makeasnek

Scaling block size is not a long-term scalability solution. Bitcoin Cash forked from Bitcoin to double the block size. Then they doubled it again. They continued this and it's now 16x Bitcoin's block size and there are calls to double it again because "fees are too high". Increased block size=increased resources to run a node. It's why most of Ethereum's nodes are hosted in one of three corporate datacenters. Very dangerous for decentralization.

All of humanity's transactions shouldn't be stored on the ledger, permanently, forever. That is a waste of resources and totally madness. L2s are the solution, they use the main chain for security but store transaction data off-chain. They also inherently increase privacy. Bitcoin has lightning and (soon) Ark. Lightning is secure, mature technology and it works without sacrificing decentralization. In the last two months alone, it has been used by Nostr users (decentralized twitter clone similar to mastodon) to send over three million tips in the last two months. None of those tips were on the Bitcoin ledger because none of them need to be.

Bitcoin wasn't down. Hasn't had a single hour of downtime or hack since it started 15 years ago in 2008. No bank holidays. Clear and transparent supply, 100% open source code. Not run by any single government, corporate board, or CEO. Sends money across the globe in under a second for pennies in fees, all you need is a phone. Powerful stuff.

Not a distro but Qubes. Incredible security and privacy out of the box. Not for everyone but absolutely one of the most interesting developments in the OS world in the past decade or two.

There's lots of ways this could be done quickly, easily, and privately. A previous attempt at this (flattr) was promising but before its time. Making Bitcoin micropayments via lightning comes to mind as a way to do this. In the past two months alone, Nostr users (decentralized twitter clone similar to mastodon) have tipped each other around a million dollars for their posts. There have been nearly three million tips in the last two months. Sending funds via lightning takes under a second for pennies or less in fees. No intermediary to report your browsing history to, no need to trust an intermediary to handle payments, no burdensome need for Mozilla to run payment infrastructure, and it all works in every country right out of the box. And there's plenty of room for this to scale since it's not limited by blockchain space.

Nostr already has a feature to automatically split up your tips according to which posts you reacted to. You can say "I want to tip $5 a month, split it up among posts I react with a heart to". This could easily be extended to which websites you visited, all websites would need to do is put their lightning url in the page source, DNS record, etc.

Nostr stats: https://stats.nostr.band/

Yes quite a few as other commenters have indicated. Another good one is [email protected]. 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

Assuming Satoshi is:

• Alive
• A single person
• Has access to the coins they mined

Which there's been no evidence of for over a decade.

No. There are still plenty of people on the rich list ahead of Satoshi. People whose wealth is measured in nations and companies, not dollars.

The difference is that such an extension isn't reporting my traffic to a "trusted third party". My browser is doing the tracking locally and sending micropayments to sites I visit.