It’s an objective improvement over EMV which doesn’t protect privacy at all.

Taler protect payer privacy while exposing income information. Meaning it can help collect taxes to pay for infrastructure, education, public service, …

That’s a fine compromise. I hope Taler become a practical alternative to EMV and other shitty payment systems being pushed by banks.

same on all chains. All have a proposal, discussion, implementation, waiting period (for code to be deployed), and activation

I though most of those steps didn’t occur on-chain in the case of bitcoin. But I could be mistaken.

Would you mind sharing a link with the equivalent information on bitcoin, ie its governance process and how each governance operation (proposal, vote, activation ) is handled by the chain?

I’m looking at BIP-1. It explains how to submit a proposal via mailing list and versioned repository, ie off-chain.

Also looking at BIP-9. It does rely on the chain for governance, and allow polling for the most popular soft-fork. But it focus on exclusively on testing soft forks, which severely limit its usefulness.

allowing multiple backward-compatible changes (further called “soft forks”) to be deployed in parallel.

It seems BIP-9 doesn’t provide a solution to propose/vote/activate the larger non-backward-compatible changes, ie doesn’t help prevent hard forks. And big social and environmental issues affecting bitcoin probably require such large change.

Tezos would still require all nodes to upgrade to the code which contains the new algorithm. It can’t just automatically know what the new code is. It then can schedule these to activate at a certain block using a signaling system of some sort.

Code proposal, vote on new code activation of new code, are all Tezos on-chain operation. These operations include a hash of the new code to be deployed. There’s some off-chain work happening to update tools, which I guess include compiling said code. So you’re right, some off-cain action is needed for deployment https://www.tezosagora.org/learn#an-introduction-to-tezos-governance

My understanding is that compared to BTC governance, a larger part of the process happen on-chain. Also there is a relatively smaller portion of nodes (baker) involved in creating/verifying blocks that must update. This allowed various protocol changes without forks over the years.

Good point, with BIPs the Bitcoin community is more adaptive than I gave it credit for.

It still doesn’t prevent soft nor hard fork. My understanding is that a change in Bitcoin’s consensus logic require ALL users/miners to take action to deploy the new software to avoid hard forks. That’s impossible in practice. So a BIP to change the consensus logic, either tweaking or replacing PoW, would necessary cause a hard fork even if it’s approved.

Not all chains handle this the same way nor suffer from this. For instance, using Tezos means automatically accepting algorithm changes after they are approved. This makes hard forks much less likely.

Tezos incorporates a built-in, on-chain mechanism for proposing, selecting, testing, and activating protocol upgrades without the need to hard fork. This mechanism makes Tezos a self-amending blockchain and allows any user to propose changes to the economic protocol, which defines the possible blockchain operations and how they are processed.

Bitcoin sure have more hype and higher price, but appears to have more difficulty evolving compared to others.

lol it can’t adjust on public approval. It’s software that runs.

It can. Software is written by people. Its authors can build it with an update mechanism.

Crypto currencies such as Tezos have a vote-based update mechanism and a community that periodically submits algorithm changes for approval.

Bitcoin doesn’t have a update mechanism that allows smooth changes. Its take it or leave it (aka hard fork). Peole can move away from it, and it’s sad that so many still haven’t.

The network was built to adjust

Then why doesn’t it adjust to avoid negative social and environmental effects? Probalby because it’s not possible to adjust bitcoin’s algorithm, only some parameters, and because miners don’t have enough intensive to abandon bitcoin for something less destructive.

My understanding is it’s not possible to modify nor fix bitcoin’s core algorithm, which include the difficulty and consensus logic.

A hard fork is possible, which means leaving the bitcoin network and setting up an alternative (hopefully better) network with a different algorithm.

Malware that feature crypto mining is probably still using GPUs, since the person getting the coins is not paying the utility bill.

Thanks for the refresher. I’m aware of the basics, but assumed the difficulty measured by the number of zeros could only increase. Apparently difficulty can decrease, and I’ve read it’s expected to decrease very soon to keep the system running a while longer.

Bitcoin’s creator was smart enough to design a system that automatically adjust to remain profitable for several years without intervention, but not smart enough to foresee social and environmental costs.

It’s a good example that illustrate why automated systems shouldn’t be left running unsupervised, even if it’s designed by the best minds with the best of intentions.

The headline isn’t accurate as usual, but isn’t completely wrong either. Anyway, the article you’ve quoted is more informative than the one I posted, so thanks for that quote.

We’re at a point where it’s no longer profitable for individual miners, even if we ignore externalities like the cost we’re collectively paying due to pollution and carbon emissions.

Mining require increasing amount of energy and resources as time pass, so unless there’s a radical change in bitcoin’s algorithm or unless energy becomes free, we should expect mining to get non-profitable in more and more situations.

Given the current price of bitcoin, I suspect the market still doesn’t know.

If someone only agree because of a dark pattern or agressive/repetitive consent popups, then it’s not free and informed consent.

It’s pressuring visitors into accepting something they wouldn’t otherwise accept, and it might not be compliant.

Clearly there need to be more enforcement of GDPR.

Those companies doing business in the EU should have been looking for alternatives since at least 2016 when GPDR was adopted.

It doesn’t seem realistic to rely on targeted advertising if that require opt-in, informed consent. I suspect only a small fraction of visitors would agree.

I hope contextual advertising and similar less-invasive approaches becomes the norm again. Contextual advertising have been used for decades in Newspapers, on the TV and radio.

Please have Police focus on better using the data it already has. Rather than just giving it the power to hoard more personal data and endangering public liberties.

Existing police records are riddled with errors:

• https://www.propublica.org/article/politic-il-insider-chicago-gang-database
• https://www.lesnumeriques.com/vie-du-net/alerte-cnil-trop-erreurs-dans-fichiers-police-n29925.html

Piling more data on top won’t fix these errors. Putting more effort in fixing errors would make the records more useful to police, and would probably avoid ruining the lives of innocents people.

Adding a second ISP can provide resiliency and ensure a critical infrastructure stays connected even when 1 ISP fails.

I would be surprised if the White House didn’t already have such resiliency.

My speculation is they just want to avoid red tape and circumvent the restriction and strict access control applied to existing connections.

There’s always a beer in Phoronix articles. Please drink responsibility, ie as little as possible.

This isn’t an all-or-nothing thing.

For Windows users, it’s already a good progress to switch to Firefox/VLC/LibreOffice/NextCloud from closed source alternatives.

The devil’s in the details. And there aren’t much details in this article.

He shoudn’t send DanSupp a cheque directly, but help him setup a non-profit or foundation for Pixelfed, then give that foundation a cheque.

Dan is doing a good job developing Pixelfed, but it looks like a one-man show, and that’s a bottleneck for the project.

No. This is no help if YouTube blocks your IP range. And it’s not a podcast feed.

Yes, but many YouTube channels don’t have a RSS podcast equivalent. YouTube is somewhat of a walled garden, like Spotify is.