which adds another dimension these days...

newspaper editorials were often written without a by-line (i.e. attribution of the author), supposedly in order to make the author "more objective", but 95% of articles named the writer

any news or opinion piece in the 2020s+ can now be written anonymously (by a human or an AI), connoting all manner of warped or disgusting principles or attitudes, then by way of apology the news outlet simply always blames the AI

it's possible to set the rate to zero and the base fee to >0, right? that should make path finding using such nodes even less complex

also, Dijkstra has been described by lightning devs as a stop-gap, it's not optimized for Lightning, just a reasonable (and well studied) generic path finding algorithm. Which path-finding strategy dominates in the end is anybody's guess at this point in time.

also, path-finding is not part of the spec/protocol, and ought not to be. It's quite possible that one of the node implementations already has an alternative algo (or even just tweaked Dijkstra). You can be sure that adventurous node operators have also already tried something different

linux is:

• much leaner (you won't need even 4GB RAM)
• done right (+ macOS is not as good as it used to be)
• supported forever
• no surveillance mysteries (do Apple suck your data or not? they seem to try very hard to convince you that they could... but don't )

"supported forever" is the most practical point, and servers are all about practicality imo. Look at it this way: you'll need to buy a new Mac, or start using Linux, when Apple cancel support for your hardware. Start today instead.


right, the least powerful node I'm running is a Raspberry Pi 3 (1GB RAM, 1.5GHz processor). With all the software upgrades (to linux + all bitcoin upgrades), it now runs better than it did when I bought it 5 years ago.

if you had good investment advice, would you:

1. start shouting about it, to everyone, all the time
2. keep quiet and buy/sell the maximum you can while no-one else notices


this financial news stuff is comprehensive market manipulation, but also quite subtle. Number 1 subtle message in financial news stories is: "and that's why you need to read the financial news, you needed to know this story, right?"

I don't think it will help. I mentioned earlier, playing the game of "look how green this project is" will never work with environmental doomsday-ers, the game works like this:

1. you: "is this much ok?"
2. Doomsday-er "NO. THATS EQUAL TO 5000 NUCLEAR WEAPPONS EXPLODING IN A RAINFOREST YOU ARE STILL TEH WORST PERSON EVA AND MUST IMPROVE"
3. go back to 1.

and you don't mean "greenhouse", greenhouse is now a bad word (these people are insane, but cult members usually are slightly)



hmmm, we will see then. will Bukele get coup-ed before his secret volcano of Bitcoins goes live? Will Saudi Arabia start doing camel racing with Bitcoin prize money? Will Greenpeace change their name to OrangeWar and challenge Satoshi to a sumo match to the death? we live in strange times

not sure if this is altogether true.

The tor project people advise to defend against side-channel attacks that can (supposedly) discover the IP of hidden services, they have an add-on (vanguards) to mitigate the issue.

not sure if more recent versions of tor daemon manage the side-channel attacks better, although a "lite" version of the add-on has been part of the main tor daemon, since last year I think. The recommendation at that time was that any serious hidden service should continue to use the full vanguards add-on.

slightly more small-fry....

my Raspberry Pi 3 node now ALWAYS verifies new blocks before the progress= log line returns 0.999999

presumably, some performance optimization in 24.0 has made this possible? nothing from the changelog stood out, possibly some library improvement. I'm running with disablewallet and 450MiB of dbcache (RPi3 has just 1G RAM)

so I don't know who to congratulate, but well done to everybody anyway!

that may be a significant test of this line of reasoning: would someone employ the massive resources to dam a river only for the purposes of bitcoin mining? Such a facility wouldn't need any kind of connection to infrastructure, as even modern satellite internet connections might have sufficiently low enough network latency to mine with (they would for sure still lose block races). Depends on the specific locale, FTTP would be better, of course.

that would be a real moment for sure, and of course, why not turn it into a military base also I can assure you, this is not the first time someone somewhere has been thinking along these lines...

I saw an interesting thread on reddit the other day

OP claimed that as more and more energy production/extraction facilities begin to mine bitcoin with their 'slack', that this will begin to both affect the dynamics of bitcoin's market price, and also that bitcoin mining and the BTC price will begin to affect energy prices too.

If you owned an energy production/extraction facility, and you could (momentarily) make more money mining BTC than selling energy, you'd do it, right? That's pushing energy prices up (and correspondingly down again when mining profits return to parity with the BTC market price)

So bitcoin's status as a reserve currency, possibly even as the currency hydro-carbons are traded for, from now on is a mere formality. Big political interests (big gangsters, really) are now openly in the market, because it's a perfect complement to their operation. Bitcoin and energy are (and always have been) inextricably linked.


I'm pretty sure someone said something along these lines years ago (here on bitcointalk). Cue environment cultists crying into their Starbucks frapaccinos

and it's really just safely reinforcing what Bitcoin already is (and always was)


miners can mine any transaction they like, including a different version of the same transaction. That means that RBF was really just a way of shepherding something that miners have always been able to do.

Sure, the Bitcoin source code didn't have that functionality, but because RBF doesn't need consensus rules at all, the miners could just change the code themselves.

and if there was 2 versions of the same transaction, one with low fees and another with higher fees out on the network, why not mine that one?


the whole fullRBF thing was probably the stupidest Bitcoin discussion ever, the people arguing against it didn't really understand what they were even saying

for exactly that reason (multi path payments), it could be done theoretically. obviously it's stretching credibility that one lightning node could convince another node to open a single channel with 35 BTC in it, and even less likely that it would be available as liquidity in one direction only (i.e. an unbalanced channel to the tune of 35BTC!!)

but the larger lightning nodes could have > 35 BTC incoming liquidity no problem, aggregated over many channels. The sender would need the corresponding amount of outgoing liquidity also... it is a bit of a stretch really.

but yes, the important point seems to be that OP is being targeted by a scammer.

that's on the table with BIP324 (except without the certificates part, any authentication has been left easy to add, but not actually specified)

but I'm not convinced that would help, transactions are propagated to all nodes, so the attack is really the same: start a node, listen for transactions to get valid public keys, crazily try to factorize the private key out of any pubkey from the instant you receive it

even directly connecting to a miner IP with bitcoind set to refuse anything but a BIP324 connection wouldn't work for the same reason; the miner would broadcast your transaction to it's peers, then onto the rest of the bitcoin network.

for Bitcoin, yes. For protocols that involve encrypting network packets using public keys, it might make sense to pick now (and I believe this is the reason OpenSSH did so). I do not know why it doesn't make more sense to extend/redesign the protocol to encrypt using negotiated ephemeral encryption keys, but maybe that's something specific the protocol.

or look at this way: anyone producing a sufficiently powerful quantum computer probably has big interest from the "local military" so to speak.

because that kind of equipment has military implications; whichever political faction who obtained such a tool first could use it to:

• outright attack enemies
• blackmail them instead

it would be a world changing event, if it came out of a clear blue sky (i.e. unexpectedly). One could pwn everything and everyone with such tech, a whole new era would begin rather abruptly

guess what though? everyone to which any of this is relevant already knows, and is preparing accordingly. Bitcoin devs are only one out of many who are aware, and they don't even have any (known) military connections

how fast will this quantum computer be able to factorize the public key into it's private key? it has to be faster than a miner can mine transactions transferring to a quantum resistant keypair.

also, don't forget that miners will want to continue to mine, so if a new keypair scheme is available, one can simply send (encrypted) transactions directly to a miner, transferring utxos to a new address using the new scheme, IBM cannot crack public keys they do not have access to.

what's that you say, the quantum resistant keypairs don't exist? well neither does IBM's 4000 qubit computer (and some kind of quantum resistant keypair cryptography does exist, although I have no idea how good it is, nor whether it's at all suitable for Bitcoin addresses/tx's)

did you say game over?

right. the small amount of writing that is specific to this era doesn't truly comport with the basics of classical liberalism or austrian economics. A recurring theme of writers describing a post cypherpunk world is "the new tools and networks will be such powerful forces that any opposition is simply to piss into the wind".

isn't that a good description of today's world? software is being written and used by people to exert their beliefs and will on the world, and those beliefs and determinations come in all shapes and sizes. Anything effective enough changes day to day life near-instantly, but only until something new comes along and changes everything again. It's like Andy Warhol's "15 minutes of fame" suddenly now applies to tech trends too

ok, I'll take your word for it



I dunno, what kind of accomplished geopolitical analyst in the 21^stC performs any of the actions in the above, in relation to any subject matter? sounds like he's not even any good at what he presents himself as, or he's maybe just a propagandist, i.e. the type of person who shows up on Joe Rogan all too frequently. Wherever does he get them all from?

is that not tautological though? "people will agree with you, but only if they agree to it"

any miner can "activate" or "lock in" a hard fork, such expressions arguably only serve as rhetorical devices, i.e.

• bitcoin devs looking to reach consensus with users can use these sorts of words to make it sound powerful / empowering, to breed confidence
• a hostile fork could equally use such language to scare users into believing there's no escape from this strong, unstoppable force

in other words, it's marketing/PR when anyone does it really, or at least it's become that way

as everyone says though, a miner unilaterally hard forking may find themselves mining an increasingly lonely blockchain.

right, improving the algorithm isn't so impressive when the hardware that could use the improved algorithm is still infeasible

interesting choice. I'm frankly suspicious of the way that all these javascript dialects are proliferating and eating everything like an army of king kong/godzilla/ghostbusters marshmallow men, but on the other hand, QT is going weird, gtk already went weird, and they're the only game(s) in town.

I confess to knowing less than zero about javascript-ey thingys and widgets, but like every self-respecting opinionated asshole, I can tell you that I don't like it and that therefore it is bad. .