P2P is how people get in and out

Does this mean that most people first get bitcoin from another individual rather than buying it from some sort of exchange?

Ecash wallets have worked well for me as easy onboarding. But the new bark wallets (Noah, shhark) also look like easy ways to onboard newbies.

I like the timeline view!

I have two sisters, both in their mid-thirties now. No children. Not likely they are going to have children.

When I think about the difference between myself and them, it's that I found a partner much earlier than they did (more than ten years?)

Anecdotally, I remember my sisters talking about wanting to have their hearts broken (as a sort of fantasy) and that they didn't want to settle down until they had experienced some tragic, romantic relationship.

Seems like there may have been some sort of Chesterton fence in traditional culture that made clear divisions between mens and womens roles and that put up weird taboos around sex.

My understanding of a peg-out transaction is that the L-BTC actually gets burned, whereas in a swap, the L-BTC is traded to another party in exchange for BTC or sats on lightning.

Woah. I did not expect them to just come up with 600 BTC

I'm curious what are the circumstances or what is the evidence under which you feel that betting with probability aligns more with running rbitcoin as your main node than with Core?

There is an interesting quality of bitcoin node software in that in order to get to the current chaintip, it has to go through 18 years of transactions perfectly. So, to some extent it comes with a track record out of the box.

But, the current chain is a known quantity and getting a node to reach the current chain tip is not the same exercise as maintaining the same chaintip from this point forward.

It's the kind of thing where not only do I want to see it function successfully for a couple of years, but I also want it to function with lots of users.

Not to put words in Rearden's mouth, but it seems like he has some belief that AI-written projects will shortly be more secure than projects with predominantly human written code.

Currently, my only way to evaluate any software I use is vibe-review or some sort of web-of-trust evaluation (do people I trust also use this software). If I think that vibe-review contributes to the security, don't I have to extend the same belief to vibe-code?

I don't buy such a viewpoint, and I stubbornly insist on relying on my web of trust + vibe review approach to software, but I'm trying to figure out how I should evaluate all the vibecoded stuff that comes across my radar.

I'd vibe my own

Would you use a vibe-coded node even if you were the vibe-coder? In my ignorance, I assume that vibing something as complicated as a node will result in lots of weirdly-shaped corners around which I cannot necessarily see -> edge cases where my node will not implement the exact same block validation rules as other nodes.

Howdy!

Happy birthday!

I'm about halfway through Neptune's Brood #1569737 and really enjoying it.

This was rearden's response to Atack:

source

In my limited understanding, Core's utxoset design results in a lot of linear processes, whereas the libbitcoin model (on which Rearden based this I think) is much more easily parallelized.

I think when downloading blocks, you can check all sorts of things before you check the truly linear thing (do these inputs exist and have they been spent before). Core doesn't necessarily do all the optimization in can here because it is based on the design of Satoshi's original client.

Helpful to think about it from a "what problem is this solving?" POV. I suspect Rearden would argue that rbitcoin, having a different architecture than Core, solves some IBD problem? For instance, let's imagine it does IBD faster. I think I'm still leary of an solely AI-written project.

In France, the day of reckoning is here and now.

Well, this sure sounds grim...and more importantly consequential. I wonder if it is the case, though? It seems like these riots will fade just like the covid riots faded and governments will get back to more of the same: spend more, tax more, extract more.

Some actual reckoning is probably what is most needed: governments being forced to deal with their deficits and the choices they keep making to spend more money rather than become more efficient.

I don't believe that we will ever see reform. These things can go on for a painfully long time and there is always some new catastrophe in the wings on which politicians can blame any unpleasant numbers.

Over the last 12 months, American Express has paid out 1.07% of purchase volume in rewards, up from 0.80% ten years ago. Other card issuers have seen similar reward inflation. Capital One paid out 1.29% of purchase volume in 2022, up from 0.80% in 2013. And Discover paid out 1.43%, up from 0.94%.

If competition is able to drive this up, presumably even the ignorant, bad-at-optimizing consumers will benefit from the marginal, highly optimizing users who are jumping to the best points plans.

But it would be much better if we could transfer points and trade them on an open market. Why isnt there some crypto bro trying to put credit card points on the blockchain?

I still need to send you the sats for this!

I sold 4, and there was a lot of interest! I had a couple people who inquired about long-term subscriptions, and I told them that you do these, but we couldn't figure out how to sign up. I can pass their names along to you.

I really enjoy these projects you do. I still haven't actually tried to mimic one of them with my kids, but one of these days, I'm going to get around to doing it (or my kids will get old enough that they can just do it on their own...)

Your Raspberrarium was definitely inspiring!