uhhhh the nation in question is the US. not a bad idea to consider other things to put money into

I don’t disagree that the US has been quite destabilized as a financial player on the world stage, but the US still has an insane amount of influence over global trade, and holds a ton of power within its own economy.

To argue that Bitcoin is more strongly backed than the entire long-standing, heavily globally financially integrated nation is silly, especially considering, comparatively, how relatively few manufacturers of ASIC miners there are for Bitcoin that could theoretically heavily influence the distribution of hashrate over time if compelled, or how most transactions in crypto still require a financial middleman to offload into currencies like USD because businesses simply can’t operate well when transacting with BTC in most circumstances if that also requires holding onto the BTC afterwards.

holding BTC long term isn’t that risky

And the original post was comparing short term treasuries to Bitcoin, not long term ones.

And even then, Bitcoin’s long-term outlook is bleak considering the % of block rewards paid from fees hasn’t substantially increased to make up for the halvings, which if the trend continues, will result in the cost per block cratering over time, leading to heavily slashed overall hashrate protecting the network.

My understanding is that for reliable email, you need to host with microsoft or google otherwise you are more likely to get sorted into junk mail.

That’s technically accurate, but it depends on the context. For example, if you set up DMARC properly and use a brand new custom domain as a personal email, yeah, you’re much more likely to get sent to spam, but not necessarily right away, and as you use that more frequently, or communicate with people using the larger providers like Google or Microsoft, the higher the “reputation” of your domain will get.

If you want the highest possible level of reliability though, then yeah, Google or Microsoft’s options are likely gonna give you the highest chance right off the bat without any fuss.

There is no logical reason not to hold BTC on your balance sheet over short duration US treasuries.

One is stable and is backed by the full faith and credit of a nation, the other’s value is determined solely by the current speculative state of the market. For a company which requires stability, they don’t want to invest in an extremely volatile asset. That is a highly logical reason.

When running a local node, the most other people could possibly see is that “x IP is running a Monero node”

When connecting to a remote node, the node can see:

• Your IP address
• When you submit a transaction (which could link your IP to your transactions)
• The last block your wallet synced (which could be used to determine when you usually use/spent monero last)

It’s also possible for a remote node to feed your wallet a manipulated list of decoys, which can reduce the anonymity of the transaction you submit by allowing the remote node to simply remove the fake decoys to find which isn’t the decoy (you.)

I’ve seen cardboard in America too! Sometimes you’ll also see reusable clip-on plastic tops that some smaller stores will actually let you return so they can re-use them, or send them back on their next shipment, although that’s much less common.

Why no emojis? Personally, I’ve always felt like they were just a better way of expressing a person’s emotion or meaning that’s a bit more than plain text can easily describe.

It had a sort of surrealist look to it that I think threw a lot of people off. I don’t know how to explain it, but a lot of people thought it just looked off in one way or the other. For me, it was the lighting with the constant change in depth of field that made it look odd, but I still figured out it wasn’t AI after looking a bit closer.

Smoking is also an activity that some workplaces allow you to use to justify extra breaks.

For example, it’s easier for one of my coworkers to go outside and have a smoke break without judgement than it is for me to go sit in the break room for 5-10 minutes and eat a snack if I’m tired.

No idea I’d thats a common thing in AI video

As far as I’m aware, it’s not. Most AI video is consistently clear, or at most just low resolution. (i.e. it tends to maintain a consistent visual style for each clip, without much changing to composition, lighting, style, depth of field, etc)

I was originally inclined to think that the blurring was added in post, to cover up moments where the AI generated footage did something that made it obvious it was AI, but even regardless of that the faces, positioning, and lighting in the background remained pretty consistent across the length of the video, which AI tends to not be very good with. (i.e. in a crowd of people faces will randomly appear, disappear, move, change height, etc in a way that’s unnatural)

I’m not inclined to trust The Daily Wire, but I also can’t exactly see anything that stands out like crazy that makes me think it’s fake.

It definitely has a somewhat surreal feeling look to it, but I’ve been tracking various faces and objects in the background and they don’t seem to move, change, or distort at all in a way that’s unnatural.

Either AI video generation technology got insanely good (or they just had a very lucky break with happening to get a good quality output) and I’m simply not able to fully identify it, or the video is real but the context and quote is what’s fake.

I’m convinced this was written by GPT.

I’m a human being. I know my writing style can often come off weird to some people, but I can assure you I don’t outsource my thinking to a word prediction program to make my points for me.

We disagree on how good or bad porn is for society and the youth, so the rest doesn’t even matter.

I haven’t seen any evidence that light or moderate consumption of porn by legal adults produces significant negative consequences for them or society at large, so long as the porn doesn’t involve non-consenting parties, underage individuals, etc. Thus, I don’t think it’s reasonable to heavily monitor and restrict access to every single individual in our society.

As for kids, research is obviously lacking since it’s somewhat of a touchy subject for researchers to study, but since we know sex ed, conversations between kids & parents, and even the most basic of parental controls and monitoring can prevent the vast majority of the negative effects, and even the whole of the initial consumption while underage, then that’s what I advocate for.

Until I see evidence to the contrary, that demonstrates larger harms from general consumption trends than the surveillance of the online media consumption of every single citizen, on top of the possible risks to online censorship, while other methods we already know work well still can’t reduce that risk below the possible harms of a monitoring/access control system, then I’m not going to support such a system.

You show your ID and a notary enters their credentials to allow you to create an account

The problem then lies in how whoever (likely the government) can ensure that verified accounts are indeed verified by real people.

If any notary can create these accounts by just claiming they saw a proper ID/biometrics, then even one malicious notary could make as many “verified” accounts as they want. If they’re then investigated, that would mean there’d be monitoring in place to see who they met with, which would defeat the privacy preservation method of only having them look at it.

This also doesn’t solve the problem of people reselling stolen accounts, going to multiple notaries and getting each one to individually attest and make multiple accounts to give out or sell, etc.

with your fingerprint or FaceID Your ID doesn’t get saved. Your biometrics are only saved in the way that your iPhone saves them for a password.

If your biometrics are stored, then there’s one of two places they could be stored and processed:

1. On your own device (i.e. you just use your existing fingerprint lock on your phone to secure your account, say, one that’s made via a passkey so as to make fingerprint verification possible)

This can just be bypassed by the user once they log in with their biometrics, since the credentials are then decrypted and they can just export them raw, or just have them stolen by anyone who accesses their device or installs malware, etc.

This doesn’t solve the sale, transfer, or multiple creations of accounts.

2. A hash of your biometrics are stored on a government server, then your device provides the resulting hash of your fingerprint scans to unlock your account to the government server when logging in.

The scanner that originally creates the hash for your fingerprint must be trusted to not transmit any other data about your fingerprint itself, and could be bypassed by modifying network requests to send fake hashes to the government server during account creation, thus allowing for infinite “verified” accounts to be created and sold.

This also doesn’t prevent the stealing or transfer of accounts, since you would essentially just be using your hash as a password instead of a different string of text, and then they’d just steal your hash, not a typical password. This also would mean the government would get a log of every time someone used their account, and you could be instantly re-identified the moment you go to the airport and scan your fingerprint at a TSA checkpoint, for example, permanently tying your real identity back to any account you verify with your biometrics in the future.

The fundamental problem with these systems is that if you have to verify your identity, you must identify yourself somehow. If that requires sending your personal data to someone, it risks your privacy and security going forward. If that doesn’t require sending your personal data, then the system is easily bypassed, and its existence can’t be justified.

What’s a solution that would be acceptable for you?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll continue advocating for it going forward:

• Parental controls and simple parent-controlled monitoring software on young children’s devices
• Actual straightforward conversations between parents and kids about adult content
• Sex ed classes.

We already know these things do the most we can reasonably do to prevent underage viewing of adult content. We don’t need age verification laws, because they either harm privacy or don’t even work, when much simpler, common sense solutions already solve the problem just fine.

Did you respond to the wrong post?

I said I use coin op shit. It takes way too many quarters to use that shit.

Sorry, I thought it was obvious that making people carry around large quantities of metal dollar coins is a bad idea for anyone wanting to spend any reasonable amount of money, and that you were implying using cards to replace the paper dollar and quarters, rather than simply replacing it with dollar coins.

Easily stackable, foldable, lightweight paper money is much more practical for most people than un-foldable, harder to carry in wallets, heavier, louder coins. Nothing stops anybody from easily getting dollar coins right now, but there’s a reason most people didn’t want to spend them when they were first introduced, or even after the government sold them for exactly $1 online (shipping was free), and I don’t think

But if you really prefer dollar coins, you can get them from your bank today, or order them from the mint online. Many coin operated machines actually take them.

denominations below quarters AREN’T useful

They are for people spending smaller amounts of money, like children who very often buy candy worth anywhere from $0.10 to $0.25 (not including tax, which requires them to have more smaller coins)

and paying 3 dollars in quarters is insane.

Three single dollar bills will get you there much faster.

Cash machines jam all the time.

Whatever cash machines you’re using must be very badly maintained. I haven’t had a single cash machine jam on me in my entire life.

This is why most pay machines now are credit card

Most machines are now credit card based because nobody has to then physically go to the machines to actually empty the money out of them.

The half penny was eliminated when it was worth more than a dime in todays money.

Cool, I still think the dime right now has enough value to justify being kept around for a bit, especially if we’re getting rid of other smaller denominations, as it provides more of a transitionary period for people to adjust to spending and receiving larger denominations, especially when rounding of purchase prices made with physical money is still being normalized.

Technically true, but it also carries a whole host of other issues.

A lot of people still use cash because they prefer it to card networks. As much as I like the convenience of paying for a $1-$2 item with my card, I also realize it’s costing my small local stores a pretty large amount of money in fees overall.

Not to mention there’s a lot of kids that are much more capable of learning the value of money when it physically leaves their hands, and they’re using smaller bills, since they don’t exactly have a ton of money in the first place. We know that psychologically, the experience of using cash hurts more than using cards mentally, which prevents overspending more compared to card payments, and it’s great for teaching kids good behaviors.

Besides, it’s also great for tipping street performers without having to make a million different accounts on PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, etc just to electronically transfer two bucks, it’s great for older people who are simply not easily able to understand how to properly use and manage cards, the list goes on.

A dollar in itself still has meaningful value. In many places, you can still buy, for example, a bag of chips, a coffee, a protein bar, items that people legitimately consume on a daily basis.

The same can’t be said for the penny or a nickel, hence why essentially nobody pays for any item, no matter how cheap, just using those coins, but very commonly does so with quarters, dollar bills, and I’ll admit, sometimes even dimes too, although I’d argue not frequently enough to justify much of their continued use in the coming years.

As long as a denomination of money can, on its own, or in small quantities, (i.e. something you could count out at a register without everyone in the line behind you getting angry at you) purchase a good, then that denomination should continue to exist, in my opinion.

they then authorize you to create an account

Authorize you how?

That would involve someone having the ability to see which accounts where made, when, and how they were authorized, not to mention likely being able to track when they’re used in the future.

with biometric credentials

What does this mean? Do you mean you verify your biometric data with the notary to prove it’s you? Your ID should be enough. Do you mean where your biometric data is your password? This doesn’t prove it’s you. If processing is on-device like how phone lock screens work, then a simple piece of software could just extract the raw credentials and allow people to use/sell/transfer those, bypassing the biometrics. If it requires sending your biometric data to the company to log in like a traditional password flow, then all my previous issues with biometric verification online become present.

There’s still a key difference between this hybrid approach and, like I mentioned previously, buying alcohol by showing your ID to a clerk at a counter, and it’s that the interaction ends there. If you show ID, buy alcohol, then leave, the store doesn’t do anything after that. There’s no system monitoring when or how much you’re drinking, or if you’ve offered some of that drink to someone underage, for example.

But with something like what you’re proposing, the unfortunate reality is that it has to have some kind of monitoring for it to functionally work, otherwise it becomes trivially bypassed, and thus the interaction can’t end when the person leaves.

Not to mention the fact that not all platforms people find porn on are actually dedicated porn sites. Many people are first exposed via social media, just like how they’re exposed to much of their other information and general knowledge nowadays. If we want to age gate social media porn consumption as well, we then need to age verify everyone regardless of if they intend to view porn or not, because we can’t ensure it won’t end up on their feed.

There’s a reason why I’m so strongly against these verification methods, and it’s because they always cause a whole host of privacy and security issues, and don’t even create a strong enough system to prevent unauthorized porn viewing by minors in the first place.

Who under the age of 18 will have money to buy these

Anyone with at least $0.25-$1, and access to any method of digital payments. (Gift Cards for most retailers, PayPal, Cash App, Zelle, prepaid or non-prepaid debit cards, any cryptocurrency, etc)

and who would be willing to sell them for the pittance teenagers would be willing to spend?

Primarily bad actors that obtain the credentials any number of ways, then either directly sell them, or sell them indirectly through third-party storefronts that buy from the bad actors in bulk. Believe me, I’ve watched hundreds of kids in Discord servers publicly sharing and using sites on the clearweb where they cashapp in a dollar then buy a stolen set of bank credentials and try withdrawing money back to their Cash App account.

I’ve monitored so many of these sites, and seen how easy it is for anybody, even teens with limited financial payment options, to buy stolen credentials with infinitely more importance and personal security measures taken to keep them safe than something specifically for accessing an NSFW site.

Some of these site owners operate for months before eventually shutting down and re-opening separate storefronts for anonymity, and I know of one who was selling stolen SSNs, IDs, Gift Cards, and assorted accounts, and made, by my estimates, at least a million dollars in revenue every month off items that were almost all within the price range of any child or teenager.

Especially if these get rotated out regularly via a system wide program.

Rotation can help, but doesn’t cut off these services from operating. They just sell stuff in smaller, more quickly refilled batches instead of buying large batches and reselling them over longer time periods. It can make prices slightly higher, but in the end it doesn’t prevent kids from accessing this content.

But what it does end up doing is creating perverse incentives.

It drives people to even less regulated, more harmful porn sites. It leads to the further stealing of credentials and personal information. It creates databases and online footprints that can be used to blackmail people, and it normalizes giving sensitive personal information to random websites online.

The last thing you want when you’re trying to prevent people from getting scammed is to monetarily encourage scamming people out of their credentials and biometric data, while simultaneously making it easier for people to unknowingly hand over credentials and biometrics by normalizing the process.

This is something practically every digital rights organization argues against, and for good reason. It’s a generally unsafe system that creates bad incentives and drives people to even more unsafe options.

The best mechanisms by far to prevent kids from being exposed to harmful material, or at the very least prevent them from experiencing much harm from such material is often proper parental controls and general internet monitoring by those parents, good sex education, and parents actually talking with their kids instead of fostering the us vs them mentality that drives many kids to rebel against these restrictions, even when they are to benefit the kid.

That’s why news like this is always so upsetting to me. It’s a mom who is understandably upset, but instead of taking accountability for leaving a unsecured laptop with access to the internet easily accessible to her kid while not monitoring it at all, she simply puts the blame on the platforms her child decided to access, even though we know she could have done many things herself to prevent this from happening without risking anybody’s privacy or safety, unlike what age-gating regulations do in practice.

The conflict that this often boils down to is that the digital world does not emulate the real world. If you want to buy porn in the real world, you need ID, but online anything goes. I love my online anonymity just as much as everybody else, but we’ll eventually need to find some hybrid approach.

The problem is that because the internet is fundamentally different from the real world, it has its own challenges that make some of the things we do in the real world unfeasible in the digital world. showing an ID to a clerk at a store doesn’t transmit your sensitive information over the internet to/through an unknown list of companies, who may or may not store it for an undetermined amount of time, but doing so on the internet essentially has to do so.

While I do think we should try and prevent kids from viewing porn at young ages, a lot of the mechanisms proposed to do so are either not possible, cause many other harms by their existence that could outweigh their benefits, or are trivially bypassed.

We already scan our faces on our phones all the time, or scan our finger on our computer. How about when you want to access a porn site you have to type in a password or do some biometric credential?

Those systems are fundamentally different, even though the interaction is the same, so implementing them in places like porn sites carries entirely different implications.

For example, (and I’m oversimplifying a bit here for time’s sake) a biometric scan on your phone is just comparing the scan it takes each time with the hash (a processed version) of your original biometric scan during setup. If they match, the phone unlocks.

This verification process does nothing to verify if you’re a given age, just that your face/fingerprint is the same as during setup. It also never has to transmit or store your biometrics to another company. It’s always on-device.

Age verification online for something like porn is much more complex. When you’re verifying a user, you have to verify:

• The general location the user lives in (to determine which laws you must comply with, if not for the type of verification, then for the data retention and security, and access)
• The age of the user
• The reality of the user (e.g. a camera held up to a YouTube video shouldn’t verify as if the person is the one in the video)
• The uniqueness of the user (e.g. that this isn’t someone re-licensing the same clip of their face to be replayed directly into the camera feed, allowing any number of people to verify using the same face)
• And depending on the local regulations, the identity of the user (e.g. name, and sometimes other identifiers like address, email, phone number, SSN, etc)

This all carries immense challenges. It’s fundamentally incompatible with user privacy. Any step in this process could involve processing data about someone that could allow for:

• Blackmail/extortion
• Data breaches that allow access to other services the person has an account on
• Being added to spam marketing lists
• Heavily targeted advertising based on sexual preference
• Government registries that could be used to target opponents

This also doesn’t include the fact that most of these can simply be bypassed by anyone willing to put in even a little effort. If you can buy an ID or SSN online for less than a dollar, you’ll definitely be able to buy an age verification scan video, or a photo of an ID.

Plus, for those unwilling to directly bypass measures on the major sites, then if only the sites that actually fear government enforcement implement these measures, then people will simply go to the less regulated sites.

In fact, this is a well documented trend, that whenever censorship of any media happens, porn or otherwise, viewership simply moves to noncompliant services. And of course, these services can be hosting much worse content than the larger, relatively regulatory-compliant businesses, such as CSAM, gore, nonconsensual recordings, etc.

They can prove its signed with the governments root cert, showing that its someone over 18, but not who.

This is generally a pretty decent system in concept, but it has some unique flaws.

A similar system is even being developed by Cloudflare (“Privacy Pass”) to make CAPTCHAs more private by allowing you to anonymously redeem “tokens” proving you’ve solved a CAPTCHA recently, without the CAPTCHA provider having to track any data about you across sites.

They know someone who had solved a captcha recently is redeeming a token, but they don’t know who.

This type of system will always have one core problem that really can’t be fixed though, which is the sale and transfer of authenticated tokens/keys/whatever they get called in a given implementation.

Someone could simply take their signed cert, and allow anybody else to use it. If you allow the government to view whoever is using their keys, but not the porn sites, then you give the government a database of every porn user with easily timestamped logs. If you don’t give the government that ability, even one cert being shared defeats the whole system. If you add a rate limit to try and solve the previous problem, you can end up blocking access if a site, browser, or extension, is just slightly misconfigured in how it handles requesting the cert, or could break someone’s ability to use their cert the moment it gets leaked.

And even if someone isn’t voluntarily offering up their cert, it will simply get sold. I’ve investigated sites selling IDs and SSNs for less than a dollar a piece before, and I doubt something even less consequential like an ID just for accessing online adult content would even sell for that much.

I’ve seen other methods before, such as “anonymous” scans of your face where processing is done locally to prove you’re an adult, then the result of the cryptographic challenge is sent back proving you’re over 18, but that would fail anyone who looks younger but is still an adult, can be bypassed by the aforementioned sale of personal data to people wanting to verify, and is often easily fooled by videos and photos of people on YouTube, for example.

There’s absolutely something to be said for trying to ensure that people don’t have access to porn as kids, but that doesn’t come from what these legal battles inevitably want to impose, which is ID check requirements that create a massive treasure trove of data for attackers to target to steal IDs, blackmail individuals, and violate people’s privacy, while adding additional costs for porn sites that will inevitably lead to predatory monetization, such as more predatory ads.

The problem is that parents are offloading their own responsibility and education off themselves and schools, and instead placing an unworkable burden onto the sites that host and distribute pornographic content.

We know that when you provide proper sex education, talk to kids about how to safely consume adult content without risking their health, safety, and while setting realistic expectations, you tend to get much better outcomes.

If there’s one thing I think most people are very aware of, it’s that the more you try and hide something from kids, the more they tend to try and resist that, and find it anyways, except without any proper education or safeguards.

It’s why abstinence only education tends to lead to worse outcomes than sex education, even though on the surface, you’re “exposing” kids to sexually related materials.

This doesn’t mean we should deliberately expose kids to porn out of nowhere, remove all restrictions or age checks, etc, but it does mean that we can, for example:

• Implement reasonable sex education in schools. Kids who have sex ed generally engage in healthier masturbation and sex than kids who don’t.
• Have parents talk with their kids about safe and healthy sex & relationships. It’s an awkward conversation, but we know it keeps kids healthier and safer in the long run.
• Implement a captcha-like system to make it a little more difficult (and primarily, slower and less stimulating) for kids to quickly access porn sites. Requiring certain somewhat higher level math problems to be solved, for example. This doesn’t rely on giving up sensitive personal info.

Kids won’t simply stop viewing porn if you implement age gates. Kids are smart, they find their way around restrictions all the time. If we can’t reasonably stop them without producing a whole host of other extremely negative consequences, then the best thing we can do is educate them on how to not severely risk their own health.

It’s not perfect, but it’s better than creating massive pools of private data, perverse financial incentives, and pushing people to more fringe sites that do even less to comply with the law.

Nickel I agree with, but I feel like the the paper dollar is a bit much. Why do you want to get rid of the paper dollar too?