every instance downloads everyone's images for a "cached" version that is currently never used. This is what makes this problem especially insidious and straight up dangerous in cases like CSAM.