AI helps by making it easier to write software. I'm not sure in what other ways it might help.

The one that comes closest is The Bitcoin Company. If you buy one of their Visa or Mastercard cards, not only is there no fee, you actually get a slight discount in the form of "sats back."

Plus, if you end up with a leftover balance on a Bitcoin Company card, you can use that leftover balance (with another LN deposit) to fund a new card. Which makes it very close to what Pay With Moon offered.

On a related note, Pay With Moon is back, but they now have a fee of 1% on every tx, minimum fee of $1. Which is terrible.

The two non-reloadable options above can be purchased without KYC. The Bitcoin company's offer is particularly noteworthy, because while it is not technically reloadable, there is a partial workaround: if you have a leftover balance, you can use that balance + another LN deposit to fund a new card. So it kinda "feels" a little bit like reloading a card, even though it's technically a new card every time, with new digits.

Noteworthy: The Bitcoin Company's card has a workaround for its non-reloadability. If you have a leftover balance on it, you can use that leftover balance + a lightning deposit to fund a new card. Which makes it "feel" reloadable, only it's technically a new card with new digits

Google’s AI made this chart for me logging Japan’s treasury balances before and after each of the last 5 interventions:



The chart suggests a surprising result, namely, despite occasionally selling reserves to prop up their currency, Japan’s reserves appear to be “growing” rather than shrinking over time.

yep, looks like they still have some reserves

I also found this spreadsheet, published by the government, which says how much money in US treasuries each country has:

https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/tic/Documents/slt_table5.html

They appear to publish figures for each month, and the last update included figures up through February of this year. At that time, Japan held 1.2 trillion dollars in US treasuries, more than any other country. Assuming they sold some just now to reduce their money's inflation rate, I hope the next update to the spreadsheet tells us how many treasuries they lost through this intervention.

I don't think it's as simple as "mining centralization would not be a problem anymore" but it would at least be a smaller problem

Stratum V2 is a more open source altenative to datum. Both do the same thing but datum's server code is not open source yet, and consequently only one pool is running it (Ocean).

Even if SV2 was the norm, it would still be bad if there was a very small number of pools, because there is an unsolved problem which neither SV2 nor datum solves. And that is, the pools running either one can stop responding to you if they don't like your block templates. If that happens, your main option is to switch to another pool running SV2 or datum. If none is available, you can run your own pool, but that's already an option right now and those protocols don't really make it any easier

Lots of work to do

Needed: an open source, disintermediated hashrate market where messaging happens on a more robust foundation than telegram

I'd like to make a proof of concept based on nostr