This is a good overview of how silent payment work, thank you for posting it. I learned some new things!

but L2s are often centralized and cannot withstand governmental pressure

This is true on other networks but not true of Bitcoin (lightning). Lightning is even more decentralized than L1 is, you can run a lightning node on an android phone.

it is more about culture and a lack of demand from the Bitcoin community.

Absolutely agree with this, but the culture has been changing. Auditability of supply of coin has been the major hurdle privacy wise, but even with keeping that there are some major changes that can be made to improve privacy. It’s a common topic at Bitcoin conferences now, everybody knows this is the direction Bitcoin needs to move in (and has been moving in).

As far as Bitcoin goes, there’s also coinjoin. Lightning transactions are pretty opaque since they don’t occur on L1. If I have a lightning node (which I run on an android phone), and you have a lightning node, and we make a tx between each other, nobody knows it. Even for a multi-hop transaction, nobody aside from those hops knows about it. Setting up a lightning channel requires an L1 transaction, but you can make a lightning channel with anybody and then send funds to anybody, it’s not a 1:1 relationship. In other words, if I want to send you money via lightning, as long as I have an existing lightning channel with somebody else, I can do it.

Bitcoin’s privacy continues to get better, it’s a common refrain at Bitcoin conferences that privacy needs to be focused on more. Monero is still king here but it’s losing ground in this area. Bolt12 is a new thing being implemented that helps with privacy as well.

L2 means “layer two”, in short, a way of conducting transactions “off-chain” while relying on the “base chain”/L1 for security. It helps keep chain bloat minimal.

There are various ways to do this with various trade-offs in terms of speed/privacy/cost/centralization/etc. Bitcoin’s main one is lightning (there’s also Ark), Eth has like a dozen of them most of which are super centralized but you’ve got Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Nova, etc. They all work a little differently.

Lightning’s concept is very simple: you make a “channel” on-chain by depositing funds into that smart contract which lives on-chain (1 transaction). The channel exists between you and one other party. The channel starts with a balance of 100/0 meaning all the BTC is yours (because you deposited the BTC). When you send BTC to the other party, you update the “balance” of that channel by both of you signing a thing saying it’s updated (now it’s 99/1). This happens off-chain. At any point, either of you can close the channel (on-chain) and claim any BTC that’s due to them according to the balance. In this example, you would get back 99 BTC and the other person would get 1. You can also transact with other parties by sending BTC “through” a chain of existing channels. And these transactions not only don’t require paying on-chain fees, they can also be confirmed in < 1 second because you don’t need to wait for the next block. You can have essentially infinite transactions back-and-forth in a channel, but one “side” of the channel cannot dip below 0. Almost all of this is abstracted away for the end user.

You can’t just keep increasing the block size. More block size = bigger blocks = more bandwidth and disk space to host a full node. It’s why the majority of Eth’s nodes are now hosted in one of like three corporate datacenter providers. Sure, disks keep getting bigger and more affordable but big pipes to move that much data haven’t kept up at the same pace. Bitcoin cash is now 16x Bitcoin’s original block size, and they are still calling for larger blocks to keep tx costs low. Eventually, with any block size, especially if you want to capture a good portion of humanity’s transactions, you will end up with massive competition for blockspace aka high fees.

Blockchain has a fundamental problem. If you put it on the ledger, all nodes have to store that forever. The more you put on the ledger, the bigger that ledger gets, the more resources you need to host it/participate, the more centralized your network becomes. Adding more block space is one solution, but comes at the cost of decentralization and doesn’t scale to all of humanity’s transactions let alone even just replacing SWIFT/IBAN. L2s are another solution, you get faster transfers and fees not directly coupled to chain space in exchange for slightly less trustworthiness (you may have to send a channel “back to chain” if a bad actor tries something, and you have to monitor that channel and chain to see if you need to do that, which is all handled automatically). With Bitcoin’s L2, I can send funds anywhere in under a second for pennies in fees. It actually works for buying coffee. In the space 1 transaction took on chain, I can now have billions of transactions. Not just between me and the person I opened the channel with, but between me and any other person who has coins on lightning. And you can run a lightning node on a raspberry pi or android phone. Lightning isn’t perfect, the inbound liquidity thing is annoying (though Ark and Fedimint proposals solve this in different ways), but it works really well and has been stable and usable for years. The inbound liquidity issue is being worked on as well through automated liquidity provisioning. Not perfect, but leagues ahead of Monero which has zero L2 and zero roadmap for an L2.

Tldr: Monero’s fees are low because there isn’t much competition for blockspace. And it’s slow. Because it’s all on L1. That space will run out as it scales, it’s up to Monero to decide how to solve that problem.

I agree with the thrust of what you’re saying but… Monero can’t sustain any circular economy of scale without a working L2. Blockspace is limited. Every transaction humanity makes shouldn’t be stored on chain for perpetuity. That’s silly, wasteful, and leads to centralization. An L2 solves that problem. Without an L2, as Monero’s use increases, so will fees, variable block size will hold that off for a while but not forever and not without sacrificing decentralization.

Monero has no L2 and not enough dev talent or funding to make it happen in the next few years. Its protocol is different enough from Bitcoin that pre-existing solutions like lightning can’t just be bolted onto it without significant development effort and privacy trade-offs. Meanwhile over on Bitcoin’s side, they continue to add more functionality to their chain with a massive dev pool in terms of talent and funding. And privacy does continue to improve, lightning and ark are both pretty opaque depending on how you measure it. So if Monero wants to be a significant player on par with Bitcoin and have a circular economy, it will need to step up to the plate in a major way, and it needs to do that before Bitcoin implements privacy upgrades that place it at feature parity with Monero, which is imo only a matter of time since those folks tend to be pretty pro privacy. Yes, there’s “ossification”, but protocol improvements are still happening, especially outside the bounds of the main chain protocol itself (in L2, mining protocols, etc).

OpenShot went terribly for me. Cool idea but did not work. Ate hours and hours of editing by failing to export. I tried everything, even opening Github issues to figure out where the problem was. Systematically re-cut and edited and moved every clip. Still couldn’t get it to export even though everything worked flawlessly in editing and previewing. Tried switching to latest, alpha, whatever, none of them could export. Absolute nightmare. Do not recommend. Eventually had to re-do everything in kdenlive.

[email protected] flatpak also needs a flatpak maintainer! Your work would help people contribute their spare computational power to scientific research. If you are passionate about fighting cancer, mapping the galaxy, etc this is an awesome way to contribute to that effort in a very force multiplying way.

Idk about nostalgic but north korea makes their own linux distro, that’s gotta rank high on the interesting list

The distro used by the one laptop per child project. Fascinating GUI

Lindows

Here’s a list if you want to find your rep https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/13/politics/20240313-congress-tiktok-ban-bill-vote-dg/index.html

There is an apt variant that can do this, but nobody uses it. BitTorrent isn’t great for lots of small files overhead wise.

IPFS is better for this than torrents. The question is always “how much should the client seed before they stop seeding and how longs should they attempt to seed before they give up”. I agree something like this should exist, I have no problem quickly re-donating any bandwidth I use.

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Fees with lightning (Bitcoin) are often under a penny per transaction and transactions settle instantly. Usability has come a long way here.

[email protected] if I am donating GPU power to science research. There is a BOINC client for Linux but packaging is a hot mess (though getting better) and compatibility with graphics drivers is hit-or-miss. So any crunching rigs I have w/ GPUs all run Windows.

Do not use openshot. Really bad bugs that will make it impossible to export your project and make all your time working with it wasted. Use kdenlive instead

I think you can still have users decide which projects get funding and have the system/organization/smart contract/etc automatically distribute funds to the libraries those projects depend on. 80% to the project, 20% to the libraries, etc.

If we let devs decide which projects get funding, they’re just going to always pick their own project. Since that doesn’t align with what users want, users won’t want to donate. If you want users to donate, you need to let them have some say in what their projects their donations go to.

The discussion portion wouldn’t happen over BTC, that’s just for funds management and voting. Discussion could happen on a forum, lemmy community, matrix chat, discord hangout, or other space. I suggest BTC because with smart contracts you can automate the voting process among stakeholders and make it so you don’t need to trust any single party to hold onto the money. It solves this exact problem of coordinating financial transactions with multiple people who can’t trust each other. It also solves the “how do we accept donations internationally easily” problem. Bitcoin has a market cap which places it in the top 25 countries by GDP, higher than Sweden. 850 billion dollars. On average, adoption and market cap grows year on on year. It may not be the USD, but it’s already more widely accepted than most national currencies.

Re: kivach, it’s not more widely used because many people don’t know about it, it’s using a lesser known cryptocurrency as a base, and people reflexively go “eew crypto” even though it’s perfect for solving these kinds of problems. Anytime you have a distributed decision-making process that needs to be international and you don’t want to trust a single party or parties to manage that system, crypto is good at solving that problem. Most people know it for solving that problem in the realm of currency production and decentralizing finance, but it has much broader implications in terms of anywhere you have distributed decision making. Note that kivach doesn’t have any kind of distributed decision making or voting, it’s basically just a smart contract bot that distributes coins based on github dependencies.

Bringing the state into this just brings us a bunch of problems and no solutions. For one, every state or block of states has different currency, and for every state whose population you want to participate, you have to some how bridge access to that state’s banking system and incorporate it into the system. And you can’t do it in a decentralized way, so you need some legal entity to be formed to handle all this and the staff to do all this. So that’s a nightmare. State-backed currencies can’t easily or cheaply be transmitted electronically across borders, and often, even within the same country. Or you have to use some third-party service like PayPal or Venmo to do this, which is its own set of complications. More nightmare. Plus, hello fees and making microtransactions prohibitively expensive. And that’s just moving funds from A to B, that’s not even getting into managing the voting system and navigating the laws every single country whose currency you use, each of which are going to have their own interpretation of whether or not your voting system is compliant with their legal system and whether or not they agree that funding a project like the Tor project is allowed. You may say you don’t care what Turkeys laws say, but if you want to maintain a bridge to their banking system, you have to. So that’s what incorporating the state and fiat system brings you. Or, you could write a smart contract once and have the administration of this system run automatically forever and be available to anyone in any country automatically. Running an international organization which receives funds, holds funds, votes on how to distribute those funds, distributes those funds is exactly the kind of thing blockchain excels at.

I would be interested in this as a user and as a dev for OSS projects. I currently donate to a few projects via OpenCollective, Github sponsors, etc. A few options:

• Users vote on how the money is spent, perhaps in proportion to how much they have donated over time. I think this is the simplest model that prevents self-dealing and accurately transmits user interest. You could use a quadratic funding model to better represent user interest instead of just giving the most vote weight to the users with the most money. On the other hand, assigning vote weight based on donations over time incentivizes users to donate more and keep donating (stopping a recurring donation could result in loss of vote weight and help redistribute vote weight as users become less active). You could also do a hybrid model: 50% is assigned according to vote weight based on total donations, 50% is assigned based on quadratic funding.
• Developers vote on how the money is spent. I don’t know how to allocate vote weight here. Devs should also submit a list of downstream libraries which would receive donations. (or is it upstream?).
• User and developers both vote on how it is spent. Vote weight could be distributed however, for example, 50% to users 50% to devs.

This kind of a system would be very possible to implement as a DAO, there are templates out there for making an organization like this. You could use BTC or ETH, both support DAOs. The benefit there is that since no single entity holds the money, no single entity has to file taxes and claim that money as income. It also automates the voting process and solves the issue of users having to trust a single person or organization to hold and distribute the funds. Making a DAO on Bitcoin lightning could reduce tx fees to less than a penny per donation.

You could also incorporate it as a non-profit depending on your jurisdiction. Many organizations like the Linux foundation have pursued this route, look at what things they have tried and what has worked. Also just a link to leave here for your research, I’m not suggesting you use this, I’m just saying it’s relevant interesting thinking in this area: https://blog.obyte.org/kivach-cascading-donations-for-github-repositories-2b175bdbff77

Other relevant links/research for you: https://github.com/Resolvr-io and https://nostrocket.org/About

Also research Gitcoin, they have used quadratic funding to fund a number of OSS web3 projects in a similar manner to what you’re proposing. I have participated in a few of their funding rounds as a donor and a recipient. Their interface is a mess but the concept is cool.

If you are going to “be your own bank” you need some very basic computer security skills like:

• Research the reputation of the wallet you are going to use.
• Don’t download wallets which aren’t open source
• Download wallets from their official dev site, not some third party repo.
• Don’t use Facebook search to find a wallet.
• If you are storing significant funds, use a multi-sig wallet.
• If you are not 100% confident in the security of a given wallet or system, send a smaller test transaction first before sending larger amounts

If you can’t be trusted to do that, you need to pick a trusted custodian to manage access to your funds (you know, like banks), preferably somebody who can get an insurance company to under-write your no-opsec-having-ass. Unfortunately, in the crypto world, these trusted custodians few and far between and have a terrible track record with exchange collapses etc. It’s getting better, but it’s still a mess. Hopefully as time goes on and the industry gets better regulated and more mature, this will be an easier thing to do.