What happened with supposed thousands of drones that were flying all over New Jersey 2 years ago?

I use a desktop.

It's not that these people need Bitcoin or anything, it's that the people who need it need that these people also use it, so they have to be led into using it even though they don't care.

There is also the greater goal of starving the State and associated evil elites of their money-printing machine, and that can't be achieved unless basically everybody is using money they can't print.

> IF you want to move from one context to another then you have to generate the ZK proof

I don't understand. What is this ZK proof you're talking about and what are these "contexts"?

I did, it is better, but also kinda sucks. In my understanding you have to rely on some big servers that keep the full history of all nullifiers forever so they can compute proofs on behalf of normal users. How much can that scale, if each person is making 3 transactions per day, and if each transaction will use more 2 nullifiers on average due to mixed inputs? That's over a petabyte per year just in storage.

Or maybe I misunderstood the requirements. Clarifications welcome.

It's not clearly self-custodial. Nothing is clear, everything is awfully confusing and that's how everybody is tricked about the claims of Spark, but not only Spark, it also applies to Ark and Lightning itself.

Yes, I'm super married to a $5 airdrop I will be getting, already making plans to buy a bag of milk with it.

What is the flaw in hashrate escrows?

This is true. If Monero adopted Drivechains I think it could become a real contender. Still, though, it would have to migrate most of its activity to the sidechain and make mainchain very small, in that sense it would be basically the same as eCash, only with a bigger initial user base and name recognition.

The bigger question to me is: can Monero scale to billions of people via Thunder-style sidechains but with Monero technology? If yes then those sidechains should probably be used in eCash instead, but I don't know.

Even if we assume away the problem of data availability it wouldn't be great to have the entirety of the world's monetary transactions depend on a single company building the blocks and publishing zk-proofs. I guess you can say this block generation can be made to be more open, but I think the incentives are that it would be very centralized regardless, no?

It's a similar problem of Spark: even if you could make it be totally trustless it would still be bad for it to be controlled by a single company.

I used to think there were two ways of scaling Bitcoin: one would be with trusted entities, i.e. banks, but deployed in a decentralized way that limited liability and government capture, and the other way was with Drivechain.

Given what we're seeing with all the Lightning custodial wallets being targeted, implementing full KYC and migrating to Spark (which is becoming almost the one world central bank) that first option is looking worse.

(To be fair my plan was never to have these companies be the custodians in the first place, but it was a bad plan anyway.)