Wait—what am I missing?  An old-style Bitcoin address can’t be more than 35 characters long, including the checksum.

Moreover, odds would be much worse than 10^-36.  Picking a prefix which includes the everything but the checksum, that sounds like bruteforcing through the whole search space of a Hash160, making for about 10^-48 odds on each try.  If a “prefix” is picked which includes a checksum not matching the rest, then the odds are exactly zero.  If a “prefix” is picked which exceeds the maximal length of a Bitcoin address, then the odds are exactly zero.

Or did I mistake something obvious here?

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Take a maths class.  Seriously.

truedeckTeam, why not a commit-and-reveal scheme where each participant commits a hash of a random value, then reveals the value, and all values are hashed together?  In my prior post, I provided links to one such system.  I don’t know if that meets your criterion for “decentralized”; you did not specify your requirements quite clearly.

This is an important question to a strictly pseudonymous personage.

For various reasons, I have long fancied the nym “nullius”.  So much so, indeed, that I failed to perform even the most basic checks before investing myself in it.  Usually, I do not make that mistake; and it’s a shame I did so here.  I am the nym expert!  I have a special aptitude for divining unique names.  Why didn’t I use it?

Here and in a few other places, I am nullius.  On Github, I am “nym-zone” due to a name collision.  I’m not (yet?) on Reddit; but there is evidently a Reddit “nullius” who is not me.  The Nullii seem to be a prolific clan of nobodies.

I was lucky to snap up the domain “nym.zone”.  That will be perfect for the privacy and security services I plan to start, and for my future homepage in the.nym.zone.  For now, it provides me a spiffy e-mail address, nullius@nym.zone.  But that’s under control of a centralized naming authority.

Ultimately, my identity is 0xC2E91CD74A4C57A105F6C21B5A00591B2F307E0C.  (Well—ultimately, or else until PGP gets Ed448-Goldilocks or I cook up something with Lamport signatures.)  It is the one identity which is both globally unique and fully under my control.

Thanks for the networking discussion, folks.  I want to underscore this twice:


So—how would you take all this networking knowledge, and apply it to routing and network topology in Lightning?  More to the point (and my original question), are the Lightning devs doing so—and if so, how?

(Aside, or perhaps not:  Shifting analogies around and down to the link layer, per OP’s article, we no longer have only a broadcast network as with old Ethernet hubs.  There is a reason I thought of Spanning Tree first.)

I see plenty of speculation about what LN will look like, topology-wise.  Yet much of that depends not only on what potential links are available, but also on how nodes use them.  I don’t see how a simple look-up table would suffice.  If you are connected to A, B, and C, and you want to reach Z, that’s not an easy problem.  It’s not easy in the first instance; and however it’s answered now, I expect that could be fertile ground for optimization in the future.

Once upon a time, in a forum where I had a certain reputation, there was a thread linking to an article with new evidence of wrongdoing by a corrupt politician whom I was well-known to despise.

Said politician was expert at deflecting blame to others.  So naturally, I wrote a one-line quip complaining that this fine, upstanding official was the victim of a vast conspiracy by political rivals.

Within minutes, I was followed up with a flood of posts attempting to prove me wrong, and/or calling me nasty names.

I never explained the sarcasm.  Others tried to.  The vehement (and sometimes vicious) arguments against me did not stop.  Neither did my laughter—till I paused to contemplate the intelligence level of so much of the audience before whom I was casting my words daily.

Now, rejoice!  For actmyname is soon to be banned by Lauda-aTriz, who is Satoshi, who is the NSA, who already banned theymos.

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Space cats drugged him, then hacked his account and posted this.

JUST LIKE HAPPENS TO ALL THE INNOCENT PEOPLE YOU FALSELY ACCUSE OF SPAMMING AND SPAM-SUPPORT ACTIVITIES, ATRI^H^H^H^HLAUDA.

As for me, my dog ate my homework.

You are confusing subtle variation in meanings of the word “random”.  Part of the problem here is that OP did not so rigorously specify the properties of the needed numbers.  From what was said (and from OP’s username), I presume what is needed is network shared, uniformly distributed pseudorandom values which can be neither predicted nor influenced in advance by anyone.  According to that specification, I don’t immediately see any reason why spartacusrex’s suggestion would not suffice.  Care to explain?

For one example of protocols respectively producing and consuming such values, see the Tor Shared Random Subsystem Specification (plus references therein), and the Tor Rendezvous Specification - Version 3 (the “next-gen” .onion services which were recently released).

(I will here leave aside analysis of your suggestions; but I hope nobody is using “random.org” for secret key material of any kind whatsoever.)

Made readable:

Or rather, this has made Meta the “happening” place for dividing the cool from the uncool.

Uncool:  Whiners, beggars, sleazeball merit-farmers, and assorted other lazy, spammy, useless freaks.

Cool:  Poking the uncool people with sharp sticks, and laughing at them.  The deeper purpose of such hostility is to induce the uncool people to leave, permanently, so that the cool people can hang out and chat about Bitcoin happily ever after.

What’s worse than a dirtball, is a self-righteous dirtball trying to play the victim.  Nobody with a moral compass or a shred of trustworthiness would try to pull something like this:


Upon that, asapjoshyy, I would not trust you to sweep my floor or empty my trash.  Thus, I have now added my own negative trust feedback with the comment:


Thanks for bringing your misdeeds to my attention with your whining.

Over two months later, I am still receiving exactly the same error as described in my OP.  The certificate SHA-256 fingerprint is the same.  Apparently, nothing changed.

I was waiting for this to be fixed; and then...  I hadn’t tried it in awhile.  It occurred to me that I should give it a spin, and test to make sure that the new forum software will be functionally usable with Javascript disabled.

But I still can’t even get in without blindly clicking through the very same warnings as I lecture newbies to never, ever, ever click through.  How are people testing this?  I can’t be the only one hitting this problem.  Are people with similar browsers just clicking through the warnings?

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...as I was saying.  So, what are all these people doing?  Clicking through the scary warning which is scary for a reason, or just not testing?  Is the new software being substantially tested only by people who happen to use the same browser as the Slickage devs?  For the record, my browser (Tor Browser) is essentially Firefox (currently 52 ESR) with some anonymity stuff bolted on.  Firefox is a browser with significant market share.

What I believe to be the shortest post I’ve ever made was given +1 by a Legendary.  Excluding quotation, the wordcount is: 3 words.  Though it’s rarely been my strong suit, I may quote, “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

The criterion of meritoriousness is not length, but substance.  Spammers will find tortuous screeds to be just as useless as one-liner junk—because it is indeed just as useless.

N.b. also that I recently was involved in an argument about the value of conciseness with a troll who posted disorganized, rambling walls of text.  Even when long, good writing is reasonably concise.  In the world of professional writing, painfully elaborate verbiage with too many adjectives is the mark of a worthless hack—the copy boy who somehow got to be a writer for a day.  Don’t do what’s called “trying too hard”; and never pad your wordcount qua wordcount.

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Petulant, self-entitled brat.  You get an F in logic.

It’s thrilling to hear that spammers are so honourable about their “commitments”.


Why yes, then we’d have a “clean zone”—whilst all the other forums would be left as a wasteland, with the lifesblood of good posts sucked out of them.

I have the same problem generally (albeit to a lesser extent) with “Serious Discussion”.  It is an internal form of the “Lifecycle of an Internet Forum”, of which you may have read elsewhere on the Net (search if not).  Forums usually start out good, then go downhill, and are overwhelmed with trolls, spam, etc.  Then, the good posters leave and go to a new forum—where the cycle repeats.  Here, the variation is that the process would be internal.

I say instead, make high-quality posts where they belong; and give the merit system some time to clean up all the forums.  Soon enough, we will have spammers with 0 merit and 500 activity (who would have been declared “Heroes” (!) without the merit system).  At some point, that must become sufficiently unprofitable that they get the hint, and get the hell out of here.

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Even better:  See the automated list on the merit page of my user profile.  Scroll down to where it says, “Received in the last 120 days”.

To highlight just a few specific posts which have earned significant merit from multiple people:

• My software release posts for the easyseed mnemonic/seed generator and the bech32 utility
• My idea for branding Bech32 addresses as “Bravo Charlie” Addresses (cross-posted with edits from bitcoin-dev)
• A discussion of Bitcoin’s Public-Key Security Level (currently +18, including +5 from a forum moderator)
• A post about secure generation of randomness (0), plus two followups on the same thread (1, 2)

Those were in Development & Technical Discussion, where I have earned most of my merit.  Here in Meta, my discussion of standards of proof for penalizing merit abusers, my mini-investigation of a merit abuser, and my discussion of trolling in Dev & Tech are three posts which have been deemed meritorious by multiple high-ranked members.

I hope that helps.  Note:  My point was that I’m pretty sure that it should be much easier to earn +1/day engaging in pleasant and useful discussions.

I was a Jr. Member at the inception of the merit system.  I started with zero.  Whiners, shut up and observe the number below my name.

Hint:  To make relatively quick posts such as this one, I am periodically pausing from another post I’ve been working on for hours.  I maintain a semi-disorganized queue of those.

It’s not necessary to put that much time and effort into posts, because it’s not necessary to earn 100+ merit per week simply to rank up.  I am only doing now just as I did in December, before the merit system existed.  Whereas if you are a reasonably intelligent person who spends a moderate amount of time on the forum, then I think you should be able to earn an average at least +1 merit per day.  That would allow you to rise through the ranks at approximately the same rate as you would by activity level alone.  The system is well-thought.

Whereas if you can’t earn at least one measly merit per day of active posting, what that means ipso facto is that your posts are of such low quality that you are wasting other people’s time by posting junk for others to read.  The merit system is a not-so-gentle hint that you should stop.

Drat.  Being something of a “hodler”, I’ve been ignoring the markets; thus, I didn’t even realize how deeply we dipped until mention of it seeped into the Development & Technical forum.  Since I never buy on an exchange requiring “KYC” privacy-rape, it takes some time for me to gather fiat and turn funny bits of paper into real money (i.e., Bitcoin).  Did I miss my chance?  Hahah.

Earlier today, I myself was just wondering whether usernames be case-sensitive.  I am guessing not; were it so, scammers would have created accounts “Theymos”, “THEYMOS”, etc.  But there does not seem to be any documentation of the specifics of username rules.

I might search for a potential answer in the SMF documentation, as I sometimes do when trying to figure out the exact BBcode this forum supports; but figuring out username rules is a low priority to me right now, since I am not creating a new account.

Troll.  I first saw that one defending another troll by calling Carleton Banks “the one they send in to abuse people and if they answer back they get banned”.  The thread was wisely mod-locked before I got a chance to respond, No, that guy is me!

It is always funny when a brand-new troll account shows up to defend an old, well-established troll account who just got flamed to a cinder.

Quasi-on-topic:  One of the great benefits of the merit system is that prolific troll accounts with 1000+ posts will remain forever frozen at low ranks.

Now, please do not feed the troll.  Especially one so dumb, it fails to grasp the advanced concept of a tip jar.

Good question; but it’s off-topic in this thread and in this forum, so I transplanted my answer here:  Fork wars are déjà vu.  Please direct all further discussion of this question to that thread.

I am transplanting this from the development forum:


“Team Evil with Bcash”, indeed.  For a sense of déjà vu, read this interview from 19 August 2015:  “Adam Back Says the Bitcoin Fork Is a Coup”, Morgan Peck, IEEE Spectrum.

I invite seasoned Bitcoiners to relate their experiences.  The conflict with anti-Bitcoin agendas is certainly heating up now, more than ever.  But Bitcoin is stronger than ever before; and to those who experienced the history or otherwise know it, it all feels like something seen before.

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This thread is self-moderated, because it seems sure to be a troll magnet.  I will not be heavy-handed.  Or maybe I will be.  Start a different thread if you dislike my judgment on that point.

That is hypercorrecting with an incorrect folk etymology.  I am aware that what you say appears in some published books.  Don’t believe everything you read; this notion is given no credence by etymologists.  I don’t currently have OED access; but some searches found this post on another board by somebody who evidently did, discussing yet another popular but spurious folk etymology for the expression:


Yes, I am a pedant.  For the same reason, I will never accept the botched expression “could care less”, or possessive “it’s”, or “alot”.  Moreover, I am deeply prejudiced against forum posts which use such little horrors.

On-topic:  To encourage me to award you merit, give correct information; and do not not spread urban legends and folk etymologies.  (And to encourage me to reply in threads you start, please don’t habitually lock them when you peremptorily decide they’re done.)

Thanks, pebwindkraft.  Of course, onion routing for privacy is a subject near and near and dear to my heart.  (The name of the Tor network started as an acronym for “The Onion Router”; it was later declard simply “Tor”.)  As a general concept, it is a source-routing method which conceals prior hops from each next-hop, including the destination; and I am glad to see the active development of an onion-routing implementation for Lightning Network.  But that’s not the type of routing problem I had in mind, when I thought about the IP network analogy.

Network routing is one of those arcane specialties filled with scary-smart people who know all the minutiae of complex systems which most developers are barely aware exist.  (How does the Internet really work?  How do all those little packets know where to go?  Magic!)  I am not in that specialty, and I’m not familiar with its research literature—but I know it has such a thing, and a quick search found some handy starting points:

https://www.caida.org/research/routing/
(CAIDA is an important site, by the way...)

https://www.academia.edu/Documents/in/Routing_protocols

When OP’s link launched a train of thought about Lightning and networking, what first occured to me was that Spanning Tree Protocol might somehow be applicable.  Of course, that’s not an Internet routing protocol; but it is the standard staple for organizing the network topology on LANs.  Then, I thought of Internet routing.  Also, self-organizing mesh networks.

The general question is:  Given a global set of nodes which form and remove links between each other unpredictably, how does each node organize its own view of potential routes and choose optimal paths?

I think there are a few network characteristics of Lightning which are sui generis:  The problem of optimal (or even possible) routes involves monetary calculations, both as to fees charged, and as to availability of funds on each channel which provides a potential hop.  Indeed, network “cost” is monetary, rather than usual measures of network bandwidth and latency.  Otherwise, however, it mostly sounds like just the sort of problem for which a network routing specialist would have applicable existing expertise.  Whence my question.  Lightning development must already encompass some answers to these questions; and I expect that routing optimization may be a significant area of evolution and improvement as Lightning grows and matures.


A quick search found only some PDFs pertaining to a financial order routing system, on a site which won’t load for me (probably blocks Tor).  I have no idea if those be relevant.  But come to think of it, there’s another pre-existing field which is likely to have applicable existing knowledge.

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Hey, thanks for posting the link in OP!  That started an interesting discussion—one in which I myself have mostly questions, not answers.

Hey, no “sorry”.  I wouldn’t be one to feel myself entitled to my desired features on demand in a hobby project someone else does for free.

The beggars get worse.  I will take that as an indication that the system is working as intended.