Respect.  No reason to let something like that stress you out when you can just use something like Muun wallet perfectly well, and get along just fine on lightning. 

I honestly think we are taking past each other really...  I recognize that privacy is a spectrum, and any transaction has parts that are not at all private.  I just see the fundamental design of Bitcoin as something that is going to cause some issues for people when they read pseudonymous as anonymous.

This seems so obvious I am wondering what I am missing.  It is, for example, possible to know how much Bitcoin is behind when someone spends their coins.

The whole way chainanalysis works depends on the blockchain being fully transparent.  And the information the blockchain provides could be used to put a big target on the person sending the money.  Could be governments, criminals, ex-spouses, and so on.

There are GREAT pluses to the blockchain being fully transparent.  There are scores of circumstances in which that information is good.  Even, for example say a charitable fund for protesters.  For people to be able to see exactly how much is collected.  Arguably a good thing.  Public companies, and governments... the transparant blockchain offers advantages there too.

But what do you do when you want to make a transaction that is mostly private.

Well there is a current best practices that includes all kinds of difficult (for normies) routines.  Mixing, using BIP47 wallets, or using layer two systems, though these are still a work in progress as fgar as privacy goes.

I personally think the blockchain being transparent is a feature, not a bug.  And I even rail against my fellow Monero supporters who are constantly sounding like BCASHers  talking about how Monero is going to flip Bitcoin etc.

Foolishness.  BUT the need for privacy is also quite real, and we are best off when we are aware of the situation.  Privacy in Bitcoin use is a VERY important issue.  And at the risk of being Batslapped... there is a reason Monero has taken BTC's market in many of the dark net sites...

I have (had?) 15mm sats of badly balanced channels with you.  I would not mind kicking in the sats to balance them.

But one question.  Should we strategize fees to keep them from going all one direction?  I think I just had fees set low and they all slid one way, and MOSTLY stayed there (though I do sort of see them slosh back and forth a little, I think)

Anyway, let me know if you want to coordinate fees.  This is an advantage of being able to communicate with a channel partner.  And for what it's worth, I don't mind them just being "imperfect" either...  I sort of burned out on channel balancing.

My only problem with this is they call it:

Mahn-AIR-oh

Similarly MAC-uh-fee (or was it muh-CAFF-ee?) used to say: moe-NAY-ro .

And another seemingly popular one is: Moe-NEE-ro which rhymes with zero.

All wrong.

In fact, the correct way of saying it is: Muh-NAIR-oh. (ma-NEH-ro?)

Otherwise a great vid-AY-oh.

Also... this was made minute ago...


LAHT-uh-pie?

Too much to hope for?  Yeah yeah... lines of hope.

Yeah...  You are being nice to the lettermen.  I hope they realize WE are not their problem, and the physician needs to heal himself first too.

I think the circle is a good thing... I am just not sure how to optimize the use of it.  My personal goal is to support the network at zero cost to myself.  I opened up channels with several nodes in Central and South America, because if I can be a way for someone to buy their Dominoes for a 10th of a penny less and a second faster, then I have done something good for the world.  Although... hopefully if they are eating garbage pizza they have graduated up to Papa Johns?

Currently this is the set of lines I have drawn on the chart.  These look like areas of interest to me.

Looks to me like we should really want 38.5 to hold if we even make it down that far!  There is just so much uncertainty and wild ass news in the world right now...

You can certainly run it that way.  BUT most of the node in a box distros are based on a RPi platform.  So it will be a little more DYI I think... I think the next best thing would be one of the docker containers... not sure what's current in that regard.

I have run Bitcoin servers on Old desktops, old laptops, rack servers, VPS instances, Amazon VPSes, RPis, and even a Celeron based QNAP NAS via docker containers.

The RPi nodes are BY FAR the best choice for a home setup.  They are low power, and easy to tuck somewhere next to your hub and always turned on. I think they are by far the best choice as long as you do not intend to do heavy duty business on them, in which case, if no $$$ was an object rack servers in a cage at some well endowed server warehouse... living in Dallas that would be easy...  But I think even if I wanted to run a little commerce I could get pretty far using the Raspiblitz for the node and the BTCPay server before needing to upgrade.

I have been itching to build a Seed Signer and am also super sad that the Pi Zero W models seem to be impossible to get.    https://seedsigner.com/

Yes.  That bolded part.  And Lioghtning adds another whole dimension of abstraction.  I wonder how lightning over Liquid might work.  That could be a very private setup.  You peg in, and no one can even see you open a channel really...  it would be like a back hole inside a black hole.  "Cept they aren't really black... just shades of grey.

I need a drink.

Well... This is a very interesting question, I think.  And actually somewhat easier to answer than it looks.

Who have you opened channels with, and what condition were those channels in when you closed them?

You and I have three channels open together.  So no matter WHAT is done with our channels, you and I will be the only ones to see the bitcoin at the end of those channel's lives.  We could facilitate trade between millions of transactions among hundreds of thousands of parties, and when we CLOSE that channel it is still the 5mm each (I think) that one or the other of us put up between us. Those bitcoin have never moved.  The ONLY thing different is who gets what at the end of it all.  It is even possible (though difficult) that we both get back exactly the same sats we put into each channel only losing the value of the fees involved.  And at the other extreme the other user could receive the bitcoin from the contract initially put in by the channel partner.  In the latter case you would have another channel with another user where you gained exactly that much equity.

So far as layer one is concerned it's sort of like a poker game.  You and I put money in the middle, and then one or both of us gets some of that money back out.  The only difference is in the meantime our nodes could have agreed to thousands of transactions canceling themselves back and forth forever.

I have a couple of channels with partners where we have done magnitudes more transactions than the channels even hold.  If I wanted to close those channels I could let the money all come over to my side, then close the channel effectively doing nothing.  Back to square one. 

So the point is if you open a channel with a criminal you might end up with  bitcoin used in a crime previously.   I personally see the opportunity to "launder" money on layer 1 with the lightning network to be fairly bad, unless we are only talking about very small amounts.  Now moving money around privately without a clear link???  Well that is another story.  I have a channel opened between the two nodes I run as well!   (Well I used to... I need to reopen it lol)

Yes, as I mentioned in my tirade, L2 is going to be one way to mitigate this.  And I think a good argument can be made for a transparent base layer, and obfuscated layers on top.

But in that scenario going INTO a lightning channel, and then leaving that smart contract is what that base layer transaction looks like, and all that can be followed.  What you do not know is what was done with that SAT in the meantime.  But ut can only belong to 1 of 2 people in the end.  Lightning definitely adds an interesting dimension to the USE of Bitcoin.

What a shame.  And I mean that in the strongest, most literal sense.

But on the other hand she will be remembered as a hero.  The only question now is if that memory will be able to be public, or if it will have to be held secretly.

Just to pick a nit.  If you put people in jail for blocking roads in India...

Well, there ain't enough jails is all I am saying.

I appreciate the nuance.

I will expand on this because the sooner we Bitcoin folk get our heads around this the better.

Not only is Bitcoin NOT fungible it is ABSOLUTELY NOT fungible from a pure mathematical aspect.  EVERY satoshi has a pedigree.  You can trace it's origin all the way to the coinbase it was initially realized in.  And you can see the trail of addresses it is passed through to wherever it currently rests.

Before you get all mad at me, and Batslap me... I am NOT making a case for a shitcoin.  I am just being honest about a feature of bitcoin that we need to come to grips with, and the sooner we do the better.

The FBI, for example seems to have figured this out.  https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/fbi-forms-new-bitcoin-unit-as-doj-taps-new-crypto-head

Bitcoin is a completely open book.  This is a tradeoff that Satoshi realized the downside of fairly early as he talked about address reuse.  And as we cheer the world waking up to what bitcoin is in the wake of the bank account seizures we also have to see that the satoshis donated to the protesters recently have mostly been flagged, and it will have created a challenge for the users to deal with.

So, there is the growing school of people that preach an amazingly difficult sort of privacy hygiene for Bitcoin, and it surprises me that these folks do not see that they are essentially just making their coins ready for a "list".  We are already seeing exchanges treat these coins differently.  Accounts get closed, and transactions are refused.  Plus the trouble to which one must go to keep their Bitcoin private is beyond the skill level of even very technically adept people.  It is unrealistic to "make every transaction a coinjoin" currently.  This is ON TOP of the fact that it also might be a bad idea.

And frankly the idea that we can add enough privacy features to bitcoin at this point is VERY dubious in my opinion.  There are certainly some ways it can be done...  BIP 47 is a HUGE improvement, and I hope we see that implemented more widely (currently only as PayNyms in Samourai), and layer 2+ can be built to be much more private.  Liquid for example has some of Monero's mojo in it.

Anyway.  I think this needs to be a much wider discussion in the Bitcoin community since we are already seeing government organizations use bitcoins transparency, and they are only going to get better at it.

Ultimately Bitcoin's fungibility is as good as we make it as the users.  Do we care about what satoshis we are paid with?  I think that is part of the answer...  I just don't know how we all get there.  It's an interesting problem.

Shadowing the markets...  Things are getting a little spooky out there.

Wonder what happens if the stock market really starts to crash...

^^^ Reported.  That is a weird one. (not paashaas, the pirate links)

I wonder what surprises await in pirated software that the person is trying to post to a forum full of people who hold bitcoin keys...  Hard for me to imagine... hmm.

HAHA~!  That is a good point.  I suppose good old lazy eye Bezos really is the Ethmaster.

OK!  Just another plug for p2pool.io

This is some cypherpunk shit.  So much coolness happening with monero and no one notices.  You get all the advantages of solo mining with all the advantages of a pool.


I am hoping I can figure out how to slow down the payout, but that may not be possible... not sure.  But that pic is ~5 hours of payouts.  I suppose after I get a zillion of these little UTXOs I will combine them just because they make me itchy.

But then again, Monero as the chain to do this on is perfect as the fees are great.

I know it's probably somewhat wishful... But you know how different fads have kind of come around for a second run over all the years in crypto as a universe?  ETH itself gives way to ICOs gives way to NFTs?  It's like the same garbage gets packaged over and over... and if one is smart (and very lucky) one can benefit from this arrangement.

Well legitimate use cases do as well.  We see it in Bitcoin alone.   In the beginning only a select few really understood why cryptographicly sound transactions would be hard to stop, and hard to censor.  I would love to put myself in this group of people who "got it" early on.  But not really... I just wanted to play poker for something that had value but was not the USD.  But as I played, I began to see why this was not just "Everquest platinum" and it had value.  And over even more time I was able to start to understand why Bitcoin would change the world.

Unfortunately for me, when I evaluated Ethereum what I saw was a HUMONGOUS attack surface and an overly complex sort of Rube-Goldberg machine that was just a bad idea.

Oh, the ETH I didn't buy. LOL.  I was right about the project.  But wrong in assuming that most other people would not fall for it.

I saw several other alts come along.  Litecoin.  Really nothing new, and a marketing slogan that had everything but a real reason to actually mean anything.  Peercoin, namecoin, solidcoin... lol remember that one? What a turd that was.  And then Counterparty!  That was the first one that really did something new.  But it wasn't just a shitcoin.  Never really went anywhere though... And Stacks (Stax?) seems to have stole it's mojo, while having the stink of a shitcoin.

And then Monero.

Wow.  I was immediately amazed.  The main thing about Monero was, it was everything that Bitcoin was but with an obfuscated blockchain.  Privacy was a legit sell.  I saw it as the first project that could exist with bitcoin but still be valuable.  It could exist along side bitcoin and do something Bitcoin never could.  I came onboard.

Well "privacy coins" never really had a heyday aside from a little action bestowed on them by John MacAfee.  And I think that is kind of a good thing.

Why?

Because we are in the middle of the world waking up and "getting" bitcoin.  Thanks to the coordinated attack on western democracies the knife's edge is waking up to seeing the money destroyed, and they know they have very few choices for places they can protect their value.  And Canada just announced it would begin freezing the bank accounts of people they decide are acting the wrong way.

And yet bitcoin cannot be stopped.  So we are about (aboot? lol) to see an explosion of interest in Bitcoin bigger than any previous market.  By a LOT.

But, some of those folks are also going to realize that bitcoin, being transparent has a feature that is also a liability.  And Monero makes a different tradeoff, which creates a DIFFERENT feature set (and different liabilities).  Yes smart contract platforms are interesting.  NFTs are fun to look at.  But the smart money is most likely starting to see that value Privacy is going to be something worth investing in.

I think Monero's first real big explosion is still ahead of us.  It never really got the attention it deserved for a good reason.  

Who needed it?  Not the honest people.  Just the drug dealers.  Because the world still made sense, and if you played by the basic set of rules then having value in a transparant blockchain was not a bad tradeoff.  Well, it is becoming one.

I guarantee you Michael Saylor has thought about Monero, and probably sees it differently than the "VC projects" of things like smart contract chains.  He even said it in an interview when asked.  If someone was in an oppressive regime then Monero might make sense.  He sees the difference.  It is basically bitcoin with privacy, and more risk in auditability.

Well the peac  eful world in which ordinary citizens can get by without financial privacy is going away.  And it's not that PETTY CRIMINALS are becoming more sophisticated and attacking Bitcoin whales.  It's world governments beginning to turn that way.

Sadly, we are on the edge of a dystopia, and that is exactly what Monero was made for.  Some of you have been around here for as long as me.  A few even longer.  None of us wants what I see coming, I am sure...  but thank goodness for Bitcoin, AND Monero.

You know what disturbs me even more than the reality of what has happened to the north of me?

The fact that (aside from Bukele) not a leader of single western democracy has spoken up to condemn this action.

It does not bode well in my opinion.

Congrats.  And I have not read ahead.  But this question is not destined to be well received.  You may not understand why...  It is primarily because of security.  Why tell a group of strangers (as well as the entire internet) that you have between 40k-400k in dollar terms in magical internet money?