Concerning ecash, I was skeptical from the beginning and often expressed my doubt here on Nostr. People who follow me already know that. Nonetheless I was open enough to give it a try, but after years of testing and using ecash I came to the conclusion that, all in all, it really is a backward step for Bitcoin and a waste of time. To this day it's been the only layer I continuously lost money on. Besides, I cannot count how often I had to dox myself just to contact mint operators again and again to tell them that their mint is down (often they didn't even know it up to that point) or to report bugs to developers. Sometimes it was just Lightning things that caused failed payments / redemptions. You know, things that never happen on Bitcoin (the 1st layer), which I began to appreciate more and more with all the tradeoffs and complexities we introduced. Last but not least, if you are OG enough, you know that you can already have a "bearer token" experience on Bitcoin. And it really doesn't cost you more than ten cuckbuck cents right now. You just export the private key and hand over the private key to the payee. Good wallets like Ashigaru and even Blue Wallet can handle bare private keys pretty well by just sweeping the funds to the payee's next unused address. That,'s it. No tradeoffs. No rugpull-risks. No middlemen. No sleepless nights. It's reliable and simple. The tradeoffs - introducing this kind of complexity, 3rd parties and most importantly, giving up custody - aren't ones that I'm willing to make anymore. In fact to me these are exactly the issues of the legacy financial system that Bitcoin was supposed to fix. I have no more interest in ecash.

If in 2026 your fancy new mobile Bitcoin Wallet still a) connects to a public electrum server without asking me first if I want to use my own or a friend's one and / or b. doesn't have a tor daemon built in which is enabled by default I won't use it and I will give a damn how shiny it looks. Now seriously, you get that this would be such a big win for privacy and wouldn't take a lot of effort to get implemented? I'm not even talking about hiding addresses or amounts. And I'm not speaking for myself here but for the normies out there. There is practically no mobile Bitcoin wallet out there which fulfills those criteria (except for Ashigaru maybe). Defaults matter guys. And unfortunately Bitcoin has very bad defaults. At this point I'm not sure anymore if I would recommend using Bitcoin to the average Joe out there, let alone activist and dissidents. So disappointing. No wonder that Monero is gaining ground.

In service again after I contacted them. I think they weren't even aware of the outage. View quoted note →

You would never allow your face and ID to be scanned to get permission to buy bitcoin, right? RIGHT? View quoted note →

@Vitor Pamplona Hello Vitor. How is Amethyst able to download files which I haven't confirmed before? And where are the files stored? I cannot find them. And what is that "untitled" thing? To be honest this makes me a little bit uncomfortable. I think until now I haven't seen any other app which behaves like this.

@jb55 There is a very weird issue for quite a while now when I make posts on Damus. I don’t know how to describe it. It seems to me that my posts aren’t broadcasted or something like that. I can’t see my own posts on Damus. But when I switch to Amethyst (where my post does appear) and click on “broadcast” it suddenly shows up in Damus. Any explanation for this? Is it a known bug or maybe just a user error? I don’t get it.

Hey Apple addicts. I’m sure you noticed how Apple totally screwed up Orbot since iOS 18.3 (or so I think). Do you want Orbot to work again? Add the two lines as shown on the screenshot and disable the “Always clear cache” switch. The pre-configured 5MBs seem to be too cautious while the cache clearing seems to consume more memory than if you just let Orbot build and then read from the cache. #tor #ios #orbot

Saylor is clearly owned by the state, exactly like the priests were back in the Church days. The priests main purpose was to disseminate state ideology (follow the king, the king is anointed by god himself, blabla) and in return they were given wealth and power. In that same sense, Saylor is owned by the state. He can keep “his” bitcoin but in return he has to do some persuasive work to make Bitcoiners obedient and loyal to the rules (not the self-enforcing voluntarily accepted protocol rules of course) by being an untiring advocate of KYC/AML-compliance, making sure miners are also regulated and kyced, not using coin-joins, in fact not using bitcoin at all but entrusting them to US financial institutions which is insanely absurd. It is really obvious that Saylor’s mission is to help the state capture Bitcoin. And it astounds me how many bitcoiners still fall for this scam and keep simping for this probably most spooky guy we have ever had in this space.

how push notifications are used to fingerprint & track you across different apps.