A "few seconds" to pay in bitcoin? So the captain is supposed to be watching for a response via email with his finger hovering over the pay button? Is the recipient address static? Surely they would use unique payment addresses if they have any hope of obfuscating payments.
This all sounds more like a TV show script than an actual thought-out plan to me.
The payments are going to a government. They're not using bitcoin to hide the payments, they're using it because receiving USD or Euros or whatever would mean that a hostile government could seize the funds from the bank.
The tracking is unique though. I don't know who had the $20 in my wallet before me or what series of payments it was a part of, but crypto has the curious property that over time, essentially all crypto money will have at some point passed through wallets associated with controversial entities or transactions.
Transaction fees are based on the complexity of the inputs/outputs, not the value transacted. You are literally paying for the minimum amount of data necessary to prove you own the funded sending-address, paying to write those hashes and amounts into the blockchain. The institution handling this offchaing lightning branch can implement fees in whatever structure you agree to transact, including percentage based.
Lightning is just an off-chain out-branch, which will eventually be re-integrated onto the main blockchain (based on its original funding/terms). The benefit of this is that single entities can branch off the main blockchain, which is limited in its total blocksize/capacity.
The only limits are those by the handling lightning institution. This differs from bitcoin's main public blockchain, which rewards/creates approximately six blocks /hour, each with a limit of just a couple megabytes.
Lightning is a protocol and there can theoretically be many disjoint networks. The biggest network is usually what's considered to be 'the' lightning network. Double spending, which would require 'settling' a superseded lightning transaction, is prevented by a penalty mechanism that makes it so the malicious party loses all the funds in their 'channel' when caught (which will be, at smallest, the amount the original payment was made for).
I'm still thrown. I don't see how an after the fact penalty can work.
Let's say I have 1 BTC. I buy something for 1 BTC on lightning network A. Simultaneously (within nanoseconds) I buy something for 1 BTC on lightning network B. I never plan to use BTC again (or if I do, I will use a different wallet, etc.) Do I just get two purchases? Is there a meta-network clearing house, and if so, why are there many disjoint networks.
Or do I need to have moved my BTC into the lightning network A or B before I spend it?
You have to commit the money upfront into not just the network, but the link on the network.
Basically a Lightning connection (or channel) is two parties locking up some money (in any amount and any split they want) and then repeatedly re-agreeing on what the current split is. At any time they can close the channel which unlocks the money according to the latest agreed split. It's cleverly set up so that if either one cheats (by trying to finalize an earlier split), the other one gets to overrule it and keep 100%.
The most money that can be transferred is when the split is 100% to one party. Then you need to finalize it and create a new one.
It's not as magical as its proponents think. It is better than the base protocol in some cases - if you have connections and money. The sender having to lock up actual money in advance, in the maximum amount they can foresee sending, is a real buzz killer for the sender. And if the sender is some central relay - if you want to receive via a central relay and not peer to peer - you'll have to convince them why they should do that. Usually by actually prepaying, in real bitcoins, a few percent of what you want them to lock. Which is more than the transaction fee for a nontrivial base layer transaction.
To date, my own full verification node rejects all lightning/segwit blocks, until a concensus level of 6+ is reached. I think both were BIP errors, but rejoined the main concensus network ~2018.
Also participated in the O.G. bitcoin hardfork, back in August 2017, supporting the larger_blocks camp (but now mainchain, only).
It also takes a week to get your money when finalizing the channel. This is because the other party has a week to post on the blockchain a proof that you cheated. Only if no cheating proof is posted can you actually finalize the channel.
On the main chain, bitcoin transactions can have "scripts" that describes who and under what condition this money can be spent.
You have to lock your bitcoin on the main chain in a script that shares the bitcoin between you, and another lightning network user (typically a hub)
The trick is that a lightning transaction happen by signing transactions to the other party that changes the way the bitcoins are split, without broadcasting it to the main chain. You only broadcast to the main chain when you want to unlock the bitcoin.
Broadcasting an earlier transaction will result of you losing the found because subsequent transaction contains secrets that allow the other party to take them.
So I allocate my one BTC to lightning network A, so I can spend it there. I try to spend it on lightning network B and it rejects the spend because it's allocated to A in the main blockchain, even if I never spent it on A. There exists some mechanism for me to switch my bitcoin to B (by broadcasting on the main chain)... maybe? But then A needs to sign off that I don't have pending transactions?
Normally, network A and network B would be connected by a path, so your bitcoins can be routed through the destination by moving balances of each intermediaries. If there is no route to the destination, you can't send them as is. You'd need to take the bitcoin out of network A and open a channel with B. And that's operations on the main chain so it may take some time.
Once you've allocated BTC, you cannot doublespend it elsewhere (well, you can try, but verification nodes will reject it so the blockchain will never accept).
> Transaction fees are based on the complexity of the inputs/outputs, not the value transacted
Not on the lightning network. Fees are used to incentivize or disincentivize routes across channels.
> The institution handling this offchaing lightning branch can implement fees in whatever structure you agree to transact, including percentage based.
No institution is needed. Even if one is used as an intermediary, when using lightning non-custodially, the economics of lightning are such that fees are determined by the nodes in the payer's desired route. If it's a custodial transfer from one user to another, no routes are needed.
No way they're boarding boats. They can get an accurate enough cargo weight within seconds visually (maybe minutes, depending on how computerized it is)
Why would you want to obfuscate payments if you can track how many ships entered the gulf using transponders? Regarding money laundering, you use Tornado Cash or Monero
I use YNAB. I thought about building my own now that AI coding make this feasible. But the moat that I can't cross is the integration with my bank accounts. Plaid and the like are too expensive and don't cater to one-off users like me.
Has anyone been able to find a personal financial data provider that has a reasonable price?
As a few others have said Plaid is actually rather cheap if you only have a handful of accounts. I created my own personal finance tracker when Intuit Mint shut down and Plaid costs me $1.80 per month for all my linked accounts which feels very reasonable to me
Check out Lunch Flow, that's the exact reason I built this :) we Aggregate multiple providers behind a simple api for global coverage, and with a pricing friendly to individuals not businesses.
Plaid has a pay-as-you-go option that's only about $2/month for this use case. (I believe the current rack rate PAYG pricing is 30 cents per month per connected bank login).
I think GoCardless stopped accepting new accounts recently, which makes it a bit harder to rely on now.
Feels like the options for EU/SEPA are still pretty limited. I’ve been looking into alternatives as well, curious if you’ve found anything that works well also?
Otherwise, with the scraping approach Woob https://woob.tech/ (FLOSS) works well enough on some banks... It's damn absurd that banks and even supermarkets do not offer authenticated feeds for data export but that's is unfortunately...
Me personally I think banks do their best to push people toward cryptos only because of their crappy services... Even the worst CEx offer better data access the banks...
While I applaud this effort for flagging AI slop generators, I would caution users to not always ignore your "foes".
Reading opposing viewpoints is so important and is becoming a lost art in our society. I encourage you to understand and empathize with people you don't agree with. It will help all of us in the long run.
The second half of that argument was not in this article. The author was just relating his experience.
For what it is worth, I have also gone from a "this looks interesting" to "this is a regular part of my daily workflow" in the same 6 month time period.
AWS Amplify was supposed to solve this. It is built on the AWS CDK. But I found it too clunky and slow and gave up on it.
These days I use SST (https://sst.dev) which is built on top of Pulumi. I find this to be a manageable infrastructure-as-code solution for AWS deployments.
Sybil attacks are very difficult to mitigate while maintaining privacy and decentralization. I see a nod to anti-gaming in this proposal, but it does fully address this.
Why did you choose Bitcoin for this? Other blockchains can have significantly lower fees and allow the distribution of application-specific reward or governance tokens.
An important feature of (some) crypto stablecoins is that they function like cash.
Cash is fungible. And cash in my wallet is not subject to being frozen like a bank account.
One can argue the merits of a digital cash for society. But a crypto-based digital cash is fundamentally different from a digital bank-based payment system.
I did find myself without barely any cash during Spain's blackout and that made it really stressful. It made me value physical currency a lot more.
Now I wish digital payments didn't require a server/ledger connection at all, but I understand that would risk double-spend attacks unless all the computation could be fully trusted, which we can't even guarantee for existing card payments.
I would imagine that the modern definition of gender is less important for healthcare then the biological sex of the patient.
I feel it is one of the unfortunate consequences of "sex" being a noun and a verb, as well as a somewhat prudish desinclination to asking "has external genitalia" and use "gender" instead that lead us to the logomachy we have today.
(Of course the label should not have been gender or sex in either case because all one can determine at birth is whether they see a penis or not, and for less than 1% of humans that's not sufficient to determine their genetic makeup)
This is an interesting example of an AI system effecting a change in the physical world.
Some people express concerns about AGI creating swarms of robots to conquer the earth and make humans do its bidding. I think market forces are a much more straightforward tool that AI systems will use to shape the world.
This all sounds more like a TV show script than an actual thought-out plan to me.
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