What about this one:

> The micro-transaction joke hits too close to home. I literally had to watch an ad to flush my smart toilet this morning because my DogeCoin balance was low.

And the response...

I am nearly in tears after reading this chain of posts. I have never read anything so funny here on HN.

Real question: How do LLMs "know" how to create good humor/satire? Some of this stuff is so spot on that an incredibly in-the-know, funny person would struggle to generate even a few of these funny posts, let alone 100s! Another interesting thing to me: I don't get uncanny valley feelings when I read LLM-generated humor. Hmm... However, I do get it when looking at generated images. (I guess different parts of the brain are activated.)

The jokes are not new. If you read Philip K Dick or Douglas Adams there's a lot of satirical predictions of the future that sound quite similar. What's amazing about LLMs is how they manage to almost instantly draw from the distilled human knowledge and come up with something that fits the prompt so well...

Gemini making a joke out of its own retirement is incredible, genuinely.

re: image gen, have you seen the more recent models? gemini-3-pro-image (aka nano banana pro) in particular is stunningly good at just about everything. examples: https://vtom.net/banana/

> dedicated DB cluster and Redis cache in AWS

Premature optimization final boss.

Bitcoin's traceability ruins its fungibility.

Fungibility and traceability are orthogonal. Equities markets transactions are highly traceable and also highly fungible.

Bitcoin's fungibility is limited by its incredibly slow transaction speed. (This is true of all cryptocurrencies AFAIK -- even the fastest ones that are only capable of 100K TPS at best.)

Correcting myself: I said "fungible" but meant "liquid." Bitcoin is reasonably fungible today, though not as easily as fiat currency. Traceability hasn't done much to reduce Bitcoin's fungibility AFAICT.

Equities markets don't have to deal with "tainted" transactions, because every transaction is like a government-approved deed or title transfer.

Bitcoin's transaction rate is artificially limited.

Your post seems like F.U.D.

#1: "between 2019 and 2023"

#2: the author wrote "This attack is not realistic. ... This is why everyone needs to run their own node"

#3: "digital forensic approach can still reveal sensitive information by examining off-chain artifacts such as memory and wallet files"

So...

#1 seems to have been mitigated.

#2 seems to not be an issue if you run your own node.

#3 seems to not be an issue if you don't let others do forensic analysis on your own computer (not the Blockchain).

It's good that people do this research to help make Monero better. I am not criticizing the people that published what OP linked to. But of course OP's post is like saying "What makes you think paint is safe? Here's a post about how paint used to include lead."

#1 and #2 are public results by market leading blockchain analytics companies that have an alphabet soup of agencies as their major clients.

Do you think they published their current state of the art?

Their current state of art leaks regularly, they inherently have to share it with their customers who are very leaky.

This reply seems like textbook F.U.D.

The fact that it's delisted from most exchanges because of its privacy features; if it was as traceable as Bitcoin, then the feds would allow it. What I see from these links is that it's not fully "traceable" and more educated guessing via heuristics.

I will admit that as far as signal goes that appears to be a big one.

Lightning (A layer-2 network based on Bitcoin) is similarly untraceable as Monero, without being an actual cryptocurrency. Yet the fed doesn't seem to concerned, probably also because few people and institutions understand Lightning, and the fed is not one of them or doesn't want to go against Bitcoin.

It is nowhere near the privacy offered by Monero: https://raphtyosaze.medium.com/privacy-in-lightning-network-...

Old paper, old link. Most of it is not relevant anymore today. They also do not compare, as Lightning is NOT a cryptocurrency nor does it try to be. It is still Bitcoin.

Please kindly provide evidence for your claims and please be factual to point the current privacy concerns still open today and what has been addressed (if at all).

Lightning is a token representing bitcoin, same as USDT representing USD.

It is NOT bitcoin, never was.

> Lightning is a token representing bitcoin

No, it is NOT. It is not even blockchain based. Not providing anything, as you can easily google all of this yourself.

The fungibility of Bitcoin is achieved through layer-2 networks, such as Lightning. No, it is not another cryptocurrency, it is just another technological layer. You are still transfering bitcoins.

Trumps "Bitcoin payment" portrayed extensively by the media was done in the Lightning network.

Monero is the only real cryptocurrency.

The root of the word "crypto" goes all the way in history as "to hide".

Monero has since many years been the only option worthy of truly being called a cryptocurrency. Doesn't even make sense to use anything where anyone can see all the value in your private wallet and where you are spending them.

The rest should really be designated as "virtual coins" or just call them "casino coins" because that is their use case.

They are not even coins. Coins do not get a pseudonym of their users attached for ever.

When you transfer monero to someone else there isn't a trace of where the money was before nor to whom it belonged.

You might be confusing monero with all the virtual "coins" out there.

They also try to enable notifications umprompted without user interaction

A better analogy might be those automated braking systems, that also tend to brake your car randomly btw.

Yeah, I was going to suggest manual vs automatic gear shift. Power steering seems like a slightly odd example, doesn't really remove your control.

Smartphones are this century's cigarrettes.

Tried to read the article but the ads were covering half the screen and also making the content shift around and move every 2 seconds