Bitcoin Science

Bitcoin failed. J.P. Koning notes in The end of El Salvador’s bitcoin payments experiment:

But here was a government that was going to champion the stuff, nullifying all of the headwinds against bitcoin in one stroke! The government meddling hypothesis would be put to test.

The Salvadoran government used a combination of sticks and carrots to kick-start adoption. First, let's list the carrots. The capital gains tax on bitcoin was set to zero to remove the hassle of buying stuff with bitcoin. The government also built a bitcoin payments app, Chivo, for all El Salvadoreans to use. (Chivo also supports U.S. dollar payments.) Anyone who downloaded Chivo and transacted with bitcoin would receive a $30 bitcoin bonus—that's a lot of money in El Salvador. Gas stations offered $0.20 off of a gallon of gas for customers who paid with the app. People could also use Chivo to pay their taxes with bitcoin.

The biggest carrot was zero-transaction fees. Any payment conducted with Chivo was free, as was converting bitcoins held in the Chivo app into U.S. dollars and withdrawing cash at Chivo ATMs. These Chivo ATMs were rolled out across El Salvador and in the U.S., too, to encourage the nascent U.S.-to-El Salvador bitcoin remittance route. Bitcoin ATMs are usually incredibly pricey to use, but in El Salvador the government would eat all the transaction fees. What a fantastic deal.

As for the stick, Bukele introduced a forced-tender rule. Beginning in 2021, businesses were required to accept the orange coin or be punished. This was costly for them to comply with. They would have to update point of sale software, signage, train employees, and set up new processes for handling bitcoins post-sale.

By all rights, this combination of sticks and carrots should have led to a flourishing of bitcoin payments. But it didn't.

Koning concludes:

The saddest thing about El Salvador's bitcoin experiment is that all sorts of time and resources have been wasted. El Salvador is not a rich country. The money spent on building and operating Chivo, compliance by businesses, bitcoin signage, and subsidies could have been better deployed on more important things like health and education.  One hopes that other countries learn from this experience and avoid going down the same route that El Salvador did.

Win Stupid Prizes

Deadly D.C. Plane Crash Comes Months After Congress Ignored Warning About Traffic at Reagan Airport

As the new administration is playing stupid games, yesterday morning, prior to yesterday’s aviation disaster, professor Thomas Schaller cautioned:

An FAA employee I know confirms agency already lacks sufficient air traffic controllers. The so-called “buyouts” and other attacks on federal employees won’t help. Remember that fact when the flight delays (crashes?) commence and Trumpers start falsely blaming DEI or Biden.

This should be a wakeup call and I have a deeper appreciation for people like Phyllis Fong who this week have resisted the illegal orders that are already causing significant harm. On the other hand, if you like anarchy and disaster, congratulations.

Hockey Trivia

As I just registered for a new season of beer league hockey starting this weekend, I thought about an episode of C’est comme ça que je t’aime I recently watched which is set in 1974 Sainte-Foy, Quebec City. Nearly all the 1974 Quebec cultural references are new to me and in this episode, there is an adventure in a hockey arena and you can pause the video in a few places and see signage in the background for a junior hockey team called Ste. Foy Couillard that only existed from 1972-1974.

You can watch it at ICI Tou.tv (in Canada) or Amazon Prime (in U.S.).

No Water is Death

“Extermination & Acts of Genocide”: Human Rights Watch on Israel Deliberately Depriving Gaza of Water

AMY GOODMAN: So, can I ask you, Bill Van Esveld, is this the first time that Human Rights Watch is accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza?

BILL VAN ESVELD: This is the first time that we’ve made a finding of genocidal acts in Gaza. It is not an accusation that we level lightly. We have not done this very often in our history. We accused the Myanmar military of genocidal acts against the Rohingya in 2017, and we found full-blown genocide against the Kurds in Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign in Iraq in the ’80s — sorry, in the ’90s, and we found genocide against — also in Rwanda in the ’80s. It is, you know, an extremely difficult crime to prove. It is, you know, mass killing deliberately to destroy people because they’re part of the group, not something we level lightly, but, yes, we found it here.

Austin Indieweb at Radio Coffee

On Wednesday 12/04 at 7pm, the Austin Indieweb Meetup returns to Radio Coffee and Beer. Count me in.

RIP Toni Price

We made a roadtrip one last time to Wimberly to see her perform at the Devil’s Backbone Tavern in August 2023.

There was no one like Toni Price.

Webfinger in the Wild

Today, a post in my feed included a mention and its webfinger verification threw a WebFinger::BadRequest exception:

Nov 08 09:18:49 AM  WebFinger::BadRequest (Bad Request):
Nov 08 09:18:49 AM 
Nov 08 09:18:49 AM  app/models/account.rb:79:in `fetch_and_create_mastodon_account'
Nov 08 09:18:49 AM  app/models/account.rb:367:in `block in create_status!'
Nov 08 09:18:49 AM  app/models/account.rb:364:in `each'
Nov 08 09:18:49 AM  app/models/account.rb:364:in `create_status!'
Nov 08 09:18:49 AM  app/lib/activity_pub/activity/create.rb:20:in `perform'
Nov 08 09:18:49 AM  app/controllers/accounts_controller.rb:148:in `process_item'
Nov 08 09:18:49 AM  app/controllers/accounts_controller.rb:75:in `inbox'

The activitypub actor document resided on mastodon.well.com but when a reverse discovery was performed, the hostname of the subject in the webfinger response was well.com instead of mastodon.well.com. Making a webfinger request to well.com for the mentioned user returned a 500 Internal Server Error so a WebFinger::BadRequest exception was thrown. What was going on?

Fortunately, an issue in the activitypub-webfinger had the answer:

Looks like some are using this host-meta redirect to use a custom domain for actors which is different to the actual domain of the server.

And that is what was happening:

curl https://mastodon.well.com/.well-known/host-meta
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<XRD xmlns="http://docs.oasis-open.org/ns/xri/xrd-1.0">
  <Link rel="lrdd" template="https://mastodon.well.com/.well-known/webfinger?resource={uri}"/>
</XRD>

A response in the issue notes

The use of host-meta as a “second layer of indirection” is something that mostly a holdover from the OStatus days, IIRC. Most projects that aren’t Mastodon or Pleroma will not check host-meta at all, and will instead always skip straight to the /.well-known/webfinger endpoint. I don’t think it makes sense to unnecessarily pressure everyone into adopting host-meta or supporting variable LRDD endpoints

I can’t argue with that so I just handled the exception without setting the custom domain.

Indieweb Meetup Austin today

After some time off IndieWeb Meetup Austin is back at Mozart’s Coffee tonight at 7pm. I guess a few things have transpired since the last meeting so I’m looking forward to learning about what’s going on again.

CPJ Head Condemns Israel's Deadly War on Journalists

Jodie Ginsberg, CPJ’s chief executive officer:

No journalist from outside Gaza has been allowed in since the start of that war, and that’s highly unusual. I speak to lots of war correspondents who’s covered many, many wars over decades, and all of them talk about how unprecedented this is to not have any access whatsoever. And that, of course, puts additional pressure on these journalists.

CPJ Head Condemns Israel’s Deadly War on Journalists in Gaza as IDF Threatens Al Jazeera Reporters

In the interview, Amy Goodman also mentions “James McGovern leading 64 other congressmembers in a letter to Biden and Blinken, urging them to push for Israel to allow in international journalists”