0 sats \ 0 replies \ @fiksn 2 Apr \ on: why is bitcoin bull market so boring? bitcoin
Boring is good. Just lower your time preference.
I mean 25 years is not that bad. In my country you get that much for murder. Those 100+ year sentences are just ridiculous IMO, then the convicts are ok whatever I'm gonna die in prison. It's much worse if you still have hope to eventually come out.
Trick is Bob needs to provably "defuse"
defense
or else the blackmail won't work.Which means just a tx with a new input from Alice and new output for Bob beside the original ones. Bob can prepare everything and just give it to Alice to add their 0.9 input and sign. So either he sees the thing confirmed in an hour or so or he broadcasts
defense
and everything goes boom.Simple attack, Bob says hey Alice additionally to the 1 BTC you owe me give me 0.9 BTC off-chain or I will punish you and you will lose another bitcoin. A rational actor would go for that deal but even if not it hurts Alice more. And what can she do:
defense
always overrides status
by definition.Therefore the network soon runs out of Alices.
This is like coming to a business negotiation with a hand granade. "If I suspect you cheat we're both gonna die". I mean it could work in practice but it requires careful tuning of the blast radius so to say.
Always when there is an asymmetry there could be some DoS. Like lots of "Bobs" blackmailing Alice since she has more to lose.
IMO the unit bias is one of the reasons why people shitcoin. "Oh look that coin.. it's totally affordable at 0.001 $ a coin unlike bitcoin.. if it ever went to 1 $ I will be rich". Very similar to pink sheet stocks. I mean people realize they are buying crap, but the psychology combined with pump&dump schemes still makes them do it.
Therefore let's standarize the use of sats (or uhm bits).
Back when I was working for a lightning company we had a list of interesting research questions. On top of my head one of the things were routing fees.
So what would be interesting to know is how much did fees rise in the last year, what is the distribution (for instance how much more do top routing nodes charge in comparison to other nodes) and whether there is any correlation between bitcoin network transaction costs and fee schedules on lightning.
Another pain point (at least for me as a hobbyist) are minimum channel sizes. We tried to measure them by trying to connect to every node and deduce from error replies what the minimum channe size is and show that through an explorer. An open-source tool for that or even using that as a consideration with autopilot mode would be great.
I'd say it's definitely a very nice idea for an academic project. My book recommendation is just Mastering the Lightning Network (https://github.com/lnbook/lnbook).
It's unfortunately not as simple as you imagine. Trick is your lightning node implementation already does a lot of trickery to chose the optimal path gauging between reliability and price. I mean there is always some room for improvement but the low hanging fruit is gone I am afraid.
What you could do is say ok my payments always go through that route. If I connected to that node directly I could leave out all those nodes and save that much on routing fees. But opening a new channel is an investment. You don't know how the network will evolve in the future. Perhaps the nodes you planned to skip will drastically lower their fees and you actually wasted money on transaction costs. So you also can't make such a solution commercially viable (since you cannot tell a user I saved you 100k sats and now I will take my cut of 10k sats).
Perhaps you could charge per advice. Sort of like investment advice. But OTOH we all know that bitcoin is the best investment and similary the best advice is simply to open a channel if you have a real life connection with the entity. For example if the other node is a bar where I drink it makes sense to open a channel because I am going to pay mulltiple times. But if somebody just says hey this node is the best based on this criteria this is more like stock picking. Ok somebody did some analysis so it's probably better than random choice but it's still something that might never pay off.
We built some cool shit back in the days...
Just to avoid misunderstandings autoswap is a bolt.observer platform related term for liquidity management for your node using submarine swaps, not some new general lightning concept.
Just a few days ago I've installed xz from nixpkgs-unstable on a machine (luckily not my node). How screwed am I? It came from binary cache tho, so configure was never invoked, well at least not on my machine
I mean
account.allow_negative
doesn't sound that nefarious. Could even be useful for some testing scenario, the fact that this flag was enabled on a real production account is what is bad.IMO, this comes from the fact the feature was designed with a very narrow use-case in mind. MAST was just about pushing more unlikely spending conditions more down the tree. Luckily this can still be used in a different way (and 128 is then just some arbitrary limit).
A good reminder that when designing an API we shoud give the consumers some lego bricks and then allow them to come up with something creative on their side instead of prescribing what exacty can be done and just giving them a few very rigid methods.
So you're telling me if I was better at shameless self-promotion and published this on my own I could have stacked 4k sats :)
Anyway, the thing is likely still quite broken (afterall it's based on my limited understanding), PRs welcome.
I've been playing with LNSocket and it is a really cool way to basically access the control-plane of the node through the normal data-plane (sort of like a tunnel). This way you don't need to specifically open inbound access to another port.
Hope some android app comes along once as well.
From a theoretical computer science standpoint I am really excited. In practice I don't think this will change much. First and foremost bitcoin is a store of value, competing with real estate and gold. And in the end no one asks whether either of those bricks can be used to emulate a turing machine or not.