me reading up on HTLCs

Thess purity tests are ridiculous. LND is open source. Bitcoin is an open source movement. LND is not developing closed source software and umbrel and mynode need to kick license fees to run the software on their node in a box.

I am glad you are taking the deeper dive and running another implementation of lightning but the reasoning is misguided. Please remember bitcoins hashing function is created by the NSA. Which it doesn’t get more statist that that. Yet we all use it without reserve.

There is an attitude, common among bitcoiners, that centralization is always bad, all the time. (Not saying this is your attitude, @kepford.) Centralization has some amazing benefits, and I want to live in a world that has lots of kick-ass centralized services and institutions to take advantage of. I just don't want crucial things (like money) to be centralized, and I don't want to depend on any centralized entity so totally that my life will be crippled if they turn evil or something bad happens to them.

Point is, SN can do a lot of amazing things because it's a website run by a dude. Nostr may take off, but my hypothesis is that it won't get beyond the curiosity phase until some new infra layers / services develop that centralize and make classes of functionality economically viable. The underlying protocol layer can remain how it is, more or less.

I have an identical hypothesis about bitcoin. It will either grow a varied ecosystem and be used by people with all kinds of ideologies, served by a host of groups and institutions across the 'centralization' gradient, or it will dwindle into irrelevance over time.

Spend taxes.

My idea:

I went to a party last year where we would all be betting on the outcomes of various fighting matchups on N64's (classic) Super Smash Bros.

The game allows you to select up to 4 CPUs to compete against each other on a randomly selected battlefield. We placed bets (1) once the CPUs were picked and (2) after the battlefield was randomly selected.

For anyone who has played this game before, you will know that different players have different advantages, especially depending on the battlefield that is selected.

It ended up being really fun and addictive. People were screaming and some of the matches were extremely entertaining and dramatic.

It wasn't as easy to predict the winner as you might expect. I also think it's elegant how vast the amount of permutations are for potential character matchups on different battlefields.

I immediately thought that the internet would probably love this, especially since this game is such a classic. I thought doing so on lightning would be even better.

I just want to see this happen. Happy to help out.

timestamp for the win

Reckless money printing in 2020. I think this was a turning point for many.

Apologies to those who were expecting the ~privacy pub to start yesterday.

Decided to take a more sustainable approach and focus on quality over quantity. We’ll still get through the list and likely in a similar order, but just not going to burn myself out in the process lol.

Lighthouse:

Ethereum and Solana suck, and they're a great example for why all of web3 is going to die eventually. Technically speaking, their promises of a fast response time are not possible at scale. The bottleneck: Networking + Repetitive Compute across the world for CONSENSUS, every < 20 seconds. (Whereas bitcoin promises to do this in a reasonable 10 minutes per block. And I wouldn't call the lightning network a centralized layer 2 solution. Bitcoin is the real deal, as you can obviously see on SN, since you're here...)

Imagine Amazon trying to implement Ethereum or Solana web3. Every time a user buys something, all the miners in the world have to move funds from the user's wallet, to Amazon's wallet, then also store the transaction in a private database somewhere, then interact with robots to deliver your groceries. The blockchain is not private, every miner has a copy. So Amazon would have to store that Amazon-private data encrypted with a key, on the blockchain, where everyone can see it. That key would have to be saved somewhere private for them still.. They'd have to do the same with all their saved user wallet addresses and their home addresses... It makes no sense, which is why Amazon doesn't do it.

Regardless of how you would TRY to do this as Amazon, think instead of 1 server in the backend handling your request, and 1 server (database) saving the transaction, and 1 server telling the robots to put your groceries in a UPS box (or maybe 100 servers doing that, IDK), instead, with web3, you have thousands of computers all around the world doing all those tasks, just to say they agree you clicked a button and you want your groceries delivered ASAP... It's ridiculous, with no real-world application, besides generating garbage (NFTs and tokens) upon garbage (Proof-of-Stake, Proof-of-History, Proof-of-not-work). Bitcoin's proof-of-work is basically "proof of time consumed to generate secure value". How do you fake time? You don't.

And if you didn't know, basically every NFT is simply a user's wallet associated on the blockchain with what's called a "string" in programmer terms. The NFT string is a URL pointing to a picture, hosted on a Web2 server. The NFT picture itself is not saved on the blockchain, because that would cost like $1000+ to store on every miner's computer in the whole world. To view your NFT, you have to use a centralized Web2 frontend which calls the web3 backend for only the URL which gets referenced by the web2 frontend in your browser to display it. When you buy an NFT, you are simply paying all the miner's in the world to save your wallet address connected to this URL. It's not the whole picture, just a little URL string that points your browser where to download the picture from.

Don't trust me?:

Many years ago, I made my own web3 website on ethereum, because I was a believer. I spent money on a web2 server to serve up the frontend, so that I could prove the concept of replacing modern day Web2 backend of PHP with Ethereum's Solidity programming language. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I paid a guy in Indonesia to make a pretty Web2 frontend for the Web3 backend (yes, all Web3 is a Web2 Frontend (like amazon) + Web3 backend (like Uniswap)). The site went live and the price to click a button to save a string was $1 back then, so nobody used the site. Now, it's $30+. So, I paid the frontend developer to add Optimism layer 2. It was still like $1 ON LAYER 2, to save a simple little tiny single character string to the blockchain, or the emulated version of it. (whatever layer 2 is...)

If I wanted, I could pay for a Ethereum Solidity smart contract developer $200/hour to come in and optimize my code and write the code to store the strings in some limited string variable type, but I gave up. I came to the conclusion that Web3 is simply hype. Hype, I've come to understand, is people's excited feelings about something, with no logic. The buzz of using something w/ a lack of comprehension of what it is that they're using. People are never going to understand how stupid modern Web3 is, because it's like an infinite casino with infinite rooms full of infinite levers to pull and money might shoot out. These levers cost $30 a pull, unless you use a cetralized layer 2 solution. It's ridiculous.

And it's unfathomable how broken this shit is.

Solana is a prime example of how broken it is. Their system requirements for miners, last time I looked, was something like 128 GB of RAM and a 32 core processor. That's a really powerful computer, yet their blockchain FAILS and has to be "rebooted" every so often, because miners can't keep up with each other. Solana has their response times down to milliseconds, but I don't know how that's even possible, since every mining computer in the world has to verify every little transaction, across the entire world. So whenever you're on a Solana exchange and converting your token from shit-token-1 to shit-token-2, the whole world lights up and somehow confirms in milliseconds..

Long story short, it fails sometimes, and people lose money, but people don't talk about that much, because they're all busy pulling levers and seeing if the money comes out, and it's really frustrating to watch. If you don't believe me, check the Solana uptime history health stats on the Solana Web2 site: https://status.solana.com/uptime?page=3 They have the most powerful computers in the world, computing proof-of-history, the easiest thing to compute, and they still break, once every 3 months or so... Do you think a business that completely shuts down that often deserves a multi billion dollar valuation?...

And ethereum is so broken... New miners that join that network aren't even able to download the whole blockchain because it's being created so fast. So instead, what miners are slowly but surely ALL doing, is downloading just the headers of blocks, and confirming the headers, not the actual data produced, just what some other miner sent to them and told them is the headers.. Ethereum's proof-of-stake miners basically just validate that they're trying to validate.. But again, the infinity shitchain is growing so fast that they can't download the shit over the network fast enough.

Anyway, I've been holding this back for years, had to get it off my chest. I think a lot of people are waiting to learn what is hype and what is not, and I've spent years waiting to read someone talking about it like this, but I just don't see it. SN is a great place for me to share, and I intend to do more of it..

I loved seeing OP's video. Big tips for OP. The truth must be known!

Bitcoin is not hype. It makes the most sense. And lightning is the real web3. Everyone just needs patience. Wait for the next biggest app, like crypto kitties, to kill the ehtereum blockchain again, and if it happens enough times, people will start to get the idea. Oh, you didn't know Crypto Kitties put miners 4 hours behind? Well it did happen, and I haven't seen a popular fun game app since...

I was in the wrong business. Took me 15 years to build a 2M revenue business that at best was worth maybe 750k haha.

What might be the most surprising or unexpected thing about life in Africa for someone who has never been to Africa?

The zaps are now fireworks so cool

Just applied to a full time position at a bitcoin company today, wish me luck freaks!

Life is filled with scams and scammers. I'm trying to come up with the earliest ...

Most of my childhood public education was a scam. When I started high school I tested into the advanced geometry class but was getting mediocre grades in algebra (I never really did homework and held a really low gpa in middle school) so they revoked my placement. Instead I got placed in the normal geometry class with a brand new teacher that didn't want to be a teacher, and with all the kids that didn't care. I pretty much gave up on school at that point.

I'd test into advanced classes but I'd be stuck retaking the classes I had failed. Occasionally some teachers would be good at their job and intervene. I did eventually end up with a really good math teacher in high school that was super unorthodox and technology forward which is probably what eventually led me to programming. RIP Mr. Gharst.

I ended up not graduating from high school.

From: https://github.com/supertestnet/utxo-dealership

first the buyer creates an htlc and deposits his coins inside
the buyer should be able to take the coins after the timelock
but the seller should be able to take them with the preimage
next the seller creates an htlc and deposits a coinbase inside
the seller should be able to take the coins after the timelock
but the buyer should be able to take them with the preimage
the buyer's timelock should be longer than the seller's otherwise
the buyer could wait til his own timelock expires, then sweep
the funds from his own htlc using the timelock path, then
sweep the funds from the seller's htlc using the preimage before
the seller's timelock expires, thus taking the seller's money
without the seller being able to reimburse himself
also both htlcs should use the same hash which the buyer knows
when the coinbase matures the buyer should disclose the preimage
to the seller
then the seller should send the buyer a sig so he can withdraw
from the seller's htlc using the multisig path
then the buyer should send the seller a sig so he can withdraw
from the buyer's htlc using the multisig path

Private channels aren't private. They should be called "unannounced channels".

They simply aren't included in your node's gossip. This means your node isn't telling all it's peer about the channel. The unannounced channel is excluded from the public network graph built by every node.

If Alice wants Charlie to use her unannounced channel with Bob, she can include a "route hint" in the invoice itself.

Then, anyone who sees that invoice knows Alice has an unannounced channel with Bob and can use it to route a payment on that channel

It's also possible to probe for unannounced channels and use them without any "permission" or route hint.

An unannounced channel is just a "suggestion" to the network that says, "hey, I'd prefer if none of you use this one."

But anyone who's determined enough can still use it.

Soon we will have short channel IDs (SCIDs) which will help hide unannounced channels better.

A thing that is not understood, and then widely misunderstood, is the role of compression in intelligence.

Many people nowadays are familiar with this idea as pertains to machine learning: a common critique in model evaluation is that the model has simply memorized the training set. This does in fact happen, most often when the model has a huge number of free parameters. It has so much capacity that it can simply encode what you give to it.

The most useful behavior comes when the model has a lot of capacity, but way less than what it would take the memorize the relevant training corpus. So for it to do anything interesting, it has to basically compress reality -- to find patterns in it that it detects with reasonable fidelity. If the system can do this, we say that it generalizes.

This is what the brain does, too. Compression and generalization are at the heart of intelligence. (Early work on this is filled w/ attribution controversy.) The limitation -- the collapse of the vector to a scalar -- is what makes it so powerful. It's what lets you recognize diverse situations as, fundamentally, instances of the same kind of thing.

It's also interesting to note that different kinds of brain damage ruin this ability in a surprising way: by giving the person nearly total recall. So the person can remember everything, but, like the model with too many parameters, can't really think. The most famous example of such a case is memorialized in this Borges story.

Anyway. It's intriguing to consider this wrt money, which is a great compressor, as you and @siggy47 are mentioning. It makes money hugely useful, but dangerous, insofar as what is left out of that invisible hand's grasp may be vitally important.

We talk about leaving out bad consequences as externalities, and there are different attempts to mitigate that, but what about leaving out good things? What happens to a value computation that doesn't include the most important thing about being alive, or systematically leaves out the concerns of millions or even billions of beings, whether they're slaves in 1850, quasi-slaves harvesting rare Earths in Congo, women a century ago, or all the animal life on the planet, in perpetuity?

What do you get, then? This amazing system that computes value, what are the consequences of the value that it computes? And I wonder if there's such a thing as a money that captures too much, like an overfit model, or like poor Funes?

Day 391 of snailposting everyday 'til BTC hits $100k.

__@_'-'

Value is subjective. A subject is a self-preservation machine (cells, organisms, collectives, etc.) capable of resisting the effects of entropy by expending energy externally. Only subjects can ascribe value to something.

Energy has value to all subjects because subjects need energy to continue existing in spite of entropy.

Subjects engage in activities that produce energy for themselves. By producing energy, subjects contribute to increasing entropy, which consequently requires more energy to resist in the future.

Subjects must maintain a surplus of energy. They must create more than they consume.

Storing energy is valuable.

Living cells store energy in lipids - fatty compounds that cells can "burn" later for energy.

Organisms store energy in food reserves - by keeping food reserves, organisms can later convert the food to energy for their cells.

Collectives store energy in money - by keeping records of energy creation vs consumption, collectives can efficiently produce and allocate energy to/from the comprising organisms.

Humans are the only known collectives that use things which aren't food as money. (Although monkeys have been successfully trained to use coins to trade for food and sex)

Collectives usually have huge long-term aspirations (like building a city or going to the moon). These require tons of energy and may take decades. Food storage is not sufficient at storing this much energy for years at a time.

Anything can be used as money.

Its up to the collective to decide what is money. The money does not store the energy like fats or food. Rather the energy is "stored" as an IOU by the collective.

By spending money, you are demanding that others in the collective burn energy for you. By earning money, you expend energy to gain more energy (in the form of money).

A good money will keep accurate records of energy expended. A good money will be equally "hard" to acquire no matter which organism is competing to acquire it.

A worse money will become 'elastic' causing the collective's record of energy expended to become inaccurate to reality. A worse money is easier to acquire for some and harder for others. Not because some organisms can expend more energy than others, but because the money rewards them unfairly (Cantillon Effect).

In theory, the best money will become the most adopted by collectives.

A money that is adopted by a larger collective is more valuable than a money adopted by a smaller collective. "Large" and "small" here refers to the energy production of the collective, not necessarily the number of organisms.

A popular money can be exchanged for more energy and thus the money itself is more valuable.

First time I have set an alarm in years. I'm representing a friend in court this morning. It's a small thing, just a favor, but it feels strange. It's been over a year. It makes me realize I am enjoying my retirement.

I don't think this is black rock, the address is a P2WPKH address which coinbase does not use.

Maybe it's a central bank 👀