So the new Coinbase credit card is available. Just got an email about it. For the USA anyway it's a Visa debit. 1% back in BTC or 4% back in XLM However, the fees are stupid: You can spend BTC with Coinbase Card but there are 3 things to know:
Flat 2.49% fee
We sell your BTC each time you make a purchase, which incurs a fee.
Spending is like selling
If you spend BTC that’s worth more than what you paid for it, you may have to report a capital gain. You can spend ETH with Coinbase Card but there are 3 things to know:
Flat 2.49% fee
We sell your ETH each time you make a purchase, which incurs a fee.
Spending is like selling
If you spend ETH that’s worth more than what you paid for it, you may have to report a capital gain. Looked a a few others all had the same fee. The only exception that I saw was USDC with no fee. Don't know if's its been discussed here before I did not see anyone talking about it. Got the card since it's free. Probably not going to use it. -Dave |
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The wheels of government move slowly. I really cannot see them denying the request as they have granted permission to other funds.
So, unless there is something glaringly different about them I see it happening by the end of the year.
As with all things that discuss investments, this opinion is just mine. DYOR.
-Dave
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...
So yeah, legacy transactions at way over the going fee rate. At least they batch their withdrawals, but Binance (and all exchanges) are responsible for a significant amount of mempool bloat.
Makes you wonder if anyone sat down and did a cost analysis of hiring programmers and re-doing some things to reduce the fees they pay and possibly increase privacy a bit by not moving funds as much, vs. the cost of dong the things the way they do now. Probably not, but you never know. -Dave |
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The interesting thing about the PIN server... is that you can actually run your own. They do provide the code: https://github.com/Blockstream/blind_pin_serverOf course, there is no guarantee that the PIN server you are connecting to is actually running this code... unless you do run your own.  And I've no idea how easy it is to setup, resource requirements etc, but maybe it could be a nice little addition to something like a RaspiBlitz/Umbrel/MyNode setup.  ...Maybe, I am wrong but it seems that things haven't changed much since the first announcement. No, you are not wrong. But I think part of the issue is that they are not targeting people like "us" who know what we are doing and want a measure of privacy and control. They are looking to go after the Coinbase / Gemini / etc. type users that want that warm security blanket type feeling. It does not really supply it, but it makes them feel better. -Dave |
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American question, since I don't know much about the way the law in Spain works.
Is there a body Spain like the US Supreme Court that rules on laws like this and can determine if it's legal there?
I see it as not much different then the draft in times of war or the war production act here in the US.
Both of which the courts have said is fine.
-Dave
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I made a comment elsewhere but it seems to be valid that it looks like there are some wallets that are responding poorly to other high fees.
Last night when the mempool was almost empty there were transactions coming in that were 1 or 2 sat/byte. Once there were a few transactions that had a fee higher then the needed one the fees started to go up a bit closer to 4+ sat/byte. Even though the mempool was empty.
It was almost like the wallet was taking an average or something of what was in the block instead of looking at the fees.
Could be a bunch of lazy programming. Almost like adding the highest 10 fees that should you see going into the next block and add them to the lowest 10 fees you see going into the next block and divide by 20.
-Dave
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There is the risk of a government-sponsored 51% attack. If we start reading reliable news coming from miners directly that someone (be it the government or anyone else), is starting to confiscate huge numbers of mining units, we could be closer to such a scenario. But it's still an expensive attack to maintain even if they gathered the required amount of hardware. I think the Chinese government has reached its goal. Chinese miners have been shut down, they have seen what will happen to them, and their mining operations in China are now a thing of the past. With them out of the way, the communist party can now switch their attention to the digital yuan. I don't think the Chinese government getting miners to stop mining in China achieves anything of substance. If the miners are allowed to move their equipment overseas, the Chinese government would be hurting their own economy, and bitcoin would still be making it more difficult for the CCP to control it's population. Information does not flow freely out of (or within) China. So if the Chinese government is seizing miners, there is a good chance this will not be publicly known. The cost to maintain a 51% attack is pretty low if you exclude the cost of the equipment. The cost of a 51% would be the cost to run the equipment, which is, with the most advanced ASICs is a fraction of the expected value of the bitcoin that would be mined absent a 51% attack. We also had the effect of having 28% of all mined blocks have no transactions via the recent 28% drop in difficulty, and there were not major issues with transaction fees rising, or the mempool getting clogged. Going a bit OT from the original point of the thread so we might want to continue the difficulty discussion here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5307087.msg57392211#msg57392211But I did want to point out that as of NOW 8:30 PM EDT 5-July there are 3 blocks of transactions in the mempool the 1st block would require a fee of 70+ sat/vb to get into it. the 2nd one you can into for 4 sat/vb and there have been no blocks for the last 30 minutes. There are some really messed up fee estimators out there. And some places just paying a fixed fee, which may or may not be messing up the fee estimators. -Dave |
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And on a side note: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlESo if they can dump in a bunch more money and get even more efficient by using robotics on a massive scale like this then it might be an even better move. Projects like this do cost a fortune and the labor to keep it running is also high. Robot techs get paid a lot more then people stocking shelves. But they can serve many more people so there is that big plus. -Dave |
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1. Are there any other projects I should be aware of?
There is also Esplora which is based on Electrs 2. Can I use Electrs to serve random users from across the internet like I can with Electrumx?
3. Can I create a Tor hidden service for both? Clearnet is not an option.
Yes and yes as far as I know. 4. What are the general benefits and drawbacks for both?
There are performance issues with Electrs https://blog.keys.casa/electrum-server-performance-report/So depending on use it might not be able to keep up with requests. For you and just a few users it may or may not matter depending on how much you will be using it. -Dave |
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Would be interesting to know if the new locations are space constrained or power constrained.
If power is the issue but not space you load up all the miners but only run the ones that generate the best profit. If the profit point switches it's just flipping one set of miners off and the other one on.
If space is the issue, you would have to plug in the more profitable ones now and hope for the best.
Wonder if we will ever know how they are running them.
-Dave
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...
Or as discussed they are relocating miners for other coins 1st. Since mid June LTC has had drops of 3%, 10%, 10%, 23%, 8% yesterday it went up 15% and it looks like it's going to be up 10%+ in a couple of days. So there is a lot of gear that went off and then on again. Figure its just a bit of time until the SHA miners come back online. Depending on how production / sales are going on miners. They might just be getting boxed up and prepped for shipment to other places that were waiting for hardware. -Dave |
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Weren't you going to move your c-lightning node and keep it running?
Yes I was going to keep both running a lnd based node in a box and a c-lightning regular build, both VMs. The machine I put them I thought had 16GB of ram so I could run 2 VMs and still have plenty to spare. But it only had 8 so I was running both with just 3GB of RAM. So I was just going to shut it down, pull out the 2 4GB sticks and put in 2 16GB sticks. Also add a 2nd 2 TB so I could mirror the drive. Had issues and going back to tired / hungry instead of going though stuff slowly I decided to just to a bunch of things at once. (Flash BIOS / different ram / pull 2nd drive) Things went downhill from there. Nothing of which should have caused the issues, but both VMs became unstable. And the last backup I had done was last week when I moved them to the new box. So no help there. Will wipe everything and start again. -Dave |
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So we all know this, but let me say it because I just did it.
Do not work on your Lightning Node OR ANY CRYPTO THINGS THAT INVOLVE REAL MONEY when you are distracted / busy / tired.
I have had several things I wanted to do including getting my c-lightning node back up and updating a few other things.
It was a busy couple of weeks and finally, today I figured it's the 4th of July, the office is closed, I can go in and take care of Dave's stuff.
Yeah, well. I was up late last night, got up early today and really should have just stayed around the house and relaxed.
But, I took care of a bunch of stuff around the house, did a bunch of "beginning of the month paperwork and bills" and then went to the office, skipped lunch and began moving hardware before I did the software updates. Which I screwed up...big time...because I was tired and hungry.
I managed to get the node back up and broadcast the close channels.
And, no I did not do a backup because why bother for some minor hardware work, I'll do it before I do the software upgrade.
Stupid....stupid....stupid.
I know better. Never touch hardware without doing a complete backup. But I was hungry and tired and wanted to get it done and get home and watch the fireworks.
-Dave
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1) it's not the Koch brothers it's Fortress Investment Group which includes their own money and the Canada Pension Plan and Koch Real Estate Investments.
2) There was another takeover bid from someone else last month. So it's not like this was unexpected.
3) Morrisons owns it's own supply chain and that makes it a prime target for investors because it's easier to squeeze every penny out of it when you control more.
At a guess, since Brexit is killing a lot of businesses across GB they figure it's going to simple to squeeze out some profit and sell off what is left.
As of now NONE of the businesses we do IT for have anything left in GB / England due to Brexit but they have found a lot of willing buyers to take over and price gouge the people who need what they were selling. Sadly we didn't get to get any of that profit. But I can easily see this being the same thing
-Dave
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I wonder if the new countries will allow them to stay.
A lot would probably depend on the amount of spare power they have. That is the issue in a lot of places. You can get a lot of clean renewable energy BUT it's in remote areas that are never going to be "built up" AND it's not always simple or even remotely cost effective to build power lines to where it's needed. So you have a lot of power and nothing to do with it. Mining solves that as it needs a lot of power but not a lot of space or infrastructure beyond that. -Dave |
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10 years ago 1TB SSD were insanely expensive. Today they are under $100 USD
Bandwidth price is falling in most places. 5G is allowing very high speeds for downloads even when you do not have the ability to connect to a local provider.
RAM & CPU pricing is falling too.
So there it's no big deal.
If you want to run a node on the PC that you just pulled out of the trash that is one thing, but if you are going to spend some money then it will be fine.
Same as now, you can run a node on a slow internet connection on a RPi3 with a slow drive attached to it.
Or you can get a 4th gen core i5 with 16gb ram and a 512GB SSD for under $250 and not worry about it.
You can probably save $40 going for a similar generation AMD based PC.
10 or 20 years from now the systems will be different but theory will be the samw.
-Dave
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Well the answer was a drop of 27.94%.
So the next question is that going to be stable for any period of time?
I don't think it will be. I feel there will be a lot more spikes up and down.
No scientific or logical reason, just a gut feeling that big mining farms are going to be a lot more aggressive in where they mine.
They moved once, they can do it again. As opposed to the "we built it here, so we will stay here" theory.
Just my thoughts.
-Dave
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As BitMaxz there are some firmwares that will allow you to run without fans.
However, the way the boards are designed you do have to get a large amount of air moving over the heatsinks.
You need a bit of positive air pressure moving through them.
-Dave
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