pull down to refresh

Earlier this year, I finished reading Antifragile by Nassin Nicholas Taleb. I must acknowledge that it took me 2-3 months to complete it and I will probably go back to it in the future, as I feel that could obtain more from it.

At the beginning of the book IV, Taleb starts describing what optionality is and how can make things work and grow. Before getting into details in the following chapters, he describes a comparison between a tourist and a flâneur.

Obviously we all know what a tourist is: someone who plans the trip well in advance and sticks to the plan. Probably, this person is ticking all the boxes in the destination and does not miss a point of interest. Most likely will not modify the plan as may miss some of the main attractions. On the other hand, some of the most interesting things as connecting with locals and living the city, instead of visiting it, will be lost.

On the contrary, a flâneur may plan in advance though, once arrives to the destination, may follow their instincts and get lost in the city, without knowing clearly where is going but taking advantage of what this new city or country is offering.

Reading this part of the book, took me 25 years back to 1999. I visited Rome and, as you can imagine there were lots of preparations, planning and a long checklist of places to visit.

The first three days were hectic. Vatican, museums, roman ruins including the Colosseo and Foro romano, Fontana di Trevi, Bocca de la Verità, Piazza Navona….

https://m.stacker.news/34633

https://m.stacker.news/34634

https://m.stacker.news/34636

https://m.stacker.news/34638

By the end of these initial days, we were exhausted and, at some point, nor even enjoying it.

Then, in the afternoon of the fourth day, we decided to stop for a coffee. It looked like just a simple bar. No tourists, just some locals taking a coffee and having a conversation. We stayed. The whole afternoon. Just talking, enjoying the place and the coffee.

https://m.stacker.news/34640

Then, we moved to Piazza Spagna, remained sat there until sunlight went.

https://m.stacker.news/34641

We realized that this was our way forward. From that day onwards, we avoided queues, enjoyed meals and coffees. Then, we visited places though relaxed, not looking to the watch. Sitting in a terrace, enjoying environment close to the Pantheon.

https://m.stacker.news/34642

Visiting a park (Villa Borghese) and spending the day out and about.

Without knowing, we were transforming in flâneurs. Not only in Rome but also with all trips that came afterwards.

When we returned our friends asked for this and that place, some of them were missing. No regrets. This is a reason to go back again, and I hope it will not take long.

Please notice that all the credit for the photos goes to my wife. I have just taken pictures from her 1999 album.

https://m.stacker.news/34643

Yes, you can be an LSP by just running some software -- and it is profitable to do so.

The first time I wrote LSP software was probably Swap Service which lets you do what Boltz Exchange does except you make the money instead of them. More recently, I revised that code and released Zaplocker, which is partly the same thing, but it also has new features e.g. it works for lightning addresses and lets people have a non-custodial one without needing to run a node. (Zeus Pay runs an instance of zaplocker software as well, though Evan rewrote the codebase because my code is bad.)

One of my goals is to make third party intermediaries unnecessary. Another of my goals is to make them as widely available as possible. Those might seem contradictory, but I don't see it that way. Some people want to use third parties for some services, and that's fine, but I'd like that to be an option rather than a need. For those who want third party services, even non-custodial ones like zaplocker come with some risks, such as being deplatformed, but these risks are mitigated if everyone can run a copy of that same third party service. So, making LSP software serves the latter goal: let anyone be an LSP, let a thousand flowers bloom, make it profitable for anyone who wants to give it a try, and that helps LSPs in general evade regulatory capture.

reply

Hi! ACINQ dev here.

Their German is also not the best

Entschuldigung! Doing our best with mostly automated translation

Clicking on "Payment options" reveals a legacy LNURL authentication scheme. Interesting. Don't know anything about the details though. What is the difference to the standard scheme?

It's for backward compat. Our legacy app had a non-standard implementation of LNURL-auth. Migrated wallets will default to the legacy mode.

There is a swap-in wallet using descriptors and a final wallet using zpub now! I think this wasn't shown to the user before.

Yes, the swap-in wallet is new and derives from the seed (in the previous version it was controlled by ACINQ). The final wallet was there before.

There seems to be a minor bug regarding fiat currency however. I only see "?!

If it persists after restarting the app, please report to support.

So I still have to see splicing in effect. I'll report back when that was the case.

One way to try is to send funds to your own phoenix bitcoin address, and bump the fee of the on-chain transaction.

This way you will do:

  1. a splice-out (1 input, 2 outputs)
  2. then a splice-cpfp (1 input, 1 output)
  3. then finally a splice-in (2 inputs, 1 output)
    and go back to the initial state. You can follow all that on mempool.space and learn quite a bit. It will cost you a few thousand sat in mining fees.
reply

Here here. Also want to help grow what @k00b and all have built here because it is awesome. So anything we can do to bring attention to it amongst the non bitcoin crowd. Help bitcoin adoption and get SN some traffic it's worth a shot.

You might say Siggy is a dreamer, but he's not the only one!

reply

You guys got me with the BTC price tracker! Man! Hahaha

reply

They were incredibly late to develop their own mobile app (or even a functional mobile web view). The sign of rot to me was when this design came through, but not because it served users better - it was launched as a better interface for serving ad formats and avoiding ad blockers.

reply

Memes count as art right? right?

reply

There are so many but the first that comes to my mind is:

LGBTQ Discrimination

Reference: 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis.

reply

I'm liking this community more and more.

reply

Um so like Pheonix has been a pretty good wallet for me. I started using blixt to try to be more advanced with it. But generally its like a receipt list of unbroadcasted transactions.

You know assume I open a channel with you for example.

I own 250,000 sats. We put those sats in a joint account that both of us have to sign off on to move the funds out of it. One of the things we both sign off on during the creation of the joint account, is if the receipt list is presented, the funds are moved to our individual accounts in accordance with the finalized balances. If the other one of us presents a receipt list that has an item on it that the other list doesn't have, then ALL funds go to the person who presented evidence the other was trying to cheat.

I say "Joint account" but there are no counter parties, its all just a script that acts automatically so its not exactly accurate.

So now, we can instantly transmit to each other with no fees, because all we're doing is updating a receipt list that both of us have.

So lets also assume you have a channel with someone else. It may help to know that there are always two balances in each channel

send/outbound receive/inbound
250,000 sats, 0 sats => 0 sats, 250,000 sats

inbound liquidity is sats that you own in our joint account. Outbound liquidity is sats that I own in the joint account. So lets assume I'm trying to pay a 3rd person

250,000 sats, 0 sats => 0 sats, 250,000 sats => 0 sats, 250,000 sats

I need to route through you since I don't have a channel with this 3rd person (I don't have a joint account with them that I can just update a receipt list.), but you have a joint account with them and you can update your receipt list. So you and I update our receipts and you and this other person update your receipts.

Step 0

250,000 sats, 0 sats => 0 sats, 250,000 sats => 0 sats, 250,000 sats

Step 1
0 sats, 250,000 sats => 250,000 sats, 0 sats => 0 sats, 250,000 sats

Step 2
0 sats, 250,000 sats => 0 sats, 250,000 sats => 250,000 sats, 0 sats

Now its a little more complicated than that because the cryptography involved doesn't allow you to just keep the sats if you decide not to route them. Someone who understands in more verbose detail can explain in more verbose detail lol.

reply

It could be argued that those in the west have been partially living in an abundant world the last 20 years. Albeit with some very large distortions. Food & clothing has been abundant for some time and that has led to some strange cultural issues like obesity and fast-fashion.

Housing & energy hasn’t been abundant, but feels like is in dire need of bitcoin to demonetise and monetise respectively. Bitcoin is also creating a healthy counter-culture.

Abundance sounds like something we should strive for. It sounds great. Yet we also need values, morals, critical thinking and productive people for abundance to generate a healthy society. If there’s one learning from this century, that would be it for me. The return of morality. Otherwise we run the risk in an era of increasing abundance, of creating more scarcity of meaning in our lives.

reply

"Stop feeling sick"

"just feel better"

reply

Test to see if I get a horse...

reply

Keep in mind that PWA support/features is still dependent on browsers where Google and Apple have a very large market share.

It's the best thing we have but it's still not ideal imo.

reply

Haha you definitely baited me. My inner toxic bitcoin maxi twitter shitposter rose up from with in and clicked just to tell you "what the fuck are you talking about".

Well done. Good article. I send sats now and go back to my cave.

reply

I flashed a graphene on Ubuntu just yesterday. Like you it didn't connect immediately to a browser. Some things to think about:

  • Flatpak installs of browsers are sandboxed and won't connect to USB so easily
  • So just install the browser fully / directly, as described here: https://brave.com/linux/
  • You may need this package also: sudo apt install adb
  • You may need to run this (as described on graphene install page): echo 0 | sudo tee /sys/bus/usb/drivers_autoprobe
  • After all this, reboot the machine

all the above, plus the android sdk you already installed (sudo apt install android-sdk-platform-tools-common) should be enough to get you going!

Good luck, graphene is awesome

reply

The 1973 oil crisis called attention to the need to consolidate energy policy.[13][14][15] On August 4, 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed into law The Department of Energy Organization Act of 1977, (Pub. L.Tooltip Public Law (United States) 95–91, 91 Stat. 565, enacted August 4, 1977), which created the Department of Energy.

President Carter created the Department of Energy with the goal of promoting energy conservation and developing alternative sources of energy. He wanted to not be dependent on foreign oil and reduce the use of fossil fuels.

reply

If someone offers to pay me in beer or pizza for a favour, I tell them I'd take half that value if it was in bitcoin.
I've had one or two people take me up on it. Friends mostly.

reply

Yes, all valid points. But to this article. Its all stuff we've heard over and over again. I guess I would say there are much bigger issues than these issues. Nothing about this to me is bitcoin specific. Its just our culture and human nature.

  1. Too much talk: Yeah, have you looked at politics, sports, and entertainment? This criticism is elitist and kinda like the communist criticism of capitalism. To much choice.
  2. Too boring: Very few people have new ideas. Most copy.
  3. Overconfidence: Again have you looked at politics?

I don't care about the first one accept for me personally. I want to be progressing.

I could TLDR this and say. Most people don't think for themselves. We are highly influenced and crowd oriented. Nothing strange about bitcoin people in that regard. This is to be expected. What I see as a pattern in these types of posts is a frustrated person who in any other popular community would be in the majority but in bitcoin they feel like they are in the out group.

reply

Thanks for the feedback, maybe personalized feeds will help in the future :)

reply