Thanks for pointing that out didn't think of that as I myself like the beauty of using the author-link of the quote tag.
I edited the post to add the link in cleartext too and will try to get into the habit of doing that.

Rumours are that the very latest increase is not from ordinals but due to this bovine-originated-fertilizer-like BRC20 thingie..:


https://cointelegraph.com/news/binance-closes-btc-withdrawals-amid-congestion-on-the-bitcoin-network

[Edited to add cleartext link]

Indeed, it took me since Mar 6th to close a channel with Chivo, yesterday the tx (1.12 sat/vbyte) was finally confirmed.

After Switzerland came to the rescue of Debit Suisse last week with the noteable amount of total 259 bil CHF it was today announced that the national social insurance (AHV) will have to save money (quite a lot). Both decisions come from the desk of the same minister (Karin Keller-Sutter).

It's ok if old people who have worked their whole life can't afford energy and food if that's the price for keeping that brilliant zombie bank alive.

Classic can't eat as much as I want to puke situation.


Edited to add: That said minister figure was rejecting a tighter banking law after 2008, because she said banks have done enough already and 2008 can't happen again under their new rules.

No clue yet, this is the only thing I found which matches the timeframe:


Though the article is less scary than the headline suggests.

May I suggest (We Are) Four Lions, I remember well watching it when it came out.
Though you need a rather dark humor to appreciate it (not unlike Monty Python).

Possibly this:

https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/03/22/tron-founder-justin-sun-sued-by-us-sec-on-securities-market-manipulation-charges/

25bps it is, let the games begin.

OMG, does actually somebody proofread articles before they appear?

I for one am very relieved to hear that the top management at SVB could pay out their boni right on Friday. I mean does nobody think of the managers, working their ass off for us plebs and getting paid in peanuts for the hard work they do (screwing people over full-time is really hard work). If somebody is innocent, then it's them, it's the dumb peasants who expected to get the money out they deposited there who are responsible for this whole fiasco.

Some punter in a local newspaper posted a comment on the SVB story today which immediately resonated with me:

"Bank run, bank run, whatcha gonna do when they come to you?"

I think we are looking forward to a very interesting monday, maybe it will even go down in history as the Bank Run Monday 2023..

For a total layman like me it seems to boil down to the old "Every cryptographic algo is only as good as the RNG feeding random numbers into it".
One of the of (very few) takeaways I learned from Bruce's Applied Cryptography is:
1. Good randomness is key <- pardon the pun! (I think that's one of the ways the NSA subverted Crypto AGs cipher machines by making the RNG less random than customers expected and later they just went with broadcasting the private key along the ciphertext)
2. If you have a true random key that is equally long or longer than the data to encrypt, XOR is perfectly safe encryption (I am still astonished by that fact)

In the past the TLAs (and FLAs for the britons) employed brigades of ladies that ran bingo drums the whole day to create one time pads. It is said they only employed women because men were generally unable to follow the procedure correctly all day long and started to make up numbers from their head or whatever, while the ladies produced high quality OTPs.

So, when our ladies for once behave totally random and unexpected, that's a feature in them, not a bug.
^Couldn't resist, sorry gals. It is depressing and embarassing enough that men are apparently unable to operate a bingo drum reliably for more than a few minutes.

Edited to add: Apologies for the repeated use of the banned c-word, I was assuming it might be safe in this context (*ducks to evade the mandatory incoming batslap*)

+1, I was about to say the same. I am using 3000VA APC units and I replace batteries in their 5th year because I learned to do so the hard way, no matter how good they report themselves to be.
It's best to use them every 6-12 months for a few minutes and check how fast their charge goes down.
There is no feeling like standing in a very dark server room and whispering to yourselves "Hmmm, they should hold for about an hour and we're only out of power for 10s now".

At least the batteries are hot-swappable and I can keep the days counting on those systems with >2000 days of uptime (yeah, I am an old, sick f*ck, but I am proud of that).

Given the sheer mass of material that has to be shot into space on a regular base to keep things working I have my doubts this will be sustainable for a long time.


^ And again, that's only for Starlink, there are many more.

Congratulations to the progress!

Re: chicken: May I suggest to look into Brahma chicken? We have recently switched to them and while they take longer to lay eggs and stay longer molting, they are very robust, very social (no fighting or mobbing seen so far) and they seem rather longlived. Also they seem to bond to some degree with humans (at least they follow dad like little ducks follow their mom) and even follow some orders like "go into the barn".

On top of that their feather-boots are just real eye-candy and everytime I watch them walk around the ministry of silly walks pops to mind :-)

Funny, an amateur radio balloon went missing/dark between Alaska and Canada last week:


The highly sophisticated spy gears were like this (oversimplified schematics ofc):



That's pretty literally shooting sparrows with cannons.

I had to deposit some corn into Kraken yesterday. Was scared from what I saw on https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/.
At the end I paid a fee of ~$0.35 (@ 7sat/vb) to move ~0.2 BTC within 15minutes.
IMO this whole ordinal crap just lifted the base fee from 1sat/vb to 5-10sat/vb which is still incredibly cheap for what it is.
Me thinks it looks like the whole fee-market-mechanic built into Bitcoin is working as intended.

Even if mempool is having a huge queue right now, it is almost exclusively 1sat/vb transactions, pay a little more and things are as fine as they were before ordinals came along.

<thisisfine.jpg>

Meanwhile Elmos expensive social media sideproject went read-only..

(A lot of people - if not all - seem to get a "Sorry you have exceeded your tweet limit." when trying to post/tweet)

The honorable undersecretary Nuland has made her attitude towards Europe very clear in the past:




I share that concern to some degree, but I comfort myself with the thought that we're meanwhile just too many and they are just too late with any of that.

So I hear sleepy Joe has an itchy trigger finger for nifty underwater bombsies:


That piece from Seymour Hersh is definitely worth the time to read. In these times of misinformation and lying one wonders naturally if this is some imposter or the real Seymour Hersh, but it looks like it is him, otherwise we'll probably hear soon about it.