Your solution is to centralized transactions on a few large payment processor nodes?

The core problem of LN remains, which is that in order to operate a LN node you must keep it always online or risk having your coins stolen. The entire point of creating a L2 network in the first place was because Bitcoin Core decided that scaling the base layer with larger blocks would harm decentralization by making it more difficult to operate a Bitcoin node. Well anyone who has ever operated a server can tell you that maintaining near 100% uptime is a much much higher technical bar than buying a larger hard drive.

The alternative for LN users if they don't want to operate their own LN node is to give up custody of their coins to someone who does operate a node, but this goes against the core premise of cryptocurrencies.

A double spend via 51% isn't really feasible anyway. A double spend attack, in the simplest case, is to:

1. Pay for good or services

2. Receive delivery of the goods or services

3. Invalidate the original payment once the goods or services are no longer revokable.

For a double spend to be worthwhile the value of the scam must exceed the cost of the scam. Maintaining >50% hashing power is extremely expensive and is more and more expensive the longer you maintain it. Therefore the value of the scam must also be extremely large. For crypto transactions it's common sense to wait for more and more confirmations (additional blocks mined after the block containing the transaction) before delivering the goods or services as the size of the transaction grows. Since it's trivial to wait for N+1 confirmations as the seller of goods or services it's trivial to defend against double spends for any meaningful amount of money.

And I disagree about the work when it comes to information. Our natural inclination as humans is to share things we find interesting. Like "check out this song" or "check out this article". I don't think this takes much work. It just happens. In this sense the information is free like the stream is free to flow through the hills.

On the flip side there is substantial effort put into impeding this free flow of information with schemes like DRM. Similar to building a dam. But once cracks form the free flow resumes.

Continuing the water analogy you could say there is also substantial effort put into building the infrastructure to make information accessible to many more people. As a library is to a city's plumbing infrastructure.

How did you prove it? What is their standard of evidence? My intuition says it would be difficult to prove a negative.

Also worth noting there are 2 versions of this kind of cross-eyed focus depending on whether your eyes are focusing on a point in front of or behind the actual image. This determines which side the left and right eye images should go on in the composite. I find it easier to focus on a point in front of the images but IME most examples online are for focusing on a point behind the image.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677216

“ I’d like to see more work put into finding ways to utilize the work from PoW. For example I have an idea to use Monero’s CPU-favoring PoW for PoW based DDoS protection as seen in Tor [0]. When a user accesses a website they are given a PoW challenge to complete. This challenge is actually for a share of mining rewards as in P2Pool. The mining reward share would go to the website operator. This would harmoniously improve several things about the web. First, it would help protect websites against layer-7 DDoS attacks. Second, this L7 DDoS protection reduces the webs dependence on companies such as Cloudflare, the internets biggest man-in-the-middle. Third, it provides a way to pay website owners costing the users a small amount of their computers time and energy in much the same way as ads do currently. Fourth, it reduces the webs dependence on advertising as the way to fund your website. Fifth and finally, it helps secure the web-native currency in which website operators would be paid and which others can use for whatever they want.

I think such a solution would be truly beautiful.

0: https://blog.torproject.org/introducing-proof-of-work-defens... “

I assume the implication here is that the thing they said 10 years ago was less inappropriate back then. So how do you predict sensitivity changes 10 years in the future to limit your speech today? Even if you delete posts after, say 1 year, archives exist. Shouldn’t you just not say anything if you’re afraid of this? Maybe discussion of self-censorship like this will be taboo in 10 years and the ship has already sailed.