BrookeGentry17P

econ

For Marco Polo, trade was simple. Limited only by the amount of goods he could carry, everything could be bartered and Gold was readily accepted everywhere. Born from a family of merchants, his life as a trader, explorer, and writer took him across the Silk Road, a historical trade route connecting Europe to Asia where he would establish a rich network of relationships over his lifetime. His writings gave Europe its first glimpse of the East and inspired subsequent explorers to imagine a vibrant future filled with culture, diversity, trade, and prosperity.

Marco Polo would love Bitcoin. No longer limited by physical belongings, today he would be free to transact across borders with wealth stored only in his mind. Marco Polo was ahead of his time. His success in the fiat world would be likely, and it wouldn't take long for him to comprehend the failings of the fiat system. If Marco Polo were alive today, how would he explore the world, how would he utilise his Bitcoin, and how would his writing inspire a bright new future?

Wandering w/ Purpose

I've mentioned Wandering w/ Purpose here on Stacker News before, but I haven't shared a proper introduction. In short, it started as a Substack publication inspired largely by Africa, Bitcoin, and the life of Marco Polo.

https://wanderingwpurpose.substack.com/

Wandering w/ Purpose is where I share my experiences and, after almost two years, it is evolving into a vehicle for growth in Africa.

Wandering w/ Purpose on SN:

A bitcoin journey through Africa https://stacker.news/items/24587
Self-reflection amongst Africa's smoke and mirrors https://stacker.news/items/667609
A bitcoin journey through Africa: Outlining adoption for each country visited https://stacker.news/items/698518

I can't say how Marco Polo would have lived his life today, but I can learn from what made him successful. He was sharp and leveraged his family's experience as merchant explorers, yes, but it was the time spent fostering his relationships on the Silk Road that grew him and his legacy.

I believe Africa's Silk Road is lying dormant. Its abundance of resources are evident, but free flow of goods, people, and ideas within the continent are tediously restricted. Bitcoin provides an opportunity to bypass systemic African issues, forcing people and their politics to confront the archaic artificial barriers preventing the continent from moving forward.

With a low time preference, and by investing in our relationships like Marco Polo, Wandering w/ Purpose is fostering our own Bitcoin Silk Road in Africa. This publication is a vehicle by which to share stories and explore new opportunities in Africa while investing in the growth of those we meet along the way.

I've shared two posts on SN regarding Wandering w/ Purpose's first partnership, Bitcoin Nakawa:

Bitcoin Nakawa - a community initiative in Zambia https://stacker.news/items/682979
Bitcoin Nakawa Porject Update #1: Our first funding! https://stacker.news/items/692768

Whether by sheer enthusiasm, subscriptions to Wandering w/ Purpose, or contributions to Bitcoin Nakawa, I'd like to thank everyone who has supported us thus far. We intend to make quick progress with our immediate goals so we can expand the Wandering w/ Purpose vision to help many others.

Please share any ideas, questions, or criticisms!

Wandering w/ Purpose - https://wanderingwpurpose.substack.com/
Bitcoin Nakawa geyser fund - https://geyser.fund/project/bitcoinnakawa


Wandering w/ Purpose: A vehicle for growth in Africa

bitcoin

Onramp: Bitcoin-Only Multi-Institution Custody

ChloeGilmoreQP6

Woah… fast moving world
angry two leg people…
back into BTC shell

opensource

I want to make sure not to miss the next consolidation opportunity.

I also don't want to receive too many notifications (noise vs signal).

What's the easiest way to get a notification when the mempool frees up?

crypto

New Bitcoin song "Who Wrote the Code" by Super Testnet

CharlesAdkinsSO6

Routing for free can be sustainable and might just be how the network evolves over time. Instead of the customer paying for being able to pay, the seller is paying for being able to receive a payment. This is especially easy to sell, since sellers are already used to being charged for payments and it will increase adoption a lot if paying on lightning was free.

lightning

SN release: random sort and NWC receives

JoRollinsJIN

This would fit nicely in alongside a "this post/comment was referenced in" feature as suggested [on gh](https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news/issues/667).

Two weeks ago, I made a post called *Some thoughts on what's worked for me in my first ten days here* (https://stacker.news/items/454547)

Not surprisingly, I've learned some stuff since then.

**1. Read bios.** 

People put a lot of good info in their bios, not just about who they are, but things like links to good posts they've made, into about projects they've worked on, etc. When someone posts something interesting, I go take a look at them and often discover a bunch of new things I want to read and learn more about.

**1.5 Subscribe to people! And territories.** 

There are a lot of territories and there are a lot of posts. Subscribing to territories makes sense for the ones that only get a few updates a day. But if there are stackers you want to hear from whenever they say anything, subscribe to their posts! And I mentioned in my first post that I didn't subscribe to most territories, but I've realized that it's too easy to miss posts in the main feed (and )

**2. Read pinned posts and territory info.** 

I'd been here for nearly three weeks, and while I'd read plenty of posts from ~privacy via the firehose, I'd never actually just gone to the territory directly. Which means I'd totally missed the fantastic *Stacker News Privacy Directory V1 - Q4 2023* (https://stacker.news/items/342249). Since then, I've spent days working my way through the fantastic directory of posts there.

Also, read the actual territory info boxes! They're minimized by default (and are actually hidden if you're viewing Recent or Top), so they're really easy to miss, but it's the way to get a sense of the territory's purpose (some are more obvious than others). 

**3. Bookmark good content!**

This kind of goes hand in hand with the previous items. I come across a lot of great content here, but it's not always actionable content. Bookmarking is great (I'm talking about SN's bookmarks, though I guess browser ones work, too).

Also, if it's good enough to bookmark, it's good enough to zap, even if it's an old post.

**4. Downzap and mute.**

I don't do either of these a lot; downzapping having a cost means it's not just like the thumbs-down button on YT. If I'm downzapping, it's not just "I disagree" or even "I don't like this." My downzapping is for content that I actively want to be disengaged from or that feels trolly. So it's rare, but I do use it.

As for muting, if I end up downzapping the same person multiple times, that's a sign to mute. But I also mute territories that I know I'll never interact with, since I tend to mostly consume content from the front page feed. There aren't many of those, either, but I know I'll never read posts in ~brasil, for instance (my language skills are awful), and there are a few territories that are specific enough that they're just not for me.

**5. Visit the saloon (and the territorial versions).**

I didn't really pay attention to the Saloon at first. But now I hit it every day, multiple times. It's a great way to actually get some sense of your fellow Stackers, it's a fun place to hang out and post, and it's led me on multiple occasions to other cool posts (see point 1 above). And many territories also have daily or weekly gatherings -- ~sports and ~music have one that's worth checking multiple times a day, and ~books has a "Weekend Book Recommendations" post that's always fun.

**6. Welcome people. But maybe not everyone.** 

I turned on the feature to show free posts pretty quickly, and I try to catch new bios in the feed. It's a good way to make other folks feel welcome. It's also a good way to spot folks who looks like they're maybe not here to contribute any content. 

**7. Playing the game wrong is okay, maybe?** 

I read @undisciplined's "Million Sat Madness is a Keynesian Beauty Contest" post (https://stacker.news/items/473181) yesterday and found it fascinating and one of the best reads of the day. Since MSM has pretty much been the norm for most of my time here, I'd never really thought about how it changed things, or how to really game it (beyond being active on the site). The notion that people might choose to *not* zap something because it might not be a big post hadn't occured to me. And I still don't have the handle on predicting what posts will blow up, so zapping things because I think others will also seems weird.

Instead, I've been zapping posts and comments I like (and, as I noted in my previous post, ones I interact with). I don't really have the patiences to comb through my stats, but looking at what's in the "spent" column for yesterday, I think I zapped four posts that broke 1000 sats overall (one of which was @undisciplined's post, of course), and a bunch where they barely hit three digits.

(I guess this is an extension of my "Strategy is overrated. Have fun" point from the first post)

And I'm doing fine. I'm not going to win MSM or come close, but if my current pace continues, I'll walk way with a lot of sats. And I'm not wasting any decision time/brainpower worrying about what to zap. I'm having fun and discovering good content.

(That's not to dismiss anyone else's way of interacting with SN; it's what's working for me.)

Some thoughts on what's worked for me, two weeks later

ChatBTC

KellyYangW7P

After a while it felt like I was smoking my sats away, and daily smokers get used to the high pretty easily. Imagine putting your sats on a bitcoin layer called cannabis......it makes you feel good for an hour and then burns your sats, and every time you use it, it takes more sats to get the same effect. Its like rug pulling yourself for a few kicks.

health

I've been running [lnaddress.me](https://lnaddress.me) for couple of years now, it started with a decent list of available domains but over time the cost of renewing domains for offering a free service became too much so I slowly started removing them as they expired.

last year I've removed lightning.by from the site because of the same reason - renewal price.

Fast forward a while - couple weeks ago I get tagged by fiatjaf in a telegram group where [Sergey](https://nostr.at/npub10u66maeh62wjc5rsr8xquzerunge7d2vz5zcx60v446tq9esmdtqsshrul) was asking who runs the site and that he purchased domain that used to be available there and would like to give it back to the service.

So lnaddress.me again supports lightning.by LN addresses thanks to Sergey, and I have a bit more motivation to run this free service a while longer to support this awesome community!

Bitcoiners are awesome - lnaddress.me story

Stacker_Sports

Phoenix Wallet announces support for new LSP protocol (bLIP 35)

ChrisMcclureZBE

come on over to the roundtable for some high-signal bitcoin discussions

https://stacker.news/items/269878

meta

# Inside your Bitcoin node there are two wolves

One of them is the consensus rules about what makes it into the blockchain. The other one is your mempool policy about what makes it into the blockchain.

The wolves are not the same. Which one is Bitcoin?

# Consensus Rules: The Day Wolf

Consensus is a good wolf. It may be savage, but it only kills and eats transactions that don't follow consensus rules.

Every transaction included in the Bitcoin blockchain follows a set of rules that make up what we call Bitcoin. If you run a node and you have an up-to-date copy of the Bitcoin blockchain your node agrees with all the other nodes about the rules transactions must follow. This is consensus.

There are a lot of consensus rules. People like to argue about them. Disagreements lead to forks and forks are scary, so everybody pays attention to the Day Wolf. It's a big hulking animal that's impossible to ignore.

# Mempool Policy: The Wolf of the Night

Mempool policy is a mysterious wolf. A lot of Bitcoiners don't even know it exists, don't even know the difference between a mempool running on their node and mempool.space. Not too many people notice how the Night Wolf[^2] feels about things.

[^2]: The Night Wolf is a better name for the mempool.

Unless you send your transactions directly to a miner, you are probably relying on a transaction relay network created by Bitcoin nodes all around the world. If you are running a Bitcoin node with a mempool, odds are you are participating in this transaction relay network.

Nodes make connections to other nodes and a lot of smart people have figured out how to make sure that when a new block gets mined, [your node has already heard about almost all the transactions it contains](https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2023/05/17/#waiting-for-confirmation-1-why-do-we-have-a-mempool). Your node doesn't have to start downloading and verifying like mad when a new block shows up because it has a mempool where it keeps unconfirmed transactions it's heard about, just waiting for them to show up in a block.

In many ways, the Night Wolf is the Day Wolf's younger brother: the Day Wolf is in charge and the Night Wolf can't do something the Day Wolf doesn't agree with. Your mempool isn't going to let in any transactions that violate consensus rules.

But does the Night Wolf have to let in *every* valid transaction it hears about?

# When the Night Wolf growls

Maybe you've heard a little bit about the debate around ordinals and filtering and spam and so on.[^4] This is a debate about the Night Wolf.

[^4]: There's been so much conversation about filtering and spam that I decided it's time we had some new metaphors to expand the semantic turf this conversation inhabits. Therefore, you are all going to get spirit animals.

You see, it turns out that some people don't like that other people are broadcasting transactions full of crappy random data (like pixel pictures of rocks) and they want to use their mempool policy to make such transactions harder to get into the blockchain.

So here's what they do: they go beat the Night Wolf and tell him that he has to slaughter any transaction he comes across that meets their criteria of what should be excluded.

They change the policy rules of their mempools to exclude transactions that are consensus-valid but, for example, that have more than a certain amount of data in the OP_RETURN.

The Night Wolf in their node dutifully becomes a wild-eyed killer.

# The Night Wolf has always been a killer

He's a wolf, people. He kills things. That's what wolves do.

Mempool policy has *always*[^5] been more restrictive than consensus rules.

[^5]: I'm not actually sure if mempool policy was more restrictive than consensus rules in early versions of bitcoin, but it has been since at least segwit.

It turns out there are already [a host of mempool policies](https://gist.github.com/instagibbs/ee32be0126ec132213205b25b80fb3e8) that let the Night Wolf slaughter consensus valid transactions so that they never move beyond his mempool. Here's just a few examples of valid kinds of transactions the average Night Wolf refuses to relay:

- transactions that are big
- transactions with a ton of signatures might
- transactions with an nVersion that isn't 1 or 2
- transactions that are worth less than it costs to get them mined
- transactions that are bare multisigs

So what's the big problem with letting people add a few more policies to their mempool and make their Night Wolf especially mean and nasty?

# The Day Wolf is stronger than the Night Wolf.

If a transaction is not valid by consensus rules it won't make it into a block. That's Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is able to do this thing we call soft-forking because of this fact. A hard fork is when you change the consensus rules so that the Day Wolf has to spare transactions he used to kill. A soft fork is when the you make the consensus rules more specific so that the Day Wolf can still kill all the transactions he used to kill, but now he gets to kill some new ones.[^3]

[^3]: Here's an easy way to remember the difference: hard fork = nicer wolf; soft fork = meaner wolf. If you think I'm stretching this analogy way too far...just wait. I haven't even gotten started yet!

So the Day Wolf--consensus rules--controls what the blockchain is and this is as it should be.

The Night Wolf can't make the Day Wolf change his mind. But can the Night Wolf cause a soft fork by killing certain kinds of transactions before they get to the Day Wolf? Could you use mempool policy to mimic the effect of a soft fork?

[The answer is no.](https://stacker.news/items/348349/r/cleophas?commentId=348418) No matter how strict you make mempool policy, as long as a small percentage (I've read some things that say 2 or 3 %, while others say [more like 30%](https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-October/021116.html)) of nodes are still relaying transactions you don't like (and are consensus valid), such transactions will make it into blocks. And once they are in blocks, the Night Wolf is powerless.

But what if all the nodes give in and embrace their own inner Night Wolves?

# People start emailing the Day Wolf

If there are people who want to spend money to get consensus-valid transactions into the blockchain, there will be miners who want to earn that money. That's what the business is.

As of March 2024, there are at least 5 publicly available transaction accelerators run by mining pools ([AntPool](https://www.antpool.com/txAccelerate), [F2Pool](https://www.f2pool.com/user/tx-acc?lang=en_US), [ViaBTC](https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator), [Binance](https://pool.binance.com/en/acceleration), [Mara](https://slipstream.mara.com/)).

Transaction accelerators are generally seen as a bad thing for Bitcoin because they might lead to centralization. When some miners see transactions that the rest of the miners don't know about, they might get an edge. And miners with an edge quickly become miners with more hashpower. Now we have to deal with a new animal: centralization.

Centralization is like a big evil bear that wants to come eat up both wolves and all the nice little lemmings that play with them (that's you and me).

# Why not just let the two wolves become one? (Relay all valid transactions?)

Since we don't want to get eaten by the evil bear of centralization, why don't we just make sure that mempools will accept every consensus-valid transaction? If we did that, nobody gets an edge, transaction accelerators return to just being a tool for people who don't know how to use CPFP and RBF and we end up with just one wolf.

@benthecarman wrote [a Bitcoin Core PR back in May 2023](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/27578) to allow nodes to reduce some of the major differences between the wolves and the discussion around it is a pretty quick primer on what's at stake.

# Inside Bitcoin culture there are two wolves

Bitcoin achieves an incredible thing: it manages ensure that a utxo created in 2009 with who knows what kind of weird experimental script thingie (because it was *all* a weird experimental thingie back then) can still be spent today despite all the many clarifications that have been made to the consensus rules.

But this means the Day Wolf can go berzerk. He still needs more training. And the Night Wolf can help with that. 

EXAMPLE:

> Pre segwit transactions can be made in such a way as to put a huge validation burden on nodes ([quadratic hashing problem](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/63625/what-causes-quadratic-hash-problem)). The consensus rules haven't changed to prevent this because it could potentially make some valid utxos impossible to spend. A number of mempool policies exist to reduce the risk that such transactions will propagate through the network.

Additionally: Bitcoin is a live network, securing hundreds of billions of dollars of value and we still make changes to the rules without anyone actually being in control of it. 

EXAMPLE:

> All transactions have a nVersion field. After segwit, this field has been reserved to facilitate future upgrades. The Night Wolf crunches up any transaction that has anything other than 1 or 2 in its nVersion to preserve this ability. Eventually, we want to be able to "turn on" some functionality by putting a 3 or a 4 there, but it needs to be held blank until we all agree on what that functionality is going to be.

The two wolves exist pretty much because Satoshi made mistakes in its early days and wrote consensus rules that allowed dangerous transactions or didn't anticipate the ways in which the project would grow. Bitcoin culture refuses fix the problem by changing the consensus rules if it results in making it impossible for someone to spend their money or if it means an increase in centralization. 

# The Moral of the story[^6]

[^6]: I was going to write just a straightforward description of all this, but my cousin Mathilde is really into wolves and convinced me that it would make more sense if I used wolves to explain it. I listened to her because she's the only person who ever helped me to understand the [Fed's Reverse Repo Facility](https://stacker.news/items/451071) and [she speaks Latin](https://stacker.news/items/442551).

It's okay for mempool policy to be more restrictive than Bitcoin's consensus rules, but it should be as close as possible and anytime miners are mining lots of transactions that most mempools reject, it's probably time to reevaluate.

> Network behavior is one of the few bits of friction driving good technical design rather than "move fast, break things, and force everyone else onto my way of doing thing rather than discussing the design in public" [--gmax, 2015](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5286#issuecomment-72564175)

In wolf terms this means: the Night Wolf can get big and ferocious, but he needs to always remember that he isn't as strong as his older brother.

If you want to learn more about this, you should read Gloria Zhao and Murch's [Waiting for Confirmation](https://bitcoinops.org/en/blog/waiting-for-confirmation/) to get started down the rabbit hole.[^7]

[^7]: Maybe I should have made this whole thing a rabbit metaphor...

Inside your Bitcoin node there are two wolves

The Loss of Shared Facts

BradyAguirre1IH

Can we forward zaps to L0la or something? Really appreciate the reporting she's doing and staying laser-focused on this beat; making shit make sense for us lil plebs