RebeccaBlanchardXB8

bitcoin

What's a technology you were LATE to adopting?

JohnathanWintersMDC

Very interesting. First time seeing [Stakwork](https://stakwork.com/). 

Looks like something to look into. 

Linux

pyKeysend: send large amounts of data using lightning keysend payments

DanielleHoodGHG

Wife has the flu and I produced another Bitcoin And . . . episode after I learned how to use a Cornell Note Taking extension in Obsidian.md. It's pretty rad but is a little wonky. I used it to notate a write-up on a Silvopasture project from Drawdown.org. 

Zapathon is rekting my Damus feed rn.

charts

I recently attempted to lure people to Stacker News from Minds. My recruitment post was seen over 6k times and received 34 upvotes, over the past 25 days. Over that time period, I generated two Stacker News referrals, which may not have even come from Minds.

## Why Minds?
I primarily used Minds, before finding Stacker News. It was created as a free speech alternative to Big Tech platforms. It also has a rewards system that is not entirely dissimilar to Stacker News'. 

The aspiration of Minds, according to its founder, is to foster open discussions while rewarding creators.

Many people on Minds are staunch advocates of advancing human freedom and they've already demonstrated a willingness to look for the best platform for doing so.

In many ways, they seemed like an ideal audience to appeal to. Everything Minds is trying to do, works better here. The conversations are deeper and more varied. The earnings are astonishingly greater. It's pretty normal to not get a single comment or upvote on a Minds post and my total earnings were only about $10.

## Why did it fail?
I was not expecting much from this experiment. I had accumulated a bunch of Minds tokens during my time there and this seemed like the best way to utilize them. Even with low expectations, I was a little surprised at just how paltry the interest was.

There were two clear reasons for the lack of converts, one was made explicitly, while I inferred the other:
1. People were put off by the bitcoin-centrism of Stacker News. It didn't matter to them that you can have better conversations about everything else on SN than on Minds, or that Bitcoin is a more functional analogue of the Minds tokens they're using, they didn't want to be around so many bitcoiners.
2. People like cheap talk. Why did my post about SN get dozens of upvotes (that's a ton for Minds), but very few comments or referrals? Well, it doesn't cost anything to click the thumbs up button, whereas taking the time to actually check out Stacker News or leave a comment takes time they don't want to invest.

## Concluding Thoughts
"We're still early" is a common refrain, but this drove it home in a different way. What should have been a very receptive audience, had no interest in a site that is superior in every significant way to the one they're using, largely because it's related to bitcoin. These are predominantly anti-establishment folks who talk about the need for parallel institutions. Even amongst that group, bitcoin isn't just not of interest, it's to be avoided.

One of my concerns about Stacker News has been that it will turn into just another toxic internet partisan circle jerk as it grows. This recruitment experiment alleviated that concern, because we're nowhere near drawing in that audience.

I'm also left at a loss for understanding where the next stage of healthy SN growth will come from.

Some Thoughts on My Failed SN Recruitment Effort

Civil unrest in Canada's future?

What are the best home security systems / cameras / monitoring recommendations?

DarleneFloyd6I3

Making something smaller would lead to wasted or unused space, but isn’t necessarily incompatible. That’s why I think decreasing block size would be a soft fork instead of hard. This differs from increasing in that you can’t fit something larger in something smaller, hence hard fork 

BooksAndArticles

Point of Sale feature now live on Wallet of Satoshi 📺

LaurenVillegasYKZ

Stacker News Features - Custom Zaps & Turbo Zapping

KristinAdams44U

This will be a blast to use not to mention all of the other features you guys have implemented. Excited to try it out

movies

France, Russia, & The CFA Franc

GilbertArcherXK0

As someone working in the financial industry, I can confirm that KYC requirements imposed by the EU are kind of nuts for every financial institution. Not only because (to some extent) they harm privacy beyond any reasonable suspicion that someone can commit money laundering, but the fact just mentioned creates a very dangerous way of thinking. Basically, European policymakers are telling financial institutions: “operate as if all your clients are fraudsters, even if there’s no reasonable proof of this fact”. I find this deeply disturbing, and borderline disgusting to be honest.

New year, new _____

SteveMcmahon2W6

Nostr has a problem with aggregating honest reputation without a centralized service keeping track of all users and transactions. It's costless to make a "seller" and give yourself reviews from 1000 "buyers". Trust rings don't really work because you don't know any of the other buyers (and you can't, because you're all purchasing illicit goods).

It's pretty simple. Each of these steps is done on a VM in my QubesOS install. But you could do it on any Linux box too. I'm sure I'm not the only person doing this. It's an obvious enough idea. But you should too if you're technical.

1. [Download Wasabi Wallet](https://wasabiwallet.io/)
2. Set the coordinator. I use https://btcpay.kruw.io/plugins/wabisabi-coordinator/
3. Mix my coins.
4. Install LND (you could probably use CLN for this too).
5. Install Tor and/or a VPN.
6. Configure LND to use tor in `~/.lnd/lnd.conf`
7. Deposit a mixed UTXO from Wasabi into LND with `lncli newaddress`. You can pick a specific UTXO in Wasabi by typing Crtl-C-D. Picking a specific UTXO is better for privacy, and more effficient.
8. Find a LN node to open a channel too. There's a few strategies here. One interesting one is to pick *new* Lightning nodes, eg from https://1ml.com/node?order=newest as the new nodes are most likely to be small and eventually shutdown again.
9. Open a *private* channel to that new node, using all the funds, with `lncli openchannel --private --fundmax`, and send all the funds on it to a different LN node/LN wallet. I like Phoenix myself as it's easy to run it on my phone without needing a node. Cashu wallets are good too.
10. Close the channel with `lncli closechannel --delivery_addr <addr>` That option sends all the funds remaining in the channel to the address of your choosing. Depending on how much is left I either send it back to my Wasabi wallet. Or I donate it to a charity accepting on-chain donations. The reserve amount in a LN channel is like 1%, and sending 1% to charity is fine by me! My church suggests donating 10% after all.
11. Delete everything in `~/.lnd` other than `lnd.conf`, and go back to step #7. This is important, as it resets the LN node ID for the next new channel so you can't correlate each channel being created.

Why do I do this? Because I'm getting the privacy benefits of Coinjoin. **Plus** I'm getting the privacy benefits of Lightning. Between the two, I've completely unlinked the source of my funds, and where they go, using both coinjoin to add privacy, and the inherent privacy of Lightning payments through obscure anon nodes.

This does cost a bit. But I'm happy to pay random pleb nodes channel fees to do all this. And I'm sure some of them benefit from getting free incoming capacity. The only issue is I want more people to do this too to get a bigger k-anonymity set of people doing this. Thus I'm writing this post, and boosting it too.

Happy stacking!