I certainly will not be stopped by an IT outage at the bank / payment processor or worse transaction censorship aka CDBC in the future. Further if I want to get rid of something then it is plastic. Sats and cash only.

It seems that there is some delay to review and publish new suggested services e.g https://lnvpn.net. And a nostr pub key to follow is missing as well.

There is an adapted PR https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/32406 that deprecates but not removes the option.

Because of the fixed supply of Bitcoin we can not fix the scales at a convenient level. Sooner or later a sat will be worth more than a cent. What will you do then? Redefine again? Therefore redefining is a futile endeavor.

42, original value, current default in Knots

DATUM is also running with Bitcoin Core, though Bitcoin Knots is recommended: https://github.com/OCEAN-xyz/datum_gateway?tab=readme-ov-file#datum-gateway

Bitcoin Knots in the default configuration requires quite more resources to run.

Why can you take part in a survey or zap paying the invoice externally but not reply to a post? In this case there is only the option "reply free". That is somehow inconsistent.

Yes, you need the full thing for running electrum etc.

DATUM (v0.2.2beta) used to work with Core as well.

Does someone know if it is possible to configure Bitcoin Knots like Bitcoin Core in terms of resource usage and if yes how? It seems that the memory consumption of Knots is about four times higher than that of core in in this default configuration. On older hardware that may be an issue.

The wallet attaching to LND requires macaroons.

Would a solution based on keysend not be easier?

I agree The Mandibles is not playing in the top league of dystopian novels, but it still contains some nice ideas as well.

I liked the fact that in the end of the novel the border to Nevada was rather a propaganda line and not a death zone. Don't trust, verify. Do not believe the lie and do the work and verify for yourself if you can escape the prison land.

I guess from the dystopian novels describing the economic breakdown of a society Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand does the best job.

However you can observe threads from all the mentioned books in this article in world today: 1984 (surveillance), Brave New World (escapism), Fahrenheit 451 (censorship) etc.

I guess that open sourcing interfaces and data exchange formats will reduce vendor locking.

Further it may demonstrate incompetence (and corruption) within their software suppliers.

I just finished Crux by Ramez Naam.

I wonder how the endgame will look like here: Are the messenger app developers just pulling out of the EU as some bitcoin wallet developers did from the US recently? And everyone that still wants to use those apps will have to install them from source. In this case the minority that cares about privacy will opt out and the majority that doesn't care will use the backdoored apps anyway.

Bitcoin Development Philosophy by Kalle Rosenbaum

Home office is the norm now. No more daily commuting.

With that also eating habits improved a lot (low carb/carnivore).

Paying with my own LND node has become quite reliable. In 2024 I didn't have any payment failures anymore with amounts up to 300k.

In the field I had one payment delay with Phoenix on a Bitcoin event. I guess the channels got unbalanced when suddenly a lot of payments happened to one particular node.

I guess that with a higher Bitcoin price a lot of older channels are now big enough to handle these medium sized payments.

I paid once with lightning in a restaurant in Lugano last fall. The waiter exactly knew what to do and the payment went smoothly.