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What's up, everybody?
For the week ending February 3rd, my name is Marks, and
this is Freedom Tech Wrap, a weekly source for news and
project updates in the freedom and independent
technology space.
We live in a highly connected world.
Freedom Tech lets you decide how you want to connect and
where your data live.
Freedom Tech Wrap is an independent show.
If you want to support what we're doing, you can send us
value through your Podcasting 2.0 app.
Your support and your feedback are greatly appreciated.
Now, this week's episode is going to be short.
Just before I sat down to finalize everything, I lost a
big portion of my notes.
That's right, me.
I'm the person who follows the mantra of, if it's not in two
places, it doesn't exist.
Well, I've been using the bookmark feature in the
Domestik Nostra client as part of my research.
And while troubleshooting an issue, I reinstalled the app,
and boom, that's when I remembered bookmarks are only
stored locally on the client.
And they were all gone.
So lesson learned for me to make sure that I'm not
depending on a single device for a chunk of my research.
All right, let's get on to the news.
The environmental arm of the US government wants commercial
Bitcoin miners to register with them on a survey.
So this comes courtesy of an article posted on the US
Energy Information Administration website.
This is a government website dated on February 1, and it's
called Tracking Electricity Consumption from US
Cryptocurrency Mining Operations.
So they are claiming that they want to do research to
understand the load on the grid and all these things.
But they went and got a mandatory court order to
impel and compel, I should say, to compel these
miners to register.
Here are a couple quotes from the article.
"Electricity demand associated with US cryptocurrency mining
operations in the United States has grown very rapidly
over the last several years.
Our preliminary estimates suggest that an annual
electricity use from cryptocurrency mining probably
represents from 0.6% to 2.3% of US electricity consumption.
This additional electricity use has drawn the attention of
policymakers and grid planners concerned about its effects
on cost, reliability, and emissions.
Key challenges associated with tracking cryptocurrency mining
energy use include the difficulty of identifying
cryptocurrency mining activity among millions of US end user
customers and the dynamic nature of the crypto market,
where mining assets can be moved rapidly to areas with
lower electricity prices."
And then the last thing I want to quote out of here,
"In order to develop more rigorous estimates of
electricity use by US cryptocurrency miners, we have
requested and received an emergency clearance pursuant to
Office of Management and Budget procedures established."
La-ya-ya-ya-da-ya-da.
Okay.
So they have to report their, the miners have to report from
February of 2024 through July of 2024.
That is when they want to collect their data on a
monthly basis.
So I want to go back to one of the lines that they said,
where it says, "Where mining assets can be moved rapidly to
areas with lower electricity prices."
They really need to look at that last sentence and
understand the implications of that.
Why would a miner physically pick up and move machinery to
a place with lower energy costs?
It's not like this is just going into another room in a
factory or even going across town.
This might be moving cities, moving states.
This can be quite a cost to incur.
So why would they do that?
Well, it's because the energy can't be sold for a higher
price in that new area.
The producer of electricity has two options.
They can either lower the price until they find someone
who's willing to buy it, or they can intentionally waste
the excess power, like, for example,
sending it into the ground.
That's all they can do.
They produce electricity and they sell it to people.
And if people aren't willing to pay the price, then they
lower it and try to find more people.
And if they eventually can't find anyone to buy it at that
price, then they just waste the electricity they produced.
This should end the entire thing.
Bitcoin is not profitable to mine where there are other
people buying power.
That's it.
If you look at Europe, for example, which has higher
energy costs, there's very little mining hash rate
compared to the rest of the world.
The places that have serious amounts of mining take place
where energy is not being purchased for other users, or
for other uses, I should say, and has become cheap.
So policymakers continue to try and figure out how they can
wrangle the mining process.
But what they seem to not want to grasp is that it is
actually helping to build out grid infrastructure in places
that wouldn't be able to build it out to begin with, because
there aren't enough customers to buy that power.
So if you have a rural town and they don't have enough
buyers to justify the build out of the grid, to justify
transmission lines, to justify increased capacity, then the
capital won't show up to build it out for them because they
won't be able to pay off that capital in a reasonable amount
of time.
So that's where Bitcoin miners come into play.
And they will buy all of that extra energy to offset the
capital until more people move into the town and start
buying electricity, and then it becomes too expensive for
the Bitcoin miners, and they leave town and go to the next
one.
If you've listened to the show since the beginning, you'll
notice that this is a theme that we talk about on here.
This is also a great time to remind people that you can get
a Bitcoin space heater.
Even if it's not profitable, you get the heat for your room,
which also adds value.
My Bitcoin space heater that I have uses half the
electricity of a normal one that I also have.
They heat up the same room, but this one mines Bitcoin at a
break-even pace.
So there are also many times during the day that I might be
the only person at home, and I turn the overall house
thermostat down a few degrees, and I just heat up the room
that I'm in with my Bitcoin miner.
So I'm saving money on the overall heating bill.
All right, next up.
There is a service called Knitter, and it is shutting
down.
If you are familiar with this, this is a privacy-oriented way
to browse Twitter.
It lets you look at Twitter, but it anonymizes your traffic.
It tries to turn off cookies and ads and other things.
Well, unfortunately, this is the end for Knitter.
According to Zed, the main developer, they say, "It
appears the project's termination is linked to X or
Twitter's decision to disable the creation of guest
accounts.
Knitter was heavily reliant on these anonymous accounts,
which were only supported by older versions of the Twitter
app."
So, fairly well.
Knitter is still running on a few servers, but it looks like
once those guest accounts expire, then the service will
cease to be usable.
Okay.
You might remember from last week's episode, we talked
about an alternative project to GitHub.
This is another one of those projects.
This one is courtesy of Fiat Jaff, who is the creator of the
Noster protocol, coincidentally.
And this project is called Gitster, G-I-T-S-T-R.
And the reason this actually surfaced with me is that the
creator of the Amethyst app, which is an Android Noster
client, said, his name's Vitor, Vitor said that with Fiat
Jaff's Gitster, you can now send a Git patch to the Amethyst
project through Noster's relays and fully avoid GitHub.
So that's really cool.
You are able to contribute to this project in a decentralized
manner to contribute to a Noster client using Noster
protocol, which is awesome.
Also it should be noted that Fiat Jaff has been one of the
people outspoken on the topic of an alternative to GitHub and
thinks that we should build a bunch of smaller apps and
microservices as opposed to a monolithic open source app that
would replace GitHub.
It doesn't think that we really need to have just one big
thing because then it tends to centralize and just becomes
difficult to work with.
So let's build a bunch of small things that can all
communicate together.
Last news story of the day is that there is another
conference that has been announced.
This is Nostriga 2024.
If you remember, the Noster Unconference first started in
Costa Rica as Nostriga.
Then it went to Japan and Hong Kong under the
name of Nostrasia.
And now it is going to Riga, Latvia under the
name of Nostriga.
And it is going to be part of a larger Riga Bitcoin Week
that also has the Baltic Honey Badger Conference.
So if you would like to attend, this is happening on
August 22 to 23, 2024.
That is this upcoming summer.
You can go to Noster.world to find more information.
OK.
Let's read boosts that we received and zaps that we
received from last week's episode.
First up, we have the Wild Hustle zapped 2,000 sats and
said, great rip.
Thank you, Wild Hustle.
Appreciate you every week.
Next up, we have Joel W. who boosted 333 sats without a
message--
well, really it was a message that says dot, dot, dot.
So thank you, Joel.
Really appreciate that.
On Noster, on the note where I published this episode last
week, Mazin, who was mentioned in the episode, zapped 888
sats.
Thank you, Mazin.
Quinton zapped 555 sats.
Thank you, Quinton.
Also mentioned in the episode.
And then Raya, 50 sats.
Thank you, Raya.
And Jeff G zapped 21 sats.
All four of these people were mentioned in the episode.
Y'all are great.
Thank you so much for zapping.
And thank you for the projects that you're working on and
what you're doing for the freedom and independent
technology community.
Thank you for your support.
As a reminder, if you send a boost on an episode using your
Podcasting 2.0 app or zap me on Noster, I will read it on
every show.
OK, on to project updates.
First up, we have Graphene OS version 2024-01-2600,
effectively January 26, 2024.
And this update has lots of updates for how eSIMs are
handled, as well as updates to the camera settings, and then
lots of kernel fixes and updates.
So check that out if you're running Graphene.
Next, we have Domus, which is a major client for Noster.
Domus released version 1.7 to test flight.
It has not quite made it into the App Store yet, but it's
notable to mention it here because they introduced a new
service called Domus Purple.
And this is a paid service that lets you support Domus
development, as well as get additional features.
So to quote Will, creator of Domus, he says, "We are pumped
to announce the launch of Domus Purple.
You can be part of the roadmap for the year to come and
beyond by supporting our team with this
optional membership.
Currently, it's open to test flight users only, but we'll
be on the App Store shortly.
Thanks for joining us on this wild ride."
Next up, we have a Bitcoin wallet.
BlueWallet 6.5.0.
They have added crash detection for the Watch app and
lots of bug fixes.
And then last today, our friends over at Start9 have
announced that there is a new app on their App Store, and
this is Noster Wallet Connect.
Officially, it's version 0.4.2.
This is really cool because it lets you run Noster Wallet
Connect on your own server and connect to your own
Lightning Node.
So you can be sovereign with your Bitcoin Lightning Node
and the way that it talks to the world.
This was built by our friends over at Albi, who many of you
use their wallet.
And this will connect your Lightning Wallet to apps using
the Noster protocol.
So a bunch of open protocols, open communication, and now
open money is able to communicate out in a
self-sovereign way.
So check it out if you're running StartOS.
That's it for news and updates this week.
This is Freedom Tech Rep.
If you find this weekly source useful, please share it with
your people.
You can also support us through Value for Value and
send us feedback on Noster to marks@nosterclubs.com.
And remember to live independent.
Later.
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(bells chiming)
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