Thank you very much for pointing me in the right direction. I was able to dig a bit and I think I found it - it looks like they were being a bit of a pedantic asshole about some spelling/grammar thing, the moderator deleted their comment because… yes, it’s a pedantic spelling/grammar nitpick. Then that user threw a massive tantrum and started yelling mod abuse.

Honestly, it’s a real shame that Liam lost faith in Lemmy over something stupid like this. Yeah, there are downsides of a public mod log - really hateful vile shit will just persist in there forever when realistically it should be just wiped out entirely. I think overall it has more benefits than drawbacks, but I certainly wouldn’t say that being opposed to a public mod log is some sort of smoking gun evidence that he abused his mod powers.

So yeah, this one guy behaving like a self-centred jerk actively contributed towards pushing a well-known and prolific linux gaming journalist off the platform. Great stuff, love to see it.

Screenshot:

Yeah, totally - I think it’s designed to be hard to understand, both tech stuff and financial stuff is often made intentionally confusing, in my opinion. It’s not dissimilar to the bitcoin mixers, but it’s still much stronger - the system is automated, you can’t mess it up as a user, you’re less reliant on a single-point-of-trust, and so on.

You might be on to something about quiet periods - I don’t really have the knowledge to say either way. There might be a bit of stuff that goes on in the background for wallets even if they’re not actively conducting “real” transactions. But, I don’t know, really.

The transaction data itself does need to be publicly readable, because otherwise the whole consensus mechanism that the blockchain relies on wouldn’t work.

From what I understand, which honestly, isn’t a lot - the method used to anonymize transactions and balances is more like obfuscation than anything else. The system uses various techniques to fuzz up the data in such a way that it becomes impossible to trace.

It’s a bit like if you wanted to send a bank transfer for £200 but anonymize it somewhat, you could transfer that money around between a bunch of other bank accounts, before sending it on to the final source. And if multiple people are doing the same thing, it becomes essentially impossible to determine where the money entered and left.

The problem is though that such systems aren’t true encryption in the same way that RSA is, for example - the data isn’t unreadable, and it’s not impossible to reverse, it’s just that there’s so much junk data and it’s such a mess that it makes the true transactions difficult to identify and the end user has extremely strong plausible deniability. However, it’s likely just a matter of time before some state actor finds a vulnerability in the technique that allows them to trace transactions - if they haven’t already done so.

I’m interested to hear more. I’ve followed Liam’s work for almost a decade at this point and I haven’t ever seen or heard of him acting unprofessionally, but I’m quite new to Lemmy.

What abuse of their moderator powers? Is there a link to see the mod log somewhere? Sorry, I know I’m being a bit needy, but I’m not really sure what I’m doing.

I’m back to pirating all of my music. I will buy CDs or pay for downloads for artists that I really like or smaller artists, but I am fucking through with the streaming platforms. They just enshittify more and more.

Cryptocurrency has basically many of the same problems as traditional banks, it’s just a matter of who is controlling it. Monero is slightly different from most, because it is much more anonymous, but it’s really only a matter of time before even that advantage is lost.

There is no substitute for physical currency if you want privacy and anonymity.

This obviously can’t be true, how did they do it without Photoshop? /s

Personally, I don’t really feel that scientology is particularly worse than other religions. So you could just say that Trump supporters are more religious than political, really. Though, I don’t think that’s unique to Trump supporters, really - modern politics really is a lot more like a sort of religious thing rather than about the actual policy for a lot of people.

Yeah, absolutely they should be forced to opening the platform more, worldwide.

They should apply to all platforms which have over a certain number of users, for sure. It’s not really a good idea imo to make it universally applicable because then you would end up with a situation where a hobbyist developer is legally required to deal with complying with all that legislation for their homebrew project with half a dozen users.

I believe that Apple has been given the same or similar, set of requirements from the EU, tried to soft-ball it by doing some bare minimum shit that the EU didn’t consider good enough, and is back in court over it.