2 separate things here.

What I posted about was the fact that with a Lightning Address i.e. something like davef@bitcointalk.org.

All that points to is LNURL string at https://bitcointalk.org/.well-known/lnurlp/davef

So at that point whoever controls bitcointalk.org can put in whatever information they want. So even if you are using your own self custody setup if you are doing this with a domain you do not control there is always the possibility of theft.

What you posted about is an intermediary service that allows you to not have to have your node on and accessible all the time.
To me, it looks like yet another answer in search of a question. If you are running something like a LN node it should be online all the time.

-Dave

I would like to think that most public block explorers are. We KNOW they are not, but it would be nice if they did.
Obviously if you are not showing ads or offering other services and operating out of pocket so to speak, you might not want to put $100s of dollars a month into running a public explorer. But going from 300mb to 500 or 750 should really not have a cost to you.

But, as I said before having a bloated mempool and full block after full block is going to push some marginal HW running full nodes over the edge. And IMO that is a good thing.
I have said it a few times, you CAN run a node on a RPi3 you can run a node on a 1st gen i3 with 2 GB of RAM. BUT outside of tinkering you really should not.

-Dave

Sorry went to sleep before the last spot was filled.

Rolling with 780002


000000000000000000063a73e7f5fff01ef9d9dbf36d1c9afba030aab9ad0a84

4- Darker45

Congrats. PM me your shipping info and I'll get it out to you later today (pending on when Verizon shows up to complete a fiber install)

-Dave

1) Whatever thew node operator sets. 300 MB is the default. You can set it to whatever you want.
2) IIRC yes back in 2017 there were a few places that had no max size, or a very large one that were saying that they were above a gig.

Going to be interesting to see what happens if this keeps up. Can some of the nodes running on older more marginal hardware may not keep up.

-Dave

Up For Raffle iluvbitcoins knife design #3







I can only ship to US addresses, would probably get though must customs but don't want to risk it.

Tickets:
1- sweeteye
2- haloxon
3- henkcryptotank
4- Darker45
5- moparminingllc
6- Sunny
7- dozerz
8- Amax16
9- BTCOVERFIATS
0- Markzellers
a- pmict
b- YodasRedRocket
c- 2stout
d- Dernoste
e- buckrogers
f- geo



How To Play:

Pick one of the available tickets from the table above. Post a reply with your pick
The last character in the hash of a later chosen block will decide who has the winning ticket.

Shipping included but, as I said above I can only ship to US addresses.

How about this instead:

Don't store any cryptocurrency that you cannot afford to loose on Windows ANY DEVICE CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET WITHOUT A HARDWARE WALLET. Not even Linux if it is running inside a Windows host is secure against everything and if you do something wrong because you were not fully paying attention since you have done it a hundred times before, no matter how secure you think you are your crypto is gone.

Telling people to use this OS vs that may help in the desktop environment, but it still comes down to the user.

If you are not familiar with linux / windows / mac OS an older un-patched un-secured version of an OS you know may actually be more secure then one you don't since you are not trying to figure something out while trying to move money around.

-Dave

Drifting OT a bit here but your neighbor can't do it.
Your ISP and government can. Setting up a MITM attack is not that difficult if you have the time and money.
At least braiins.com is using DNSSEC, so many pools are not making it much easier to pull off other forms of attacks against the pools.

-Dave

At a quick look the 1st input was from years ago. It *might* have been the same bug that the other person had. But in the end, it probably does not matter due to the amount involved. As others have said it's not worth blowing a block for under $25 even if BTC goes to $250000 it's still under $300.

OP what wallet were you using? How did you wind up with this? Deliberate thing you did or did it just happen?

-Dave

Closed / open does not matter when you get to the fact that crypto was stored in an online hot wallet.
As I have said dozens of times. I use Coinomi on my phone, I know it's unsafe. But, on that note so is electrum on my phone, and desktop because wait for it.....it's a hot wallet on an internet connected device.

Any real funds are stored offline and secured with hardware.

-Dave

With AML there a limits as to how much you can take in and out at a time.
In *theory* they have a better idea of who is converting fiat to BTC.
Would it have helped in these situations, perhaps in some small way.

The issue is now, there were 10s of thousands of dollars moved to scammers / criminals and no way to track the victims.

More importantly since they were operating unlicensed machines, they don't know what they don't know.
BTC purchases from straw buyers for other criminal things.
People avoiding the tax people
and so on.

The issue also is there are licensed ATMs that people could have used so there were also taking money out of the pockets of people who did things the proper way.

-Dave

Possibly. But even so, I have bought physical prepaid cards [in a store with cash] for customers when I had to pay for some subscription or something and could not track down one of the owners and used bogus addresses and never had an issue.

---

So with a bit of testing. It looks like even if you get past the purchasing of the card and getting the activation info you cannot activate the card using any known VPN IP. Will just fail. If you get around THAT and get it activated you cannot use it in some locations. Did a few tests with people. Some worked some did not. Will let them comment in the thread if they want to discuss.

-Dave

Not much to really show, it's just going to be the conversation between your miner and the pool.

Pool -> here is what I want you to work on.
Miner -> this is what I got so far.

The stratum protocol is well documented:

https://braiins.com/stratum-v1/docs
https://github.com/lclc/stratum-docs/blob/master/protocol-specs.rst

that along with what iwantmyhomepaidwithbtc2 posted should give you a more or less complete view of what is happening.

There is really not much too it the fact that although what is going on in the miner is somewhat sophisticated the actual conversation between the miner and pool only has basic information.

-Dave

Except now they are pushing out a larger block that takes longer to propagate then an empty block. Sooner or later that is going to backfire on them when their large full block looses to an empty block. Probably not today or tomorrow or next week or next month, but sooner or later a pool that does not accept spam is going to put out a block that is empty since the mempool is just filled with spam at that moment. And someone is going to see it and solve the next block on top of it instead of the spam filled one.

The problem with a pool taking the 0 fee is that it's short term thinking.
OR as others have suggested they got BTC on the back end that they may or may not have shared with their miners.

Kind of like the VIAPool TX accelerator. They keep the money paid for that, the miners just get the lower fee that was in the TX itself.

-Dave

Just some basic name and address info, but you would need to give most of them something for online purchases so they could verify address & zip when processing the card.

At least here in the US the online merchants verify the house number and zip code or the card gets declined. They prepaid center never did any verification if it's a real address.

I just PMd both of you.

-Dave

No I mean you get a separate hardware wallet and connect it to core.

Handy video for Cold Card: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc_TxlByxeY

There are a bunch of options out there for hardware wallets that was just the only video I had a link saved for.

Figure out which HW wallet works for you.

Different features appeal to different people. You can dive into the hardware wallet section: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=261.0 to get more info & discuss options.

-Dave

Use a hardware wallet for your main BTC software. Be it core or electrum or whatever. This way even if your machine is compromised it's not a big deal they can't get your coins. *You can still make a mistake and get something like clipboard malware on your PC which can cause you to send funds to the wrong place but they just can't steal them.
 
For lightning payments, just keep in mind they are going to be insecure, but you should not be keeping a lot of funds in one anyway.

-Dave

The BSQ token, that you use on the Bisq marketplace is a Layer 2 colored coin.

https://bisq.wiki/Introduction_to_the_DAO#BSQ_token
https://bisq.markets/
 
Which is why I said before there are a bunch that I can't think of, they are out there and exist as L2 but not really discussed that much.
And then we all forget how some things like Bisq / BSQ actually work and just accept that they do.

So I *know* there are other L2 things out there. I *know* I have discussed them. But 100% I don't remember what they were, since it was a brief discussion many years ago and never thought of again. The projects might not even exist in any real way anymore which adds to it.

-Dave

If you want to see the entire conversation across the network: https://www.wireshark.org/
With this you can see all the packets that come and go and from things on your network.

Wireshark also will reassemble the 'conversation' that happens.

Obviously, you need to know what you are looking for when reading what is being send to / from your miner but that should get you all the data, you can then decode it.

-Dave

Around $115. Internet + base TV + phone.

They found the pain point of cutting the cord or switching to FiOS and are just below that. I could go to just internet and get some more streaming and loose the phone but it's not going to save enough to make me want to go through the time and effort involved.

Back to this, it sucks that people got scammed and lost money. But the NEXT time, because we all know there will be a next time, it's another thing that we can point to and say look it's a scam. Here are all the other scams that looked exactly the same way.

TANSTAAFL

There
Aint
No
Such
Thing
As
A
Free
Lunch

The more we point out that things like this can be legit, but they have to really prove themselves, explain how it works and why it works the better we all are.
There are some places in the world that don't give a rats ass about KYC and everything else. But, there still are steps you have to go though and things you have to deal with.

Cards like what was offered really do fall into the 'magical internet money' category.

-Dave

Since someone made a private comment to me:


Saying I listed the back end twice, the answer is no I just did not express it properly:

The back end 'network' is all the back end infrastructure you have to run to keep your office and the BATM BUSINESS running.
The back end 'server' or servers is what you need for the BATMs to talk to the outside world and send & receive transactions.

For the sake of security should be separate and discrete setups.

Too often they are not separate as they should be, but even so there are still a ton of costs to run BATMs

-Dave