TLDR; SN still has about 1100 active stacking users like two years ago, but total sats stacked per month has doubled to 0.1 Bitcoin. Even more impressive when realize value of Bitcoin has quadrupled since 2022.
In my last post, @k00b challenged me to “read the analytics.” Joke’s on him - I called his bluff! https://stacker.news/items/712073
Looking at the 2022 Stacker News pitch deck https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ONoS1VLKRYiG14ODx3tIboH9JdndxL2fQwlACWdULok/edit#slide=id.gedbcbf3247_0_610 every month had about a thousand users earning sats, and those users earned about 5 million sats total.
https://m.stacker.news/56009.png
https://m.stacker.news/56010.png
Two years later by September 2024 where are we at? Well @k00b has a fantastic open source analytics tool to let me don’t trust, verify!
Ultimately we’re still where we’re at two years ago with about 1,100 users earning sats in any given month. The big win here though is me using the word “we.” I’ve only been around just over a week (thanks to @grayruby referral) and I already feel like a cowboy! So while user growth is flat, it’s a testament to the resilience of the SN idea that this site hasn’t died.
https://m.stacker.news/56012.png
Actually, we’ve DOUBLED in sats earned with user count constant. Now a whole 0.1 Bitcoin is earned by users every month! And the $USD value of Bitcoin now ($64k) has QUADRUPLED since then ($16k) so that makes it even more impressive!
https://m.stacker.news/56017.png
But forget https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/. More like, WTF happened to SN Rewards in March 2024?!
Thank you @k00b for being on the bleeding edge of lightning!
Find a natural park in some mountains, look at alltrails or similar app, find some cool hikes and find a trail between them, depending on how much time you want to spend.
Things you want to stop by are lakes, cool vistas, waterfalls, historical buildings...
If you are in Netherlands, then just take train to another country that has mountains 😅
How I think about it
Segwit transaction outputs are locked by a condition that looks like this 0x0014<20 byte-key-hash>.
An old node would look at that and interpret it as push an empty array on the stack, then push 20 bytes on the stack. There are no signature checks or anything. By it's rules, anybody could spend it, even by just putting 0x00 in the scriptSig of the input that spends the utxo.
A post-segwit node would look at 0x0014<20 byte-key-hash> and see it as a template for a P2WPKH transaction and only verify it if it provided the correct pubkey and signature in the witness part of the transaction.
Let's say you had a pre-segwit node and were running a separate program that looks for transaction outputs whose locking conditions are only data pushes and then spends them. After segwit, your program would not work because it would try to spend the outputs, but the rest of the network would say you need to have signature in the witness part of the transaction.
I made my first trade using bisq and I was shocked how fast my order was taken. I will use more often
No one is more aware of the centralization risk than Bitcoin Core developers themselves. The project as a whole takes regular actions to distribute and minimize this risk and has been doing so ever since Satoshi vanished.
Lead maintainer Wladimir van der Laan retired recently[^1]. They are not replacing him with a new "lead maintainer", instead opting to operate in a leaderless fashion going forward. Pieter Wuille has also distanced himself from the perception that he is a leader among Bitcoin Core developers, going so far as to remove himself as a maintainer.[^2] Even in the realm of release signing the Bitcoin Core project has moved in a direction of greater decentralization, removing the static list of release signers in favor of a rotating cast of characters[^3].
Accusing "Bitcoin Core" of being a centralized group is a bit of a reach, in my opinion. Several contributors come to mind as contentious figures who rub a lot of other contributors the wrong way. I will not name them but ask anyone who follows Bitcoin Core and they can certainly corroborate this characterization. These figures are not ostracized or excluded from contributing to the protocol or mailing list, their contributions are merged and help to make bitcoin stronger, just as all contributors do.
I think there are many more and far larger threats to bitcoin than the developers. Between frivolous lawsuits, hostile legal regimes, and regulatory protocol capture I don't ever lose sleep that the developers themselves will materially harm the project.
[^1] https://twitter.com/WuBlockchain/status/1626468462972502016
[^2] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/25568
[^3] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/110517
https://i.postimg.cc/26dQvR6r/burak-ark.jpg