SonyaHarperMR2

bitcoin

The Evil Baby Attack

IsaiahBlackwellMCR

lightning

Native American Bitcoin Mining?

MackenzieCopelandHR7

it's very cool. i've been using nix for a few months now and love it. learning how to write nix files per environment like this was a bit of a pain. it's nice to see people are working on lowering that barrier

news


Not so much a review as a recommendation to read.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et le Papillon) by Jean-Dominique Bauby

What is it about (short version)?
Gut-punch exploration of the power of freedom and imagination in the face of truly terrifying adversity. 

What is it about (long version)?
Jean-Dominique Bauby, was a journalist-editor of French Elle (a beauty and fashion magazine) who at the age of 43 suffered a stroke resulting in 'locked-in syndrome' where, despite maintaining full consciousness, he was unable to move his body except for his left eyelid. It is impossible to separate the process of writing the book, entirely through blinking, from the final work and I would encourage anyone to look further into his transcription method for it is truly inspirational and almost as remarkable as the writing itself. 

The book comprises short chapters highlighting different aspects of his life, and incredibly he is often able to infuse humour and warmth into his observations. His reflections on life itself, love, and mortality resonate throughout and offer an appreciation for the beauty of the human experience in addition to demonstrating his profound longing for freedom from confinement. The contrast between his life before and loneliness he is reduced to after his stroke is dramatic and moving.

"My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory."

His story challenges common perceptions of disability and prompts the reader to a deep consideration of the issue. It is a true masterpiece (I acknowledge an overused term) that transcends the  tragedy from which it is born, showing the strength of the human spirit and the power of storytelling. Life can be both resilient and beautiful despite a person being confined within.

"My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly"

For me it sits alongside books such as Victor Frankl's 'Mans Search for Meaning' and whilst not in the detail it is certainly in spirit.

Definitely recommended 9/10

Book Review | The Diving Bell and the Butterlfy.

BooksAndArticles

Rgb or Taro?

JoRollinsJIN

Probably the best talk that I saw at TABConf. Such a mic drop moment. 

Trying to gain rough technical consensus on covenant proposals

JeanSchultzG36

There is a town in Norway called "Hell," and it frequently freezes over.

El Salvador has its own mempool.space site with its treasury holdings

DwayneAcevedoPV2

Tinkering with miners. Installed a Noctua fan on the FutureBit Apollo only to find out the 2000 RPM max doesn’t keep it cool enough (had to reinstall the stock fan with 4000 RPMs). 

![Snapseed.jpeg](https://m.stacker.news/15253)

Stacker News Privacy Policy

MalikTucker61G

I enjoyed writing and researching this a lot.

A short summary:
- scalability trilemma means BTC can't be scalable, secure and decentralized at the base layer
- Bitcoin Cash, going the big block way route of 32MB blocks, can [only do 50 transactions per second on the base chain](https://gist.github.com/stanislavkozlovski/ccdcd6c78c5ae7c059f8092621f9b70e)
- if you wanna scale via big blocks, you'd have 190TB of data *a year* to support 24,000 transactions per second. No node can keep this much, not to mention syncing
- _Lightning solves this beautifully_
- The default LND node is able to do 33 payments per second on a 8vCPU 32GB memory cloud machine
- Assuming most Pis running LND can do 4 payments a second, the Lightning Network right now should be able to scale to *16,264 payments a second*.
- That number is 2.2x the average transactions from Visa in 2021, so more than enough to overcome them
- At the same time, Lightning's transaction fee is 13 times less than visa. 0.1% vs [1.29%](https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-credit-card-processing-fees-costs-america/)
- Lightning hasn't even started prioritizing scalability or performance. Reliability has been at the forefront
- [As River shared](https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/8sajmb/ln_the_chances_to_route_a_certain_amount_of_btc/), its payment success rate is 98.7% at an average payment size of $46. 4 years ago, Lightning had $5 transactions fail 48% of the time.

![image](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/.image/c_limit%2Ccs_srgb%2Cq_auto:good%2Cw_700/MTkzOTM1NjA2NjU1NjI0ODgx/transactions-per-second.webp)


My thoughts on how future Martian colonizers could use BTC. 

Martians won't be able to mine BTC assuming that speed of light radio communication is the maximum transmission speed available at the time. Read [Bitcoin Astronomy](https://unchained.com/blog/law-of-hash-horizons/) to learn about the law of hash horizons.

However, Martians are not blocked from broadcasting on chain transactions and verifying blocks with their own node. They will just experience a significant delay that could have unexpected usability bugs. For example, suppose a corporation has a multisig address and both the Earth and Mars headquarters have keys to spend from it. If the earth HQ broadcasts a TX, it's likely to confirm in 10 mins, however, the martian will not see that anything has been spent from the multisig until 30+ mins later. The Martians will forever be (on average) three blocks behind the main chain. 

If the martian HQ attempts to spend from the shared multisig soon after the earthling HQ broadcasts, the martian transaction may be purged from the mempools since it's attempting to spend a UTXO that has already been spent.

In the context of LN channels, a martian should be able to open and close a channel cooperatively (with expected delay) since these actions are just on chain transactions.

However, the martian LN node will start to experience some issues when trying to pay an LN invoice from an earth node.

LN nodes are quite chatty. Each node builds its own model of the network topography by gossiping to all it's peers about the new nodes, channels, TLD (time lock delta) policy updates, and fee policy updates.

So the martian node will have a local network graph that is (on average) 30+ mins out of date for all earth nodes. If the martian attempts to craft an onion for a route using a channel that doesn't exist, or by supplying the wrong fee for a channel, the payment will fail.

That assumes, that the node is even able to craft the onion in the first place. This part might take a while because construction of the onion requires a lot of back and forth communication to generate and exchange shared secrets to do all the encrypting, verification, and byte padding of all the layers of the onion. If we assume a 30 minute delay, construction of an onion with just 3 hops, might take hours. Furthermore, they'd have to be careful not to make a route that goes from Mars to Earth, back to Mars, then back to Earth when routed (for obvious reasons).

So for Earth-to-Mars payments, it's actually more efficient to use on chain transactions.

There's actually no concept of a single "Lightning Network". There are many LNs. Some networks use shitcoins, some use keysend or AMP, some use unannounced channels, some are a subset of what we call "mainnet" and some are not even payable from mainnet.

Martians could leverage this quality of LN to establish their own Lightning Network that exists entirely on Mars. They could use their mainnet to pay other martian nodes with ease. They would establish channels with each other by broadcasting a TX back to Earth. Then, they'd have to increase the time lock deltas on all their channels to give themselves more blocktime to respond to fraudulent force closes.