+1 Raspberry Pi

I'm using an Rpi 3 (which shares the USB bandwidth with the ethernet), and it's more than enough to do the job

my advice would be to buy 2 external disks; one small SSD (even 32 GB is enough) for speed and reliability, and then one regular HDD with big capacity (+2TB for the future). Put the your Linux installation on the SSD, also Bitcoin's chainstate folder, but then keep the actual blockchain blocks on the slow HDD.

then, run it like a real server: use. the. command line. you'll find you will eventually want to tweak the kernel options to improve the reliability, or maybe for security to run a Lightning daemon alongside bitcoind (Lightning requires a hot wallet)

I did things exactly like this "back in the day" (although I am not living in 1990's America as a hip hop/r'n'b afficionado as one might expect, and so sincere use such vernacular would make me sound like some embarassment of a tv-panel show addict watching pub wit/wisdom cretin desperately trying to appear trendy by way of slangwords from 30 years ago)

And I did it precisely because I knew the BTC would be worth more in future, and that keeping it all to myself (when I have no need for ludicrous sums of money) would be the best way to spread Bitcoin's network effect faster, and to do so to reward the brave and pioneering (small & independent) merchants who chose to try it, when they could have chosen an apparently safer option.


(I know what you're thinking: but no, I probably do have more BTC than you: spending income as BTC does not mean spending your savings too, as stated previously)


we're all really happy for you, now that you feel rich. well, except for all the people that you could have spent your income as BTC with in the meantime, because you were choosing the safest possible option for little old you.

---

Really, this technology in this age absolutely exposes people's true convictions: many people took spectacular risks with their safety and their career prospects, giving up everything to be involved not just because of the monetary rewards, but also how it could empower people to protect their own rights in the 21st century. The impact isn't even fully realised yet, but will certainly accelerate faster than the rate of  increase of usage & adoption.

And some people just sat around rubbing their sweaty palms together, waiting to get rich :-/

If you're one of the latter: PLEASE SELL. You're only a rung above the weakest hands, because when the political forces that dislike this little monetary revolution start to put pressure on you, you will fold like you're going for the origami world record. You're all clearly desperate enough to give anything in order to be able to keep your riches, including:

• following gov mandated hard-forks
• getting your BTC whitelisted with KYC outfits
• using miners who handle only whitelisted BTC (via out of band tx propagation)

...and whatever other concepts that the owners of the banking system would prefer in order to maintain their political power. If you'll essentially sell your own asshole in order to attain some pathetic, fawning 21st century new-money status, please sell said asshole forthwith, because we have a monetary and self-sovereignty coup d'etat to conduct, and your vapid self-serving nihilsm is muddying the concept.

Good day to you, may you spend your (ill-gotten) money on life extension gene therapy such that you can live out some precious few extra seconds of sumptuous self-regard! (oh and don't forget the ~40-60% capital gains extortion you owe to the rapists to who you both consented and empowered)

interesting that you're now (almost) back-pedalling on your "I'll never spend Bitcoin on anything, because it will be worth more once I'm dead" bullshit

funny how the more it becomes worth, the more you think spending it won't hurt? It's almost as if a complex world, with more than 1 dimension to every economic analysis, actually exists, doesn't it?

IIUC, the BIP8 parameters can specify _not_ to activate the soft fork on timeout? Which is identical to BIP9 behavior?

if the information reported on poolin's old fashioned poll (well, seemingly twitter threads at least) is accurate, then pools representing 82% of hashrate are broadly in favor.

Is it feasible that 5% can be found to oppose it? The chance of a BIP91/BIP148 re-run is high if such a high number were signalling once any activation period begins, I sense that miners will not risk getting caught mining blocks that could get orphaned for at all long, safest action would be to prepare your node then start signalling

it's "none of the above", as there's no version of Bitcoin Core released yet with any activation logic.

The pools/miners can suggest their preference for the activation parameters, and the devs can code their choice of activation parameters into the core bitcoin daemon, but if the users running network nodes don't like it, it's all moot.

neither of those things matter, that's like saying "people avoid keeping cash in their pockets when they leave the house, because they could've invested it better and made more money"

people selling newspapers in kiosks don't accept ACH transactions from your savings account, because it's inconvenient.

Lightning is about convenience of use, not optimum investing.


and so, if this means big nodes can't ever make money, and the LN will just be like the cash system (people transferring around everything from their weekly takings, down to the pennies lost under their couches), again, what's not to like?

yes, but that didn't stop you and DaveF lamenting the fact that profit is a canard up-thread, made more painful by clinging to the possibility that you could compete seriously

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: the market dynamics of the LN are an absolute race to the bottom: if anyone tries to charge higher fees than their operating costs, some upstart will try to undercut them, in the belief that they can push their competitor/s out of the marketplace by running at a loss "short term". This will probably be a mistake, but it won't stop them trying. When everyone wants to participate (because fast cheap transactions), there will always be transactions to route, and always a procession of people thinking they can use routing as a way to earn income... and people with alot of BTC in channels that want to troll such profit-seekers by undermining their ability to make any money. Thusly, the margins are cut to nothing, and the balance of routing rewards trends to zero.

Sorry to burst the bubble, but I think that secretly, you already knew. Really though, what's not to like?

ot: although the number of reachable nodes may increase radically (and rather suddenly) if the NAT-PMP port-forwarding pr is merged into Bitcoin 22.0, although this was also an the 21.0 milestone and got pushed out into 22.0, not sure why

"profit" is a canard imo.

With Lightning, you have access to cheap, anonymous transactions. If you break even on routing fees, that's a pretty good outcome.

LN routing supply is market driven, because it's an open competition. Therefore, you can expect some people to take the competing part seriously, and so try to be better at routing than others. The key point is that this cannot lead to monopolization while the ability to compete remains open, and so fees will be pushed as low as routing nodes can tolerate. I expect many will figure out some way to run at a marginal loss, and recoup the costs some other way (e.g. miners/pools are well positioned to run loss-making LN nodes, as they're the ones confirming the open/close transactions on chain in the first instance).

I broadly agree with moccacino about the risks of Lightning, and with your caution thereof. In addition to the inherent risks of Lightning's protocol, there are also the inevitable software-based teething problems (vulnerabilities have been found in the software clients, implementation of the spec is sometimes inconsistent across clients, the Lightning spec itself is unfinished, etc). Expect more.

So I suggest we dust off an old expression (which still applies to Bitcoin, albeit less so than ever before): "Don't put more BTC than you can afford to lose into Lightning channels"

In practice, I would suggest only keep as much as you might practically need immediately/soon in Lightning, quite like you would with a regular wallet in your jacket pocket. Or applied to a business, keep as much in Lighting as you would feel comfortable left in the cash register.

also, such a pool will struggle to maintain competitiveness even in today's mining market, let alone after subsequent block reward halvings (the 2024 reward halving will reduce the reward to 3.125 BTC every block, and after 2028 the transaction fees earned per block by miners will be a significant proportion of the 1.5625 BTC block reward)

but hey, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Right guys? This is all very amusing, it seems that the dying financial system's bid to thwart Bitcoin consists mostly of... becoming part of the Bitcoin economy

so here is my tutorial

1. Open Terminal, do sudo find / -name bitcoin-cli
2. Take the result, and do ln -s /usr/local/bin <result>
3. Don't forget that Snap might change all this later! Then you have the fun of doing it all again

^ good advice


You need to find where snap has put bitcoin-cli, as lightningd is looking for it in the wrong place

/usr/bin or /usr/local/bin are typical directories (folders) for installing programs, but it seems snap puts programs installed using it in a different place

...and...

Beware! Don't be surprised in the future if snap "updates" the place where bitcoin-cli etc is installed, then the link in @Rath's post will stop working (the ln -s terminal command)


My advice: learn how to install programs _without_ snap packages, the sooner you do it, the faster you can say goodbye to this kind of problem

@Pmalek

the key phrase in your explanation is here:


...because if you open a channel directly to the grocery place, then your outgoing capacity is their incoming capacity. For that channel only.

So it would be no problem in that case, but the grocery place would get some info about your on-chain funds (i.e. how much change you received from the tx that opened the channel to them)

Taproot isn't primarily about privacy anyway, it's more of a scripting improvement that adds _some_ privacy as a side effect. The bigger difference will be that combining Taproot with protocols built on top of Bitcoin will improve the power and simplicity of those protocols.

basic examples:

1. Payments sent through lightning channels become smaller
2. On-chain transactions that open channels become smaller

---

the big privacy improvement will come from the developing Coinswap protocol (which will also be improved using Taproot)

but Coinswap will not require Taproot, it's being built today. We already have every feature we need for a basic Coinswap protocol, and so it will happen regardless of how long the Taproot/Schnorr soft fork takes to go live on the Bitcoin network

they are entitled do howsoever they choose, but such a thing will be not Bitcoin (as you say)

it amounts to riding the momentum of what Bitcoin truly does without wanting to use it. There are many such users (here on the forum for instance), I would be quite happy to see their involvement reduced in such a way. They aren't cut out for this (and are often quite proud of it)

I'm noticing this only works with lnd atm (which LightningLabs develop).

Boltz is better for buying incoming channels; the server code is open source (eg. LLabs Lightning Loop server code was famously closed source code), and it works with other lightning clients. And the concept of "leasing" sounds appalling on an open network; the node who opens a channel to you is gaining something if someone routes through the channel, as their node is necessarily part of the route.

Better still would be negotiating this all across the LN itself, in a fully decentralized way. I imagine the various 3rd layer tech will eventually provide such possibilities.

there's no reason why Iran needs to import so much, they've been forced to revert to a ~99% internal economy anyway (i.e. a "war economy"). That means they can simply produce as much BTC as they need for minimal imports, and not sell _any_ oil or gas (the market prices of which are being pushed down right now due to the Saudis dumping oil in the marketplace).

Strategically, holding oil/gas while prices are low and producing BTC while prices are high (and in a bull market) makes alot of sense

I don't think that's exactly a "big" reason, most users don't need to prove ownership of funds at any address (other than by sending a transaction from the address, of course). And many probably aren't aware that it's possible (or even what it means)

There is a developing standard (BIP322), but it may not be finalized for a few weeks/months yet. It was recently changed (simplified, in fact), so the new proposal will be reviewed amongst Bitcoin developers before it's ready to be implemented into wallet/client software.