maybe the computer specialists working at the biggest, most well funded police force in the world are stupid too sorry, I meant ignorant



sorry, but this story is stretching credulity a little thin. The entire plan was based around making off with some ransom money, the sophisticated hacking of an important (and probably not public) computer network (owned by a company making alot of money from the underlying asset), was the means, not the ends.

it's like Houdini, Al Capone and David Copperfield stole all the gold in Fort Knox, only for Ayrton Senna to turn up as getaway driver in one of those circus clown cars that falls into pieces when it parks to pick up the loot

apparently, other South American governments are considering just that. The best the US can do is not react, then slowly & quietly launch subtle coups d'etats against them, that would be entirely their style. Making too much noise about it in the media might backfire altogether.

it's kind of amusing timing really, I imagine there are a few US/European billionaires wondering "just when you need a Trump as president, along comes Biden instead". Democrat presidents typically have a difficult job; come up with ways of exploiting the 3rd world without the US public noticing, lol

but didn't the "stupid" hackers break into the computer system of a major infrastructure provider?

• smart enough to hack someone that will have had an expensive contractor securing their system
• knew almost zero about cryptocurrencies, and didn't have more than 5 minutes to learn the basics that lost them their ransom

if we consider that FBI agents have been proven corrupt liars so so many times, it's highly likely that "we hacked bitcoin" isn't the only lie being told here

hmmm, I thought that the October/November activation simply permits witness v1 spends? (and so any non-upgraded miner will reject blocks containing witness v1 spends, and subsequently find themselves mining a fork)

I suspect that most El Salvadoreans who already use Bitcoin will continue, and many will continue not to.

There is a risk that by politicizing the issue, the US government will become interested, one way or another. Central America has been heavily manipulated by the US military/intelligence for 100+ years, and their European counterparts (i.e. partners in crime) have no doubt played a role or two also.

If the ES president hadn't made this announcement, the userbase could have grown there without so much fanfare. After all, Bitcoin was doing fine in El Salvador without anyone trying to make their face part of that success.

not a bad description of how politics works: persuade normal people that a picture of a face (with very white teeth) will make their life work out ok.

yes



I don't recognize politicians, businessmen or countries as relevant or authoritative determiners of markets, and if bitcoin works the way it was designed, such people/concepts moving their mouths would not have any effect

bitcoin doesn't hack computers, NSA hackers do

sadly, the Bitcoin equivalent of Charlton Heston is Brock Pierce, who's actually closer to Jeffrey Epstein in reality

SMALL, WEAK GOV PERMITS ANTI-GOV MONEY

yeah, big story

• it's impossible to stop mixing "bad" coins and "good" coins together
• it's also impossible to stop someone swapping "good" coins for "bad", and then mixing afterwards (can be done fairly anonymously using the upcoming Coinswap wallet)
• people will always have some reason to do a "good"<->"bad" swap (can't buy things in gov controlled market with "bad" coins, can't buy things on the free market with "good" coins)

so it's just cat and mouse stupidity really.

apart from the WA Redmond AI analyzing all the phone-home data from Windows

Snowden is a bit of celebrity really, not sure why we should take his opinion as being more interesting than anyone else's

---

Taproot doesn't do much to improve Bitcoin privacy.

Bitcoin transactions can have optional parts in the contracts (even the simplest style of Bitcoin transaction where "Mr. A pays Mrs. B" is a basic contract, really)


With Taproot, the optional parts that don't get used aren't recorded in the blockchain. With current Bitcoin contracts, all the possible options are recorded onchain, which is a waste of space. Who cares about the parts of the contract that didn't happen?

So that's why people are saying Taproot improves privacy; it does, but it's more meaningful as a way of stopping the blockchain getting filled with useless parts of contracts.

right, I'm using a UPS because bitcoind can't handle power-cuts without revalidating some blocks afterwards. I'm trying to make my Pi node as low-maintenance as possible

that's just saying what I said, slightly differently

the C language lets you control resources. Golang mostly does not.

c-lightning is written well enough that it uses resources efficiently. LND consistently has issues. That's OK is you're running it on an expensive server, and you only want to run one lightning node on the server.

with a fully-fledged server, you can run multiple lightning instances anyway. Maybe running 1 or 2 LND's will prove useful for different reasons, I'm not currently in your position where I have a decent enough machine to try.

Maybe keep the Pi as a local watchtower, powered (also the internet router) with a UPS? Or at some other location, of course.

Try the clboss plugin for Lightning, you can dial down/switch off some of the features if you want to: https://github.com/ZmnSCPxj/clboss


wait till version 0.10.1, or compile/run master branch, the spec for dual fund has slightly changed. I'm hoping that the clboss plugin will seek out nodes to dual fund with automatically once the spec is finalized.

yeeeeesss... o_O

it's slightly more likely that more hashrate will be added/removed than those things though. slightly

Matt Corallo's betterhash ideas also contributed to Stratum 2. Not sure the details, though. Matt is listed as a co-author, IIRC

hashrate can be added or removed at any time. So maybe. But it looks pretty positive.

---

1006 blocks out of 2016, 741 of which signaled. Looking decent. 74% at near the half-way mark, maybe that will improve.

no, I'm doing 725 / 987 = 0.7345 (see, I told you it was climbing )

my interpretation is that "count" signifies "blocks signalling taproot BIP9, in this 2016 block difficulty period" and that "elasped" signifies "total blocks mined out of this 2016 block difficulty period"

I think the difficulty period and the signalling period are synonymous, I'm just trying to simplify the details (plus I'm not sure either )

seems like a mistake

because LND's written using golang, the devs are having to deal with golang's problems

1. Difficult to find bugs where the CPU usage has frequent 100% spikes
2. High memory usage, again where spikes are sometimes difficult to explain

using golang makes it hard(er) to control that sort of thing, and it's by design, because the idea is that the programmer can focus on writing the app, not on the subtle job of also making the app talk to the operating system

c-lightning uses minimal RAM and CPU, because it's written in C, where the programmer must directly control almost everything the app does (with golang, a bunch of Google-written magic does the job for you)


So really, these small rPi nodes (and bigger servers with more than one LN node per machine) are better off ditching LND.

It's becoming more clear this will be necessary as Lightning gets more actual use; I'm running c-lightning on an rPi 3, and when the network is quiet, all is well with system resources (I've got 2GB swap space on an SSD to ameliorate the low RAM). But when there are big storms of transactions, the gossip updates push the CPUs to ~ 50%. There will be even more bigger surges in future, I expect


If LND don't fix their problems before Lightning use gets more regular (and heavier), these little rPi nodes won't be able to handle it.

Besides, LND seems to exist to sell a bunch of services to you anyway (swaps and watchtowers), c-lightning is focusing on supporting a more peer-to-peer dynamic (dual-funded channels). LND is coming to represent what critics say about Lightning: resource heavy and centralized

hmm, checking the stats on my node (using bitcoin-cli getblockchaininfo), only 72.5% of blocks have signalled this difficulty period. Maybe I'm reading it wrong?

whatever the true stats are, the number is clearly climbing.