No, that's all good.  I am mixed on my fee taking.  I like the idea of zero base fees in general (http://rene-pickhardt.de/), but go back and forth on the other... right now I have them impossibly low 0/1 almost across the board with a handfull of 0/0 channels.  Might change soon.

I felt better about Bakkt at the beginning... But I guess I rather this be them than Coinbase at least.

Strange advice.  Bitcoin is THE crypto unit of account.  Even if at least as many things are priced on markets in Monero.  Monero's value in BTC is part of it's ultimate value.  But uion that arena as well XMR tends to do slightly better than man other alts.

She's really pretty good at the cartoons.  But that particular one is a masterpiece, though the slice of people who understand it almost as small as the number of folks that know all the memes crammed into it.

I think so.

But one possible buzzkill.  I am pretty sure RTL shows fees as millisats.  In other words 243600 is 243.6 satoshis.

The algorithm be praised.

You would want to add in *some* amount of money for whatever you spend on the flatulance prevention and eventual medical care?

I am sure someone already answered this.  But yes that is exactly correct.

Now... there are two fees.  A BASE fee and percentage fee.  My own philosophy is to make the base fees be the bar for how small a payment you are willing to route (on certain nodes I charge ZERO base fees. Podcastindex.org for example for which I route tons of teeny payments (sub 20 sat)), and the percentage fee how much you want to skim off the size of the transaction.  There are some interesting arguments for weighting fees entirely in the percentage direction for the sake of pathfinding for smaller (coffee size) payments.  If someone is buying coffee and has to make 6 ten cent hops then they might as well use the base layer.

I don't know if he remembers, but in 2017-ish I told my only normie friend that tolerates my bitcoin talk about how bitcoin would revolutionize the energy sector.  He looked kind of cross eyed at me at the time.  I wonder if he remembers now that we are on the cusp of that.

More recently I realized there were areas of the world with significant populations but little power, but that are near abundant clean energy sources like large rivers.  But there is no financial incentive to build hydroelectric there because of the relative poverty of the human demand.

Viola.

Build the dam.  Use 80% to mine Bitcoin. Send 20% to the villages.  The villages begin to flourish.  Shift the power over as the people begin to out-compete the miners for the energy.

It's beautiful really... 

 

Agreed.  His contributions to Bitcoin are super valuable.  And continue to be.  As long as I ignore who he flamboyantly blocks on twitter and for why, I am fine.  That was the bit the sort of surprised me.  He does the cancel-culture thing pretty hard for people who hold different beliefs than him politically.  Obviously there are some assholes on twitter (lol understatement) but it's strange to me that he is able to see so much nuance in some arenas and seemingly so little in others.

Government manipulate money with the excuse that they are making it "fair" for everyone.  And we see how that turns out.  Bitcoin does not reinvent fairness... but it does take the ability for the elite to game the system away.  At least the competition is fair.

We will always have people who were smart, or lucky enough to become rich.  Everyone here is either in that group or will be soon enough.

I am with you on the "just a while back I'd have thought this was crazy" bit.  But we are not crazy.  We are just seeing it early.  Eventually what is happening will be news all over the world.  On one side people working to give everyone guns and take the control of money out of the hands of government, and the other side wants to disarm the world, and obsolete private property ownership.  Who will win?  It might be our grandkids who get to know.

I am a little younger than you, but not much... and I have similar feelings about what Bitcoin might do for me.  But I am also afraid, especially in the US, that they might do whatever they deem necessary to strip us of the benefits we were wise enough to see early.

I have some old fashioned metal guns... But I might just add a plastic 9mm rifle.

Sort of off topic...  But also not.

The 28 year old inventor of the FGC-9 (Fuck Gun Control-9) a nine mm semi automatic 3d printable rifle "died of a heart attack" in his car 2 days after being raided by the German police.

He created a 3D printable firearm that Anyone with a 3D printer and the right filament and some easily attainable parts can produce without permission from their government.

I am not a gun nut, or even a big fan of the FOSS firearm movement, but it is obvious to me that the coming world government wants to keep firearms out of the hands of those who are currently not allowed to have them, and take then from those of us who do.  Because they will HAVE to do this to control us.

This young man brought the possibility to bear arms against the coming tyrannical global rule to the people who do not currently have it, and was executed for it to be an example to those who will follow in his footsteps.

In the end I hope he will be seen as a martyr and his death will produce dozens more like him.  If nothing else I hope it will awaken some to what is coming, and why the US 2nd amendment is so very, very important, and a freedom that just like the freedom of speech should be replicated in ALL the nations of the world.

Hit piece about him here:  https://pastebin.com/ZRLpwW0L




To those of you who think I am crazy... I hope you remember this warning when you realize in the future that I was not.

*EDIT*

I FORGOT TO MENTION THAT IT WAS FUCKING COINBASE WHO HANDED HIM OVER. 

Yeah... I just logged back into this whole thing.

This stuff is all about affinity scam, I think.  All the old "apps" are deprecated and everything now is focused on the STX token and NFTs. 

Some of the ideas here are good (and originally pioneered by counterparty) but the execution is scammy in my opinion.

I have merited this because you are principled enough to say it.  I think he was a great boon for early Bitcoin.  And he's a complex dude.  I can't STAND his political stance (nor do I agree with most of his positions as expressed, but I am not talking about that I am talking about the holier than thou, preachy intolerance).  And he does seem to have a bit of shilliness...  I do not mind that he is somewhat permissive of altcoins.  But the dude has to be smart enough to understand why ETH is doomed to not only centralize but be a net negative for "crypto".  And he wrote that book.. yeah.  Shill.

Yeah... I have been mixed about Stacks from the beginning.

The project talks a GREAT talk, but:

1.  They minted a effing coin.
2.  I have never seen any of the Stacks apps really work.

And that's not to mention 3!  They have joined in on the stupid NFT craze.

On the other hand, if Stacks is just an affinity scam, then isn't Liquid too?

I dunno... I have a couple stacks accounts.  Burned bitcoin to make them, I think...  no idea if it's worth it.

One unique thing about Bitcoin is since it CAN be self custodied, and is a bearer asset both individuals and businesses will be able to avoid these sorts of traps.  So if the world you theorize develops, so might a parallel world which will challenge the people playing games with Bitcoin.  Perhaps even destroy them.  Hal Finney also talked about this in his famous "Bitcoin Banks" post I like to quote so much...

I had to read that 3 times.

But what it means is Bitcoin has currently outpaced the amount of money being moved in the US by VISA+Mastercard?

That might be one of the biggest pieces of financial news of the year, and nearly no one knows. 

This is yet another rock solid proof of an asymmetric information situation, the magnitude of which is hard to overestimate.  Greatest wealth transfer in history, blah blah...  Still early, blah blah.

Now we just need the number of payments being made to outpace them as well.  I am sure we are still lagging there.  And that is the archetypal coffee transaction, and the LN is going to be a big part of that... not sure how long that takes.

No... that's about right.

They are just locked in a multisig address with your channel partner with some clever (albeit somewhat convoluted) safeguards so that eventually only one person can spend the coins at that address.

Theoretically sats in LN MS addresses can stay there indefinitely.  Though this is one of the areas it becomes interesting.  Because we are also both keeping a ledger of our transaction history for that channel which will continue to grow until it is finally executed.  This introduces some interesting realities.  For example you could drain all the bitcoin out of your channel but still leave it open. (This would be a pain in the ass)  And then you could just leave it up to the channel partner to close it eventually.  

So it is as Bob has put it, sort of a strange Bitcoin quantum state.  The money is spent and not spent at the same time.  You still have the lightning channel addresses with the bitcoin in them, but you have removed all your bitcoin and rode off into the sunset.

But it gets weirder still...  Say I establish a channel with you, then I pay myself ALL my share of the bitcoin from that channel.  So my sats have all shifted over to YOUR side now, and when the channel is close you will get all of them.  BUT... what if our channel is used by YOU to then make a payment.  What happens is this.  Another one of my channels send your payment out from MY outbound liquidity, and some of those sats in our shared channel scoot back over to me.

Lightning allows you to spend some of my OTHER outbound liquidity by shifting some of YOUR bitcoin in our channel over to my side.  This can be confusing when you are managing a lightning node because it's hard to know where your bitcoin has actually gone.  But all the math still adds up.

This brings one of my concerns/curiosities to the fore...

What happens when these channel states get ridiculously long?  Is there a point at which we really NEED to close the channel and start a fresh one?  Or can we really just keep these little channel ledgers going and going forever.

Fun to think about.