it's a little confusing, the editor thinks you're linking a territory when you type the opening tilde

it really depends how long your talk or interview is going to be.

if you have the time, I recommend including a bit of general sociological/archaeological history^[1]; how human societies got from the point where outstanding debts and favors were simply remembered and passed on by word-of-mouth, through the emergence of various technologies [monetization of jewelry, written records, eventually currency that functioned only as such]. I think it's an important perspective when introducing Bitcoin, otherwise the problem of coordinating all of humanity with one financial technology seems a little contrived.

covering this in any significant level of detail takes time, so if you're pressed maybe at least mention that there is this background and you don't have time to go into detail. The most important point is how inflation of modern currencies dilutes the poor into wage-slavery, making the modern world with its cognitive dissonance in some ways bleaker than the less "enlightened" civilizations that preceded it.

1. I always liked Nick Szabo's blog post on this topic, and the Nakamoto Institute site has a copy of it: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/shelling-out/ ↩

... want them to be kind and considerate. Does that clear this up?

honestly, only for me thinking about my own personal use of the site.

once I begin imagining even something as "common good" as a script for archiving "best of" posts and comments, I run up against the following problem: all the socioeconomic machinery that you and your community are innovating is irrelevant, from the perspective of a client without even the occasional temptation to comment anonymously.

right now, I'm guessing that robots either ignore the site completely, or crawl it without much consideration for anything beyond HTTP errors and IP bans, which is a sad state of affairs. it should be possible to reach a better compromise.

few

... reasons? sculptors? chips of marble that do not resemble an elephant?

I'm beyond lost.

I hope I'm not critically late in posting this comment, as I was distracted by various... chores and verbiage.

a sane procedure for a dev maintaining his apps?

Are you interested in my rambling halfbaked opinions?

I warn you, and anyone else who might jump on this part of the already bloated conversation, that you're likely to continue commenting as you often do on my comments. also, it's been a long time since anyone considered me "maintainer" of any "apps"; my method boils down to building tools for my own use, and using them to service my clients.

firstly, thanks for expressing your bafflement!

what your original post was asking

sparking conversation, with the poll options in case someone reads, has an opinion, and doesn't wish to waste verbal entropy [let alone CCs] in comments

sounds like more of a ~devs question though

yeah it's the most likely crossposting target; however, my concern is with SN specifically, not some born-yesterday "what's a robots file good for" chitchat

some people are actively anti-crawlers, which I think is a bit of an extreme stance, although they prefer that folks who wish to deploy spiders literally shake hands and reach agreement, written or otherwise, rather than releasing them across the whirled wild web and hoping for good faith and mutually-profitable results. "devs" could have all sorts of opinions, and I'm interested specifically in how people think this website should behave when visited by crawlers.

an important note, the following are the only information I have personally reviewed about the site's behavior towards crawlers:

1. your lack of a proper /robots.txt [cute gif! sad code...]
2. Archive.today's /wip/ dynamic tracing monitor
3. Wayback Machine's /save/ summary resource listing

most importantly, I've not actually read ~200Ksloc of the site's code, despite actually cloning the repo and telling myself several times that doing so would be a better use of my electricity bill than running a lightning node.

for better or for worse, it's been running for so long that the quoted tweeter is already legally deceased; any words of your own worth spending your precious credits on?

get worm out

It starts to bait engagement in the saloon, or it gets the mute?

thanks; archived

May 27, 2025

Block, Inc. today announced it will launch bitcoin payments on Square, marking a significant milestone in making bitcoin more accessible and usable. Bitcoin payments on Square will be showcased at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas from May 27-29, where attendees can experience this new feature firsthand at the BTC Inc. merchandise store. By leveraging the Lightning Network, the Square Point of Sale app enables merchants to accept bitcoin payments directly through their Square hardware for near-instantaneous, low-cost transactions. The roll out is anticipated to begin in the second half of 2025 and is expected to reach all eligible Square sellers in 2026, subject to applicable regulatory approvals.
Square’s new, native Bitcoin For Businesses offering will build upon its Bitcoin Conversions feature launched in 2024, which allows qualified merchants to automatically convert a portion of their daily sales into bitcoin. Together, these bitcoin offerings will create a seamless experience for both merchants and customers, helping bitcoin to fulfil its original vision as a true peer-to-peer payment system, as outlined in the bitcoin whitepaper.
“Block has long been a champion of bitcoin, focused on making it more accessible and usable in our everyday lives,” said Miles Suter, Bitcoin Product Lead at Block. “Rolling out a native bitcoin experience to millions of sellers brings us one step closer to that goal. When a coffee shop or retail store can accept bitcoin through Square, small businesses get paid faster, and get to keep more of their revenue. This is about economic empowerment for merchants who like to have options when it comes to accepting payments.”
For customers, paying with bitcoin is as simple as scanning a QR code at checkout. The Lightning Network enables near-instant settlement, while Square’s integration handles all the complexity behind the scenes, including real-time exchange rate calculations and confirmation notifications.
“We believe in an open, decentralized, fair, fast, and low-cost money system for everyone, and that’s exactly what we want to bring to Square sellers,” added Suter.
Bitcoin payments on Square will be the latest addition to Block’s growing bitcoin ecosystem, which includes Cash App’s bitcoin buy, sell, and transfer capabilities; Bitkey, a self-custody bitcoin wallet; Proto, a suite of bitcoin mining products and services; and Spiral, which builds and funds open-source projects that advance the use of bitcoin as a tool for economic empowerment.
Block is also advancing global access to bitcoin through Bitkey, a self-custody bitcoin wallet launched in March 2024. Starting in May, Bitkey will roll out new privacy and security features to further strengthen user control and protection. Designed to eliminate the complexity of traditional seed phrases, Bitkey uses a built-in, multi-signature security and recovery system that offers users full control and simple recovery options. It’s the only hardware wallet that provides inheritance as a recovery feature to all users, helping people ensure that if they are unable to move their funds their beneficiaries are able to initiate a recovery process. Bitkey was built to make self-custody intuitive, secure, and accessible for people around the world.
In addition, Block is building Proto, bitcoin mining products and services that aim to decentralize mining by increasing access to tools for builders, regardless of size or location.

It's not obvious to me why they mention "confirmation notifications", plural; let's hope for a satisfying story from @siggy47 about how they've tackled the UX chanllenges...

do you need to get muted?

you might be working out policies for managing your login from a hotseat... I dunno, your problems are yours, and you even pay the Sybil fee!

which "new block thing" ?

you've got dozens of paragraphs of argument, I'm not reading all of it.

if you're familiar with both terms than you probably are confident in your usage.

isn't the thing about bitcoin that it is portable. [...]

ok, this is beyond typos; you're using the wrong word, entirely.

please read about fungibility, or simply take my word for it: "portability" is understandable in context, however, the fundamental property to which you refer is most accurately termed fungibility.

thanks; that suggests that maybe he's compartmentalising the vibecoding to the language with which he's less familiar.

I had begun skimming the sources before I reviewed the commit message history, and didn't find any mention of vibecoding in the comments of e.g. util.c, which he might even just be pasting from well-tested reference libraries.

please list your evidence for calling it "vibe coding"?

here we go:

Commit: 93a7256

Merge branch 'antigravity'
This is Google Antigravity fixing up my visualization tool (which was
also generated with help from google, but of the normal kind).

It mostly went smoothly, although I had to figure out what the problem
...

I'm not gonna waste the remainder of my SN editing window on tweaking this formatting. DYOR etc

my original comment:

all I see so far:

AboutAbout

Random digital audio effects

DocumentationDocumentation

the README and LICENSE were added together, in the latest commit with a comment that actually reads like Linus

SourcesSources

nothing obviously vibe-coding-related in the filenames

Is there some fingerprint or "code smell" that you recognize, from your familiarity with vibe coding?

remember, territory names are quite possibly the most important point on the "slippery slope" of getting someone from outside of SN to actually visit; they might have heard of the website a few times, although the next thing in the link is the territory name.

probably should have cross-posted to ~devs and maybe even ~Design ; after all, the "robots file" is deliberately also human-readable... I often read the robots file before wandering through sites because so many these days have a terrible navigation labyrinth.

you spent one credit responding, although you probably have enough credits to do what I was going to propose while watching the edit countdown:

vote an approximately equal number of times on each option, e.g. once, if you hadn't already responded...

then, I like you because you have provided some minimal pseudonimity padding on the options, you like me because I have helped the site boost activity, devs like us both because an interesting conversation has begun, and voters afraid of having their votes correlated with comments are able to begin rationally coping with unreasonable paranoia.

unfortunately, you don't care whether I like you, I care too much about your opinions, and the devs probably wish I'd buy territory rather than worry about protocol engineering.

please consider spending [at least?] one of the zapped credits on voting for the response code[s] that you consider most appropriate, unless you honestly have no strong opinion.

I realise you might not have any relevant experience [e.g. reading raw logs of edge servers] and thus don't expect any vote from you; if you do have some strong opinion that isn't captured by the few options that I provided, please comment...

In case you want the original 999 [ archive.md/#noCap ] link, that got slightly ambiguated by the capslocking:

https://archive.md/pPbBI shows that LinkedIn returned a 999 response code.