I've got a kid who's going to have to start thinking about a direction in life over the next few years. I'm not very confident in what advice to give, though I do think fields of study that offer practical training for an in demand profession are always en vogue. I'm not surprised to see CS, engineering, or nursing at the top of the list of least-regretted majors, but those tend to benefit from fairly specific personality types, and even then the industries stand to see significant disruption in the next decade.

Part of university should be about nurturing your own natural curiosity and exploring your interests. But ignoring the practical reality of the prospects of a good paying job in that pression is daft, especially with the ever increasing tuition rates. I hope he's able to settle on something like one of these few fields that satisfies his personal interests, offers a creative outlet and plenty of opportunity. The prospect of choosing a career on the first try that perfectly satisfies one's ikigai is daunting, especially when the stakes are so high. His personality is different enough from my own that I wonder if he might be happier with an entrepreneurial endeavor rather than something like engineering/CS. If so, I'll try to encourage that, but it's certainly a path that could likewise lead to regret. It's certainly an interesting time to be facing this decision and finding a place in the world.

I'm not sure raising the outbound fee of that channel would prevent any of this from happening. It sounds like the node operator should have set fees higher to cover the actual cost of draining their channels' liquidity.

One strategy is to open up large enough (and probably fewer) channels and set the fees such that if they're entirely depleted, opening and closing costs will be recouped. If the channel is depleted, it's done it's job, just open another.

Another is to dynamically adjust fees such that as liquidity becomes more scare in a channel, the fee rate (ppm) goes up. This naturally balances supply and demand. There are many plugins or node managers that will do this in an automated fashion, i.e. CLBoss.

There does seem to be a general equilibrium problem, where you can find the stables effective fees for your channels only to gain a peer (or even just liquidity with an existing peer) who has much greater demand for outbound liquidity and then your channels get saturated/depleted. Again, I think the only viable solutions are to completely automate channel fee management, or to set fees very conservatively.

I read a critique of these sorts of figures that suggested the conclusions are generally wildly out of line due to the wording and nature of the surveys conducted. Basically, people like me that keep just enough money in their bank account to pay off a credit card statement and mortgage every month would be categorized as "paycheck-to-paycheck." Hint to the headline writers: my savings are not held in a bank account.

Yeah, their hashrate measurement is a moving average over several days. I'm sure there's randomness/noise when looking at the hourly data, but maintaining 1ZH for even half a day impresses me regardless.

One can dream, right? I need to complete the set. =D

I'm contributing! (with 1.2Th)

Elder millennial and I feel like most of these were still pretty common in my youth. My grandparents still had a rotary phone, which I recall being a pain in the ass to use, and I used my mom's electronic typewriter a few times - IBM selectric maybe? It was cool because it had a memory and you could backspace a time or two before it had even printed the actual character. 0 points for me.

There are many ways to make fantastic wealth if you're morally uninhibited. I think people like Shkreli tend to get rewarded in an outsized fashion by the economic system and market of the US. Personally, I wouldn't be able to stomach capturing a market to take advantage of desperate people. I'm grateful that a saving technology exists where I don't have to passively support such behavior as with stocks and index etfs.

There's a museum in NYC called spyscape. They have you play a series of personal assessment games to evaluate different metrics - one of them was your risk tolerance. In this game you have four or five chances to inflate a balloon, each of which can randomly pop, with a goal is to maximize the total air inflated. My instinct was to inflate the first balloon all the way to distruction, because otherwise you have zero information to know when you should stop. The second balloon I also inflated a bit recklessly, but stopped around the failure level of the first, though maybe slightly higher. The third popped at a relatively lower level, and so I played the last two slightly more conservatively.

I thought it was a fascinating test, and there must be an optimal strategy, but I had trouble rationalizing/verbalizing my approach. Anyway, it's nice to see the real world analog to this problem and that the optimal strategy can be rationalized with math!

I just want to know if the joy-cons will use hall effect sensors or if they'll develop drift after 3 months like the current ones. I've lost track of how many times I've repaired/replaced these on my son's switch.

Just giving you more to look forward to once you cross this hurdle =D. Sounds like a bug with Zeus as there doesn't seem to be any protocol related issue here (well, the only other thing is to make sure your channel to olympus is active, but that should be the case.)

Do you have inbound liquidity on them in excess of the invoice amount? There's a channel reserve to factor in as well. I assume the olympus node supports the option_route_blinding feature (bits 24/25)? (If it's node id 031b301307574bbe9b9ac7b79cbe1700e31e544513eae0b5d7497483083f99e581 it looks like it's supported.)

Blinded paths are really hard to debug, but usually the difficulty is in diagnosing payment failure with no error information, not in adding a blinded path to the invoice.

Lol, yeah, he got really anti-bitcoin! I tried to argue it's merits a time or two. I noticed there were a few other forum members who were also bitcoiners, but it turns out smart people don't necessarily have to be open-minded. Actually, I think this experience perfectly encapsulates Jesse Myers' Why the Yuppie Elite Dismiss Bitcoin. I didn't take offense, some people just aren't ready to be open minded or put in the time. Their loss!

Anyway, I think the overall concept still has merit, and you can easily swap out index ETFs for self-custodied bitcoin to achieve the same results faster. Still, it mostly comes down to discipline, shunning a couple societal norms, and getting real analytical with your expenses. I think surrounding yourself with others attempting those things is useful if you want to take it seriously. Even if it's just by hanging out in the forums on occasion.

I think most people - in the US at least - spend a lot more than they need to. Whether it's ridiculous homes, living in a HCOL area, $80k trucks for a basic commute, holidays or constant dining out. Sure, those who take FIRE seriously usually approach a 50% savings rate, but I've seen that done even on meager salaries. Mostly it's engineers, nurses, etc. who have good paying professional careers, but those jobs and people aren't incredibly rare.

I only ever achieved a ~25% savings rate, but at 40, I'm only still working because I get to contribute to the lightning network and I would be doing that anyway. I would probably have another decade left if it weren't for bitcoin, but one could argue that makes this approach even more accessible.

As a long time Mr. Money Mustache reader and having ordinary schmuck friends who have done this well before age 50, what's wrong with the math?

It was a gift, but now that I've owned it a while, I'm rather fond of my Garmin. The battery lasts for weeks, and it provides detailed stats on activities, sleep habits, etc.. I was surprised but I rather enjoy keeping up with family and friends when they share their bike rides/skiing/diving activities. It's also a handy compass and gps that I now automatically have available on any hike.

It's interesting, GME was up 12% yesterday after announcing they would hold bitcoin in their treasury. But now down that and more after announcing a Michael Saylor style playbook of issuing convertible bonds to buy bitcoin.

I think antioxidants are quite important. You can't eliminate all sources of free radicals in the body, nor should you want to, so allowing natural mitigation from antioxidants seems like it would be fairly important. I've always tended to shop around the periphery of the grocery store (i.e., primarily fresh produce, meat, and maybe a little dairy.) Eating a diet of less processed foods naturally seems to provide reasonable sources of antioxidants, which at least makes some intuitive sense as our bodies evolved for millennia to thrive on these food sources.

As a US citizen, it was honestly a relief to have the attacks against the bitcoin ecosystem and self custody abate with the change of the administration. As a liberal leaning voter, I also didn't mind the DNC getting their asses handed to them after endless self-goals and a total disdain for the general voting public. However, all that is a small consolation if the judiciary gets stripped of its independence and the limits on power that allowed the US to flourish are systemically removed. This president and administration are way too cozy with authoritarians and their methods for my liking. I really don't care about pumping my bags - bitcoin was going to survive just fine regardless. I'm less confident about the outcome for democracy in the US.

I'm setting off tomorrow on a 5 day canoeing trip. There was definitely a lot of thought and planning around how to get potable water for drinking, cooking, cleaning up, etc. over the course of the trip for 15 people. It really makes you appreciate everyday access to clean water from the tap.

Spam prevention here seems to mean the same as channel jamming. It's an interesting concept. I didn't read the linked paper, but it seems like the burned funds would need to be aggregated or a channel will accumulate a lot of tiny outputs. That also raises the point that it changes the economic incentive of the channel opener slightly. Whereas now forwarding a payment may reduce your balance, it simultaneously grants you an equivalent inbound liquidity on the other side of the channel. That would no longer be the case if bits of the channel capacity are gradually lost to the burn outputs.

It seems like this would reduce risk for routing large payments, but it could make small payments extremely costly if they fail.