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.

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

Bitcoin uses <1% of global electrical usage, mostly from renewables since miners must chase the cheapest electricity and renewables at off-peak times are it. They turn off during times of peak demand since they can’t afford higher-priced electricity. How do you think that compares to banks? Remittance services? All the infrastructure used to move money from point A to point B? It takes energy and even more valuable: human capital to move value around.

For reasons why Bitcoin isn’t a huge waste of energy and why it actually helps stabilize grids, increase efficiency, decrease electrical costs, and subsidizes the provision of new renewable infrastructure, see https://endthefud.org/

Cash: continues existing, providing simple, privacy-perserving, anonymous payments for the population

Governments and CBDCs: “And I took that personally”.jpeg

Gotta love to use a currency with that fluctuating value. /s

When I pay for a coffee and the shop says that I paid the equivalent of 5 cents. Then, I pay the rest and all of a sudden: I paid the equivalent of 100€.

How has your USD or EUR held up the last 5 years? Buys fewer eggs than it used to huh? Bitcoin has held up pretty damned well. Its price has gotten more stable with time, it is more stable than most national currencies already. Stability is a reflection of scale. Need perfect stability? You can use Bitcoin for payments while receiving and sending in USD or your currency of choice, just use Bitcoin as the settlement layer. Strike already does this in like 20+ countries with instant settlement times thanks to lightning. And no fees.

Fiat currency is guaranteed to lose value over time. Central banks set a target inflation rate of 2-3% per year. Bitcoin may gain or lose value over time. Choosing between a guaranteed loss of value or a potential loss/gain in value, the choice is clear for me. For 15 years in a row, holding BTC has been a better investment than holding USD.

So, you agree that it’s not anonymous?

It’s pseudonymous, with proper use, you can achieve a great deal of anonymity with it, especially now that lightning and coinjoin are things. Monero does most of that automatically, so if you want hard anonymity the easy way, use Monero. Bitcoin’s privacy continues to increase with time and is a priority for developers. An auditable supply is also crucial.

ahh yes crypto, where every single transaction is kept on a permanent ledger, truly a bastion of privacy unlike this dollar bill that may or may not have been used to snort cocaine or put in a strippers thong.

A ledger which is pseudonymous. On Bitcoin lightning, your transactions don’t go on (but are secured by) the Bitcoin ledger. Monero offers even more privacy.

“Crypto” is full of scams, you’re right about that. Bitcoin has been around for 15 years. You can use it to send money to anybody on planet earth with a phone in under a second (with lightning) for pennies in fees. It has a transparent, auditable supply. It has done this function without a single bank holiday, hack, or hour of downtime since the 2008 financial crisis, through a pandemic, wars, and attempted bans by nation states. No country controls it, there is no CEO and no board, it runs according to an open source protocol.

Bitcoin has a market cap bigger than Sweden’s GDP, currently around a trillion USD which places it in the top 20 countries by GDP. On average, every year it grows no matter whether you are measuring market cap, number of nodes, number of transactions, volume of money moved, whatever. It processes millions of transactions and moves billions of dollars of value a year. On nostr alone it has processed 2.9 million transactions over the past two months.

Bitcoin works. It’s been working. People all over the globe use it as a currency, as an asset, and as a payment method.

GNU Taler is worse for privacy than cash in many ways and intermediaries all your transactions. It’s funded by major banks and the EU, the same EU that wants Chat Control. The money in it “expires”. It’s a backdoor for a Central Bank Digital Currency, which is some dystopian shit that will enable total financial surveillance and control. https://lemmy.ml/post/17733761

#shopstr is a growing alternative which uses nostr for posting instead of Facebook. Unfortunately not as many people but I always check there first and list there preferentially. You can use any payment method with is but most people use Bitcoin lightning, which has some privacy pros and cons but certainly more private than Facebook.

You could buy more from places that support Bitcoin lightning or Monero, which gives you a lot more privacy. You can buy gift cards online with those currencies and then spend those gift cards at major online retailers.

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.

where you’ve previously used a SIM linked to your name

Don’t do that then. Also consider that people buy and re-sell used phones. The same IMEI is not a guarantee it’s the same user. Privacy isn’t necessarily about being absolute, sometimes it comes in shades.

Decentralized & federated networks: Lemmy, Mastodon, Nostr, Freenet, I2P, etc

All versions over the past decade including the latest one