Peter Todd @pete@petertodd.org

Brutal: due to 23 deaths shortly after vaccinating with Pfizer's mRNA vaccine - out of 25,000 who have received the first dose - Norwegian authorities are now recommending that the very old and frail don't get vaccinated.

Looks like the notoriously severe side effects may be bad enough to kill some people. Ugly trade-off, because COVID-19 is also quite deadly in the age group.

Depending on how this goes, might lead to mandatory vaccination for the younger population.

https://trondheim24.no/nyheter/legemiddelverket-har-sett-pa-13-dodsfall-i-etterkant-av-vaksinasjon/

https://amp.ft.com/content/929ef3cd-8611-49b2-9f23-918dc3470166

"[Natural COVID-19 infection] gave better than 94 per cent protection against symptomatic Covid-19, matching the figures for the most effective Covid-19 vaccines."

Who would have thought that a natural infection is just as good at providing immunity than a vaccine designed to closely simulate a natural infection?

Amazing how many people have been trying to vigorously deny that herd immunity is a thing.

@FreePietje @orionwl @joeyh git-annex is awesome software! I've been using it for years.

@alan8325 Complexity probably. More work than Monero. Also, the typical transaction size (in terms of BTC) might be high enough that they're not sure that they'd be able to reliably keep sufficient channel capacity.

@lucash_dev https://petertodd.org/2016/block-publication-incentives-for-miners

I don't really know of great resources covering this game theory stuff in detail frankly. It also doesn't help that there's a lot of dishonest academics and others with incentives to mislead people about how this stuff works, to promote their own coins.

@alan8325 If they screwed up, sure. Monero is certainly easier to use privately than on-chain Bitcoin, as reasonable privacy happens by default without any extra effort.

@lucash_dev #1 reason is because people voluntarily donate their bandwidth to do so, on a huge scale.

...and re miners, small miners have an incentive for other miners to already know about the txs they're mining. Basically, blocks are sent around the network as lists of transactions these days, not the raw block. So the more txs in common, the faster they propagate.

(it's actually more complex than just txs lists - but what I said is basically correct)

@ArturoGoosnargh @alan8325 @bitcoineagle Well what I was talking about up-thread was finding ways to get past the monopoly position of CDNs for people trying to compete with services like Twitter and YouTube. Sure, even Bittorrent can help w/ file distribution. But we need something that's actually competitive for mainstream websites.

@ArturoGoosnargh @alan8325 @bitcoineagle IPFS isn't magic: ISPs need to run IPFS caches if you want latency and downloads speeds to be competitive with existing CDNs.

@drgo @nvk @grubles You could do that fairly easily with the Scuttlebutt protocol actually, as it's crypto-based and doesn't care where data comes from. Mastodon has message signing too, which is used for relay servers. But it'd be a bit messier, as you'd still need instance servers for the initial identity.

@orionwl I've got literally hundreds of gigabytes of stuff in git repos, using git-annex. Even without git-annex, storing binaries in git repos when the intent is long-term 100% complete archiving is fine. Only downside is normal checkouts take up twice the space.

Looks like the full set of binaries is a couple hundred MB. git can handle that just fine out of the box.

@orionwl One option of course would be to have a git repo of all the binaries and timestamp the git repo itself. Then publish on the website only the .ots proof for the .asc, extracted with the git-extract command.

@alan8325 @bitcoineagle Problem is it's a chicken-and-egg thing: without a major browser implementing it, hard to get enough ISPs to run edge cache servers.

On a tech level, you could anycast the edge caches. But where is the money going to come from to pay the bills to run them while you wait for ISP adoption?

@orionwl The PGP signature packet format does *not* include the full digest of what is being signed - just 16 bits of the digest - so there could be a potential issue with verifying the file contents if quantum computing ever becomes a thing. IIRC ECC sigs act like hash functions even with quantum computing, so IIUC they would be verifiable. I don't know about RSA.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4880#section-5.2.3

@orionwl Yeah, simply timestamp SHA256SUMS.asc and upload the .ots proof.

I'd advise *against* timestamping the SHA256SUMS files directly, as that gives the wrong impression as to what the main purpose of the timestamp is: validation of the PGP signatures into the future, not validation of the releases themselves.

@drgo @nvk This is what I used: https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/mastodon

Very easy, _if_ you understand the basics of how web servers work. But if you don't, kinda hopeless...

The instructions for setting up your own, on your own hardware, aren't so easy frankly. I haven't tried alternative software. But Mastodon itself is kinda a beast - it's a standard high scalability web app using lots of fancy tech. It looks intimidating to me, so I went for the one-click option.

Probably a docker setup somewhere...

@nvk @alanturing @jb55 Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. I really don't think there is enough traction right now to transition to a pile of independent servers - lots of less technical people on this instance, and it's a big overhead to set one up relative to the alternatives. More likely that Bitcoin mastodon will just die.

@bitcoineagle @alan8325 Exactly!

This tech is out there. The challenge is getting adoption in mainstream browsers. Quite possibly an insurmountable challenge, as Google has negative incentives to do it... Maybe Apple would be willing to in Safari.