You can make as many Bitcoin addresses as you want. You can look up an addresses balance but not a wallet’s balance. It’s not as clear as you’re making it sound.

Bitcoin over Lightning is much, much more opaque, and it’s where the majority of Bitcoin transactions are now occurring. You can’t look up somebody’s balance. The only people who know about the transaction are you, the recipient, and any intermediary nodes used to forward the transaction. Privacy is continuing to improve on lightning and main chain.

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In the last two months, Nostr users alone (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 2.6 million tips (individual transactions) over Bitcoin lightning. In that same time period, Bitcoin main chain did around 20-40k. Most transactions are on lightning by number of transactions. Maybe not by total value moved, but lightning is pretty opaque and grants additional privacy, so it’s hard to measure for that reason.

Lightning continues to grow and get upgrades (look up BOLT12 if you are curious about the latest upgrades which bring additional privacy enhancements).

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.

It’s a self-custody wallet and open source. It’s regular main-chain BTC but it does automatic address rotation. Unfortunately it doesn’t support lightning, which is where the majority of Bitcoin transactions occur. Lightning offers significantly increased privacy, sub-second transactions and fees measuring in pennies.

Am I missing something? “Like all our services, Proton Wallet is open source so all of our security claims can be checked by the public to enhance security. We have also published the Proton Wallet security model so you can understand how Proton Wallet protects both privacy and security.”

They aren’t an intermediary. It’s a fully self-custody wallet.

It’s a self-custody wallet, they do not control the keys.

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.

Personally very glad to see them roll out this feature. Bitcoin offers pretty decent privacy out of the box, especially with lightning. Like using any technology, using it in a fully private and anonymous way requires some attention to detail. The ability to send/receive BTC from other users knowing only their e-mail address is pretty cool. And the self-custody element is critical.

This is not accurate. Monero offers a very high degree of privacy and anonymity. So does Bitcoin lightning, to a lesser degree. Lightning transactions don’t go on chain and are known only to: sender, recipient, and intermediate nodes, if any.

Fixed

We beat it last time.

Chat control was beat. This can be too. Contact your MEP, let them know this issue is important to you: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

Chat control was beat. This can be too. Contact your MEP, let them know this issue is important to you: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

Bitcoin has been hacked so many times it isn’t even funny anymore, it’s just sad, including a $300 million hack just a few days ago.

Bitcoin has never been hacked. Nobody has ever been able to print money the protocol doesn’t allow nor spend money without the appropriate private key. People have had their Bitcoin stolen, which is like getting your wallet stolen IRL, but we don’t say ‘The USD got hacked’ or ‘The USD is insecure’ just because that happened.

And hour of downtime? Bitcoin has also had that numerous times, where you haven’t been able to process exchanges at all for hours and hours.

That’s not downtime, that’s congestion. It never stopped processing transactions. If you paid a high fee, you would go through immediately. And that’s happened rarely and doesn’t effect lightning transactions which are the ones you use if speed is a priority.

<1% of global energy use to process billions of value transfer every year. Lightning transactions have the energy usage equivalent of an e-mail since they don’t go on chain. Main chain, via lightning and other L2 solutions, can process and secure trillions of transactions per year.

Yes quite a few as other commenters have indicated. Another good one is !boinc@sopuli.xyz. BOINC is an open source platform for volunteer computing that also has hundreds of scientific papers and citations under its belt. There are BOINC projects for medical research, space research, math, you name it, there’s probably a BOINC project for it. Anybody can start a BOINC project and you choose which projects you contribute CPU/GPU time to. You can pick more than one at a time. You may recognize some of the people hosting BOINC projects: Large Hardon Collider, Max Planck Institute, University of Washington Institute for Protein Design, etc

Vote in every election big and small. Tell your reps you are watching their votes on issues like this. This is how you keep these fuckers from implementing their dystopian plans. Don’t like your options at the ballot box? Vote for the least evil of them all and/or run for office.

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.