All software has bugs. This is same as claiming ETH will always get hacked because of the DAO hack.
As far as I can tell there is no fundamental design flaws in Solana that makes it so that it will always go down. There are bugs in the networking stack that are being fixed.
An no, "engineers" don't bring it up. I run a validator and only i'm incentivized to restart it back up because of my stake.
This is no different from ETH, Lido staking has ~30% market share[0].
Stake centralizing != less security. no amount of stake can allow validators to steal your funds, this affects only censorship resistance. So actual validator count is more important than superminority.
In case of USDC I'm assuming Circle should be running their own validator, which is the source of truth.
As someone who has used most networks, Solana has the best experience for transacting USDC.
I've tried doing this read & updates using Postgrest and row-level-security using Supabase. When it works its an amazing experience but even for semi complex stuff you would still need to use Postgres RPC, which is still another "API" layer. I find writing API using SQL a nigtmare.
Simple queries like this don't work on Postgrest:
`update likes set likes = likes + 1;`
Bitcoin value is in it's potential to become a savings technology(store of value, digital gold, hard money) on the internet.
Decentralisation is a spectrum, expensive and slow is intentional in it's design to provide the highest level of security and trustlesness. If you want fast and cheap transactions then blockchain is not the answer.
If Bitcoin goes mainstream, layer 0 will be used for large value transactions. Rest will be moved off chain to custodial wallets and on probably a much smaller scale lightning, liquid and ethereum. Compared to fiat, transparency and opting out of centralized systems are easier.
The real question is not whether Bitcoin is a good SoV but if Austrian economics and sound money are a better alternative to our present economic system[1].
Either way, I believe Bitcoin might become the safe-haven asset that people could fall back on in times of inflation[2].
I think the following arguments against Bitcoin are not useful.
Happened to us, we built a bot[1] to buy and sell bitcoins privately on Telegram. Someone messaged me saying that they would get a 'SCAM' label on our bot if we didn't pay them the ransom. We didn't comply and within a few days we got the label(guess they managed to get a lot of accounts on our bot to report scam). Their support team was unresponsive and it took around 3 weeks to get it resolved.
Needless to say, our users lost trust and we couldn't risk this happening again.
We still run the service(from request of a few existing users) but not actively promoting it.
> Loneliness is an involuntary reaction that arises from a lack of meaningful social connections
It might be a cause for most people but not everything. For example, when I feel lonely it's not because of "meaningful social connections" just that I have nothing worth doing.
Something I realized taking a remote job for the first time, having genuine conversations was the default - my capacity for giving and taking hard criticisms is so much better. Some of it has also spilled into my personal life :)
- use coinjoin with something like wasabi wallet(https://wasabiwallet.io/)
- purchase BTC with cash