MadisonPineda65H

Music

Upendo - Mining Block Party Auction

CandaceFoleyQBW

There is no such thing as a "decentralized stablecoin". If it's a stablecoin, there must be some central entity backing it. Alternatively, if there is some algorithm that controls the supply based on the exchange rate, there must be some central oracle that reports (signs) the exchange rate on-chain.

builders

It has been a while since I made a post about the work that occupies the centre of my mind and the majority of my days, the month of May was pretty rough for me mentally, and progress was a bit slow.

I am part way into integrating the use of libp2p to handle all the peer to peer connections and such, and I now need to have a distributed database that peers use to share information about their addresses, services, and hidden services they can intermediate to start a hidden service connection.

I was completely oblivious to the way one implements these things, even though I had several times previously looked at parts of the things, I wasn't applying them in code so I didn't remember.

Fortunately it's pretty simple. Libp2p has a very nice, advanced gossip system that forms sparsely connected graphs with low latency and high message volume efficiency, and there is a simple framework for setting up these gossip networks that basically hides all the complexity and your code simply reads and writes to it as though it was a serial console same as printing to the terminal or sending data over the network. Go is pretty sweet like this, almost every kind of connection in code can be addressed in the same way - open, read, write, close. 

I have got all the other pieces ready, the message types, some of the relay logic related to these messages (from the hidden service protocol prototype), I just needed the mechanism for propagation, and the chat examples in the libp2p Github repository are short, sweet and appear to be the exact thing I need, each node writes a message, and every other node eventually receives it.

With the database working, the gates open up to replicating all the protocol tests from their channel simulator form to a localhost-only, and then with all the protocols proven, setting up the app to launch, much of this part is sketched out pretty well by my colleague and sponsor.

So, I think realistically I will have finally made two separate computers connect via this way by the end of this month, and maybe by the end of august the testnet will be running.

## Support the Project:

I am on a very minimal income and extra funds will help a lot with some of the infrastructure and keeping all the workers healthy. If you want to send some sats, you can always send them to this account or you can use my Wallet of Satoshi LNURL wisevirgo03@walletofsatoshi.com - thanks in advance.

If you have skills in some area of p2p and LN programming, in Golang, and are looking for something interesting to contribute to, you are most welcome to pop into our telegram https://t.me/+lMrozLWIho1mYWY0 - I expect I will need to explain some things, give a primer on the layout and of course critique and analyse any of the original algorithms in it for security and performance problems.

## Thanks to everyone who has supported this project so far.

Hope to see you in the Telegram chat soon!

Indranet Progress Report

Operation Saylor - Episdoe 1/120

EarlLambSAK

I think I've only used it three times.

One was targeted at you, before I found out you couldn't see it.
One was while a few of us in the saloon were trying to figure out what downzapping does look like.
The only real one was some stupid post calling everyone racist. That's the exact kind of toxic internet content that I don't want SN to devolve into.

Stacker_Sports

[meta] The ~fedimint territory is now switched over to ~ecash

MarciaShieldsMCI

Happy piggy bank!
![Happy piggy bank!](https://github.com/camillo777/memes/blob/main/bitcoin_pig.png?raw=true)

ecash

Until recently, I was under the impression that America was founded on the principles of free market capitalism, whereby private individuals and companies made their own economic decisions without a central government or state actor tipping the scales in favor of certain companies or individuals over others.

After reading [Americana](https://www.bookmarked.club/books/americana), it’s clear to me that I was wrong. The author Bhu Srinivasan makes the case from the earliest days of America’s existence, state and federal governments have played key roles in funding, protecting, and advancing US technology, as well as over-riding property rights, and regulating industries that become too powerful.

I was under the impression that this kind of state involvement in markets was mostly a modern phenomenon, but the track record of great American innovations that relied on state support tells me otherwise.

Below are a few interesting examples Bhu highlights in his book of government intervention in the early days of America…

##### Examples of Government Intervention in American Markets

- In the 1790s, New York offered monopoly rights to entrepreneurs to create a steamboat that could successfully travel from Manhattan to Albany, enabling people to settle the interior of the state at scale. The first successful voyage in 1807 granted Robert Livingston and Robert Fulton a monopoly on all steamboat traffic in New York for 20 years.
- In 1817, the state of New York funded America’s first long-distance canal with $7.8 million of debt, at a time when the entire US federal government budget was only $8 million. This project did work, and set off a chain-reaction of other states (Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and others) to fund similar canal projects, which ended up being responsible for 10x-ing the populations of the region now known as America’s Midwest.
- In the early 1830s when entrepreneurs began trying to build railroads in America, states granted eminent domain rights to companies that forced property owners to sell their land in order to enable more direct rail lines.
- In 1843 the US House of Representatives funded Samuel Morse with $30,000 to build a telegraph that would work across long distances in outdoor settings. Morse’s success eventually enabled instant communication across America.
- The tariff act of 1870 imposed a $28/ton tariff on imported British steel (which cost $30-$40/ton without the tariff) to allow American steel producers to be profitable while they became more efficient and competitive. This worked, but meant that Americans were forced to pay almost twice as much for their steel in the late 1800s.
- Governments created the limited-liability corporation, patents, copyrights, trademark rights that established the rules of American business, allowing inventors and entrepreneurs to earn for their work despite none of these concepts having any physical or natural precedent. These patents played crucial roles in the development of the electric light among other innovations.
- The Sherman Act of 1890 forced monopoly businesses in many industries (which were originally legal) to unwind their consolidated powers. Standard Oil is the most famous example, but nearly every industrial vertical was trending towards monopoly “trusts” in the late 1800s prior to this government action.
- Poor sanitation conditions in US meat-packing factories and unknown substances in patent medicines in the late 1800s led to the creation of the “Federal Meat Inspection Act” and “Pure Food and Drug Act”, which gave the federal government authority over quality assurance for “private products meant for private consumption”, eventually paving the way for the creation of the FDA.

##### Counterpoints

- The automobile seems to have been mostly a free-market driven innovation. Henry Ford raised $28,000 from private investors to start Ford, and never raised another dollar for the rest of his life.
- Prohibition in America was another example of government intervention, but ultimately created a temporary push back on government power, whereby many went underground to consume alcohol, often sourcing it from lower quality vendors, which countered the government food and drug regulations that were introduced a couple decades earlier.

There is a particular quote from Bhu I like which I think provides helpful nuance in understanding the role of capitalism in America over the last 400 years:

> “American Capitalism was not intellectually rigid. It was never the laissez-faire laboratory of purist, principled imaginations. The strength of the system came through its pragmatism and flexibility, juggling competing and contradictory ideas… and eventually finding political solutions to seemingly intractable issues, especially after the scars of the civil war. Just as successful species adapted to changes in their environment, democracy would shape capitalism to adapt to social conditions, with compromise emerging as the best form of insurance against any risk of revolution. This middle ground, forrged by the clashing interactions of capitalism and democracy, a free people acting to check free markets, would give rise to the regulatory framework that would govern its economic system.”

A few questions for stackers:

- What role do you think governments should play in free markets?
- Are there any examples of free markets successfully preventing monopolies and ensuring transparency in food/drug products without any government intervention?
- If America’s federal government never took steps to fund/protect/nurture early innovations, would America be more, less, or equally as successful as it is today?
- What catalysts have led to the shifting role of America’s federal government from a position of nurturing and funding innovation to limiting innovation today?

What Role Should Governments Play in Markets?

tech

Tornado Cash devs getting reamed by government

bitcoin

Pseudonyms lets you practice agency

JakeRaymond53O

Territory top-up time tomorrow.

Looking forward to investing back the gains of this past month.

Really cool project using LNbits.

Project story on Geyser: https://geyser.fund/project/bitcoindifficulty

Code and game rules on Github: https://github.com/maxpolizzo/bitcoin-difficulty/tree/dev/bitcoin-difficulty

Follow @PlayDifficulty on X for updates: https://x.com/PlayDifficulty/status/1809519470378881380

Bitcoin Difficulty: a Bitcoin board game on Lightning

I was discussing with some people these days (in a bar, drinking some beers paid with sats) about what is Bitcoin as financial instrument.

And I made a simple drawing on a piece of paper using the 3 circles diagram, positioning myself in the middle:
![](https://m.stacker.news/51616)

### Where do you position yourself in this diagram?

I will explain why I position myself in the middle, based on how I use bitcoin and what is for me. Maybe for each one of you is something different.

*1. Bitcoin as money is:*
- medium of exchange
- unit of account
- self banking / self custody
- financial sovereignty
- worldwide acceptance (no need to use a currency exchange)
- property
- freedom of speech / censorship resistance
- no coercion
- path to freedom

*2. Bitcoin as asset is:*
- limited property
- still depending on a fiat currency
- capital gains
- possible coercion for taxation
- custodial / self-custodial
- dependable of a currency exchange
- you are still under a fiat system

*3. Bitcoin as currency is:*
- backed by bitcoin as money
- is used only as currency exchange platform, to facilitate exchanges between other fiat currencies (paypal over bitcoin)
- capital gains (maybe)
- property (maybe if is self-custody)
- possible coercion for taxation
- you are still under a fiat system

Discuss...