So nothing was eased.

If there was one, someone would write down the steps necessary and put them on the internet. But I have never seen a sound description of how to self-custody Bitcoin in a safe way.

The hardest part seems to not even be the one that currently creates all those problems - the hardware and software used. The hardest part is storing the key (for example a seed phrase). If anyone says they know a way to safely store Bitcoin, my first question is: How do you store the key?

From a bird's-eye perspective, 3 things are needed: Create a key, derive an address from the key, store the key.

Creating a key safely is possible with dice. You would probably create a seed phrase instead of a key directly, but for this discussion it is the same.

Deriving an address from the key is hard and I have not yet seen a good protocol on how to do it. I have read through a bunch of descriptions of how people do it and they are all weak and brittle. The most popular seems to be "I order a hardware wallet and follow the instructions that come with it". But even people who put a lot of thought into it come up with weak and brittle approaches. I would think there is a way to do it safely. But I have never seen a description of one yet. It might involve multiple computers, multiple software implementations and a hell of a lot of work to create a multisig that is not prone to a single attack vector.

Storing the key is probably the hardest. The most popular way seems to be to store it in a drawer or a safe. So now those coins are just as safe as a piece of gold would be. Or they use a multisig and store the keys in multiple locations. Quite painful. As you have the ongoing problem of keeping those locations accessible and safe at the same time.

If one would make a list of things that can go wrong, starting from the supply chain that delivers parts to the manufacturer, malicious employees at the manufacturer, mistakes the manufacturer can make, attacks on the delivery chain from the manufacturer to the user, to mistakes the user can make creating, using and storing their keys - the list would contain hundreds of points.

Isn't this the exact use case it was built for, preservation of news data in a way that it cannot be tampered with and so that it is kept accessible for everyone forever?

[1] https://arweave.org/

But Google phones had those too.

That's why I said I "feel" like Apple takes security more seriously. And that I wish there were hard facts. Statistics of number of bugs by severity. Independently verified.

Apple makes $200B per year from selling the iPhone alone. Plus the services they sell on it, plus deals like the one with Google, plus app store ads, plus cross-selling of other hardware ...

I have one too.

Not because I like the hardware too much. Pixel phones are much nicer, they don't wobble when you put them on a table. Not because I like the software too much. Android is much more to my liking with more freedom to customize it.

But because I have the feeling Apple takes security more seriously.

I wish there was some kind of security arena like there is LLM arena for AI. That gives hard facts about the security track record of phone manufacturers.

Relevant XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/525/

    The CEO is the throughline in a history
    of billion-dollar blunders

For comparison:

He outperformed the Nasdaq 100 which made 18% (plus dividends) in the same time.

And he way outperformed Warren Buffet who made 14% in the same time.

It's not a matter of choice. Once a country runs on US artificial intelligence, it can't just say "Well, let's do things manually again". People won't know how to do it anymore. There will be no more keyboards, steering wheels or cash registers to operate.

It's true that China might offer an alternative. But changing a country from being run by US AI to being run by Chinese AI is not a small feat and comes with its own issues.

> US doesn't even produce the chips

TSMC is running and expanding a factory in Arizona. Budget: $265 billion. Intel, Samsung and Miron are also building capacity in the USA.

The USA has managed to dominate software for decades now. Why would it change? Take a look at the current datacenter investments in the USA vs other countries. It looks very much like the USA will even extend its lead.

> why would they want to default on their debts

So they don't have to share the AI profits with foreigners who hold shares in the AI companies.

Do Europeans have options to hold Bitcoin in ETFs, ETPs etc that are not storing the coins in the USA?

Anyhow, much of the new currency will flow to the USA if the USA becomes the worlds source of (artificial) intelligence.

So if the USA declares "ownership be damned", it would be a net win for the USA.

Or in simpler terms: The USA has been giving out IOUs for real goods for decades. It is now tempting to default on those IOUs. The USA did this before. Up until 1971, a dollar certified a claim to gold. Then the USA simply canceled that promise.

The current ramp up to AI dominance might be what holds the USA back from breaking more ties with the world. It is a race that must be won. And investments from abroad help. But when the whole world is operated by US AI factories things might look different. When every task around the world is performed by intelligence generated in the USA, just like every computer is run by US software now - there might be little incentive left to "pay the rent" for the rest of the world that now sits around idle, fiddling their thumbs.

The examples they show are someone typing something into a prompt and then some agent starts coding.

But the hard part in automation these days is not writing software. It is "how does the software get the credentials to access data and services? What APIs does it use?". So before being able to type a prompt and then use the software created, there must be the hard part: Setting up all those interconnectivity pieces. Making sure the software can access and change data, trigger actions, but only within a certain scope.

Who are the contenders that start fresh with focus on AI?

One that comes to mind is IONOS. They seem to be in the process of building something like a "SAP in the times of AI" from the ground up. Starting with the demands of SMEs. It looks like an interesting approach to me: Having a "knowledge base" for each customer, initially filled with the data from the website. Then let the customers add more data. Then offer agents that do work for the customers. Answer calls and emails and do marketing for example.

    Emarketer’s data finds that standalone chatbots like ChatGPT,
    Microsoft Copilot app, Google AI Mode, and Amazon Alexa for
    Shopping (formerly Rufus) in U.S, will generate less than $1
    billion in ad revenue this year, and just $5.41 billion by 2030.

Just because there are no ads now does not mean there never will be. Google search was run without ads for the first years too.

As long as the website gets paid more than the cost of serving the pages, it does not matter if a human or a bot did the POW.

Securing signup forms is another issue. Maybe related. But not what I was referring to.

Bitcoin and others are already secured via massive pow computations. If we could shift that into browsers, no additional energy would be used and we could solve an issue that has been unsolved for too long: How to pay websites that provide useful information other than with ads.

The question is which resources typical consumer hardware has that large centralized compute power does not. In-browser POW to pay websites would only be possible if such a resource exists.

I am not familiar with the topic, but maybe CPU power and memory? Both seem significant in a typical consumer device.

Napkin math: If a consumer device can generate $100 per month, that would be 100/30/24/60/60=$0.00004 per second. If the user waits for 5 seconds before the first pageview, that would then make the website provider $0.0002 per visitor. Serving a million visitors per month is nowadays easily possible on a $10/month machine. So the $0.0002x1000000 = $200 would make the website a nice profit.