Crypto was and is inconvenient to use. So many years passed and almost nobody uses crypto daily. It's too inconvenient.
And it's not secure or anonymous at all. At some point you need to buy crypto or sell crypto, or buy some goods with crypto, and at that point you can be easily identified. Happened so many times.
Even here in Russia, under all US sanctions, only a few use crypto. It's so inconvenient that even under pressure of US sanctions it hadn't become more popular.
I would agree that no one uses it - but not out of convenience. It is an adoption problem, no one accepts lightning payments because no one has lightning balance. If you download a modern, non-custodial wallet such as Phoenix or Wallet of Satoshi, it is easier than paypal or my online banking website. It sure as hell is easier than opening any online bank account (Wise, Revolut etc.) as there is no kyc.
Regarding anonimity when exchanging, yes. But you can make the same point about cash. You are identified when withdrawing, and identified when depositing. You cannot be identified when cash changes owners, and the same holds true for lightning payments. So if anonimity is the same, lightning is still to be considered superior as it works also for online payments while cash is bound to physical means of payments.
Russia had roughly ten years to prepare. First talks about building national payment system started around 2010-2012. And it was meeting notable opposition: "why should we care? MC/Visa are good enough, why spend money on national infrastructure".
But yeah, it is amazing that in 2022 nobody here even noticed that MC/Visa left. Even MC/Visa cards haven't stopped working and are working to this day (banks made a rule that cards that expire after 2022 continue to work for several more years so that everybody has time to switch to MIR).
What really do Americans know about Ukraine or Taiwan? E.g. can even 1% of US population show Ukraine on the world map (without using Google Maps)? Could they do it before 2022? Before 2014? Do they know anything about Ukraine or Taiwan history? How many Americans know a single foreign language?
If tomorrow there would be a war or protests in, say, Burundi. Will Americans stay with Burundi or against it? Or with the country the media will tell them is "good" because their interests align with US interests?
I think answers to all these questions are obvious.
To be fair, lack of knowledge of other countries is hardly uniquely American. As an Irish person travelling around the non western world, there's a lot of people who don't know that Ireland is a country separate to the UK, or even that it exists.
In 2023 there was record harvest of potatoes in Russia. Prices dropped, so farmers stopped planting potatoes in 2024 and 2025. Wouldn't be surprised if they plant more this year due to high price.
EU is a colony of USA. If it would be necessary, US can simply force EU to buy US technology.
If you check the EU politics, they never do or say anything that can be interpreted negatively by US or damage US interests.
In 2025, EU and US signed an agreement that obliges EU to buy energy resources from US at ridiculously high prices, despite that EU is already struggling with the high price of energy.
In the tech sector, EU has been a colony of pretty much every other country which it used to colonize. IMO, the fines that the EU used to collect regularly from US big tech companies were bribes to keep suppressing the EU tech sector.
Had the same problem with my moto (key not turning the lock). Fortunately, there was a car nearby and owner had a spare jug of oil. I put some oil on the key, put it in the ignition lock, waited for 5 minutes, and it started to turn again.
Although I must admin WD-40 helped me in the past opening an old door lock.
I suspect the difference is whether (as with the old door lock) there is no lubricant at all and anything is better than nothing, or whether (as with the ignition key) there is a lubricant there which was designed for the purpose but for some other reason isn't working as intended, and which the WD-40 will displace and replace with something worse. "Fails in hot weather" sounds either like some sort of thermal expansion problem or the intended grease gets too thin to properly lubricate a high-pressure contact area. Or there just isn't enough of it.
In both cases, the real issue is when the oil (eventually all do) oxidizes and ‘gums’. Tight tolerances make it cause worse problems sooner of course, but it’s the same problem eventually.
Putting new fresh oil in it often temporarily fixes it because it dissolves some (or a lot) of the old varnish. Acetone can often do the same thing too, but can also wash the varnish deeper into the mechanism where it turns into really solid ‘plastic’ when the acetone dissolves.
I was 2000 km from home (1242 miles) and I was in panic because it was pretty uninhabited place. My bike is 12 years old but I used it in very harsh conditions (dirt, mountains).
Probably should replace the lock but it is so expensive.
I've used Redpanda for local development and testing stands. It is super easy to setup in docker, starts really fast and consumes less resources than Java version. Haven't really compared it to anything, but I remember using Java version of Kafka before and it was a resource hog. It is important when you develop on laptop with constrained resources.
to be fair, Kafka now has a GraalVM docker image[0][1] which was made for local dev/testing, and it has caught up fairly well to these alternatives re: memory and startup time
There was Lynx text browser that was ported even to MS-DOS. I was using it until about 2010. It was a great browser until websites become unusable.
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