Doesn’t answer your question directly, but nostr is working on this. Nostr is an open protocol like ActivityPub (which underlies Mastodon and Lemmy). Its main use is as a twitter clone right now, but it also has a very new reddit clone and can theoretically support videos as well. And you can choose your own algorithm. Here’s all the choices I get from one of their clients, and there’s dozens of nostr clients to choose from. The cool thing is that anybody can make and publish an algorithm and you can subscribe to any algorithm. Your client does all the sorting locally.

If you are an American and care about privacy:

• Write your representatives. Your message can be as simple as “I care about privacy”. It’s important they know you are watching their votes.
• Participate in elections, particularly downballot elections. Congressional makeup at the federal and state level matters a lot more for these kinds of things than who is president. Many recent laws like “right to repair” etc have happened at the state level since you can bypass federal congressional gridlock.
• Participate in primaries. Most Americans do not vote, most voters do not vote in primaries. If you don’t like having to choose “the lesser of two evils”, primaries give you much much more choice to express your preferences. As a primary voter, you have an outsized influence on the electoral system and can help determine the options other people get to choose from.
• Donate to PACs and non-profits working to protect your right to privacy. The EFF is an awesome non-profit. One benefit of donating to PACs is that they keep an eye on races across the country and help find and fund candidates who will advanced privacy legislation.
• “Vote with your dollar” when you buy things. In many cases, your purchasing power outweighs the political power of your vote.

You may know me as a Bitcoin educator and engineer.

Yeah well, in that case, fuck you and the hypercapitalist horse you rode in on.

This guy is a protocol engineer, talking about protocols. You may not like like Bitcoin, but it’s pretty hard to argue it’s not one of the most successful, widely-used, and forked open source protocols developed in the last several decades. Bitcoin core is in the top 100 starred repos on Github. It has a unicode character.

Bitcoin’s market cap (> 1 trillion USD) is bigger than Sweden’s GDP and it moves billions of dollars around the world every year. You can use it to send money to anybody with a phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees, and it settles instantly. And it’s been working for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or hack despite pandemics, wars, financial crises, and attempted bans by global powers.

Like, be mad if you want, but it’s a pretty successful and robust protocol. And if you don’t like it, you can fork it and change it, because it’s open source.

Yes absolutely, because any time the government can increase surveillance and control, they will. The Pirate Party is one of the few political forces in the EU fighting hard against this. Central Bank Digital Currencies will be the biggest threat to individual liberty and privacy we see in our lifetimes. In a time of global instability, these threats to our freedoms continue to compound from all over the political spectrum. People are more willing to accept some loss in freedom in the promise it will protect them from the “other side” gaining too much power or from worsening economic or other environmental conditions.

Bitcoin is a solution for those who want privacy, money, and autonomy to work hand in hand. Bitcoin offers much more robust privacy than a bank account and the degree of privacy it offers continues to improve. It’s not controlled by a central bank, entity, or board of directors who can mess with the supply or have any kind of special access to your financial information. You don’t need six forms of ID to use it, in fact, you don’t even need one! It’s truly autonomous money that separates the role of the state from the role of money.

With Bitcoin, I can send money to anybody anywhere on planet earth with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees (using Bitcoin lightning). And I can send that money to anybody even if they have an unstable banking system, no banking system at all (billions of people), or their banking system excludes them due to their gender, sexuality, or status as a political dissident. Venmo can’t do that, Paypal can’t do that, my bank can’t do that, Taler can’t do that. It has a clear fiscal policy of a 21 million coin cap. It has faced attacks and attempted bans from nation states and world powers, yet it has reliably performed this function of sending money around for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, without a single hack, without a single bank holiday or failure or any kind. It has a market cap bigger than Sweden’s GDP. It is more widely adopted than most national currencies. It can’t be controlled, debased, or inflated by any corrupt central bank. It actually has use and value. You may not use it, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t get immense use out of it.

Monero is king when it comes to privacy coins though. So from a privacy perspective, that’s worth looking into as well. Long-term I think Bitcoin will eat Monero for lunch since it can easily adopt the privacy technologies Monero has and the Bitcoin community is very pro privacy. Monero also lacks an L2 like lightning which means transactions are slower and more expensive and eventually fees will get ridiculous if adoption reaches parity with Bitcoin. Depending on your use case, that may or may not matter.

These laws are being passed by politicians who generally don’t understand technology. What they will achieve is a reduction in privacy and liberty for every citizen in the EU and easier methods to clamp down on dissent. Just because it’s not technically perfect or difficult to implement fully doesn’t mean it’s not a threat. It’s one step closer totalitarianism, and what’s stopping totalitarianism is everyday people, one step at a time, battling it back.

Honestly this applies to a lot of people in civic service. Not rich politicians, but the people trying to run your local or state government. Often the races are uncontested, because they literally can’t find even one other person who wants the job. Some of them are incompetent or pursue these jobs for power-seeking reasons, but many of them have their hearts in the right place and want to give back to their community, often while fighting ridiculous red tape at one end while contending with threats and harassment from citizens at the other. And the pay is often terrible. My local city council positions would qualify you for food stamps/EBT.

Commercial transactions -

Aaah, the kind of transaction that most transactions are?

Operated by providers

Aah, so any business which accept crypto must KYC every one of their customers. This makes accepting crypto especially burdensome, which is half the point of this legislation in the first place.

So non-commercial transations are fine, as are crypto transactions to non-custodial wallets.

Unless you’re using the wallet to buy or sell something. You know, the thing people use money for.

Why does the government need to have every transaction reported to them? Crime is bad because it causes harm. If harm is being caused, that means a person or entity is causing that harm. That means there is evidence. Follow that.

Police have more surveillance and crime-detecting tools than at any point in human history. Nearly every category of crime, particularly violent crime, is on a decades-long downtrend. We all travel with GPS monitors in our pockets. We all use credit cards instead of cash. We all are recorded by CCTV 90% of the places we go. We don’t need to give them more financial surveillance because ‘crime’.

Digital IDs are step one to a central bank digital currency which is probably the greatest threat to individual liberty, privacy, and financial autonomy we will face in our lifetimes. Imagine a currency supply the government can manipulate at will, where the government has 100% visibility into every transactions you make big or small, where the government can print and un-print money at will or dictate where and how you spend it. And imagine when the political party you don’t like is suddenly in control of this kind of power. Central banks already engage in enough shady behavior and market manipulation and if we give them this power, they will never give it back. This is a dangerous road imo. Plus, a CBDC provided a centralized database of all transactions can be hacked and leaked because that happens to all centralized databases, so now not only does the government know every transaction of yours, so does the world.

If we need the ability to do digital ID verification, there are decentralized opt-in ways to do this which don’t pose these same threats of centralized control and provide a safe opt-out/safety valve mechanism if the people administering that system are not trustworthy. CBDCs provide no such alternative.

Run !boinc@sopuli.xyz . You can choose from over a dozen different scientific research projects from cancer research to finding pulsars and solving mathematical conjectures. It’s entirely open-source and runs on every platform. You can also earn Gridcoin for your computational contributions to some projects, but it’s optional. I’ve been crunching BOINC for 10+ years it’s an awesome way to contribute to the greater good.

If you want privacy/security, check out qubes

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I have been crunching BOINC for years. Very fun to be involved with and helps heat my apartment in winter.

Whenever there is a small task that will take less than a few minutes, I ask myself “When else are you going to have 80 seconds?” and usually that makes me realize I should just get it done now. Sometimes I still say “tomorrow” and reminds me to pick a specific time to do the task.

I see a lot of people here frustrated with our two party system. I too am frustrated. Donate to FairVote to get ranked choice on the ballot in more states. Ranked choice voting allows voters to express actual preferences between more than two parties and it is a win no matter who you normally vote for. Many states have a ballot measure system that can be used to pass legislation without requiring the agreement of the state legislature. Several US states have implemented ranked choice voting already. http://fairvote.org

Show up in every election and vote (and be engaged in other ways politically). It’s very easy to ignore people who don’t vote. Don’t like your options at the polls? Participate in primaries and donate to campaigns pushing ranked choice voting.

CBDCs are one of the greatest threats to freedom and liberty over the next 50 years. People should be very skeptical about giving this much control and surveillance power over to the government.

A. Lightning solves this with their super fast confirmation times.

B. Merchants do this regularly. The equivalent to a full block confirmation (the money is yours now and the transaction can’t be reversed) for credit cards is on the order of 30 days. Venmo and paypal have similar policies. Plus higher fees. Plus sometimes they charge or otherwise punish you even in the unlikely event you win the dispute.

The risk of fraud is the cost of doing business and buyer-initiated fraud is rampant on these platforms. It’s why I don’t sell anything > $50 USD on ebay, because the buyer can just say it “doesn’t work” and get to keep the item and get their money back.

For everyday spending, I would consider “The tx is valid, signed, seen by nodes, and has a fee high enough to make it into the next couple blocks” as plenty of confirmation on main chain. That part takes seconds. Like if I’m splitting a bill w a friend a merchant selling somebody a coffee a double-spend attack is really not even in my realm of considerations, I don’t need it to make it into a block.

Man these bankers can’t even keep up. Bitcoin has been doing this for 15 years across all borders and the recent lightning upgrade makes it even better. It’s accessible to anybody with a cell phone in every country regardless of their credit history, the stability of their banking system, or the reliability of their national currency. And no government or politician can increase the supply thereby decreasing the portion of it you own. It does this 24/7 365 with zero downtime, no bank holidays, and for .1% of global electricity usage. Less than remittance services alone like Western Union use and mostly from renewables. It is the first truly international currency.

You can send a million dollars for less than 50c in fees on the main chain or <1c in fees on lightning. Lightning transactions confirm in microseconds, main chain transactions confirm in seconds to minutes depending on block timing and how much security you want to guarantee.

Yes but decentralized does not inherently mean more private. Look at Bitcoin, everybody’s balance and every transaction they’ve ever made is public. There are some enhancements that make it more private, but it’s very not private as a baseline. Or look at Lemmy or Mastadon, your instance admin can read all your DMs even though technologically there’s little reason this needs to be the case.

Decentralized tech is the future for a simple reason: it’s cheaper and more efficient. Web 2.0 and “platforms” inherently required centralization, there was no real peer-to-peer way to do social media at the time, the tech really wasn’t ready. What federated stuff did exist was either archaic, hard to use, etc. Things like authentication and establishing network-wide policies were really hard to do, still are, but decentralized tech has some leaps and bounds in this area thanks to DLT (distributed ledger technology). Governments are investing big in open source software and some policy advocates are coming around to the idea that your data needs to be portable and exportable between platforms. We now have more than an entire generation of people who have seen the downsides of centralized platforms like Facebook.

A single company to run a service like Facebook simply no longer needs to exist, and those companies have every incentive to engage in “rent-seeking behaviour” ie enshittification. As a user or a company, you can choose between a decentralized alternative (no rent-seeking) or to pay some middleman ever-increasing costs to do the same thing. Why would you pick the middleman? Uber doesn’t need to exist, a platform for coordinating rides and customers can easily be run decentralized with smart contracts. Smart contract platform A has to compete with Smart contract platform B for the ridesharing market, that will lead to better prices and administration for everyone while eliminating much of the incentive for rent-seeking behaviour since it’s much harder to establish a monopoly. Plus, all somebody needs to do to compete with the “next uber” is write a smart contract. They don’t need to get a massive data center with PoP all over the globe. They don’t need to solve how to store massive central databases of users, they just plug into some other external authentication system. Drivers could switch between smart contract platforms at will, just like they now switch between Uber or Lyft depending on the fares that hour.

The market will choose the most efficient option. The most efficient option is not one or two massive companies with a duopoly engaging in rent-seeking because they can because they are the middleman.

Every time these sites die (Uber still was living off VC money last I checked) and users migrate, it’s another opportunity for a decentralized alternative to replace them. As long as federated and decentralized alternatives don’t absolutely fumble this, it seems inevitable that they will replace current centralized web2 infrastructure.