I have a little tingle in my somewhereoranother area...

I know it's a weekend so I do not know if this tingle represents a move soon, or starting next week... but I am thinking we go look at the 33-35 area. 

Time to test.

Thanks!  Yeah that's probably one of them!

It certainly feels like that...  And I think that is one way it could go.  Consolidate around here for months on end.  But I still think we have some interesting times ahead.

This is exactly what it was.  To a t.  

But people are not learning the right lessons.  Novogratz still trying to defend the damn idea.  It is rare when I am glad for someone to lose tons of money.  I hope he did.


What a steaming load.  Evidently you can be super successful in finance without having a brain.  How can you "invest in the company behind Luna" and then call the project decentralized.  Those two things are contradictory.  There is no company behind something decentralized.

Luna and UST were a algorithmic Ponzi that blew up spectacularly, as we have been saying was obvious from the beginning.  I have to admit, I hope whomever was behind this attack has act two planned out for the very near future.

It might dent confidence in legitimate projects like Bitcoin because there are imbeciles like Novogratz who have no idea what "decentralized" means.

It should have been a LOT worse...  But yeah.  I got stuck in quite the "OK just one more little cup" loop pretty hard.

And I ended up proposing to Bob...  hopefully he was touched.

Does it bother you how well it worked on the Ruskies?  It does me...  Something stinks about all this... it really does.  How many people are lying to us?  At this point I think it might be all of them, the bastards.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.

I don't mean to be a dick but lighting is NOT SIMILAR TO WESTERN UNION.  Western union is a centralized service with 100% control over what goes through.  Lightning is a COMPLETELY FOSS project in which YOU and I can completely independently set up a channel between us and NO ONE but us sets the rules and NO ONE but us has to know about it.  Wha I am saying is you and I can use the "lightning network" without asking the permission of anyone else, and including NO ONE else in our network (channel).

That in itself is a fundamentally HUGE difference.  But I could go on.  I am just too drunk to now.  I found some really awesome spiced rum.

I get it if you have issues with lightning as a trust minimized protocol for exchanging Bitcoin.  There are plenty of things to complain about or to gripe over... but you really need to pick better.  It is not even CLOSE to Western Union.

Ah... buying, no.  That's nothing.  They can do that easily.  Implementing a country wide payment system... that's what I was talking about.  But I do think this will light a fire under SOME of them to start buying... especially now that the downside is so reduced.  i hope.


This was actually better than I expect it to be.  Totally knew what he sounded like the moment I saw him, but even with all the hype, interesting stuff...  And what an odd format a live phone looking shot?  Strange.

That said... we are testing that low range again this morning.   Ugh.

Considering all the other things we are seeing.  The current administration is acting in concert with foreign powers to strangle the US on almost every front.  I am surprised that you of all folks would not see the conspiracy angle here.  If they crash it all then they get to "build back better".  Get enough starving babies, etc?  And things like UBI and the like are a soft sell.

The boomers have too much... could be time to take it away?  I gotta say I like your other theory better... that the markets will never stop going up, but...

I have felt the same.  And as was mentioned some folks are probably dipping their toes in hoping the IMF won't call their bluff.  But at the same time it seems almost impossible for at least a HANDFUL of these countries are not getting in.  How long will that take?  Not sure. Seems like a fairly large scale project.

But part of the point is Bukele and his country have done so much of the legwork already.  I imagine deals being made to use software, etc.  The way he rolls I would almost not be surprised if he gave away some of the tech they developed.  He SHOULD, as getting other countries on board here is a big deal.

The silence from the western media is possibly the most telling thing.

This is a threat to the system, for sure.

I still worry for Bukele...  he has a  pretty big target on him at this point.

Same, I think.

At a glance I do not see much about the following here... my apologies if it has been already discussed.



This is a shot of central bankers and finance ministers from 40+ countries that Nayib Bukele invited to El Salvador for a conference on using Bitcoin as a nation.

The list of countries reads like a whos who of the folks that would be targeted by the IMF et al with their loans etc.  These folks are looking to get off the plantation and they are doing so en masse.

Banco Central de São Tomé e Príncipe
Banco Central del Paraguay
Banco Nacional de Angola
Bank of Ghana
Bank of Namibia
Bank of Uganda
Banque Centrale de la République de Guinée
Banque Centrale de Madagascar
Banque de la République d'Haiti
Banque de la République du Burundi
Central Bank of Eswatini
Ministry of Finance of Eswatini
Central Bank of Jordan
Central Bank of The Gambia
Comisión Nacional de Bancos y Seguros de Honduras
Direction Générale du Trésor, Ministère des Finances et du Budget, Madagascar
Maldives Monetary Authority
National Bank of Rwanda
Nepal Rastra Bank
Sacco Societies Regulatory Authority (SASRA) Kenya
State Bank of Pakistan
Superintendencia General de Entidades Financieras de Costa Rica
Superintendencia de la Economía Popular y Solidaria de Ecuador
Banco Central de El Salvador
Central Bank of Egypt
Central Bank of Jordan
Central Bank of Nigeria
Ministère de l'Economie, des Finances et du Plan du Sénégal
Superintendencia de Bancos de la República Dominicana
Banque Centrale de Mauritanie
Banque Centrale du Congo
Central Bank of Armenia
Bangladesh Bank
Banco de Moçambique
Bank Al-Maghrib (Morocco)
Bank of Sierra Leone
Bank of Zambia
Central Bank of Lesotho
Central Bank of Liberia
Central Bank of Sudan
Financial Regulatory Commission of Mongolia
Ministry of Finance, Zambia
Palestine Monetary Authority
Reserve Bank of Malawi

They did this quietly, and it has not been covered much by mainstream western news.

Probably nothing, right?

I have become a fairly strong fan of Feather.  But then, I also quite like Electrum:

https://featherwallet.org/

There is an applauncher version.  Run's perfectly on Arch for me.

People like Dudas either do not have any earthly idea of what "censorship resistance" is or they are anti-bitcoin or spooks.

Dudas has turned his cards over enough to show that he supports systems that exercise central control.  I can;t be bothered to find the quotes but he has said things that imply he is for things like wealth redistribution, and that sort of thing...  Those folks don't tend to like Bitcoin because they are too stupid to realize that human's cant be trusted to rearrange personal property to make it more "fair".

Of course he likes Eth.

I pointed out that this dude is anti-bitcoin ages ago:



I just want to point out that YESTERDAY I routed a $300 payment to Kraken.  Sure works well while it's not working.



(also I charges 10 sats to route this...  not even a penny.)

Ah... I might need to move a little pile of corn over to the nodes to reciprocate...  All those transactions will eventually clear...  It's down like 30% from the weekend.  -eidt- wait no... it's down like 65%...  My mempook is only like 30 blocks deep right now...

I think you may not be thinking enough levels deep.  The very first email response to Satoshi's announcemnet laid out the problem immediately:


A couple years later Hal Finney made a similar point:


Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain.

That's the crux.  That is the point of the blocksize wars.  And there has been disagreement here forever.  It can be argued that Satoshi himself even seemed to intend for Bitcoin to scale "on chain".  But we have realized over time that this is not possible.  You cannot have a broadcast network broadcasting 10,000 TPS to a immutable ledger without centralizing.

Therefore... IF we scale to where the whole world is using Bitcoin as the foundation of a payment system, and the blocksize remains where it is now then block space is going to become EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE.  Because there will be a huge demand for base layer transactions. Put another way, if lightning (and other layer two systems) get a large amount of traffic then the node operators are going to have to pay the miners to settle channel balances.  And the miners will be setting those fees. 

In fact, if we are going to keep blocks small the ONLY way bitcoin survives is for base layer fees to go up to replace enough of the subsidy that mining stays worth it.  In that sense layer 2 does not "steal income from miners" it ENABLES it.  If we can only have 3,500 transactions a block max, then we will need to see fees in the ~$200 range to replace the current subsidy.  And the only way to justify fees like that is to have a 2nd layer on which trivial transactions can take place and to use the base layer for settlement.  Lightinng will not have hurt the miners... it will have saved them.

And the argument that we should increase blocksize enough to handle all the transactions... well enough has been written on that.  And the reality is it would still be technically quite difficult to have that much traffic being broadcast to EVERY node each 10 minutes.

Not to mention the fact that 10m is not fast enough for small transactions.  Buying a car?  No problem we can sit for a while at the dealership.  Buying a bowl of Pho'.  Nope.  Takes too long.

So the puzzle now is how to use bitcoin in a trust minimized way on a second layer from which settlement can take place on the base. 

I also wonder if we might see the consensus emerge for increases to the block size.  Obviously this is a contentious topic and some believe we can never see it happen because of the code becoming ossified. But if that happens, though it will not turn Bitcoin into being able to do broadcast layer microtransactions, it WILL at least allow for more transactions, and therefore more total fees per block.  As tech advnaces I think it will not be too long before the chain and network could su stain a 3-20x increase in resource needs.

You are a miner.  How will enabling millions upon millions of transactions a day not increase demand for Layer 1 space?

Yeah... it does not make much sense.  If you want a <5s/b tx right now you will need to wait several hours.  If you need the tx to confirm immediately then it's gonna be ~20s/b.  If you are sending BTC to a CEX to sell into this bear, and are using a client that does not auto-calculate fees, or you purposely choose a 1 sat per bytle fee?  Well....  I would not say anyone TRICKED you, lol.

I do not know why I am compelled to do this, but this particular FUD is so annoying.  I just want to point out why it is wrong.

Once the block subsidy is very low, or over, then fees will be what pay miners.  If we continue on with blocks the size they are fees will go up quite a bit.  This will not matter because it will be being used as the settlement layer.  Transactions will be batched by LSPs, and other people willing to pay high fees to enshrine transactions in the immutable layer.  It is conceivable that transaction fees could end up in the thousands of dollars (by today's failing standard).

The circular nonsense people believe about this is annoying.  You can;t have both.  If lightning and other 2nd layers are a success then there will ALWAYS be transactions in line to get on the base layer.

Now I am sure someone MIGHT be able make a good argument why fees will not ever be enough to support the miners.  But so far I have never heard it, and THAT is certainly not it.

I did a few transactions over the weekend.  I payed 3s/b for them all.  I think they were all in the next block or 2 max.

If there is a a strategic reason for Binance to do this other than the just consolidate utxos then it is to make it difficult for unsavvy users to move bitcoin during a price panic.  But I am not sure what good that would do either...