Would there be any value in creating a concerted effort to drive more traffic to SN? Maybe pick a day that we do a social media blitz or something? Personally I found SN because of a reddit post, and I definitely think there would be value in adding more traffic to this site.
Any thoughts?
Thank you for this excellent described story of your node.
I concur with part of your experience (I wrote about it in many of my guides about LN nodes and experiments I've done).
Most of what you describe is also mentioned in my guides, trying to raise an alarm for all those noobs that are jumping straight into running public nodes with no idea what they are doing.
Is very good that old bitcoiners like you are explaining these aspects, so others can learn more and do not do the same steps. I am not saying that were good or bad steps. We are all learning from own mistakes, errors, struggles. Is part of this Bitcoin journey.
What I will want to add to your post are the following.
I see the LN (Lightning Network) as the PAYMENT NETWORK of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin (onchain) cannot go forward without LN. It will be almost impossible to use it as money soon, only using onchain.
LN cannot exist and function without a strong base layer (onchain). LN is actually just a delayed onchain tx, no more no less. Is just not broadcast in the moment of the payment, it is broadcast and settled onchain only when the peers are closing that channel. But IT IS a real BTC onchain tx.
How I see LN topology from now on:
Level 1
The large base of large public nodes with a lot of liquidity, nodes that can last a long time and put a lot of capital at stake. You also earn more money, but they are the ones who put in the most money. We need this strong base of big nodes ! It doesn't matter if are big companies, banks. They are the ones that keep moving the "water".
Level 2
LSPs (those that are intermediaries between public and private nodes), also with good connections, but not much capital is necessary, but not little either. It is very important for them to have well balanced channels and fees accessible to the "entry level" of users. These LSPs are mainly public nodes by main wallet apps, but also other players that want to be this bridge between public routing and private use of LN
Level 3
The plebs nodes, the poor ones, who want to learn and level up. But very few are going to resist because they don't have much capital. At this level you were... and you couldn't resist. Nothing wrong with that. You did your part, helping the network as much as you could. And thank you for that.
Level 4
Private, mobile nodes (Zeus, Blixt, Mutiny, Breez, Electrum, Phoenix, Nayuta etc.) These depend 100% on the LSPs.
These private nodes DO NOT ROUTE! Just use privately the LN. And is nothing wrong with this. These are the MAIN real users of LN, because are the ones that made the payments.
This way we will have the LN functional. And new users, should choose wisely their position in this network.
Why should I choke you? I like your "Operation Saylor" series.
I even share it with others, to read and learn from your journey / experience.
Keep'em coming !
You talk about custodians.
What about "uncle Jim" solution?
Running a bunch of nodes in a small community can help a lot those that could not run their own nodes / services. And can have quite good trust.
I think more node runners should think about this scenario, as I explained here:
https://darthcoin.substack.com/p/bitcoin-private-banks-over-lightning
Is true, even until 2016-2017 LN was just a dream. Were some discussions about but nobody had an idea how to do it. Nowadays we are quite far from those times, but still we have a long way into this jorurney. LN is still veeery young.
https://imgprxy.stacker.news/qDx4d929xZk27JLCD6YPkFVAXLLE4oON1hIyjaPGVi8/rs:fit:600:500:0/g:no/aHR0cHM6Ly9tZWRpYTQuZ2lwaHkuY29tL21lZGlhL3pQUncyMThSc3pHT2w5cWRPWi9naXBoeS53ZWJwP2NpZD02YzA5Yjk1MjMyeHh1eWM2bWU0Z3JjemVlb3BieTU3a2phd2FlOGozM2cxYzZieW0mZXA9djFfaW50ZXJuYWxfZ2lmX2J5X2lkJnJpZD1naXBoeS53ZWJwJmN0PWc
Just had gpt4 pull some cool visuals together for me
Daily discussion threads - comments per day (since May):
https://imgprxy.stacker.news/hLFtubF_EmWj7HWXEmNql-Pvy7oRhssuMUjVhZNZEzg/rs:fit:600:500:0/g:no/aHR0cHM6Ly9pLmltZ3VyLmNvbS9VQ0dxYndWLnBuZw
Cumulative DDT comments (since May):
https://imgprxy.stacker.news/6vBdOKoKbeiP4ZfV11HQFTDB9-cAOVJuJ_2ew_vVNco/rs:fit:600:500:0/g:no/aHR0cHM6Ly9pLmltZ3VyLmNvbS9QTG1OeDlHLnBuZw
We on the rise
I believe it's hard to understand digital scarcity if you have grown up without ever witnessing such a thing in the 50+ years of internet history. The internet, a network of networks, built to share data. How can a thing which purpose was to share data make the complete opposite possible: to keep data scarce? Which introduced p2p file-sharing and thus the biggest enemy of copyright holders? Which made more information available than ever before, to so many people at their fingertips, wirelessly and globally? The internet is like a printing press on steroids. And that's an understatement.
So I think the problem is not that bitcoin is complex: the problem is that it's such a paradigm shift, you need to unlearn some things you thought are never possible to start to grasp it and the concept of digital scarcity. And some people will indeed never grasp it. They simply don't have enough time in their lifes left for unlearning or adapting.
I will always remember how my professor said that when he heard about public key cryptography for the first time, his first thought was that that's impossible: how can you share a key over an insecure communication channel and keep it secret? Surely there is no way!
That's when I witnessed myself how I take things for granted which were considered miracles when they were discovered (do we invent math or discover it?). The way he framed it, I realized what an astonishing discovery RSA and the Diffie-Hellman key exchange must have been. And now we take HTTPS and E2EE for granted and use it in our daily lifes to message friends in private, do online banking or... write on SN, knowing it's the real SN since TLS certificates authenticated the host.
I believe the same will happen with bitcoin. Future generations will grow up with it and just accept digital scarcity as something so natural, you won't question it at all.
Nice, attacking bitcoin strengthens it. In this case, attack is ordinals and BRC-20, and strengthening part is the effort to invent scalability solutions like Ark or Tbdxxx. Or perhaps those solutions just get more attention now, not sure.
edit: just saw another post claiming that Ark == Tbdxxx. Seems plausible, contact email is Burak's.
By chance, I picked out Atlas Shrugged off a bottom shelf on a Barnes and Noble trip. I had no idea what it was or that it was controversial. I just liked the cover art and the blurb.
At the time, I was living in motel room behind a Mexican restaurant in Los Banos, Ca, carless, bankless, and living paycheck to paycheck as a grocery clerk. I kept the copy in my apron and read it on my breaks.
It flipped my worldview upside down. Atlas Shrugged made it clear that I was choosing to be a victim and could, instead, choose to be a hero (or at least stop being a victim). I went pretty deep on objectivism, then anarchism and Rothbard and Mises.
At some point I decided to go to college (skipping some steps here ... I didn't graduate from high school), thinking I was going to do pre-med, but took an intro computer course and got hooked. I graduated Summa Cum Laude in 2012.
Being in CS, I occasionally saw Bitcoin mentioned on HN, but didn't make the hard money link. I'd also developed a healthy distance from politics and philosophy as I went through college, further preventing me from seeing Bitcoin's significance.
I bought my first Satoshis in 2014 to buy LSD on the Dark Net, and continued to buy small amounts of Bitcoin for similar purposes, still not having my Bitcoin epiphany.
Fast-forwarding a bit more, I was spending a lot of time on high-fat, low-carb Twitter in 2016/17 (I've always struggled with my weight) and eventually ran into Michael Goldstein, Pierre Rochard, Saifedean Ammous, and Jimmy Song. The dots finally connected between sound money and Bitcoin. I was hooked.
I moved to Austin 18 months ago and quickly dedicated the rest of my career to Bitcoin after attending a few Bit Devs.
Started from Los Banos now we here.
Tailscale. Based on WireGuard. This is nextgen VPN/tunnel/secure way to expose your service. Works out of the box and can be customized as you see fit.
Forget expensive cloud vpn to site, you can run 100 clients for free but I would recommend paid services if you are serious. I don't get a dime from them, just happy to share what I use and consider actually useful....
Day 425 of snailposting everyday 'til BTC hits $100k.
__@_'-'
https://imgprxy.stacker.news/a6eUcHaYGzzC6qG1fyUWoca7c-UBVDLJ9g4T0HuqWww/rs:fit:600:500:0/g:no/aHR0cHM6Ly9pLmltZ2ZsaXAuY29tLzd4N21iYy5qcGc
one day friend
Certainly.
Existing Bitcoin inheritance solutions roughly fall into 2 major categories:
The first one is relatively simple to understand (but not simple to implement), and probably the most common. Basically you would share all your keys and wallet data directly with the beneficiary, as well as the instructions to recreate said keys and wallet from scratch.
The problem with that is that this potentially creates a security vulnerability. You might be confident in your ability to safekeep sensitive key material, but it's hard to say the same for your family. The more copies of the keys you create, the easier you make it for a potential attacker. Furthermore, if the wallet is a multisig or uses a custom setup, the instructions can be quite difficult to follow, especially for someone non-technical. (You can perhaps "mitigate" this complexity by keeping your bitcoin in a singlesig wallet, but this comes at the cost of being more vulnerable to SPOFs).
Pre-signed transactions, on the other hand, require you to lock UTXOs. This technique interferes with your daily wallet usage. Every time you have a new transaction, you'd need to update the pre-signed transactions. You also need to pick transaction fees in advance, which may be problematic as we transition into the fees era, and the fee rate might become more volatile - the pre-signed transactions might get kicked out of the mempool. Last but not least, pre-signed transactions require you to pick the destination address/wallet in advance. This to me is its weakest point. The more time passes, the more uncertain we will be about what happens to the destination wallet. Will the beneficiary still have control over that wallet? Has any of its keys been compromised? etc. A lot can happen in 10-20 years.
Our Honey Badger solution solves this by having a dedicated inheritance key. The beneficiary does not need to know everything about the original wallet/keys in order to claim the inheritance. And we have tried to simplify the process as much as possible. The inheritance key is also time-locked, so you don't have the same vulnerability as the typical key duplication technique.
And of cos with that we are also able to sidestep all the problems with pre-signed transactions, since the inheritance claim happens on-demand on a future date, not now.
Hope this answers your question.
Nope. But I confess that I used to focus on the trending Hot posts because I thought doing so would help me get back my sats’ worth.
Now that I have a bigger bag (and withdraw what I think is my fair share from here), I’m not calculative about “breaking even”. Sometimes I zap new Stackers’ posts or “obscure” posts to give others a lift up. It’s okay - I have enough haha
Hm that’s an interesting question and kind of hard to speculate on. Before LDK came along I didn’t think an enterprise-first style implementation would exist and now we have one of those with phantom nodes and other cool scale based features.
I think pretty highly of the existing Lightning devs out there. If they won’t add a particular feature I suspect there would probably be a good reason for not doing it.
In the near term it does feel like there is just a ton to be done and too few to do it all. But perhaps one day lightning will ossify and we’ll look be able to look back and say oh hey it’s done.
I don’t see a day like that coming anytime soon though.
One area Lightning devs aren’t working on is automated channel management and rebalancing and I do suspect that area will see some pretty awesome innovation over time. If that progress well, and I suspect it will, we’ll eventually have one button lightning node deployments that just do everything for you automatically.
But with that 100k sat boost he paid? 😋 This is advertisement, and benefits us all in the redistribution. All good.
Hey @k00b and @kr, on the last SN podcast, KR had a great idea about companies AMA !
Let's do this! Invite bitcoin related companies to present their product/service and have an AMA.
Amazing idea!
Pick 2.
Why don't proponents of covenants first actually build some pressing new features using covenants and get people to buy-in to their vision.
This sales pitch of "Lets just implement it and I promise that it will all work out" is an absurd elevator pitch that has zero real chance of getting buy-in.
It's: https://stacker.news/top/posts/week
We need to enable more fine grain control of time, but that's like a lagging homepage.
Morning! Snails walks into a bar…
After 30 days.
My cowboy hat has blowed away.
I have misstepped on these dusty trails. I'll get back on that saddle.
All plant life on Earth nearly died from low CO2 levels at the end of the most recent ice age.
Why? Crustaceans had been pulling carbon our of the atmosphere for millions of years in order to make their shells and there is no offsetting natural process to recirculate it into the atmosphere.
None, people in my family are financially literate for at least 3 gen.
The people that are not into Bitcoin are still smart enough to understand the advantage of a hard money.
Sounds like you just want provocation. Childish.