I woke up in the middle of the night last night thinking about discussion on @dagny761's post here, and immediately made this. It's intentionally a bit hyperbolic, but begs for a conversation that I think we need to have. I've been feeling this tension a lot recently.
Yeah, anyone who thinks they're immune is instead demonstrating some combo of naivete and willful ignorance. It's interesting to think about how it plays out, personally, on SN. What do you say that you might not otherwise? What don't you say that you otherwise would?
It's not at all hard to see how it has played out in the larger btc space. Or the larger political space.
But these are just more emphatic places. It's everywhere, always.
I do not suggest rolling distros. If I was forced then Manjaro. I have tried hundreds of distros and my best advice for anyone wanting to run Linux as a primary desktop OS as follows:
Always go for LTS if offered
Never bother with bleeding edge rolling distros
Just install Debian where you can. Don't make life harder than it needs to be.
We have lots of ideas, but they will have to come at the right time. I want to revisit the lightning card for example, but right now it's too early: people don't perceive the value of the added security because lightning is still for pocket change.
Once on-chain fees go up and drive users to other scaling layers we will work on security devices for these solutions as well.
Life has a way of balancing things out. June I expect you’ll see me much more active once more.
Can confirm my recharge station of choice is amongst the trees. Pretty special smelling not only the living eucalyptus & pine trees, but also those around in the countryside fuelling their homes & barbecues with fire wood. Like breathing history.
I think #3 is compelling -- the neverending total war and global conflict is entirely a function unlocked by fiat, which is certainly something a progressive can get behind.
The thing that I'm not sure about, though, is the game theory of it -- you could have a country that stuck with a commodity money, and keep the assorted benefits of sound money, but if their "competitors" had access to this warmaking capability unlocked by the money printer, the gold standard peeps get weeded out of the evolutionary pool. On the short term, the ability to coordinate human action at scale in service of some small cadre of people is a massive advantage -- that's why it happened in the first place.
So I'm not sure what to think about this argument from a pragmatic perspective, even though it's true.
It's so true, I feel the same way about social media, and with search just either pushing the highest bidder or the site that is monetised through Google display it really is all curated for maximum profit and minimum utility and enjoyment
those that get enjoyment from the current social media apps are all about consumption, they don't really care too much about the content, but rather the act of consuming and passing time is all that they are there for.
I find my internet use has dropped considerably, I don't want to contribute to those sites any longer, I don't want to hear people tell me about the latest tiktok video or trend, its so mundane
But like the author says, the internet is what you make of it, switch your search engine, fuck around on nostr and curate your own experience
Nice use of BitVM. Can you give a real-world example of who would compose a staker set to make the bridge? I don't understand what their incentives are. Like operators of a bank or a casino?
The article points out that lightning nodes never control user funds but then says -- in a parenthesis -- "except the one-way control to route a payment along a user-specified path." But that is false. Lightning nodes don't control user funds even in a "one way" respect. The user's funds remain on the user's device until the payment to the intended recipient is complete. Only after the payment is complete does the routing node acquire what used to be the user's funds, and at that point they don't belong to the user anymore. Since the routing node only acquires money that rightly belongs to themselves (per the terms of the smart contract) and never touches user funds, it is not true to say that they have "one-way control" of anyone else's money.
It is true that the government recently argued that you don't need to control someone else's money to transmit it. They gave the example (see page 30 of this document) that if party A puts money in a lockbox, gives that box to party B, and pays them to deliver it to party C, party B still counts as a money transmitter even if they never touch the actual money and only touch the box containing it.
But FinCEN has actually considered the government's example and explicitly denies that such a courier counts as a money transmitter: "FinCEN does not treat as a money transmitter an armored car business that solely engages in providing secure transport services, including currency and other valuables, for the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Mint, banks, and private companies, so long as the armored car business cannot be viewed as participating, or having a stake, in a financial transaction." source
So the government's example falls apart. Routing nodes do even less than a courier. They do not even control a "locked box" containing someone else's money. They only ever have their own money in their own node. I hope the courts laugh off the government's claim that you can transmit money without controlling it; if that claim stands, then almost everyone is an illegal money transmitter because if the government was right, it wouldn't matter whether or not you touch someone's money, only this would matter: if the government sues you, they win as long as they can find some time when you helped someone complete a payment faster and cheaper than they could have done it on their own -- even if, in the process, you never touched their money.
Joined the Monday Meme competition for the first time today! Probably won’t win but the process of creating a meme on imgflip.com and posting it on posting images.org and taking down the markdown URL made me feel that I have learnt so much tonight! Successfully posting my meme here is an accomplishment in itself
I used to but then I stopped. Now I wear more subtle things for lower op sec like a fold card t-shirt or the stuff slush pool puts out. Only purists will know I’m a low key bitcoiner
Phoenix, Breez, Nayuta are LN dedicated wallets. Are not supposed to be used for onchain txs. Swaps they provide are not meant to be used so often or in these strange situations we are today with these fucking ordinals.
Phoenix should be treated as LN wallet only. The onchain feature is dedicated only to open channels on the fly and when is needed, to refill drained channels.
Blixt, OBW, Electrum have better control over onchain wallet and txs. OBW for example have RBF, batch txs and other features for onchain. Electrum also is powerful for onchain rxs and also including swaps with LN.
I explained all features of these wallets in my guides. Also I explained that choosing a LN wallet is a very important task and also do not use just one. I suggested also to use external submarine swaps, where you can control better the fees and the swap, so your tx couldn't get stuck for mistakes.
I use Phoenix too, but I do not use too much the swap feature. My sats are spread in many wallets so whenever is needed, I can choose the one that have enough sats and for each situation. Here I explained how I use Phoenix
This kind of content is exactly what "open sourcing" the BITCOIN channel was hoping to attract. Hope we see more of it from some people on stacker news. Cheers, to nerd2ninja for the read through, and peter todd for the write up.
Thank you all for the contributions here ! We are still developing the protocol and the app and we appreciate all the feedback added here.
We have tried to build an extensive library about Fedimint (https://fedimint.org/docs/intro), but we understand this is a large concept that can be difficult to communicate. We’re looking to expand on this and welcome your input via our telegram group (https://t.me/fedimint).
We added below some points that might help to answer some questions you raised. Again, we are super open to learn from you and we might have questions we won’t be able to answer right now, as we are still in the development stage. But they are key for us to build as much bulletproof product as possible. With that said, let’s go to some points to consider:
Fedimint is a community custody protocol that allows you to more easily store your bitcoin with the people that you trust, whilst still being able to transact in a private way.
This isn’t a new concept, it already happens either with physical money in communities around the globe or in Bitcoin - some of you might have the experience to assist friends or family members with custody.
We know the best custody is self custody, but we believe that 2nd party custody with a simple product is better than 3rd party custody. We believe removing bitcoin from exchanges into the hands of communities will be a significant win for bitcoin.
We understand this is a first step on the journey of many to understand the importance of custody in general and adopt Bitcoin in a safer manner. That’s why guardians are assumed to be trusted parties in the community otherwise you would be unwise to place your bitcoin with them. So it isn’t like a bank or an exchange, but a collaborative form of custody.
A key point with Fedimints is to understand that we are building for a world where there will be thousands to millions of collaborative Fedimints - decentralising the custodians. Each will have different trust models based on your relationship to the guardians of those federations. Larger federations may be useful for more private transacting and smaller federations would be more appropriate for custody of funds, we expect there will be a design space to explore here.
Current custody models used in bitcoin provide the custodian with full visibility of the individual's balance and transaction history. We believe one significant improvement which can be made here is to use Chaumian eCash to ensure that the custodian does not have visibility of the balance or transactions of its members.
When referencing backup the guardians only hold an encrypted shard of a master key which can be used to get access to funds. The guardians cannot reconstruct this key. They can, however, assist the member of the federation in retrieving this key so that they can decrypt it. Once decrypted they can recover their funds without further assistance from the guardians.
Fedimint isn’t Liquid, but has some similarities. One way to think about this would be that Fedimint is a software platform that makes it simpler to deploy many federations as opposed to one federation in the liquid model, decentralising the custodians.
Finally it is worth describing the relationship between Fedi and Fedimint. Fedi is not Fedimint, itself but a company committed to building on and educating about Fedimints as a platform. We don’t take any custody of federations funds, these will always remain with the communities supported by a federation.
Hope this clarifies some questions. When we have the app ready we would love to have an AMA, so you can see this concept translated into reality. But as a whole Fedi will be a safe place where individuals will communicate and move their money freely and privately with the ones they trust the most. We are getting there… ;)
This post is a psychic attack. Nothing said reflects reality. Usually a good lie has a mix of truth and lies, but this post came from a parallel dimension where reality is mirrored to our own
NGL, it's probs gonna be a multi-decade slog. There will be regular setbacks, but we will have occasional victories.
The economics favors bitcoin. The fiat freaks cannot stop printing. Hopefully we can keep the faith and hang in there and do Satoshis work.
One thing I just started doing recently: Requiring my friends pay me and pay me back in bitcoin and I do the same to them. We need to insist that we use bitcoin with fam and friends. Get that circular economy going, as small as it may be.
Saying we don't need covenants because we can do them on a layer 2 is a gross misunderstanding of the entire point of covenants.
Covenants main benefit (in my opinion) is to enable multi party protocols / layer 2s. Without them we can only build 2 party protocols (lightning) without putting huge complexity and availability requirements that defeat the whole purpose.
This argument comes from the block size wars where it actually made sense, we don't want every transaction to happen on-chain, we want them on higher layers. Advocating for covenants is actually a continuation of this, we don't want to do an on-chain transaction to on-board every user onto bitcoin, ideally we can group hundreds to thousands of users into a single utxo and have them be onboarded in an infinitely cheaper way.
We can't do covenant functionality on a higher layer because we need covenants to be able to build the higher layers.
Michael you’re wrong on every point as usual. Man, you hold a grudge 😅 Saylor was a guest at our conference and I wouldn’t set up a meeting for you. Get over it.
For anyone new to Michael’s world, he’s literally walking anti-signal.
First of, thank you so much for your work! Second, I have three human rights related questions:
What are currently the best ways to help people living in North Korea? What's the current top thing? Is it still USB flash drives? Does Bitcoin play any role?
What is the level of awareness in the African countries under CFA about their value being sucked by France?
I really enjoyed your essays and investigations on different countries. Are there more essays in works?
Routing is a business. It has revenues and expenses. If you can maximize revenue and minimize expense, then you can be profitable.
In mining, a terrahash is more or less the same as any other terrahash. It will be rewarded basically the same so your primary competitive advantage is energy cost.
In staking pools, one token is more or less the same as another token. Investing 10x more into a liquidity pool will yield about 10x more reward. Your competitive advantage is access to capital.
However, in LN, every channel has unique properties. Capacity, routing fees, onchain fee paid, position in the network, relative liquidity flow (sink/source) and many other factors will directly impact the ROI on a channel and each factor presents an opportunity to optimize into a competitive advantage.
You are unlikely to generate passive profit because you will always be out-competed by someone who actively tries to optimize their channels.
Many people think that one day, there will emerge an algorithm that magically and automatically manages your node to achieve maximum profits. Then, LN basically becomes a staking pool where access to capital is the only competitive lever.
I think this senario is unlikely for the same reason that there is no magic portfolio that always returns maximum results. People create algos to trade stocks profitably, but as soon as a critical mass of capital is deployed by the algo, all the arbitrage is depleted and another strategy will outcompete it.
Same here, was amazing to see that Argentineans were not really interested in BTC, even though they have a crazy high inflation. I asked them 7 years later if they bought bitcoun - none of them did.
The Bitcoin Bugle is a parody. The title isn't supposed to be accurate. It's supposed to be funny. And in this case, being funny required it to have a certain truth to it.
There's a lot of nuance required to answer this question. I'll try to break the privacy concerns into a few broad categories with their high level issues:
Information you broadcast as a public node (gossip) This could include an IP address and anything you put in the node alias. The mitigation here is either to not be a public node (open only private channels and be okay not routing payments) or to connect only via Tor and announce an onion address.
Linking your channel funding transaction to your node. Mitigations: mix your utxo first, don't announce your node. The combination of taproot channels and an updated gossip protocol will likely help with this in the future by breaking the 1:1 linkage of on-chain utxo to channel announcement, but this is an issue now.
Spending Spending is fairly private by default. Issues are when outsourcing your routing you dox your payment. If you run your own full node, this shouldn't be an issue, but mobile wallets may try to do this for an improved UX. For users of phoenix, multiple trampoline hops could help here in the future, there just aren't enough trampoline nodes currently. Probing is also an issue - monitoring changes in channel balances by periodically trying to send payments through. These payments are designed to fail, but depending on where they fail, some information about channel balances is leaked. Reducing htlc_maximum_msat can help here. Also, this only applies to public channels.
Receiving This is the worst privacy aspect of LN currently - BOLT 11 invoices pretty much dox your node. Blinded paths (a default feature of BOLT 12) will help here. The BOLT 12 specification is fairly well fleshed out, but still needs wider usage and formal adoption.
I've heard that from other places, too. Seems weird, although when I steelman it, I guess I can sort of get it. I have a PhD in a different field and I can think of a zillion really fundamental things that you don't get exposed to unless you insist on it. There's just too much to cover, and those foundational things are ... foundational. Considered to be so basic as to not need examination, I suppose.
One of the byproducts of going down the btc rabbit hole, for me, was encountering so many super fascinating takes on money and its origins and the psychology of it. Bitcoiners don't often get exposed to these through the normal channels. For instance, here's probably my favorite book on money topics, which I've never heard anyone even mention. (Though in fairness, no one mentions it outside of btc, either.)
If you just go one field over, it's like a whole other universe of things to discover.
Microlancer is essentially an LN-enabled Upwork (i.e., a client lists a gig they want to find tasker to perform the work specified, and the rate. Taskers respond with their offer to do the work). Microlancer also has added Microlancer Services, which is comparable to a Fiverr (i.e., Advertise your service, and the compensation). Escrow and dispute resolution are performed by Microlancer.
Suitable platforms already exist. What is needed are for employers / clients to be aware of these methods, and to actually use them. There is maybe a 1,000:1 ratio (or greater) between potential freelancers/candidates wanting to perform the work for every gig / task listing available. This is not unique to just Microlancer.
There are a number of altcoin-related platforms that were built to create a use case for their specific altcoin, and they have become ghost towns after the initial funding runs out. There's a network effect that makes gaining traction difficult. And then when the gig platform is successful with the matchmaking between a client/employer and a freelancer/tasker/worker, the platform isn't needed for continued follow-on work -- the employer can just coordinate with the worker directly, no intermediary needed. This is in contrast to, say, Upwork where the platform handles fiat payment from the employer and payment to the worker (which is especially useful when paying the worker requires conversion to a different currency and payment method).
There was a pretty good interview of Paul Itoi of Stakwork, you might find it interesting:
I'm incredibly laid back. Had a good question the other day, pretty much out of no-where: "What company is behind bitcoin?". The answer seemed to be of interest, I was thanked, and they went out of the room.
I take heart from Aesop's fable of the North Wind competing with the sun. Force and might doesn't work, in fact, it can do the opposite. Gentleness love and time works for me.
I finished the first few chapters of Mircea Eliade's "A History of Religious Ideas Vol. 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries". The book starts with the earliest clues we can guess at with regard to prehistoric man, and then briefly explores each successive development as religious ideas and impulses are brought forth in subsequent civilizations.
Prehistoric men were hunters following the game. Their sense of spirituality centered around hunting, contemplating where their prey came from and therefore where man himself came from. I found the suggestion interesting that they purportedly felt a kinship with the animals they hunted and went to great lengths to honor and verify the remains of the animal, presumably under the fear that the animal might exact vengeance on them from the afterlife. To me, this presages some early awareness of karma, or cause and effect of killing. My favorite part about prehistoric religion is that they the deification of all this was wrapped into a archetype or figure named "The Lord of Wild Beasts". Awesome.
From there, you have the slow transition to agricultural society and the subsequent emergence of the oldest known civilization in Sumer. Like the hunters, man worships what he spends his time on; getting food. While growing food and paying dependent attention to the cycles in nature, man develops an awareness of the continuity of life after death. Crops dying in winter are reborn next season. This model gets applied to human life and presages later concepts of reincarnation. Society also shifts more feminine with greater emphasis placed on cycles, continuity and working/worshipping the natural world. The Sumerian myth of Inanna descending into the underworld to die and be resurrected, as well as her husband, Dumuzi, undergoing a periodic banishment seems to set the early tone for later figures of resurrected gods like Jesus. You've also got Gilgamesh and the quest of man to find immortality and be free of death.
Later, you've got the Egyptians, where preparing for death becomes a literal science. Also important is the emerging belief of an incarnated deity in the form of the pharaoh god-kings. Presently, I'm reading about the subsequent influence spread over Europe with all the stone monoliths like Stonehenge, which also seem to be contemplative of death. Perhaps stone was imagined to capture the soul and immortalize the deceased, resulting in the modern day gravestone?
Anyway, cool shit (to me). I've been loving the opportunity to chime in on my current read each weekend on this site. Makes me feel like I'm doing a book report in elementary school. Hopefully others find it half as interesting as I do.
you guys did a LOT to push the state of the art on noncustodial financial services. Thanks for all the hard work! I think I'll be missing itchysats forever.
Speaking of which, if you're really determined to use GraphQL as your API, please be ready to charge a few sats per API call. Because if not some moronic idiot is going to think it's funny to flood the site with compute-expensive calls.
Every site I know of that exposes a GraphQL API is eventually forced to either (a) put users through CAPTCHA-hell (b) do browser fingerprinting, usually via cloudflare, (c) some kind of real-world identity linkage like SMS verification, or (d) some combination of the above.
I would hate to see that happen to SN.
I probably can't convince you that exposing GraphQL to anonymous callers is a bad idea, so hopefully I can convince you to be ready with something less awful than (a)(b)(c)(d) when the inevitable result occurs.
I don't think bitcoin satisfies any of these qualities, not according to the definitions given in the article.
Consistency
If we are discussing the mempool, it is definitely not consistent. You can quickly ascertain this experimentally by sending a transaction only to peer 1 and then immediately requesting a copy of the mempool from from peer 1 and peer 2. What will happen? They will very probably give you back different copies of the mempool. This is not consistent per the article's definition: "In a consistent system, once a client writes a value to any server and gets a response, it expects to get that value (or a fresher value) back from any server it reads from."
But of course, the mempool isn't technically "part of" bitcoin's consensus rules -- the blockchain is. But the same thing applies there. If you find a block in bitcoin and send it to peer 1, then immediately request a copy of the latest block from peer 2, peer 2 may not know about it yet. So you "[wrote] a value to [one] server...[got] a response...[and got an older value]...back from [another] server." This violates their definition of consistent, so bitcoin, per their definitions, is not an example of a consistent system.
Availability
This one I'm less sure of. Your bitcoin client can craft a "write" request intended to be added to the blockchain (i.e. you can craft a transaction) and send it to a peer, but pay a fee of 0. The peer will then probably drop the request. If your client then makes a "read" request, the peer will likely reply with either the same chain it had before or a different one, but still without the user's transaction in it. So I think, in bitcoin, write requests are sometimes ignored. I think this violates their definition of availability: "The server is not allowed to ignore the client's requests."
I'm not sure though because I think bitcoin might satisfy their definition of "not ignoring requests" as long as the peer sends back an error message. If he sends back an error message, he didn't "ignore" your message, he replied. But even there, I don't think peers in bitcoin have to return error messages. I haven't checked the codebase, but I doubt you would ban a peer for a single ignored message. I think you would ban them if they ignored "multiple" requests, but not for a single one. So I'm not entirely sure. You might say "but if they ignore a message that means the peer crashed, and the article says it doesn't count as an ignored message if it was due to a crash." And that might be true -- I'm not sure -- but Bitcoin also doesn't exactly have a "spec" so if a node "chose" to literally ignore 1% of messages I don't think this would count as a node "crashing." It would just be a slightly jerk-ish node, and I don't think there's anything in bitcoin that forbids that.
Partition tolerance
This is defined as "the network will be allowed to lose arbitrarily many messages sent from one node to another."
This is what I was talking about just a moment ago: I really don't think any bitcoin client bans peers just for dropping one message. But I do suspect they ban peers who drop "arbitrarily many" messages -- e.g. all of them. So per this definition I actually don't think bitcoin qualifies as partition tolerant. I think you will ban peers if they drop a certain number of messages, and that seems inconsistent with the article's definition of a partition tolerant system, which is supposed to permit nodes to lose "arbitrarily many messages" without issue. But again, I'm not entirely sure -- "the network" is fine even if you ban one peer, since you have seven others. So I just don't know for this one, but I don't think bitcoin satisfies it.
i believe one of his apps was exploited rather than having the bug responsible disclosed
The guy who exploited anigma.io responsibly disclosed the bug in a private dm. I didn't know how to fix it at the time and I didn't want to learn how because I was tired of the project, so I put up a warning banner that the software is compromised and called it a day
I did not responsibly disclose the off-by-one bug, in fact I didn't know if there was a bug or how the ord software would handle my weird transactions. I just thought "These will probably crash their block explorer" and then tried them on mainnet to see what would happen.
Also, their block explorer did not immediately appear to be broken in any way. My transactions were mined at midnight and nothing seemed wrong when I checked the ord explorer website, it seemed to be working fine and in the ordinals discord no one noticed anything weird immediately. So I went to sleep thinking nothing meaningful happened. It was only this morning that someone linked me to an issue on the ord explorer github page about my weird transaction, and I discovered I unknowingly introduced an off by one error into their software (or rather exploited an existing vulnerability that I didn't realize was there). Off by one errors are notoriously nefarious in that they are not usually immediately obvious but then something breaks horribly later on.
Also, even though my transaction didn't crash ordinals.com, it did crash other ordinal indexing software that other people wrote, including one by unisat that is the basis of ordinalswallet.com.
https://m.stacker.news/52300
I woke up in the middle of the night last night thinking about discussion on @dagny761's post here, and immediately made this. It's intentionally a bit hyperbolic, but begs for a conversation that I think we need to have. I've been feeling this tension a lot recently.
Yeah, anyone who thinks they're immune is instead demonstrating some combo of naivete and willful ignorance. It's interesting to think about how it plays out, personally, on SN. What do you say that you might not otherwise? What don't you say that you otherwise would?
It's not at all hard to see how it has played out in the larger btc space. Or the larger political space.
But these are just more emphatic places. It's everywhere, always.
I’ve solved bugs in my code in dreams…
I do not suggest rolling distros. If I was forced then Manjaro. I have tried hundreds of distros and my best advice for anyone wanting to run Linux as a primary desktop OS as follows:
Just install Debian where you can. Don't make life harder than it needs to be.
Every other sentence in this propaganda piece is a boldface lie! But, no publicity is bad publicity: as @woonomic states: this is a absolute dream.
50k sats
StackerClaus is done for tonight.
See you in December stackers!
Yes!
We have lots of ideas, but they will have to come at the right time. I want to revisit the lightning card for example, but right now it's too early: people don't perceive the value of the added security because lightning is still for pocket change.
Once on-chain fees go up and drive users to other scaling layers we will work on security devices for these solutions as well.
Added Slice to my list of dozens of products that let you earn Bitcoin…
https://www.stacksats.how/
Nice of you to notice.
Life has a way of balancing things out. June I expect you’ll see me much more active once more.
Can confirm my recharge station of choice is amongst the trees. Pretty special smelling not only the living eucalyptus & pine trees, but also those around in the countryside fuelling their homes & barbecues with fire wood. Like breathing history.
https://i.ibb.co/FsDxmCT/20220924-231119.jpg
I think #3 is compelling -- the neverending total war and global conflict is entirely a function unlocked by fiat, which is certainly something a progressive can get behind.
The thing that I'm not sure about, though, is the game theory of it -- you could have a country that stuck with a commodity money, and keep the assorted benefits of sound money, but if their "competitors" had access to this warmaking capability unlocked by the money printer, the gold standard peeps get weeded out of the evolutionary pool. On the short term, the ability to coordinate human action at scale in service of some small cadre of people is a massive advantage -- that's why it happened in the first place.
So I'm not sure what to think about this argument from a pragmatic perspective, even though it's true.
It's so true, I feel the same way about social media, and with search just either pushing the highest bidder or the site that is monetised through Google display it really is all curated for maximum profit and minimum utility and enjoyment
those that get enjoyment from the current social media apps are all about consumption, they don't really care too much about the content, but rather the act of consuming and passing time is all that they are there for.
I find my internet use has dropped considerably, I don't want to contribute to those sites any longer, I don't want to hear people tell me about the latest tiktok video or trend, its so mundane
But like the author says, the internet is what you make of it, switch your search engine, fuck around on nostr and curate your own experience
https://m.primal.net/HWIz.jpg
The Bisq Dashboard is excellent, thank you for creating that.
https://bisq.markets
How did that come to be something added to Mempool? i.e., did Bisq request it, or you just wanted to scratch your own itch, or ???
Mining sites and landfills using methane. Let’s get this bitch carbon neutral baby.
Literally OP
https://media.tenor.com/3wtr1MRT_I8AAAAd/i-get-it-omg.gif
Nice use of BitVM. Can you give a real-world example of who would compose a staker set to make the bridge? I don't understand what their incentives are. Like operators of a bank or a casino?
The article points out that lightning nodes never control user funds but then says -- in a parenthesis -- "except the one-way control to route a payment along a user-specified path." But that is false. Lightning nodes don't control user funds even in a "one way" respect. The user's funds remain on the user's device until the payment to the intended recipient is complete. Only after the payment is complete does the routing node acquire what used to be the user's funds, and at that point they don't belong to the user anymore. Since the routing node only acquires money that rightly belongs to themselves (per the terms of the smart contract) and never touches user funds, it is not true to say that they have "one-way control" of anyone else's money.
It is true that the government recently argued that you don't need to control someone else's money to transmit it. They gave the example (see page 30 of this document) that if party A puts money in a lockbox, gives that box to party B, and pays them to deliver it to party C, party B still counts as a money transmitter even if they never touch the actual money and only touch the box containing it.
But FinCEN has actually considered the government's example and explicitly denies that such a courier counts as a money transmitter: "FinCEN does not treat as a money transmitter an armored car business that solely engages in providing secure transport services, including currency and other valuables, for the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Mint, banks, and private companies, so long as the armored car business cannot be viewed as participating, or having a stake, in a financial transaction." source
So the government's example falls apart. Routing nodes do even less than a courier. They do not even control a "locked box" containing someone else's money. They only ever have their own money in their own node. I hope the courts laugh off the government's claim that you can transmit money without controlling it; if that claim stands, then almost everyone is an illegal money transmitter because if the government was right, it wouldn't matter whether or not you touch someone's money, only this would matter: if the government sues you, they win as long as they can find some time when you helped someone complete a payment faster and cheaper than they could have done it on their own -- even if, in the process, you never touched their money.
Joined the Monday Meme competition for the first time today! Probably won’t win but the process of creating a meme on imgflip.com and posting it on posting images.org and taking down the markdown URL made me feel that I have learnt so much tonight! Successfully posting my meme here is an accomplishment in itself
https://imgprxy.stacker.news/1UzwCXl-Li5lG_tfcsHwUwme5uq5E1V8jq6T2aI8PGI/rs:fit:600:500:0/g:no/aHR0cHM6Ly9jZG4ubm9zdHIuYnVpbGQvaS9iZWI3YjQ4YjZjMWViYTA2ZGQxNDMwZDY0NmY1ZjViYTkzZTQ1ZjQ1MWYxYjlkYmRiYjVkNDU0YWZkOWQ0YzY4LmpwZw
There's a good chance Apple won't continue to dominate consumer electronics.
Keeping my longest cowboy streak going until __@_'-' reaches its destination: 6
I used to but then I stopped. Now I wear more subtle things for lower op sec like a fold card t-shirt or the stuff slush pool puts out. Only purists will know I’m a low key bitcoiner
Phoenix, Breez, Nayuta are LN dedicated wallets. Are not supposed to be used for onchain txs. Swaps they provide are not meant to be used so often or in these strange situations we are today with these fucking ordinals.
Phoenix should be treated as LN wallet only. The onchain feature is dedicated only to open channels on the fly and when is needed, to refill drained channels.
Blixt, OBW, Electrum have better control over onchain wallet and txs. OBW for example have RBF, batch txs and other features for onchain. Electrum also is powerful for onchain rxs and also including swaps with LN.
I explained all features of these wallets in my guides. Also I explained that choosing a LN wallet is a very important task and also do not use just one.
I suggested also to use external submarine swaps, where you can control better the fees and the swap, so your tx couldn't get stuck for mistakes.
I use Phoenix too, but I do not use too much the swap feature. My sats are spread in many wallets so whenever is needed, I can choose the one that have enough sats and for each situation.
Here I explained how I use Phoenix
3M sats for @Anita 🎉 congrats @siggy47 @grayruby 🤙
I'm not sure nostr is ready for this, But i'd rather have something spun up and going that's rough than nothing.
Hiking to Burgess Falls, just about 14 miles south of my town.
https://m.stacker.news/14779
This kind of content is exactly what "open sourcing" the BITCOIN channel was hoping to attract. Hope we see more of it from some people on stacker news. Cheers, to nerd2ninja for the read through, and peter todd for the write up.
If you are reading this and want to make a similar video upload to http://youtube.com/BITC0IN make a pull request like this one. It got the above video uploaded: https://github.com/Fiach-Dubh/BITCOIN-YouTube/issues/12
Thank you all for the contributions here ! We are still developing the protocol and the app and we appreciate all the feedback added here.
We have tried to build an extensive library about Fedimint (https://fedimint.org/docs/intro), but we understand this is a large concept that can be difficult to communicate. We’re looking to expand on this and welcome your input via our telegram group (https://t.me/fedimint).
We added below some points that might help to answer some questions you raised. Again, we are super open to learn from you and we might have questions we won’t be able to answer right now, as we are still in the development stage. But they are key for us to build as much bulletproof product as possible. With that said, let’s go to some points to consider:
https://fedimint.org/assets/images/fm-spectrum-custody.excalidraw-4db14732495b99429517511026155dfa.png
Hope this clarifies some questions. When we have the app ready we would love to have an AMA, so you can see this concept translated into reality. But as a whole Fedi will be a safe place where individuals will communicate and move their money freely and privately with the ones they trust the most. We are getting there… ;)
sorry never got round to replying to this - pull to refresh is available in the latest version
To me this looks like a hosted version of Shamir Secret Sharing. I get it that normies might find this comfortable.
But we as a community need to prioritise self sovereignty, and work hard on getting the message out there.
Spread your self soverign risk by using purpose built by tools like Shamir Secret Sharing.
https://trezor.io/learn/a/what-is-shamir-backup
Never skimp on food. Its a key input that determines your ability to function. I.e. your output.
If you must reduce the food budget, then reduce the experience of the food, not the food itself. E.x. cook at home instead of getting takeout, etc.
Too many people trim their budget by eating ramen instead of steak and then they have cravings or low energy that impacts their ability to earn.
Budgeting your TIME with the goal of increasing your income is the best way to budget IMO :)
Yes, everyone's food budget is up almost 2x from a few years ago. Nobody knows why, inflation is only 5% after all /s
Oh yea, stop paying for a "budgeting app" lmao spreadsheets are free!
This post is a psychic attack. Nothing said reflects reality. Usually a good lie has a mix of truth and lies, but this post came from a parallel dimension where reality is mirrored to our own
NGL, it's probs gonna be a multi-decade slog. There will be regular setbacks, but we will have occasional victories.
The economics favors bitcoin. The fiat freaks cannot stop printing. Hopefully we can keep the faith and hang in there and do Satoshis work.
One thing I just started doing recently: Requiring my friends pay me and pay me back in bitcoin and I do the same to them. We need to insist that we use bitcoin with fam and friends. Get that circular economy going, as small as it may be.
Saying we don't need covenants because we can do them on a layer 2 is a gross misunderstanding of the entire point of covenants.
Covenants main benefit (in my opinion) is to enable multi party protocols / layer 2s. Without them we can only build 2 party protocols (lightning) without putting huge complexity and availability requirements that defeat the whole purpose.
This argument comes from the block size wars where it actually made sense, we don't want every transaction to happen on-chain, we want them on higher layers. Advocating for covenants is actually a continuation of this, we don't want to do an on-chain transaction to on-board every user onto bitcoin, ideally we can group hundreds to thousands of users into a single utxo and have them be onboarded in an infinitely cheaper way.
We can't do covenant functionality on a higher layer because we need covenants to be able to build the higher layers.
It'll definitely fail. But wait until we see entire nations trying to shitcoin, it'll be hilarious.
Michael you’re wrong on every point as usual. Man, you hold a grudge 😅 Saylor was a guest at our conference and I wouldn’t set up a meeting for you. Get over it.
For anyone new to Michael’s world, he’s literally walking anti-signal.
If you want to read a ton of discussion on this, the HN thread is pretty great is burning up.
Holy crap
Basically what I just read.
Speaking as a writer, this is a high IQ turn of phrase 🫡
Wish this thread comes up daily :)
I am working on freelance project - android app - upwork for X
want to get started with coding with LN today.
Will search for tutorials.
Day 278 of snailposting everyday 'til BTC hits $100k.
...and 78 push-ups. (20 - 20 - 20 - 18)
__@_'-'
Hello! Im pretty new too and SN is the best!
First of, thank you so much for your work! Second, I have three human rights related questions:
Zap buy in here.
Images embedded in comments.
Routing is a business. It has revenues and expenses. If you can maximize revenue and minimize expense, then you can be profitable.
In mining, a terrahash is more or less the same as any other terrahash. It will be rewarded basically the same so your primary competitive advantage is energy cost.
In staking pools, one token is more or less the same as another token. Investing 10x more into a liquidity pool will yield about 10x more reward. Your competitive advantage is access to capital.
However, in LN, every channel has unique properties. Capacity, routing fees, onchain fee paid, position in the network, relative liquidity flow (sink/source) and many other factors will directly impact the ROI on a channel and each factor presents an opportunity to optimize into a competitive advantage.
You are unlikely to generate passive profit because you will always be out-competed by someone who actively tries to optimize their channels.
Many people think that one day, there will emerge an algorithm that magically and automatically manages your node to achieve maximum profits. Then, LN basically becomes a staking pool where access to capital is the only competitive lever.
I think this senario is unlikely for the same reason that there is no magic portfolio that always returns maximum results. People create algos to trade stocks profitably, but as soon as a critical mass of capital is deployed by the algo, all the arbitrage is depleted and another strategy will outcompete it.
Same here, was amazing to see that Argentineans were not really interested in BTC, even though they have a crazy high inflation. I asked them 7 years later if they bought bitcoun - none of them did.
Pretty stunning to me.
everyone agrees with 5
thats why they are pushing for V2 and this new DATUM
to avoid pool owners being able to dictate anything other than 5
Posting this to let everyone know that contributing to bitcoin can be small changes like this or just reviewing code.
Don't be intimidated!
The Bitcoin Bugle is a parody. The title isn't supposed to be accurate. It's supposed to be funny. And in this case, being funny required it to have a certain truth to it.
https://www.zapread.com/i/9Hi
There's a lot of nuance required to answer this question. I'll try to break the privacy concerns into a few broad categories with their high level issues:
Information you broadcast as a public node (gossip)
This could include an IP address and anything you put in the node alias.
The mitigation here is either to not be a public node (open only private channels and be okay not routing payments) or to connect only via Tor and announce an onion address.
Linking your channel funding transaction to your node.
Mitigations: mix your utxo first, don't announce your node.
The combination of taproot channels and an updated gossip protocol will likely help with this in the future by breaking the 1:1 linkage of on-chain utxo to channel announcement, but this is an issue now.
Spending
Spending is fairly private by default. Issues are when outsourcing your routing you dox your payment. If you run your own full node, this shouldn't be an issue, but mobile wallets may try to do this for an improved UX. For users of phoenix, multiple trampoline hops could help here in the future, there just aren't enough trampoline nodes currently.
Probing is also an issue - monitoring changes in channel balances by periodically trying to send payments through. These payments are designed to fail, but depending on where they fail, some information about channel balances is leaked. Reducing htlc_maximum_msat can help here. Also, this only applies to public channels.
Receiving
This is the worst privacy aspect of LN currently - BOLT 11 invoices pretty much dox your node. Blinded paths (a default feature of BOLT 12) will help here. The BOLT 12 specification is fairly well fleshed out, but still needs wider usage and formal adoption.
The (likely automated) spam bots have arrived!
https://i.postimg.cc/bJ00xX4d/Screenshot-at-2022-08-07-17-37-11.png
Each account has a post with the same image (partial image snap follows):
https://i.postimg.cc/50fQMXkN/Screenshot-at-2022-08-07-17-40-48.png
I've heard that from other places, too. Seems weird, although when I steelman it, I guess I can sort of get it. I have a PhD in a different field and I can think of a zillion really fundamental things that you don't get exposed to unless you insist on it. There's just too much to cover, and those foundational things are ... foundational. Considered to be so basic as to not need examination, I suppose.
One of the byproducts of going down the btc rabbit hole, for me, was encountering so many super fascinating takes on money and its origins and the psychology of it. Bitcoiners don't often get exposed to these through the normal channels. For instance, here's probably my favorite book on money topics, which I've never heard anyone even mention. (Though in fairness, no one mentions it outside of btc, either.)
If you just go one field over, it's like a whole other universe of things to discover.
trying to help people understand dual-funding + splicing as a new way of thinking about lightning
Microlancer is essentially an LN-enabled Upwork (i.e., a client lists a gig they want to find tasker to perform the work specified, and the rate. Taskers respond with their offer to do the work). Microlancer also has added Microlancer Services, which is comparable to a Fiverr (i.e., Advertise your service, and the compensation). Escrow and dispute resolution are performed by Microlancer.
Freelancing platforms which pay in Bitcoin, and other ways to earn bitcoin
https://cointastical.medium.com/freelancing-platforms-which-pay-in-bitcoin-e38be56166df
Suitable platforms already exist. What is needed are for employers / clients to be aware of these methods, and to actually use them. There is maybe a 1,000:1 ratio (or greater) between potential freelancers/candidates wanting to perform the work for every gig / task listing available. This is not unique to just Microlancer.
There are a number of altcoin-related platforms that were built to create a use case for their specific altcoin, and they have become ghost towns after the initial funding runs out. There's a network effect that makes gaining traction difficult. And then when the gig platform is successful with the matchmaking between a client/employer and a freelancer/tasker/worker, the platform isn't needed for continued follow-on work -- the employer can just coordinate with the worker directly, no intermediary needed. This is in contrast to, say, Upwork where the platform handles fiat payment from the employer and payment to the worker (which is especially useful when paying the worker requires conversion to a different currency and payment method).
There was a pretty good interview of Paul Itoi of Stakwork, you might find it interesting:
The Kevin Rooke Show – E49: Paul Itoi on Stakwork, Sphinx Chat, Earning Bitcoin, and AI vs. Humans
https://stacker.news/items/33413
https://anchor.fm/kevin-rooke/episodes/Paul-Itoi-on-Stakwork--Sphinx-Chat--Earning-Bitcoin--and-AI-vs--Humans--E49-e1jbki5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=972LzVeH8aA
I'm incredibly laid back. Had a good question the other day, pretty much out of no-where: "What company is behind bitcoin?". The answer seemed to be of interest, I was thanked, and they went out of the room.
I take heart from Aesop's fable of the North Wind competing with the sun. Force and might doesn't work, in fact, it can do the opposite. Gentleness love and time works for me.
We definitely do not want to break lightning's transaction-level privacy.
I finished the first few chapters of Mircea Eliade's "A History of Religious Ideas Vol. 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries". The book starts with the earliest clues we can guess at with regard to prehistoric man, and then briefly explores each successive development as religious ideas and impulses are brought forth in subsequent civilizations.
Prehistoric men were hunters following the game. Their sense of spirituality centered around hunting, contemplating where their prey came from and therefore where man himself came from. I found the suggestion interesting that they purportedly felt a kinship with the animals they hunted and went to great lengths to honor and verify the remains of the animal, presumably under the fear that the animal might exact vengeance on them from the afterlife. To me, this presages some early awareness of karma, or cause and effect of killing. My favorite part about prehistoric religion is that they the deification of all this was wrapped into a archetype or figure named "The Lord of Wild Beasts". Awesome.
From there, you have the slow transition to agricultural society and the subsequent emergence of the oldest known civilization in Sumer. Like the hunters, man worships what he spends his time on; getting food. While growing food and paying dependent attention to the cycles in nature, man develops an awareness of the continuity of life after death. Crops dying in winter are reborn next season. This model gets applied to human life and presages later concepts of reincarnation. Society also shifts more feminine with greater emphasis placed on cycles, continuity and working/worshipping the natural world. The Sumerian myth of Inanna descending into the underworld to die and be resurrected, as well as her husband, Dumuzi, undergoing a periodic banishment seems to set the early tone for later figures of resurrected gods like Jesus. You've also got Gilgamesh and the quest of man to find immortality and be free of death.
Later, you've got the Egyptians, where preparing for death becomes a literal science. Also important is the emerging belief of an incarnated deity in the form of the pharaoh god-kings. Presently, I'm reading about the subsequent influence spread over Europe with all the stone monoliths like Stonehenge, which also seem to be contemplative of death. Perhaps stone was imagined to capture the soul and immortalize the deceased, resulting in the modern day gravestone?
Anyway, cool shit (to me). I've been loving the opportunity to chime in on my current read each weekend on this site. Makes me feel like I'm doing a book report in elementary school. Hopefully others find it half as interesting as I do.
Picture of the "Lord of Wild Beasts" below.
https://m.stacker.news/14750
Adding Nostr Wallet Connect to the Stacker News wallet would be cool.
Send and receive nostr zaps from SN, pairs nicely with the crossposting addition.
Oh goodness. I could have gone the whole day without remembering that expression exists.
you guys did a LOT to push the state of the art on noncustodial financial services. Thanks for all the hard work! I think I'll be missing itchysats forever.
Speaking of which, if you're really determined to use GraphQL as your API, please be ready to charge a few sats per API call. Because if not some moronic idiot is going to think it's funny to flood the site with compute-expensive calls.
Every site I know of that exposes a GraphQL API is eventually forced to either (a) put users through CAPTCHA-hell (b) do browser fingerprinting, usually via cloudflare, (c) some kind of real-world identity linkage like SMS verification, or (d) some combination of the above.
I would hate to see that happen to SN.
I probably can't convince you that exposing GraphQL to anonymous callers is a bad idea, so hopefully I can convince you to be ready with something less awful than (a)(b)(c)(d) when the inevitable result occurs.
Thanks again for creating this awesome site.
Specifically tried to get first comment today. No luck y'all are too quick 😂
What kind of thermostat do you have?
One with a needle?
The Bitcoin standard
I don't think bitcoin satisfies any of these qualities, not according to the definitions given in the article.
Consistency
If we are discussing the mempool, it is definitely not consistent. You can quickly ascertain this experimentally by sending a transaction only to peer 1 and then immediately requesting a copy of the mempool from from peer 1 and peer 2. What will happen? They will very probably give you back different copies of the mempool. This is not consistent per the article's definition: "In a consistent system, once a client writes a value to any server and gets a response, it expects to get that value (or a fresher value) back from any server it reads from."
But of course, the mempool isn't technically "part of" bitcoin's consensus rules -- the blockchain is. But the same thing applies there. If you find a block in bitcoin and send it to peer 1, then immediately request a copy of the latest block from peer 2, peer 2 may not know about it yet. So you "[wrote] a value to [one] server...[got] a response...[and got an older value]...back from [another] server." This violates their definition of consistent, so bitcoin, per their definitions, is not an example of a consistent system.
Availability
This one I'm less sure of. Your bitcoin client can craft a "write" request intended to be added to the blockchain (i.e. you can craft a transaction) and send it to a peer, but pay a fee of 0. The peer will then probably drop the request. If your client then makes a "read" request, the peer will likely reply with either the same chain it had before or a different one, but still without the user's transaction in it. So I think, in bitcoin, write requests are sometimes ignored. I think this violates their definition of availability: "The server is not allowed to ignore the client's requests."
I'm not sure though because I think bitcoin might satisfy their definition of "not ignoring requests" as long as the peer sends back an error message. If he sends back an error message, he didn't "ignore" your message, he replied. But even there, I don't think peers in bitcoin have to return error messages. I haven't checked the codebase, but I doubt you would ban a peer for a single ignored message. I think you would ban them if they ignored "multiple" requests, but not for a single one. So I'm not entirely sure. You might say "but if they ignore a message that means the peer crashed, and the article says it doesn't count as an ignored message if it was due to a crash." And that might be true -- I'm not sure -- but Bitcoin also doesn't exactly have a "spec" so if a node "chose" to literally ignore 1% of messages I don't think this would count as a node "crashing." It would just be a slightly jerk-ish node, and I don't think there's anything in bitcoin that forbids that.
Partition tolerance
This is defined as "the network will be allowed to lose arbitrarily many messages sent from one node to another."
This is what I was talking about just a moment ago: I really don't think any bitcoin client bans peers just for dropping one message. But I do suspect they ban peers who drop "arbitrarily many" messages -- e.g. all of them. So per this definition I actually don't think bitcoin qualifies as partition tolerant. I think you will ban peers if they drop a certain number of messages, and that seems inconsistent with the article's definition of a partition tolerant system, which is supposed to permit nodes to lose "arbitrarily many messages" without issue. But again, I'm not entirely sure -- "the network" is fine even if you ban one peer, since you have seven others. So I just don't know for this one, but I don't think bitcoin satisfies it.
Forgive me if you've answered this before, but do you think the existence of only 21m bitcoin was:
The guy who exploited anigma.io responsibly disclosed the bug in a private dm. I didn't know how to fix it at the time and I didn't want to learn how because I was tired of the project, so I put up a warning banner that the software is compromised and called it a day
I did not responsibly disclose the off-by-one bug, in fact I didn't know if there was a bug or how the ord software would handle my weird transactions. I just thought "These will probably crash their block explorer" and then tried them on mainnet to see what would happen.
Also, their block explorer did not immediately appear to be broken in any way. My transactions were mined at midnight and nothing seemed wrong when I checked the ord explorer website, it seemed to be working fine and in the ordinals discord no one noticed anything weird immediately. So I went to sleep thinking nothing meaningful happened. It was only this morning that someone linked me to an issue on the ord explorer github page about my weird transaction, and I discovered I unknowingly introduced an off by one error into their software (or rather exploited an existing vulnerability that I didn't realize was there). Off by one errors are notoriously nefarious in that they are not usually immediately obvious but then something breaks horribly later on.
Also, even though my transaction didn't crash ordinals.com, it did crash other ordinal indexing software that other people wrote, including one by unisat that is the basis of ordinalswallet.com.