Pre

I #webdev for a day-job and live in the #london #uk

Working on an interactive #vr #scifi story, that involves lots of #programming and #animation and #art: starshipsd.com

Public Key

npub1pkhzm90462y3cfat45m25nmz6p9ku0lw0ak4fqjttpy8qvfhrymqjlln8r

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsqmt3djh6a9zguy7466d42fa3dqjmw8lh87m25sf94sjrsxym3jdsmv3nak

Publishing to

global.relay.red

nos.lol

nostr.rocket-tech.net

nostr.swiss-enigma.ch

relay.damus.io

relay.snort.social

Author Public Key

npub1pkhzm90462y3cfat45m25nmz6p9ku0lw0ak4fqjttpy8qvfhrymqjlln8r

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Last Notes

2024-06-16 12:34:40

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Similarly, if it requires a mobile app and can't be safely accessed through the web, I'm unlikely to use it, since I don't install apps if I can help it. They aren't safe.

2024-06-13 14:22:38

Why is it all Nostr people and Bitcoin people wear baseball caps all the time, even indoors?
Does worrying about the bitcoin price make a person bald?

2024-06-07 13:06:20

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Wicked. With that plus the sock influencing you're gonna make it. :)
I haven't done it but yeah, OBS should work. "Publish a live" they call it. Lol.
https://docs.joinpeertube.org/use/create-upload-video#publish-a-live

2024-06-07 12:42:08

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Your peertube instance should allow you to stream I believe? But not to also get sats in a backchannel.
Intrigued at how it can be "live" and also "1991" ;)

2024-06-03 14:11:07

Most bitcoin mining machines will never discover even one single block. The number of mining machines being produced is higher than the number of blocks being found.
What other hardware do we make which mostly never fulfills it's purpose?
Most fire extinguishers never extinguish a fire I suppose.
Anything else?

2024-06-01 19:02:20

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> I'm here, I'm me. I don't need to call myself RegionalHodlXXL9000 and tell folks how they should live their lives
That's right. As long as it's clear you're not Phil Collins that's all you need from a name 😆

2024-05-26 18:19:09

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The moderation is the reason that people like and use it. Nostr may be about censorship resistance, but that is not the only possible type of forum, nor even the best kind usually. Censorship resistance leads to spam and bullying and anti social behaviour.
Activitypub is about decentralized moderation: your own community should be running the server and sharing the moderation load.
In Activitypub it's deliberately not the burden of the individuals to perform moderation, it's a responsibility delegated to community managers.
Picking an instance is picking your moderation team.
If you don't like the moderation team, pick a different one. Or run a server yourself. Mastodon probably isn't the best for a single user server. Over-engineered for that. Gotosocial is very easy to install if you want a single user instance.
But most people don't want a single user instance, they want to share the moderation responsibilities with the community.

2024-05-04 18:24:53

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MMT is just a description of how fiat money systems operate. If it is marxism, then the current fiat money systems are marxist.
I don't see how it is Marxist though myself, it certainly isn't in any way trying to put the workers in control of the means of production.
It just explains how governments create fiat money from thin air and how that money is controlled and destroyed through taxation.

2024-05-04 18:20:29

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Finishing off that confused stuttering ramble with "I don't think there's anything confusing there" is the masterstroke. 😆

2024-05-02 11:44:24

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ActivityPub/Mastodon isn't about censorship-resistance, quite the opposite, it's about decentralized moderation.
If you don't like your moderation team's actions, move to a different server. Or start your own.
Looks like she just decided to leave and stay on Twitter instead more than a year ago though.

2024-04-29 12:28:50

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Like the LLM machines, they are layers of transformer networks sandwiched between layers of attention networks.
Unlike LLMs, the music machines are trained on music not language.
The phrase for describing both/all is Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, GPT, even though "GPT" from OpenAI itself is only an LLM, and there are many other types of pre-trained transformers not trained on language.
Computer jargon is always stupid.

2024-04-29 11:14:50

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What's wrong with "musician"? Or I guess "producer" seems more common than "maker" in the biz.

2024-04-28 16:52:27

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Using TOR is gonna make is slower and more difficult to run, but if you don't use TOR you'll only have to rebuild over TOR when the government makes it illegal.

2024-04-28 14:38:17

If the USA successfully drives all bitcoin and crypto companies out of the country, will that be good for countries that aren't the USA? IE: Most of the world?
Seems like it would be bad for the USA but maybe bad for America isn't good for everyone else.

2024-04-25 16:06:40

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I set up my last one with Umbrel, which would have been fairly smoothly done if it wasn't for failing hard-drives and initially trying on a machine which kept overheating and powering down.
Drive-space is the thing. You are gonna want a 1TB drive really. The blockchain will take up more than half of that already.

2024-04-25 01:06:54

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Oh, okay. Sirius business and spam, but that's it.
Only those two things.

2024-04-19 18:22:44

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You can indeed follow hashtags.
I've been liking phanpy as a client lately. It's "catch up" mode is pretty great.
Like any social network the key is to follow hundreds of people really.

2024-04-18 18:09:31

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Well, he may think he can do what he wants with the users but the rate the users are leaving might indicate otherwise.
It's emptying as quickly as Myspace did when Murdoch bought it.
I delete mine within weeks.

2024-04-11 20:26:31

I have posted a few of today's memes to my friend Dan whose birthday is today. He'll be confused and has no idea what a nostr is I shouldn't think.

2024-03-08 12:00:19

Remember when "going viral" used to mean that people liked a thing so much they shared it with their friends?
And now it just means the algorithm picked it and forced it into everyone's feeds.

2024-02-22 21:15:31

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Scaling to global money still ain't fixed. Quite liked the discussion on WBD about scaling last week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seOK8CujQQI

2024-02-22 21:11:40

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Oh, I meant to say.
Current fees are about 1.50 GBP to open a channel, about 80p for a payment transaction to buy the book.
On-chain fees are the tricky part about Lightning. A couple of quid to close a channel isn't so bad but if price goes up and blockchain-congestion goes up. Say 20x between the two factors?
Fifty quid to open and close a channel?
Better hope there's more than 50 quid in it.

2024-02-22 20:45:24

Been ages lying dormant, but I finally got around to trying to get my #lightning node working again.
There is a thing called autopilot which will handle the opening of channels etc if you know to enable it.
No button to do so with #umbrel, had to edit config files that didn't even exist until I created them in the magic places, and reboot.
It opened a channel for me, putting 80 percent of the wallet balance into it.
That means I can send in theory, but still can't receive coz of lack of inbound liquidity.
There's an app for that.
"Loop out" is what they call it. On umbrel you install "lightning terminal", and it has the option to do a loop out.
Loop-out means using your ability to pay with lightning in order to pay someone to do an on-chain transaction that gives you your money back.
I think they say this is "trustless" but :shrug:, I just trusted it anyway and wouldn't have any idea how to check if they were crooks first.
I sent 70% or so of that channel back to myself onchain that way, and then the autopilot opened a second channel.
That gives me a fairly good position in the network. Outbound and inbound liquidity about balanced, multiple connections.
It even did some routing, earning me 5 sats on day one.
The autopilot keeps some of your balance on-chain, since there will be on-chain fees to pay to close channels down and do loop-outs and stuff.
The 5 sats that I earned put me back in the zone of the autopilot have too much capacity so wanting to open channels. It opened a third tiny one that will probably become too small for the fees to close it this bull run. :eyeroll:
With the wallet finally working it was time to go try and buy Lyn Alden's book again.
I scanned the QR code on the site excited to do my first lightning transaction with it,k and only after the transaction was submitted realized I was doing an on-chain transaction anyway. Not a lightning one.
Doh.
Apparently with fees low enough it took 12 hours to confirm too.
But I'm legit with Lyn now. Turns out I needn't have checked I could pirate the book first, it is indeed DRM-free anyway so I can put it on my Remarkable even without having to pirate or break any codes.
There is much more work to be done to get Nostr able to "zap" money back and forth.
I think I have to expose LNBits to the internet somehow first? And my plan of just using a reverse ssh tunnel for that didn't work.
In short: you still gotta be really really keen and geeky to run a lightning node. Even with Umbrel and 30 years industry experince. It's hard.
Still.
Five sats a day.
In only 50 thousand years I'll have a whole bitcoin!

2024-02-16 02:14:25

You see the highlighted number "9" on the top of the peak of the price today?
That is the count of the number of days for which it has been true that the price is higher than the price four days ago.
Sort-of.
Instead of going to 10, it wraps-around to 1. Note that: 1, not even zero. No candles are zero candles. Nor tens.
Which means every candle is labelled with 1 of 9 possible digits.
The people who believe in the TD Sequential method would have you believe that the price is more likely to turn around if it's a 9 than any other number. They generally seem to count 8s and 1s as close.
You know, plus or minus one. Give or take. On the balance of probabilities. Maybe. If the moon is right and the stars align.
If the labels were instead just assigned randomly, then tops would happen on a bar which was randomly labelled "9" about one out of every nine times. One in three, give or take. If the stars align.
The TD people think you will then have a few days of pull back.
But....
I really do think that they are right on this occasion at least.
We are indeed way over-extended, there hasn't been a down-week in ages.
As a measure of it going up too much and so it should surely go down for a bit, yeah!
My main problem with the method is the wrap-around and the lack of a zero.
I like it as a measure of how extended price is: The number of days in which the price is higher/lower than the price a week ago.
But when you modulate your count by 9 you make it into a basically 1/3 random number thing.
Still. They'll be right anyway. If you are a swing trader, (I am not), short for a day or two I guess?
Also on that picture you will see that the bottom was at a red 9.
Sort of. If 2 candles later counts.
Which it will if you are a price horrocopist.
And honestly, even though it's horroscope bullshit, it would have turned your short into a long at about the right time.
[Nobody mention the time it turned around on a 5ish like you'd expect it to do about half the time also]
https://image.nostr.build/d70f5c638912f860d7d09c2769a5aa730075d3ecb788b5c28a03c7624056e7c7.png

2024-01-27 19:43:28

Does anyone here like DIY hacking programming projects? I've been programming my #pinetime smart-watch in python this month and I'm pretty pleased with the results.
https://dalliance.net/vPre2/waspos

2024-01-12 00:07:02

In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXs3maguye4 pete asks the question "Why 21 million" and Aaron does not know.
I know.
Do you know?
There are 6 ten-minute blocks in an hour.
There are 24 hours in a day.
There are 365 days in a year.
That's 210240, rounded down to 210000 blocks per cycle.
The infinite sum of those halving rewards, starting at 50 and halving every 210000 blocks: 21000000.
Even if you decide to divide each Satoshi still further, and eek out sub-satoshi subsidy, the sum will never reach 21000001.
So it's 21 million because it starts at 50, and we have ten minute blocks, plus a halving every four years.
The magic numbers picked are 50 and 4, the rest comes from the calendar and maths. It's about the actual number of blocks in the revolution and an the orbit of the planet.

2024-01-11 22:17:13

Question: How big will the blockchain be when the last satoshi is mined?

2023-12-11 23:33:10

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🤔 Seems hardly any point in it being on-chain at all then if every request to move one ends in a call to a central Tether server.

2023-12-11 19:23:51

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What gas-fees is Tether paying to update the smart-contact with a new list of banned addresses? Less than the amount of dollars cancelled I guess, but need that be true?
Is there a hack here to get enough addresses banned they have to lock up the blockchain with banning addresses?

2023-12-11 18:58:36

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So they have to update the smart-contract in order to block the addresses?
What if there were so many addresses that the smart-contract can't hold them all? Is there a limit on smart-contract size?
Or maybe the smart-contract can call out to ask the Tether server if it's okay?

2023-11-22 18:52:55

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No, you are O-P, I am reply-guy.
In this thread anyway.

2023-11-17 23:49:06

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Heh. Sounds like he was getting the ChatBot to write his answers to board questions then.

2023-11-11 12:09:09

This week I stayed up till 5am on thursday night playing with the level-editor for VR shootng rhythm game Pistol Whip.
The game gets closer to the feeling of being in an action movie than any of the other VR shooters because of the way it's all synched to the music, making it more of a choreographed dance game really.
Careful chirography and matching music is how they get those movies looking so cool too.
So the level-design is mostly about track selection really. I went with Pendulum's "Slam", because it fucking slams.
Here's a video of me playing the level I built aroud it.
https://dalliance.network/w/3WdWcesGTUMzhLxP23RzJS
You can play my level in the Remix section of the game if you want.
Last time I looked that was all filled with unfinished trash and I thought I might be the best on in there, but actually there's loads of other cool work in there now too.

2023-11-08 11:58:54

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Just write "Doing crimes" on it each time. See what happens.

2023-10-26 00:07:13

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Ain't nothing quite the same as a home-grown bitcoin, but unless you have nearly free energy you'll find it cheaper at the corner store.
Also depends how much you wanna buy. Gotta be tens of thousands of dollars to be worth the hardware outlay I'd think?

2023-10-19 22:15:20

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Not me! I'm not there, I'm here.

2023-10-13 11:05:27

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Not in any depth. Looks okay.

2023-10-12 22:43:47

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I'm glad to see groups starting to happen on Nostr.
They may mostly be about bitcoin and nostry, but the groups give a way for communities not about those things to find each other I think, so hopefully that's a good fix for the monotopic problem.

2023-10-12 22:42:18

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This is pretty interesting, the way the reddit-style groups that the users create can be ranked by either likes or zaps.
Pay to toppost! Is that a great plan? I dunno. Maybe it is? I'm not against paying artists for their work, but I never really liked karma-whoring and that was just for a highscore not even money.
I remain unconvinced that attaching money to every post is a good plan for a community.

2023-10-12 22:00:22

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Building new channels
Building my new Lightning node (Under Tor with Umbrel this time) took *way* longer than I had hoped. Blockchain download was long, and hard-drive failures were oft. In the end I had to replace hard-drives two times and the entire mini-PC once coz it just wouldn't stop overheating.
But it is finally done, just at exactly the same time as the hard-drive of my old node failed.
I have managed to move the wallet data to the new node, with only a few weeks downtime, and other than apparently one of my peers is offline now I think that's worked.
In the two years or so of the old node running it helped with a total of about 3 transactions.
So the plan is still to shut this node down and build a new one unassimilated with the old IP addresses/IDs.
I'd like to be more useful to the network with the new node than one and a half transactions a year. I don't really care about making any sats profit from it, just wanna contribute to the liquidity flow and keep the channels balanced.
But I have no idea how to open channels which might do that, or about any search systems that could find them.
Anyone got any advice?

2023-10-12 19:58:08

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I dunno what happened to Iris. It was nice for about two days, lovely and responsive with useful sidebars, and then it just turned into a single-column snort clone.
I think it was actually snort, that my browser got confused about the URLs?
Fuck knows.
Trying satellite.earth and actually this may well be better still anyway. I like the fact it's got conversation groups as well as just the microblogging.

2023-10-10 11:44:41

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And now Iris just seems to have changed itself to look exactly like Snort does. Wierdness. Wonder why and if that will fix itself? Confusing.

2023-10-10 10:41:36

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Thing is, the other social networks also have plebs who don't want fame. But you never see their posts, because the algorithms only show you the preening showoffs. It's not that every person wants that, its that the algos only show you the people who want that.

2023-10-07 22:22:49

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There's a fair chance that Hamas made quite a lot of money trading shitcoins on Binance.
Also a fair chance they held to long and lost it all, you never really know.
That's the thing about the money-for-enemies. A money your enemies can use is a more useful money for both of you, but it does mean your enemies can use it.

2023-10-07 21:53:02

Is World War Three bullish 🐮 or bearish 🐻 ?

2023-10-02 16:48:37

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I tried to buy it on Kindle but i came with DRM, and apparently all books since January you can't break that DRM any more, so I couldn't read it on my Remarkable, so I refunded it.
Can I assume this saif version is free of any DRM?

2023-09-30 02:07:58

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But yeah, Snort is bad now. I'm fed up with Snort.
This does seem better already.

2023-09-30 02:06:29

Snort started getting weird about asking for a PIN I didn't want to give, and it was easier to look and see if there are simply better clients not asking such annoying questions so I asked the chat-bots.
Perplexity AI tells me that iris dot to might be good.
This does seem pretty nice as it goes.
Do you know I made a bitcoin cartoon in VR?
If this embeds from PeerTube then Iris is my new client now and I love Nostr portability quite a lot more:
https://dalliance.network/w/o1nkCuZwvH3UiG1Q868dmd
There's a lot hanging on this: I make maybe one post a month to Nostr so it's all up for grabs.
Does anyone see it?
I think it will fail to embed, and also that almost nobody will actually follow the link either.

2023-09-04 15:58:05

Happy MayDay to all the Americans out there. Don't let international consensus stop you celebrating four months late, you do you!
Up the workers!

2023-08-29 11:50:47

Episode 11 of my "Observers" cartoon in which the aliens discover a planet where the people squabble while their planet is on fire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0503ItLOUfc

2023-08-24 23:19:31

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Also not actually convinced that adding a payment channel to the network is that great an idea TBH.
People do ridiculous stupid pointless things for karma even then they're just worthless internet points.
I'm glad experiments are happening, but I don't expect it to enhance the conversation.

2023-08-24 23:16:50

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I'm trying to rebuild my lightning node but I think maybe the new hardware is faulty, it keeps stopping. Current error is "Panic before malloc heap initialized" and I have no idea what to do with that really.
It persists after turning it off and on again.
I think the hard-drive is screwed coz of constant mid-write freezing due to overheating?
Probably needs a CPU less prone to overheating. Took fucking months to download the blockchain again over TOR.
Zap was connected to my old wallet then Zap went and became something else that won't set up properly.
I'm between wallets I guess.

2023-08-24 23:07:43

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"Don't sell at all", anywhere is the obvious answer I guess ;)

2023-08-24 23:07:13

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This is a question that hadn't occurred to me till you said that: Where will Blackrock buy their bitcoin?
They aren't going to set up an exchange presumably, so it's like, just buying it on Coinbase? Or will they spread it around the other markets too?
If I'm selling on Coinbase then presumably I can't say "Only not if it's Blackrock what wants to buy", so that'd mean you're saying don't sell on Coinbase at all?

2023-08-21 21:21:09

I was out at a friend's place this weekend. They've got a tiny bit of land. Growing their own food, planting an orchard, solar panels to go mostly off-grid.
They're selling some power back to the grid at times, but seemed dismissive as though it wasn't really enough cash to be worth doing. And I also suspect it's more accounting-trick than actual-power-distribution that means they can turn off a gas boiler or anything.
When I wondered about running a bitcoin miner instead, they looked fairly offended. These green folks can have a visceral reaction to Bitcoin's energy consumption.
Didn't get into it.
But really, if you hate Bitcoin's computing power being run from oil-burning generators: best thing you can do is take the free wasted solar energy you already have and out-bid the oil-burners in the hashing market.
The oil-burners will have to stop burning the oil if they can't sell profitably, and if everyone else was mining with their excess solar they wouldn't stand a chance with their expensive oil.
And if you want Bitcoin's price to go down, so it can't justify so much hash-rate, best thing to do is get some of the coins and sell them to make the price go down.
I dunno the actual amount of stranded-power they have so dunno what the economics would be really.
Looks like you'd need about 3000 watts to run the machine, and if the power is stranded and so otherwise-wasted or free, then it will be profitable to run it whenever the power is there.
Roughly two grand or so for the hardware to get about 10 dollars a day in current prices.
You'd pay for the miner in about about ten months then be earning 10 dollars a day after that.
Or more. Or less. Depending what the price does.
Also you'd have to reduce that by all the time you have to turn it off coz it's dark or you need the power for the washing machine and lights and kettle or whatever. It may only be viable in summer.
But every satoshi you earn and sell lowers the price, and reduces the proportion of Bitcoin which is mined by carbon-burning.

2023-07-01 13:35:36

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Yesterday:
* Reddit ends free API access.
* Twitter turns off anonymous reading.
* Youtube is talking about banning ad-blocking users.
The tech industry was living on cheep money and low interest rates, and now they're all afraid to let their precious content get used for AI training.
The walls are going up, the lawful corporate web is collapsing in on itself.

2023-06-30 11:46:14

Imagine if you started a blog somewhere and were posting to it for years, gathering an audience, expressing your ideas.
And then one day the service provider just locked your blog behind a login-wall, removing your blog from the digital commons and enclosing is as part of their digital capital.
That'd really suck wouldn't it?
#twitter

2023-06-15 21:26:00

And it's breakout day for the pound, recovering fully from the trusterfuck, within fivepence of recovering to the levels it was at on Brexit day.
I guess buyers like the high interest rates, and don't care about the massive crushing levels of debt?
Will it make it another 20% to reach pre-referendum levels?
Is Sunak and Hunt really the end of economic mismanagement?
https://void.cat/d/WFkDmo4wPR88sJjQ2kGqfm.webp

2023-04-22 12:48:04

My new #bitcoin node finally reached 100% synced overnight. It's taken six months and one hard-drive replacement to get synched.
The blocks are too big!
Need to set up Lightning next. My old node helped route like 1 transaction per year. Need to somehow figure out better places to make channels to in order to build a more useful node in the network.
Dunno how to do that currently. Anyone got any advice?