• 18 Posts
  • 145 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 4th, 2023

help-circle




  • 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.



  • 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 is the same speed it’s always been. Blocks happen every 10 minutes. The transaction is transmitted at the speed of light but final settlement requires a block. 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. If you use Bitcoin lightning (a scaling layer built on top of Bitcoin which moves transactions off-chain but secures them on-chain), transactions take under a second for pennies in 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.

    Bitcoin cannot be diluted (~27:25) REALITY CHECK: Bitcoin is always being diluted until it reaches its hard limit.

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

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

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










  • 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.


  • Inflation is caused by inflationary currency. Any other inflation caused by supply chain issues, corporate greed, lack of market competition, etc is just added on top of that. Fiat inflationary currency is a rather new invention in terms of the human timeline. They aim for 2-3% inflation in “good years”. Central banks are not to be trusted.

    Think of it: in the last 50 years, everything has gotten cheaper to produce thanks to increasing mechanization, outsourcing to cheap labor/low regulation countries, and extremely efficient supply chains. Yet so many things “costs more” than it did 50 years ago. Even basics like bread. How is that the case? Shouldn’t it cost less? Where is that “extra efficiency” going if not to lower prices? The answer: bread is the same value it’s always been, the money has gotten less valuable. This is how they keep working class people running on a treadmill, never able to achieve economic mobility.

    Inflationary currency devalues the currency you worked hard to earn by increasing the supply. It hits the middle class the worst because they have more of their net wealth in cash, often in the form of emergency funds, savings, and putting together enough money for a down payment on a home. Rich people have their money in assets which aren’t harmed by currency inflation. Poor people live hand to mouth. If you want to identify the causes of increasing wealth disparity, the inability of people to save money is a major one.





  • Same thing whenever you see articles about Bitcoin’s energy use. Or the energy usage of any tech service/product:

    • For some reason blames the product or service people are using, not politicians for failing for decades to invest in renewable energy.
    • No contextual information (how much does the remittance industry use? How much energy does SWIFT, IBAN, or printing paper money use)? How efficiently do these systems actually use energy?
    • No mention of the many useful things it does with that energy or why it uses energy in the way it does. (Send money across the globe in under a second for under a penny in fees to anybody with a cellphone and halfway reliable internet) (low fees available on Bitcoin lightning)
    • No mention that most of that energy comes from renewables or how being a “buyer of last resort” for energy actually helps build out renewable grids since grid operators can guarantee whatever energy capacity they provision will be bought. Doesn’t even look at energy mix and demand curves.

    Just ragebait tailored to their readers who already have strong negative opinions about this asset class but not about bonds or stocks or other asset classes for some reason. Even though Bitcoin has kept all its promises for 15 years in a row, never been hacked, never experienced an hour of downtime, or bank holiday, and never had its value printed away by an ever increasing supply (supply is capped at 21 million coins).