Last Notes
Fifteen minutes to the CM open call (North America-friendly time)!
https://centurymetadata.org/chats/
Had a delightful chat last week with Craig Raw. He is, obviously, a proponent of open protocols. It's something I assumed, but I also assumed nobody else would want to run this service! Still, building independence in from the start is important.
The second key takeaway is that this should be an Electrum protocol extension! That makes life easier for users, (no extra dialog to choose a Century Metadata server) and for wallet devs, who already use the Electrum protocol.
So I read the Electrum protocol spec. It's restricted JSON-RPC (no \n, except at end). Fairly simple, easy to extend. Looks looks a good fit...
Three hours to the CM open call (Europe-friendly time)!
https://centurymetadata.org/chats/
Fifteen minutes to the CM open call (North America-friendly time)!
https://centurymetadata.org/chats/
Had a delightful chat last week with Craig Raw. He is, obviously, a proponent of open protocols. It's something I assumed, but I also assumed nobody else would want to run this service! Still, building independence in from the start is important.
The second key takeaway is that this should be an Electrum protocol extension! That makes life easier for users, (no extra dialog to choose a Century Metadata server) and for wallet devs, who already use the Electrum protocol.
So I read the Electrum protocol spec. It's restricted JSON-RPC (no \n, except at end). Fairly simple, easy to extend. Looks looks a good fit...
Wild huh? Let's be friends.
Apparently the idea that we should be our best online, not our worst, is radically outside the mainstream?
Three hours to the CM open call (Europe-friendly time)!
https://centurymetadata.org/chats/
As a Free Software developer, I've followed expansion of IP law quite closely. "Home taping is killing music", et. al.
The Internet turned a monopoly on duplication into a monopoly on distribution. DMCA created a ban on white-market copying assistance. The trend was all one-way: copying was harder, monopolies ossified and were further normalized.
Then the AI train drove through and ignored copyright. And, so far, it's ok. Nobody is going to shut them down, and they're going to get better at copycatting. So now there's actual competition to the monopolies.
Should be fun!
This was fun! Good chat about finer grained control and incentives to mirror....
#nevent1q…ewts
Century Metadata is a product for Bitcoiners, because they're the only ones who have motivation to maintain their secret key. That makes this whole "public service" data model feasible: you encrypt, so we don't have to keep any secrets. We just have to make your data available.
Precision isn't appreciated any more! Brink's form was harder than I thought...
https://npub1jw5z46xmasx06rephwy60rdk5myn4cvnngc29cejmc7vgk7el0xsw7csux.blossom.band/198f01fa5094cf152559ba4dc916a3d7d3ba1251033581196f6a35978079ccfc.jpg
Not kernel, but he was Debian Project Leader at one time!
Sometimes I forget there are old pictures of me on the internet...
https://lwn.net/Articles/66669/
At #OsloFF several people asked when Shit Bitcoiners Say would be back, so let me put it on the record: it's hibernating during the bear market.
The account serves me as a balance, to keep things grounded. It's not there to kick people when they're down, it's to serve as a reality check. When Bitcoin is a grind it should be offering free hugs or something.
When people are extrapolating to infinity and you feel the urge to research low-gravity espresso machines for your inevitable
Bitcoin moon-citadel: I'll be back!
4 hours before you can hear this live :)
#nevent1q…pw5d
Hey @nprofile…6z2t should I be pitching @nprofile…g954 to OpenSats?
More like "Bitcoin ALREADY HAS cured cancer, you just don't know about it yet!!!!"
I'm back wearing a Pebble watch! I loved the original, and wanted to support the reboot. Let's see how we go after a month...
This is my new Century Metadata account. I'll try to remember to post CM stuff there, not here!
#note1fx9…kelx
I don't understand why @nprofile…jp2l, @nprofile…6z2t and @nprofile…64cf hate each other, and at this point I'm afraid to ask...
This is really touching!
I loved working on #bitcoinlightning and #CLN over the years, and I leave both in excellent hands. Lightning is going to be so much more than it is now...
#nevent1q…f93p
Ah, so if I understand the meme correctly: price down means girlfriends are a scarce resource?
I think it's the logical, conservative approach. I wouldn't be upset with a wholesale replacement, but I would be dissatisfied if we didn't have a fair comparison.
TBH, I don't know what "championing" would look like. I'm not going to hand-to-hand combat with anyone who disagrees! Nor am I going to spend all my time on it. If enough skilled people think it's the way forward, they will make it happen.
Official Bitcoin Twitter Self-Worth Chart
$70k: your hairline recedes.
$60k: gangrene develops.
$50k: you lose the ability to make coherent sentences, and all you can say to your panicked loved ones is "Bitcoin is digital energy".
$150k: erectile dysfunction vanishes.
$250k: your wife returns with the kids, saying she made a terrible mistake.
$500k: your long-dead father rises from the grave, tells you that he was wrong and you were right, and he's proud of you.
Starting the long walk to Vienna!
That's telling it strait!
Several people have asked about the future of CLN without me at the helm. It's a worthy question, but not one I'm concerned about.
One of my key responsibilities at Blockstream was to build up a team to support CLN development and usage. I've done that, and there's no critical dependency on me any more. I expect new developments to slow for a year while the team fills gaps, but users probably won't notice, because CLN is entering a phase of refinement, not radical change.
Most of the exciting change happens one layer up now: plugins are really coming into their own, and daywalker90 has plans to rewrite reckless as a "one stop shop" plugin manager, which should really boost the ecosystem. Its telling that my last two big efforts in CLN have been in plugins: payer proofs and repeatpay are both in plugins (coming in 26.09!).
I also have 2400 branches in my git tree; I'll have scripts and an LLM churn through them all looking for the unfinished/unmerged ones to decide how many are worth exposing to the world for others to finish.
Software is never finished, but this is not my first time handing over major FOSS projects I've founded: I consider that doing that well is a key part of maintenance.
My team is ready, and they will continue to make me proud!
The only on-chain impact I'm considering is OpenTimestamps, TBH. Building a long-term venture on the assumption that blockspace will be cheap seems unwise...
So I'm leaving Blockstream at the end of the month, to try to start up Century Metadata. A non -profit to store and serve a small amount of encrypted data for 100 years, for a small one -time payment. Lots of fun problems in doing this, only half of then technical.
I'll be talking about it at BTC++ in Vienna, and I'll also be attending the Oslo Freedom Forum just afterwards.
The main benefit of LLMs is that you don't need to apologize or justify when you clean up their mediocre code. It's a bit like having an insomniac coding intern who really likes to type.
BOLT 12 can be in different currencies for this reason.
#nevent1q…ledg
But now I don't even have to care!
https://npub179e9tp4yqtqx4myp35283fz64gxuzmr6n3yxnktux5pnd5t03eps0elz4s.blossom.band/692a425b55bcf45fefae7ef471794f02ed3f78ada6fe961e3cb283d9e54e7f1a.jpg
I've been thinking about taking profits from a Sztorc Fork.
I wouldn't sell someone a lemon face-to-face, even with full disclosure. Sure, they're adults, but the world is a better place when we care for each other: that is not who I want to be. Do not enable bad things.
The anonymity of the marketplace does not absolve this.
So, no. I will not encourage it, talk about it, or handle it. And I'll sleep great.
Guess in getting up for 5:30am then.
#nevent1q…0790
Don't support things you don't want to see more of.
It's a threat. It's just not one yet.
I've been through three VR waves. Same thing: there's a seed of truth there, just the tech isn't ready.
Celebration time!
https://npub179e9tp4yqtqx4myp35283fz64gxuzmr6n3yxnktux5pnd5t03eps0elz4s.blossom.band/73d0cfb3257f35410fdb7874c1e159abd265830434668fe14a9b73acbe6902d1.jpg
So, we're debating paying kids pocket money in sats. Since we're talking a few dollars a week, I'm thinking ecash, using https://cashu.centurymetadata.org/
But what client? They have Android devices...
https://youtu.be/iDzV_jESwGA
Indeed.
#CLN We're finally deprecating pay (in favor of xpay) in the next release: Greenlight has conclusively demonstrated that it's more effective across the board. That begins the 12 month window to removal.
We've long had `xpay-as-pay` for xpay to take over pay commands. Flipping that to default true and running the tests has been eye-opening.
Given our commitment to not breaking users, I'm re-learning things about pay. For example, if you try to pay the same invoice twice, pay "succeeds", whereas xpay says you've already paid. So when acting as pay, xpay needs to do that too.
Mostly, the xpay error messages are much more informative and readable. But in a couple of cases they didn't use the correct error *code* (eg. There's a specific one for "route too expensive") so that's fixed.
After this, I'll get back to my new "repeatpay" command and plug-in, which is a higher-level way to deal with recurring offers (an experimental option for now).
I expect Bitcoin to get a quantum scare every ten to twenty years, FWIW.
I wish! No, it rolls back the database, deletes the gossip store if the format has changed, and checks of you've used any new features which would prevent downgrade.
That's why we have a downgrade tool now, too.
Seems like I should try to wrangle timezones enough to join your podcast sometime!
We pushed it a bit on this one: There are some clients who may have trouble staying connected to you: LNDK nodes and some people who are running an older git version of LND.
You can set message-padding=false if this happens.
Many people! I would certainly put sats towards such an effort. The winning tx could collect them all at once.
The idea of an activation challenge is interesting. But my preferred form would be an on-chain reward. A tx which uses its first input's txid to generate the puzzle NUMS, so you can't just copy it. Not sure how to generate such a challenge, maybe GSR, OP_TX plus cleverness...
This would start a month-long (4032 block) countdown to disabling vulnerable spend paths, as a final shot across the bow.
Weekly summary: I heard Iran is going to use Quantum Black is going to crash Bitcoin!
There's a lot of repetitive work which needs to be done, and I'm happy to outsource that.
Claude is really happy to write more code. This can be a super-power! But it can also mean repetition, nasty workarounds, and unreviewable code :(
For the BOLT12 payer proofs, I asked it to take my implementation, produce test vectors then compare against Vincenzo's LDK implementation. There was a bug in the spec around field ordering which this found, and it proceeded to fix my code, adding another complex pass to reorder the fields. Instead I asked it to change the Rust code, and indeed it was much simpler there too.
If I hadn't caught this, we would and been stuck with a very weird spec and a lot of gratuitous code in every codebase.
So now I need to start emphasizing the joy of simplicity, I guess.
To be clear, you're thinking of deriving a second (hardened) key, for which a signature is checked in tapscript, assuming that the keypath spends will eventually get disabled? To do that we need a BIP32 path standard, and get this advice into BIP-0341 instead of the current advice on unspendable script path selection, then get wallets to implement it.
Things which actually use tapscripts need to decide whether they need to do this (is the loss of keypath spend fatal, or merely inconvenient?). This also needs a clear warning: that you should anticipate loss of the keyspend path...