new left is surprisingly intolerant...

They are what they claim to hate in so many ways. It's absurd and also so human. And by that I mean not unusual.

The new left is as moralistic as the old conservative religious right. They are as hate fueled as they protray the MAGA movement. They hold so much bigotry toward working poor white people that are too dumb to vote Democrat.

I've suspected these things for years but they are now exposed for everyone to see.

I'd like to see more development done on OBW. I think it is highly under rated & has the potential to be the non custodial WoS.

Using WoS has the best experience in terms of speed, low fees, & appearance. So I still use it to onboard newbies

Set default tip to 100 sats.

New season "Black Mirror" is pretty good.

Cool, I'll take a look at your prediction market idea! I feel like this is the era for prediction markets, so any fun ways we can utilize Bitcoin, Lightning, and nostr to be the bedrock of that technology will be resources well spent!

With regards to the negative ROI, the market currently does not have enough liquidity to support miner hedging at scale. Once we're confident that everything's working smoothly, we're planning to increase the initial subsidy thus enabling more speculators to profitably bet, and enabling miners to hedge their hashrate.

An alternative to our current strategy that can enable positive ROI on each outcome is fixed odds betting. However, we don't want to provide fixed odds betting because it's easily financially attacked and also is suceptable to the same variance problems. The approach we take is we want to decentralize the liquidity in the markets, rather than us being the centralized bookmaker. Then anyone who is comfortable with the risk can place bets, and as long as they have a large enough bankroll, they can strategically bet over time to balance any miner hedging bets. That means we need more speculators betting more frequently to enable miners to hedge.

On your objection to betting markets decentralizing hashrate, I recently spoke with the founders of Demand Pool at btc prague and they were interested in offering hedging services through Bitcoin Prediction Market to their miners. Demand pool is creating a StratumV2 pool that is PPLNS (I believe, I definitely know it is not FPPS). The big problem with mining pool payout schemes is they don't enable smaller pools to grow. Miners don't like variance, and they don't want to deal with it. By betting on Bitcoin Prediction Market, a miner that mines for AntPool (because they get safe FPPS payouts) can switch to Demand Pool and safely deal with variance by betting against Demand pool (betting no). As long as the market has sufficent liquidity, they can profitably hedge their hashrate by betting No on Demand Pool. (Of course, sufficent liquidity implies that we need more speculators betting every block.)

If we want StratumV2 to get adopted, we need miners directing their hashrate to smaller pools. That means they need to feel comfortable doing so. That means they need to deal with variance in a way that is not FPPS (because FPPS is a broken centralizing mechanism). Bitcoin Prediction Market provides them with that path, and that means it can facilitate hashrate decentralization.

I think you might have misinterpreted the quoted section. It means if the market odds do not match the hashrate distribution, then any bet that incrementially moves the odds indicator closer to the actual hashrate distribution has positive expected value. It's just a theorem to show that speculators can indeed generate sustainable yields over time with Bitcoin Prediction Market (that we're not trying to scam you). We wanted to mathematically prove that it's possible to make positive expected value bets so long as the odds don't match the probabilities.

Thank you for your in depth comments! If you have any more I'll be around to answer anything else! 🙏🙏🙏

Too frustrating

The "complex" solutions like btcpay have a huge learning curve or require hiring someone to do it for you

The "simple" solutions make you pay an LSP or a custodian, and the LSP models can't prevent or hide force closures. The moment one happens, merchants will probably notice a fee -- especially if the wallet tries to fix it for them -- or, if not, the merchant must make a frustrating choice: either learn how to fix it (they definitely don't want to learn yet another thing) or take it as a loss i.e. leave it unfixed and leave the money stuck in a base layer address that the merchant doesn't know how to use

Both options (complex and simple) distinguish between "lightning" and "bitcoin." Merchants don't know the difference so they must do one of two things: learn the difference or ignore the difference. Having to make this choice is frustrating, and if they choose to learn the difference, that is also frustrating, because merchants don't want to learn yet another new thing.

Whether or not the merchant learns what lightning is, some customers will click the bitcoin option. If the merchant did not learn the difference between the two in the beginning, or forgot the difference, he will suddenly discover that, because the customer chose bitcoin, he has to wait an unknown number of minutes, and, because he didn't learn the difference, he also won't understand what's going on while he's waiting.

Even when customers select the lightning option, the merchant will discover that, contrary to the marketing, lightning is very often slow. If the sender is not using one of the popular wallets (which are mostly custodial), their lightning payment may regularly take a whole minute or more before their wallet says it either worked or it couldn't find a route. Merchants hate waiting 60 seconds or more to even learn what the problem is. After about 10 seconds of waiting they start asking the customer to consider paying some other way. But if the customer chose lightning, they can't, because their first payment hasn't failed yet. It might succeed or fail at any second, but in the meantime you just have to wait, and there is no transparency as to what is going on or when you might get a message.

If the payment fails, it's pretty bad: maybe the merchant loses that sale. Maybe the customer pays with fiat instead. Maybe he falls back on a base layer payment and we're in for an even longer wait. Whatever happens, the merchant learns that bitcoin payments aren't very reliable (even though it's actually lightning's fault, not bitcoin's) so he won't want to let customers pay with lightning OR bitcoin when there's a line. And he also won't want to set up a special "bitcoin queue" for bitcoiners only, so he will be inclined to just stop accepting bitcoin altogether until it gets more reliable.

Here's another frustration: after that one bitcoiner finally nags the merchant into accepting bitcoin payments, he will likely have a total of one customer who actually uses it. Reminder: most people don't have bitcoin, and most bitcoiners prefer not to pay in bitcoin, for many reasons. It's either too expensive on the base layer, too unreliable on lightning, too much of a tax burden, and/or maybe they don't understand why anyone would ever spend their hard money (bitcoin) when they can spend their inflationary money (fiat) instead.

So the merchant finds himself with a payment method that (1) he doesn't understand, (2) it doesn't work very well, and (3) it is only requested by one guy. You'll forgive him if he forgets to train his next staff member how to accept your bitcoin payment. And the next one, and the next one, til the staff forgets they even accept it and no one remembers where the bitcoin tablet is anyway or what its password is.

Lightning (and even the base layer) are just too frustrating right now. I don't blame merchants for avoiding it -- I'm surprised any of them accept it at all

It sucks if I post something Bitcoin related, then an army of shitcoiners comes in to downvote my post. If no moderation is done, I will effectively loose my deposit for no reason. Although they loose their sats, it affects me as well.