Makes me even more bullish on Monero. Once upon a time, they shit themselves when they heard "Bitcoin". Yeah...

Can anyone help me out? Why do I miss IRC so much? Is it really just "Nostalgia"? How do you feel about it?

The bridges are being torn down now. Be careful.

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.

Finally... 😃
#vanadium #grapheneos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFoeLGg1r2A

Geil.