You can make as many Bitcoin addresses as you want. You can look up an addresses balance but not a wallet’s balance. It’s not as clear as you’re making it sound.

Bitcoin over Lightning is much, much more opaque, and it’s where the majority of Bitcoin transactions are now occurring. You can’t look up somebody’s balance. The only people who know about the transaction are you, the recipient, and any intermediary nodes used to forward the transaction. Privacy is continuing to improve on lightning and main chain.

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In the last two months, Nostr users alone (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 2.6 million tips (individual transactions) over Bitcoin lightning. In that same time period, Bitcoin main chain did around 20-40k. Most transactions are on lightning by number of transactions. Maybe not by total value moved, but lightning is pretty opaque and grants additional privacy, so it’s hard to measure for that reason.

Lightning continues to grow and get upgrades (look up BOLT12 if you are curious about the latest upgrades which bring additional privacy enhancements).

It’s open source, and it’s fully self-custody which are two important features. Having a wallet directly integrated into the e-mail client is nice, being able to send payments to other users just knowing their e-mail address instead of their public key is pretty cool. It does automatic address rotation to preserve privacy. Wish it supported lightning for cheaper/faster transactions and additional privacy but hopefully that feature comes in time.

It’s a self-custody wallet and open source. It’s regular main-chain BTC but it does automatic address rotation. Unfortunately it doesn’t support lightning, which is where the majority of Bitcoin transactions occur. Lightning offers significantly increased privacy, sub-second transactions and fees measuring in pennies.

Not a distro but Qubes. Incredible security and privacy out of the box. Not for everyone but absolutely one of the most interesting developments in the OS world in the past decade or two.

There’s lots of ways this could be done quickly, easily, and privately. A previous attempt at this (flattr) was promising but before its time. Making Bitcoin micropayments via lightning comes to mind as a way to do this. In the past two months alone, Nostr users (decentralized twitter clone similar to mastodon) have tipped each other around a million dollars for their posts. There have been nearly three million tips in the last two months. Sending funds via lightning takes under a second for pennies or less in fees. No intermediary to report your browsing history to, no need to trust an intermediary to handle payments, no burdensome need for Mozilla to run payment infrastructure, and it all works in every country right out of the box. And there’s plenty of room for this to scale since it’s not limited by blockchain space.

Nostr already has a feature to automatically split up your tips according to which posts you reacted to. You can say “I want to tip $5 a month, split it up among posts I react with a heart to”. This could easily be extended to which websites you visited, all websites would need to do is put their lightning url in the page source, DNS record, etc.

Nostr stats: https://stats.nostr.band/

Yes quite a few as other commenters have indicated. Another good one is !boinc@sopuli.xyz. BOINC is an open source platform for volunteer computing that also has hundreds of scientific papers and citations under its belt. There are BOINC projects for medical research, space research, math, you name it, there’s probably a BOINC project for it. Anybody can start a BOINC project and you choose which projects you contribute CPU/GPU time to. You can pick more than one at a time. You may recognize some of the people hosting BOINC projects: Large Hardon Collider, Max Planck Institute, University of Washington Institute for Protein Design, etc

The difference is that such an extension isn’t reporting my traffic to a “trusted third party”. My browser is doing the tracking locally and sending micropayments to sites I visit.

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.

I’d rather not have ads at all and just pay $5 a month and have all the websites I visit get a portion of that $5. Some people tried this years ago, but the payment infrastructure wasn’t ready for it. Nostr can do it now though, their users “zapped” (tipped) nearly 1M USD (950k) over the past two months alone to content creators on their platform (twitter clone). And there’s a feature to automatically split a set donation among all the posts you’ve liked. No reason that can’t be done for the entire web. All instant, all with incredibly low fees, all payments made directly from you to the site you visited, no middlemen having to manage custody risk.

Browser extension tracks what sites I visit and then at the end of the month send them all tips. Sites could detect such an extension and automatically not show ads if you have it installed.

The question is, how do we pay content creators? Websites? Etc. Nostr has a potential solution. In the last two months, their users “zapped” aka tipped nearly a million dollars ($950k) to content creators on their platform. And it doesn’t just make it easy to pay content creators, but to also put a portion of your “zaps” towards the relay you use or development of the software if you want. If you have a nostr account, you can easily tie it to a lightning address to send/receive tips, nostr doesn’t take a fee. Relays can also portion out a bit of their zaps for the people who publish the most engaging content on their relay. The possibilities are quite extensive. And because it’s over lightning, zaps happen instantly and for pennies or less in fees. And you could expand this infrastructure from just tweets to web browsing as well. In nostr, as you could in theory for the rest of the web, you can say “I want to donate $5 a month, split it up among all the posts I liked”. Though, you can use nostr without zaps at all.

For those unfamiliar with nostr, it’s a decentralized social media software much like ActivityPub/mastodon, the main use right now is as a twitter/instagram clone but there’s also a reddit-style section being built up as well. Moderation abilities from the perspective of the instance/relay are identical to activitypub/mastodon. But one bonus if that if your relay goes down, you don’t lose your identity, since your identity and relay are separate. And if you change apps or relays (you are typically connected to multiple relays), all your content moves with you seamlessly. And the payment/zap infrastructure is all decentralized, relays don’t ever custody or manage the payments. If you tip a content creator, it goes directly from you to them. The lightning network has basically limitless transaction capacity. If you have cash app, it supports lightning, so you can already send zaps (you will need different apps to receive zaps though because cash app doesn’t support the LNURL standard). Strike natively supports it. And because it’s lightning, it works in every country automatically.

Long-term, if I am a content creator, which “fedi”-type system is going to be attractive to me? One where users can send me tips and mircopayments or one where they can’t? This is why I think nostr is going to win out long-term over AP/Mastodon. Mastodon could add this kind of functionality but I don’t get the impression they’re open to it. People may not want to commit to yet another $5/month subscription to a YouTuber’s patreon or nebula or whatever, but they are happy to tip 1-10c after watching a video. So there’s a psychological beauty to micropayments as well. As some random person I have made like 7c on tips this month, but I’ve also given out plenty to other people.

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Instead of trying to clone, it may be easier to:

• Install Fedora to new drive
• Reinstall any packages you modified from base install
• Copy over your home directory including hidden directories, plus /etc

A lot of OSS projects and small non-profits? Yes. The cost to entry is “be willing to volunteer” and very few people pay that cost so basically anybody can get in. These aren’t exactly competitive positions. And if they improve the software honestly idk if they’re a shaman healer or whatever. I care about the software. As long as their energy healing garbage isn’t somehow getting into the software who cares?

But as you experience more you do know more

About some things. You also lose knowledge with time as well as mental acuity. The brain is a leaky memory storage device.

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Pretty well established case law at this point. If it weren’t, you’d see Tor relay operators, small ISPs, etc being hauled into court constantly.

• https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230
• https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/eff-tor-legal-faq/

A. I wouldn’t because that implies by being around longer I know more or am more right about some things than young people. I’ve accumulated knowledge, but that doesn’t mean anybody should listen to what I have to say or that I’m wiser. There are certainly times that is true, but it’s also true that we have a lot to learn from them and we should listen to them.

B.

• Health is your greatest wealth.
• Love is the answer and all that matters. Be good to others
• Stay humble
• Stack sats