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There is no “delete a user from the internet” button. It doesn’t exist. Even if a single admin could ban a user from entire network, which is giving immense amount of power to any admin, all that user has to do is make a new account to get around it. That’s true for Nostr, AP, Twitter, Facebook, E-mail, etc. This is why spam exists and will always exist. AP or nostr or whoever isn’t going to solve spam or abuse of online services, the best we can do it mitigate the bulk of it. Relays and instances can share ban lists in nostr or AP, that can be automated, that is the way to mitigate the problem. There is, however, a “delete a person from society” button we can press, and that is LEOs job. That, conveniently, also deletes them from the internet. It’s just not a button we trust anybody but government to press. We do have a “delete a user from most of AP/Nostr” button in the form of shared blocklists.
As we get stronger and stronger anti-spam/anti-abuse measures, we make it harder and harder to join and participate in networks like the internet. This isn’t actually a problem for spammers, they have a financial incentive, so they can pay people to fill out captchas and do SMS verifications and whatever else they need to do. All we do by increasing the cost to spam is change that kinds of spam are profitable to send. Other abuse of services that isn’t spam have their own intrinsic motivations that may outweigh the cost associated with making new accounts. At a certain level of anti-spam mitigation, you end up hurting end users more than spammers. A captcha and e-mail verification blocks like 90% of spam attempts and is a very small barrier for users. But even that has accessibility implications. Requiring them to receive an SMS? An additional 10% but now you’ve excluded people who don’t have their own cell phone or use a VoIP provider. You’ve made it more dangerous for people to use your service to seek help for things like addiction, domestic abuse, etc as their partner or family member may share the same phone. You’ve made it harder to engage in dissent against the government in authoritarian regimes. You’ve also made it much more difficult to run a relay, since running a relay now requires access to an SMS service, payment for that SMS service, etc. Require them to receive a letter in the mail? An additional 10% but now you’ve excluded people who don’t have a stable address or mail access, etc. Plus now it takes a week to sign up for your website and that’s even getting into apartment numbers and the complications you’d face there. For a listing to be placed on Google Maps, maybe a letter in the mail is a reasonable hurdle to have, after all, Google only wants to list businesses which have a physical address. For posting to twitter? It’s pretty ludicrous.
I generally trust relay admins to make moderation decisions, otherwise I wouldn’t be on their instance or relay on the first place. And my trust becomes extended to other admins they work with and share ban lists with. And that’s fine. But remember that any person with any set of motivations can be a relay or instance admin. That person could be the very troll we are trying to prevent with this anti-spam or anti-abuse measures. What I don’t trust is any random person on the internet being able to make moderation decisions for the entire internet. Which means that any approach to bans would need to be federated and built on mutual trust between operators.
Before we get into the weeds here, let’s start with an important basic premise: Moderation ability, at a protocol level, from an instance/relay admin perspective in nostr and AP is identical.
Are there moderation tools to propagate bans across relays quickly?
Relay operators can share ban lists like they do in AP. Relay operators can only directly control their own relay, not other relays. I don’t know the ins-and-outs of how the interface on the admin side looks, but at a protocol level, AP and Nostr offer the same abilities.
Some users need to be booted off the network entirely and swiftly sometimes, we’ve seen several cases of this in Lemmy already with users posting horrendous shit. I’d be concerned that one of my relays would lag on banning (timezone differences for moderators or whatever innocuous reason) and these users achieve their goal of more people seeing the shit they post. For some people this might trigger PTSD, which is why I say it would be a huge barrier to mass adoption until that issue is resolved.
Relays sharing ban lists help can solve this problem. I would argue that we don’t want to give that power (to ban a user from the entire network) to a single relay admin or even a couple relay admins (since anybody can be a relay admin), so broad consensus of some form needs to exist OR sets of relays can form their own little networks of trust where they will automatically trust a ban from other admins in that network. A relay admin doesn’t need to be able to ban somebody from the entire network if they simply disagree with that user’s post, they can just ban the user on their own relay. There is value in having public squares with varying degrees of moderation, among other reasons, because laws about what kind of speech are acceptable vary country by country. There is value in having mainstream platforms which refuse to host some kinds of content and having that be a different moderation policy than the one used by the government, for example. Remember that legality and morality are not the same and that there are differences in what is illegal vs illegal in different jurisdictions. We don’t want the legal standards of Russia or China to the legal standards the entire network has to follow.
If the user is doing something which is very illegal, which I believe you are referring to, that is a job for law enforcement. Neutral networks like the internet are traditionally policed “at the edges”. We don’t have gmail proactively filtering for objectionable or illegal content because of the consequences that come from that privacy invasion, false positives, additional computational load, reducing reliability of sending/receive between email carriers, etc. Comcast is not inspecting packets as they fly through their network at a the speed of light, delaying them, and determining if they should be passed or not. It’s the internet, they just pass them through. Instead, we say “this is an open, neutral network and if you break the law, LEO will deal with it”.
Sounds like somebody gave you some incorrect information re: banning.
- You don’t need a w3c standard to have a protocol that is open source and used globally, it’s just one way to go about that. You can also have standards which are not made through w3c but are made through some other governance body, or you can have standards where the standard just kind of evolves from a bunch of different devs trying different versions of things until there’s one main way which floats to the top since everybody prefers it. Nostr has the NIP (Nostr improvement proposal) process which has been used to make standards for everything from video streaming to calendar events/invites.
- Relays on nostr, which are the equivalent to instances in ActivityPub/mastodon/lemmy can set their own moderation policies, defederate from other relays, etc all the same as in ActivityPub. The moderation abilities are the same. This means relays can choose what content they allow and ban users/topics/content from other relays, etc. The key difference is that you are by default connected to multiple relays. So if your relay blocks a user you really want to follow, you can keep following that user and see them in your feed, they just don’t show up for other users on that relay. If a relay blocks you, you can’t post content to that relay. So you get the best of both worlds: relays have curated, moderated public squares with trending hashtags and tweets while not reducing your ability to choose who to follow and who can follow you.
- Identity portability is another key feature: if your instance goes down, you don’t lose all your DMs, followers, etc.
Nostr is the way. I think it’s going to end up with way more adoption than mastodon or bluesky. I wrote a post comparing nostr vs mastodon if anyone is curious. https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081
Solana is incredibly centralized compared to BTC. The higher the TPS on your base layer the harder it is to meet the hardware requirements to run a full node. Scaling in layers is the solution.
Eth’s L2s are a confusing mess. They offer a variety of degrees of security and decentralization, some of them, like Polygon, are a network run with only 15 validators, yikes! And many of them are secured by a single bridge. There have been plenty of notable bridge hacks, it is not fun when your currency gets depegged.
This requires multiple transactions on the blockchain
It literally requires one to open and one to close, so like $1 most of the time in fees. If you have a custodial wallet, it requires zero. You can keep a channel open forever. Within that channel, you can have essentially infinite transactions between you and any other party and you can use the channel to route payments to anybody on lightning network. All those transactions settle within a second and have fees measured in pennies. A channel doesn’t need to be opened for every baby being born, babies don’t use money. Seriously though, there are additional improvements coming down the pipe (like channel factories) which enable you to use one on-chain tx to make hundreds of channels. People do not understand the scale lightning works at.
The amount that both sides put in “escrow” is the max payment imbalance that a channel can accept
All of this is abstracted away for you as a user, you don’t have to worry about it, especially for custodial wallets. Most people earn and spend roughly the same amount each month, so liquidity isn’t anything they ever need to think about. There are also automated ways to rent inbound liquidity which are incredibly cheap, that can be done with self-custody wallets.
Say, you want to use a channel to buy a car for $20k, then you need a channel that both you and the other guy have put in $20k in bitcoin.
Wrong. If you want to buy a car for $20k, you have to put $20k into lightning. The other guy doesn’t have to put in anything aside from the $1 in on-chain tx fees to be on the lightning network in the first place, which he doesn’t even pay if he has a custodial wallet. Then you send that 20k to the guy with the car. Now you can receive up to 20k in payments in that channel. Not that you would spend $20k via lightning, if you are buying a car and moving that much money, use main chain.
If some calamity happens, these funds are lost in nirvana.
Calamity doesn’t happen, funds don’t get lost. Custodial wallets literally never encounter this, it’s all handled by your custodian. Non-custodial wallets also rarely encounter this, all the incentives are lined up to make “force closes” (which is what I assume you are referring to) rare. And of those force closes, the only risk is that your counterparty publishes an old version of the channel. You have like five days to correct and publish your more recent version to claim your funds. And if they tried to cheat you out of your funds, you get your funds and they pay a penalty. Given that watchtowers are basically automated, this never happens. Your funds from one of your channels might be stuck on-chain for a few days at worst, this is not a nightmare scenario. Banks and traditional payment processors have random holds all the time, especially when dealing with anything international. The difference is, the funds in lightning are always yours because you have the key. There is no scenario where when properly used, you lose funds in lightning.
I’m just using the lemmy.ml web interface, which does.
On main chain. Via lightning you can support all the capacity of Visa/Mastercard/banks and then some. Main chain provides the security for lightning, lightning provides the transaction storage space and infrastructure.
The lightning infrastructure, if you graph it, looks very similar to existing global payment networks. The difference is that transactions settle instantly because they are protected by the underlying blockchain and they are automated with no middlemen to delay things. No complicated currency conversions, no banks negotiating liquidity in blocks manually and having to buy/sell other assets to stay in balance, no bank holidays, less fees. Which means you can take your money from person-to-person faster, which reduces friction in the economy. Which is exactly what a good currency should be.
Stablecoins are a house of cards built around stably relating to another house of cards which is the entire inflationary fiat system. Every single asset and currency is speculated on via the open market. Bitcoin is no exception. If it is overvalued or undervalued, that creates market opportunities for people to exploit the difference. The market has decided it’s worth a certain amount today, it will be another amount tomorrow. Not unique to Bitcoin. Every year people have said Bitcoin was “overvalued” and powered purely by hype, on average, the market has decided they were wrong the following year.
Any honestly-run stablecoin inherently has to collateralize their coin with something. They can buy BTC (and do), they can buy USD (and do), they can buy wheat futures (but I’m not sure they do). Ultimately, a diverse portfolio would probably be wisest. Yet you don’t see anybody complaining that “USD is being pumped by Tether/USDC”. Why? Because it’s not a problem.
Some have tried, they have all failed. Bitcoin is international. A 51% attack is so implausibly expensive that nobody really has the resources to pull it off. Even if you had enough money and energy to burn, there is the small problem of acquiring enough of the specialized hardware to do it (ASIC miners), and potentially the specs and fab to make that hardware. People will see it coming a mile away. Don’t want to use ASICs? Enjoy at least a 100x increase in energy and equipment costs. And it gets more expensive every year. If you had that much money to put into destroying Bitcoin, it would be much better spent on an ad campaign telling people Bitcoin was bad than doing a 51% attack.
A 51% attack doesn’t prove Bitcoin is broken, it proves the protocol is working exactly as expected. A 51% attack causes a temporary fork. This happens all the time organically when two miners find the next block at the same time, it’s a natural part of the protocol. That’s why for really large or important transactions on main chain, you wait a few blocks before considering them fully secured.
Bitcoin’s value to society is the ability to easily transfer money from point A to B and having a clear fiscal policy it has kept to for 15 years, 365 days a year, 24/7 without a single hour of downtime, a bank holiday, or getting hacked. There’s a reason big money like hedge funds and private banking are investing in it: it’s actually useful and has massive potential. The market cap of Bitcoin is 850 BILLION USD, that’s bigger than the GDP of Sweden or Israel or Vietnam. People use it to move over a trillion dollars of value a year. You can debate how much of that movement is trading & speculation vs use as a currency, but it’s a trillion nonetheless. I personally pay for things regularly with Bitcoin, you’d be surprised how many places you can spend it when you start looking. And it’s available to anybody with a cellphone and halfway reliable internet access, including the billions of people who are “unbanked” and lack access to stable banking infrastructure.
Transactions on Bitcoin lightning occur in under a second and cost pennies in fees. That’s to send it across the room or across the globe. Remittance services and bank wires use just as much energy and cost 10x-1000x as much. And they waste not just energy but human capital as well, we no longer need humans manually sending bank wires like it’s 1910. You just don’t see headlines about the energy impact of bank wires or western union because it’s not novel, we just accept it as a cost of our financial system.
That’s not even getting into the secondary costs to the environment of running a society on an economy based on an inflationary currency which requires that currency be rapidly spent because it’s getting constantly devalued. That’s a great strategy to rapidly industrialize the world, but it’s not a great strategy on a globe with limited resources. Tell me, if you knew your dollar would be worth 10% more next year, would you be more hesitant to spend it? Might you consume less if you knew saving money in your bank account would actually cause it’s value to stay the same or increase over time? Might you focus your spending more on quality products that will last instead of just buying the cheapest thing because if it breaks, you can just buy a new one? This isn’t just on a personal level, this same kind of calculus is used by big investment firms to build everything that won’t last. Buildings, stadiums, entire cities, financed with money that is constantly losing value. Bitcoin’s value relative to goods and services will fluctuate like any currency does, but the supply of the currency does not increase. There are 21 million which will ever be minted. Your 0.1BTC will always be 0.1BTC and will always represent 0.1/128M% of the total supply. If the Bitcoin economy grows, you share in that growth and the value it produces instead of seeing the difference printed away and given to whoever controls the money supply and whoever they want to give it to.
Why not? It’s a thing people can buy and sell on the open market just like stocks or futures or whatever. There are dozens of exchanges you can use all around the globe that publish their data openly, that is where average price and market cap comes from, just like a stock. Those coins being sold on exchanges and the prices they are being listed are are determined by real people (or companies or whoever) who own Bitcoin. They set the price they are willing to buy/sell at. The protocol doesn’t sell any itself, there’s not some massive reserve waiting to be sold.
If one exchange is fudging the price, that creates an arbitrage opportunity which is immediately exploited by trading bots. We are well past the point of the market price being found on exchanges somehow not being real, we passed that point like a decade ago. One can argue how real the reported trading volume is, but price per coin and therefore market cap? Nope.
A stock is a promise/asset, enforced by the legal system, saying you own part of a company. You can trade it with other people and use it to vote on shareholder resolutions. Bitcoin is a currency/asset whose ownership and system of rules is enforced by a decentralized protocol. You can trade it with other people and use it as a currency/use it to send value from one place to another. You could use stocks as a currency, of course, they’re just kind of cumbersome to use for that purpose.
re the 2 billion: Massive buys and sells change the price just like with stocks or other assets. The market cap is not the real amount you would pay if you tried to buy (or sell) all the available supply because that number is uknowable. It’s just the current value of one unit of the thing times the number of units in existence.
If this sounds like a big number, keep in mind this is roughly 0.02% of the Bitcoin in circulation. The eventual total supply of BTC is 21 million BTC. Bitcoin’s market cap is around 800 billion USD, which puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. Next to switzerland, bigger than Norway, Sweden, Vietnam or Israel. (GDP isn’t the same as market cap, just trying to give an example for scale).
It’s open source, and it’s fully self-custody which are two important features. Having a wallet directly integrated into the e-mail client is nice, being able to send payments to other users just knowing their e-mail address instead of their public key is pretty cool. It does automatic address rotation to preserve privacy. Wish it supported lightning for cheaper/faster transactions and additional privacy but hopefully that feature comes in time.