Posts tagged "bitcoin (BTC)"

CFPCs

The label 'CBDC' is deceptive and should be discarded. I suggest a replacement: CFPC. Centralized Fiat Programmable Currency. This is important because the existing term throws us off the scent.

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I sense scant interest in crypto out there. What a difference a year makes! Take your mind back to New Year’s Eve, 2024-5. Cryptopians were not sparing the champagne. Trump had won; crypto had dodged a Democrat bullet. Ross Ulbricht was to be pardoned. On December 13th, bitcoin (BTC) had hit six figures in price. Bitcoin Maxis brashly weened1 whether $150,000 or $250,000 was a more likely target for the end of 2025.2 Everything was going to plan. I want to give my top reasons why things did not go to plan.

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Crypto For Lefties, Part Three

I have been trying to convince Lefties that crypto is a good option for them too. In Part One, I argued that it makes no sense to cling to the banksters’ form of money, e.g. dollars, in a reactionary way, unless you really are a Reactionary.1 In Part Two, I gave the reader my recommendation of the three best ‘Left-aligned’ cryptocurrencies to use. I know that most Lefties will have nagging doubts still. Doubts over crypto are reasonable. I will try to deal with some of them.

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Five Ways To Avoid Populist Flak

Populism is reaching fever-pitch. The corruption of our so-called ‘elites’ is worse than folk thought. I’m not a populist myself, but I do want a sharp course-correction. A few heads displaced by guillotine would not be out of order in my opinion. I won’t go on, because the Epstein saga is being covered by almost everyone at the moment. Here’s the question which got me thinking recently: We know that we aren’t part of the ‘elites’, but do they?

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Monero Under Attack

At time of writing, the Monero Blockchain is under attack, and not by some secretive group of hackers, as is usually the case, but by the leaders of a rival coin, qubic (QUBIC). Qubic didn't do anything clever. Qubic said to Monero's miners: "Keep mining XMR, but do it under our control, and we'll triple your profit." Admittedly, it doesn't take much to lure a miner. I think Monero's miners are more loyal than others.1 I suspect that Qubic lured away far fewer miners of monero (XMR) than implied. The whole organization smells fishy to me, but I won't go down that rabbit-hole here. There's a lot of cap-and-gown disquisition at the moment. Proof-of-Work in general is under scrutiny. Well-meaning nerds reach for technical solutions by default, but I think Satoshi's system was successful due to behavioural economics.

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RBF Workarounds

RBF (Replace By Fee) is not going away anytime soon. RBF is a pox on bitcoin in blatant and subtle ways, as I showed in recent posts. We are stuck with customers waiting at least ten minutes for their just-purchased wares. Actually, we’re not. There are workarounds and they work really well. In this post, I will go over the two best in my opinion: bitcoin over Lightning (BTC-LN), and litecoin (LTC).

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RBF, Elitism, and Crypto Purgatory

With crypto, you hit ‘send’, and your transaction goes to a kind of purgatory, and there it stays, waiting for the blockchain’s publishers to give it the thumbs up. That’s not the way I see it, mind you. That’s the widespread understanding. It’s no wonder that Computer Science grads push for shorter and shorter block-publishing times. Why spend too long in purgatory? I wrote recently about RBF for Bitcoin (BTC) and how it made BTC less usable as money. Now, I want to focus on how RBF puffed up this ‘purgatory’ misbelief. I will show how RBF unwittingly served the goals of Bitcoin’s competitors.

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The Coming Crypto Crisis Opportunity

I want to get ahead of this one. I suspect a plan is being rolled out. A recent article in the Financial Times alerted me to it. The plan is to coordinate media to blame crypto for the next big crash. I also think a big crash is closer than we think.

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The Luds Are Alright

The Luddites… being called one nowadays has an inescapable insinuation: “Give up.” I’ve been called a ‘Luddite’, despite me knowing my TCP from my IP. I don’t mind. I’d rather be a Luddite than a Tech-Bro. Nowadays, there’s a Neo-Luddite movement cropping up. It might not be long before the yahoos are smashing server racks. I’m not sure whether that’s ever appropriate.1 Should they just give up before they start? I will argue ‘no’.

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Two Kinds of Centralization

Recently, I wrote that, by calling it a 'Central Bank Digital Currency', it's too narrow, our scope of wariness. The ‘Central Bank’ part is not to be sneezed at. Just don't end up watching for wolves and getting mauled by a bear. It’s the centralized aspect itself which demands vigilance. If our form of money is centralized, then expect it to be conquered. This might come as a dramatic takeover, but more likely would happen with bribery and blackmail behind the scenes. I want to flesh this idea out with examples. Specifically, I want to look at the two main kinds of centralization with a cryptocurrency: centralized ‘mining’ (i.e. the minting of digital currency) and centralized development.

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What is P2P V4V?

P2P V4V stands for 'Peer-to-Peer, Value-for-Value'. 'Peer-to-Peer' is a way of doing commerce. 'Value-for-Value' is a way of doing commerce. Both have been around for a while now. As far as I know, joining them together is new. The result is a basic framework for commerce that is fairer and freeer and leverages existing 21st century technology.

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Why I Hate RBF

I never use RBF (”Replace By Fee”). There was one time when I was tempted. I needed to exchange bitcoin (BTC) for monero (XMR), because I needed to renew my VPN, which was expiring in 2 hours. Bitcoin sent, I checked after ten minutes… twenty… thirty… still ‘unconfirmed’… turns out, the fees had spiked, leaving me at the back of the queue; a perfect use-case for RBF! I genuinely will not partake in a piece of dev-meddling which ‘Rekt Bitcoin Forever’. Let me lay out why I have this extreme opinion.

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