After my second Austin Bit Devs, I began asking myself, “why can’t I find this productive of a Bitcoin community online?” Bit Devs are monthly Bitcoin meetups held worldwide, an interactive review of primarily technical Bitcoin-related developments. It’s a seemingly simple meetup but something special happens when you share space with people you share values with.¹
I left each Bit Devs high on Bitcoin’s orange tonic - energized and convicted for weeks. I learned about bleeding edge Bitcoin tech, taught what I knew to others, brainstormed on how to promote and defend Bitcoin, and made strangely persistent relationships. I dedicated my career to Bitcoin after my second Bit Devs. Only, I had to move to Austin to have this experience.
“This bothers me,” I complained to Ben Carman on a walk to get drinks after a Bit Devs. I wanted a Bit Devs community online, a Bit Devs regardless of where I lived, a Bit Devs every darn day.
While I was orange-pilled by some combination of Michael Goldstein, Pierre Rochard, Saifedean Ammous, and Jimmy Song on Twitter in 2017, Bit Devs’ essence was absent on Twitter. It’s also absent on the unfortunately crypto-phobic Hacker News and on the borderline lowest common denominating Reddit. To speak to something bigger, what’s absent online are natural communities² and I believe its because of their community’s incentives.
Behavior in human communities develops as a result of the incentives humans in the community are given, and existing online communities influence behavior by format, pseudo-reputation, gamification, and moderation. Basically their communities develop as a result of expression limits, rewards backed by nothing, and centralized control. My assumption with Stacker News is that Bitcoin fixes this by having users stake something other than pseudo-reputation, Bitcoin, and earn rewards that are worth something in the external world, Bitcoin.
In Bitcoin we say “Bitcoin fixes this” because we believe Bitcoin changes the incentives humans have in any inheriting system. We believe Bitcoin encourages people to think long term and that this seemingly small yet fundamental change is utterly transformative for the better. This is why I started Stacker News. I think Bitcoin will help us build natural communities like Bit Devs online.
- Sharing an interest in Bitcoin with people isn’t sharing a simple kind of value. Monetary systems are meta-value systems. Sharing Bitcoin with people is something more powerful.
- I’m loading the term natural communities with what I think makes in-person communities productive, incentives imparted by nature. For me, what primarily distinguishes in-person communities from online ones is that you’re sacrificing something real when you participate, social reputation, and earn something real when you participate well, social reputation, meaningful favors, and friendship.
Is this the saloon? so many cowboy hats in here 🤠
Day 228 of snailposting everyday 'til BTC hits $100k.
...and 28 push-up(s).
__@_'-'
Kollider is still primarily a trading platform.
Kollider Exchange powers basically everything that we do. The synthetic stablecoins and the swaps that are built into the wallet are only possible because they're powered by the exchange on the back end. The synthetic stablecoins are actually created using derivatives to hedge BTC on the exchange. So in some ways, the wallet is really an app that's build on top of the exchange infrastructure.
We're definitely excited about Nostr, especially because we think there's going to be a growing crossover between the world of Lightning and the world of Nostr, hence the relay as well as building a lot of Nostr features into the wallet to make it super easy for users to access both.
Constantly switch web clients. Coracle best so far
No. I am trying to get a hold of team management to have someone on for an AMA.
Very cool.
Market settlement is going to be a very interesting problem to solve in future versions.
I wonder if you could nominate an npub (or have an m of n npub model) to agree on the outcome. Then anyone participating could:
Market settlement then only possible based on nominated npub signing a settlement message with their nsec.
Also, will be great to get stats working right. I love to randomly check Predictit, Manifold, and (this is the most shitcoiner thing I do) Polymarket.
It's worth saying that I have no idea how an undertaking like this would play out in this medium, but seems a worthy experiment.
Setting up Albyhub.
Taking a step back and focusing on getting outside more often and experiencing the real world. Bitcoin is amazing but sometimes I need a break from looking at a screen all the time.
Don't rug pull my $1.53 k00b!
I'm just fucking with you. Hope the upgrade goes without a hitch.
Snail?
3-4 times a month
He didn't know it would become a compliment! 🤣
Have you considered squatting on the nym so no one else can claim it and impersonate you?
I tried many
giving gifts by exchanges
Open dimes
Download BlueWallet and I’ll send you some
When I am gifting for birthdays weddings and the such I always think how can I get them bitcoin trying to stay away from having them buy KYC but sometimes I suggest it
Ask your questions right here on SN, lol
As for pleb nodes, DarthCoin has recently been popularizing the idea that plebs should not run routing nodes. Which I agree with.
Rather, plebs should run nodes with only unannounced channels, this is for privacy but also, a pleb with poor liquidity can actually cause net harm to "the network". As other nodes will attempt to use your channels for routes, but as a humble pleb, your channels are not actively managed and your public node causes other's payments to fail or timeout. Also, as a pleb, you want your node to work when you go to use it, but if you're not pricing your liquidity correctly, you may find that other nodes have used up your public liquidity causing your own payments to fail or become more expensive.
As for why PlebNet has mostly disappeared:
Recognize LN is still early and the best information comes direct from the source (usually githubs of the projects themselves).
But the support network for LN keeps growing and places like SN and even Reddit are great for asking questions and getting help.
Thank you, I'm glad to see people on here taking this stuff more seriously than on twitter.
That's awesome! You can have a similar "Days in office" count for that.
After realizing that docker is also to blame for my constant network interruptions and the only solution seems to be to disable IPv6 [0], I am also interested in alternatives to docker.
I've seen some people in the docker github mentioning that they switched to Podman. The only other thing that comes into my mind is K8s. But I don't have experience with any of them so not sure how well they suit your use case.
[0] https://github.com/docker/for-linux/issues/914
I just want to say that SN saving your post if you accidentally leave the page is awesome!
Thank you for the thoughtful and in depth analysis of our privacy policy.
Our main objective is to contribute to the longevity of the Bitcoin Lightning Network's development as the main financial payments system of the future. For enterprises and holders of large amounts of bitcoin to adopt LN, assurances about payment reliability and risk mitigation need to be in-place. This is what we are providing at Amboss. For the purposes of improving LN performance, we crowd-source information from LN operators and users. For data that is not publicly available, this information must be requested; in other words, the data owner opts-in to provide it.
To help lightning network mature, we operate a data analytics company that helps users make thoughtful decisions about whom to connect to. We have taken many steps to ensure that we are being thoughtful about the development of the lightning and our design decisions to help the lightning network's long-term growth. This, in many ways, is achieved by opt-in, transparent data collection to create ways for users to manage risks as well as improve payment performance. All feedback is welcomed; this helps us make better design decisions.
I'm happy to hear that privacy is a priority for you and I hope that our policy can help guide development of better privacy tools for users and more ways for users to consciously decide what information they would like to share. This is the essence of privacy: the right to choose which information to disclose.
Yes, and personally I think ThomasV was right. I think BIP39 should've just based itself on the Electrum solution.
The 24 words have cost lots of people lots of money without really enhancing security at all.
About mobile apps: Breez, Blixt and SBW are great non-custodial LN wallets that allow you to run a LN node on your phone. BlueWallet is nice to use as well, without the ability to run a node, but also can be non-custodial.
I've been working on a project to build a decentralized DNS, using Bitcoin and Nostr for the base layers. It's starting to come together, and I wanted to get some feedback on the general approach to the protocol.
The idea is this: Bitcoin serves as the timestamp provider. Publish a hash on the blockchain. Built into the hash are the root-level name, the public key and a merkle root for children (more on that in a moment). This is published to the timechain as a proof of ownership (names are first come/first serve).
After publishing a claim of ownership on chain, you can then publish a Nostr event, which contains the data necessary to recreate the on-chain hash. After that link is forged, we can use additional nostr events to publish record changes (like DNS records), always linked back to an on chain proof of ownership.
As you can see, the idea is that the blockchain is used to basically timestamp a claim to a name, and nostr is the actual transport protocol for the name data. It uses the same cryptographic primitives as bitcoin and nostr, so it all dovetails very nicely together.
It is intended to be highly scalable, because root-level names published on chain are actually entire namespaces on their own, containing potentially infinite descendants in a tree. Think of it like:
comis the root name,amazonis a child,wwwis a grandchild, etc. The only thing that ever needs to be published on chain again are ownership changes (transferring ownership of a name to a new private key, or adding new descendants).It's also intended to be self sovereign and censorship resistant. The descendants are aggregated into a merkle tree and published as part of the ownership proof hash on chain, and each name is associated with its own cryptographic key. Which means that, even in the distant future when you may not be able to afford an on chain transaction yourself, but if you get a descendant name from some business offering the service, once you are given it, it belongs to your private key and cannot be revoked.
I'm building an indexer right now, which is just software to look for transactions on chain and the correct nostr events on relays, then link then and provide an API to query for name records. Once that is ready, in a few weeks or a month, I will publish it along with a more formal-ish spec.
The intention is for this to be a very simple protocol, easy for devs to implement and understand. If nostr has taught me anything, it's that simple protocols inspire a lot of enthusiasm.
Any thoughts on this approach?
I once knew a Darth Vader inspired stacker,
Who used the force as his standard rejoinder,
Oh, at his memes we would lol,
The alt crypto newbies he would troll,
Till he called me a ‘damn dirty shitcoiner..’
doubled by author