I'm on Firefox and when I right click and open image in new tab I see an svg file with pale blue text colour and cut-off lettering. The source of the svg suggests that the letters are drawn paths rather than a font.
Saving the svg file down and loading into Inkscape shows a grouped object with a frame and then letter forms. The letter forms are not fonts but a complete drawn path. So I think the chopping off of the descenders is a deliberate choice (which is fine if that is what's wanted).
The whole page looks narrow and long on my landfill android phone so the content is in the middle third of the browser but can pinch-zoom ok onto each 'cell' or section of text or the graphs.
Thanks to tirreno and reconnecting for posting this interesting page markup.
The original plan with the iPhone was to have web apps, not native apps. That's why they needed to run the rendering engine of the iPhone on Windows. Then they went native and Mac only with the dev environment.
I don't think that Apple would earn one single dollar by porting Safari to Windows again.
"MiniBrowser" opened after installing AppleMobileDeviceSupport64 from iTunes and VC_redist.x64, and it appeared to be making network requests, but it never rendered any web content I could see.
You used to be able to get Epiphany preview on Windows, for quite a long time after you could get Safari on Windows. Doesn't seem to be the case anymore, though.
Thanks for the feedback, that's a really good point.
To be honest, I added that text hoping to improve search engine visibility, but I wasn't sure if it was the right approach. It seems like it hurts the user experience.
Is the general consensus that this kind of content should live on a separate "blog" or "about" page for a single-page application like this? I'm new to this and would love to learn the best practice.
Users who see the blog post section will know it is an SEO tactic, which puts people off. Also, nobody's going to read it; I would recommend adding some JS to detect if the user is a google bot, if so, remove the blog post. Lastly, the faceless, generic design can seem very sketchy.
I don't really think it matters. This helps with SEO so more people can find the site. The UI is right at the top, so it doesn't really impact the user experience, especially since few people would bother to read all that content. As long as the tool is functional, that should be enough, right?
Personally I think PWAs are a bit confusing for consumers as they think "It's a website, i won't be able to use it offline." and if they get reminded that they can use it offline they usually forget.
Because a user first encounters it on the web - where it acts exactly like a website. The only difference is that the bookmark-button-thingy says "add app to home screen" instead of "add to home screen".
It's not giving a "I'm installing an application" vibe, it is giving "I am creating a shortcut to a website" vibes. Apps are installed via the app store, not as weird quasi-bookmarks in your browser.
Most ordinary people thing that they are just adding a shortcut to the website, whereas these wrappers convince the user they are actually installing an app app.
And extremely centralized in the so-called Lightning version. Due to ridiculously absurd requirements of the Lightning layer (bidirectional channels on L1, locking funds in advance, solving NP-hard problem thousand times per second a scale etc.) everyone basically resorts to using very few centralized entities as a pseudo-bank, who issues virtual paper, IOUs, which which wallets trade on L2. Basically all negatives of the banks and all negatives of crypto-tokens combined, with no positive sides at all.
Okay this was what I thought would happen. I looked into Lightning a few years ago and found the whole concept to be quite dense and not something that a "regular person" does. I don't have a strong opinion on the Bitcoiner vs Shitcoiner debate and have been happy to participate in BTC/BCH/XMR style chains, and the ETH/SOL/EVM-style chains as well. But I felt like Lightning ended up acting a lot like the Ethereum L2s with weaker guarantees.
It's still pretty affordable and not-hard to run your own Lightning node; The pseudo-bank hosted wallets people use (e.g Wallet of Satoshi) is purely out of convenience.
The real lesson is that most people don't care enough about the underlying risks - they care about convenience.
If I'm not mistaken, running own Lightning node would mean opening channels to every single merchant you want to trade with AND those same merchants would need to open a symmetric channel back to you with the same amount of locked funds. And then during the transaction this system would need magically solve traveling salesman problem per each transaction in the system, taking into account that after each completed transaction system state changes. Oh, and those channels are all on L1, which has 7 tps on best days.
Lightning can't work distributed, by design. It's a silly architecture. I guess the problem that the proponents of the alternative were slightly mental, sealed the fate of the BTC. It really should have increased block size, multiple times by now, and don't bother with stuff that can't work.
So, for a normal case where multiple people want to trade with multiple other people/merchants we would need a centralized node with connections to every single one of the clients and every single one of the merchants (so a "bank"). Both clients and merchants need to open a channel on L1 (so it's goddamn slow or expensive) to that node and freeze in the channel the full amount of tokens they would wish to spend with every single peer or merchant in the future (so basically a "deposit" of all or at least a lot of the funds in a "bank"). And every merchant would need to do that too for the full amount of anticipated transactions. And then this system will work on L2 somehow, if the system will correctly calculate paths and and sums in all the channels there are. To exit the system, channels must be closed on L1 (slowass or expensive) and if there are not enough funds in the channels, create new channels with more funds, again on L1.
Even in the most absurdly centralized scenario, the system is practically unusable as soon as there are more than a handful users. Or people just stop pretending and use custodian tokens, aka bullshit IOUs.
Wouldn't repeated block size increases lock out "normal people" from participating too? Hosting a local BTC node is already hard, and completely impractical on a mobile device.
If I'm not mistaken, you don't need to host a full node to access and operate BTC network. But hosting full nodes certainly adds resilience and speed to the system.
Point 1. Increasing node storage size would not be very expensive, people are buying NAS storage for fun, some of the more idealistic ones would certainly do that for BTC. BTC chain today is less than one terabyte. Even increasing chain size x10 times would still mean that it would fit on a single cheap consumer HDD. Increasing it x100 times would require something like a 6-8 HDD stripe, under 1-2 thousand bucks in price. People do that for memes or hosting torrents every day, all across the globe.
Point 2. Increasing chain size by a lot would mean that the amount of full nodes would inevitably drop, lets say by half, or even by 3/4. Still a lot would remain and the system would be very decentralized. While with lightning crutch the decentralized part is clogged permanently and is unusable for any serious currency replacement use, while users are forced on a broken by design centralized Lightning.
In my opinion the answer is obvious, if we want to have a truly decentralized currency, and not some casino replacement for gambling and law avoidance.
How much BTC do you need to run a node? And what are the failure modes if the node goes down or becomes network unreachable or something? I'm not trying to be critical, just curious myself what happens if I run a node. Would be happy for any resources you have on hand if that's too much for an HN comment.
I’m with you. It’s too complicated to run self-custodial node. I’m an engineer and can do it and yet I gave up after a year of constant baby sitting my node.
Hopefully future versions of Start9 or Umbrell make it easier. Or some hybrid solutions like Greenlight/Breez or Spark.
Only for tax purposes in the US. If you're worried that your speech will be censored by the government (importantly: corporate social media can censor you on their platforms but can't censor your BTC usage in most developed countries), then declaring BTC for tax purposes is probably the least of your worries in most places.
As far as I understand as a non-US citizen, the recent presidential bills anchor your (US citizen-) right to deal in bitcoin between private entities. So the "good" kind of regulation.
What has that todo with anyhting? For Nostr you need bitcoin (lightning) and there is plenty of ways to acquire/buy it anywhere in the world. No need to limit yourself to coinbase.
P.S: anon1395 is likely a new, mere troll account. Well played.
Lightning is not anywhere near as private as monero. It's a band aid at best. If it was actually private it would get banned and suppressed like monero.
And attention that Monero isn't the only privacy coin in town, but it is the one that is without doubt more attacked by governments due to its privacy. You don't see the same treatment for neither LN nor bitcoin, instead you see governments supporting it. There is a big difference.
Your link is from 2022 - blinded paths are now here in lightning. Async- and trampoline payments are around the corner. The article is heavily outdated.
I am involved in Lightning and run my own node - it is pretty much private enough for all sorts of micro payments for content creators. Not private enough for organized crime to move large sums, agreed.
You also forget to mention the 51% attack monero recently suffered. Lightning is bitcoin based and way more resilient to that.
The paper does not state what you make it out to be (it sees theoretical privacy-lowering attacks, but not as you state it "lack of privacy"). Practical attacks are not even proven.
And it - too - does not look into trampoline payments. Trampoline payments are a new feature that are not yet in a BOLT standard, but tried and tested in beta and used i.e. by Phoenix Wallet or Electrum.
>I am involved in Lightning and run my own node - it is pretty much private enough for all sorts of micro payments for content creators. Not private enough for organized crime to move large sums, agreed.
I don't get it. It's like saying bank transactions are private enough for all sorts of micro payments for content creators, but not private enough for organized crime to move large sums. Technically true, but...
You do not even acknowledge that monero payments take minutes (plus waiting for X confirmations) up to hours to finally settle. Lightning payments are instantenous, and take seconds (!). While moneros privacy might be higher that lightning, it is completely unusuable as a web micro-payment network.
I don't think you ever used Monero because payments are settled in a few minutes and the user gets fast notification of incoming transaction.
So that point you raise is fake. However, if you want to pick a more realistic reason then complain about the fees which are still high when doing for example a payment of 5 cents and the fee will often also be 5 cents whereas it should be free.
Anyways, I'm not even a fan of Monero being used for that purpose. The conversation here was about privacy and the lack of it on some virtual coins.
There is no point discussing with you, you twist every argument around - "...payments are settled in a few minutes and the user gets fast notification of incoming transaction." is not even contrary to what I wrote, you repeated my point. Minutes to clear a transaction vs. a second (sometimes a couple of seconds) is not even close to comparable. Anyway, I am out of this thread.
What's the "meta" like to find payment channels? That's the thing I found weirdest with LN, I needed to find a channel with enough funding. I presume the custodial LN providers just have their own payment channels?
There is a sweet spot between custodial and self-custodial wallets: "non-custodial" wallets like Phoenix Wallet or Electrum. You keys, your coins - but expect higher fees (which are still way less than CC providers or other payment processors). No need to manage channels yourself.
