Mint is centralized as far as I know. It is similar to Hosted Channels though.

I hope that makes things a bit clearer.

your split personalities are in an m of n multisig!

Backups and security. I wish we wouldn't have to worry about them as much. If I could choose anything, even unrealistic things, I would want the Lightning network to be as simple as on-chain: Backup your keys properly and you'll be ok.

I think we're on a good path with Eltoo (which eliminates huge parts of the headache that backups cause today) and things like the Blockstream's Greenlight and VLS.

No.

Ok, I'll bite: It always puzzled me how Bitcoiners, who I think are people who question the nature of money and what it is or can be, fell for this energy battery narrative. It's clear that Bitcoin uses energy for mining (which is then lost as heat to the environment) but it's beyond me why people believe that the fact that it can be used as money and make someone else on the other side of the planet move physical objects by paying them to do so makes it any sort of energy. Saylor did this.

да. если ты можешь её обменять на что то похожее. например $ на газ. или сатоши на подписку.

I would love to dig deeper in Bitcoin and Lightning implementations one day.

Hey man! Thank you. Yes, I followed those discussions, I think scheme is pretty solid. Most of the issues that came up are really implementation-based. Coding up the basic mechanics in a few days was a real trip!

What still fascinates me is that the equations for the blind signature scheme used in Cashu can be summarized in a couple of lines. Here is the gist that @rijndael was referring to: Link

lol thank you and sorry! I tell myself that a (healthy) obsession is one of the best things that you can have in life. Any energy and motivation you feel inside is a gift you should cherish since stasis comes way too soon as you get older. It's too bad that life is so damn short.

I don't know how to get you the headspace but what works for me is routine, workouts, good food, fun on the weekends, and a problem you can work on that is way bigger than your personal life.

I also recommend meeting Bitcoiners in real life. It's more motivating than anything else.

Thank you! Yes, I have played with nostr for the first time just this weekend. Already preparing an update for the Cashu CLI client to send ecash from one wallet to another using their nostr pubkey. It's working!

I love how nostr got a healthy push, it's a great community effort and there is an impressive number of tools and implementations for it available. The biggest lesson for me is that simplicity is key for developer adoption. It's very easy to build a nostr app!

I'm a bit worried about the spam and relay resource problem though. It will be very interesting to watch how different attempts at preventing spam maybe by charging users will play out and also how the relay network will evolve. To my understanding, the resource requirements are considerable and we'll see how these limits will affect the UX.

Thanks!

We do win! For many different reasons, bitcoin will keep growing and that's the most important thing.

My take would be that the internet needed a native currency for the idea to truly flourish. Imagine trying to build a privacy-preserving fiat banking system today. Never gonna happen.

I'm accustomed to thinking in networks and have implemented network algorithms myself before which probably makes it easier to imagine how the lightning network works and what the possible routes for optimizations could be. It's a rather unexplored area (which shows how early we are) and most node implementations use very basic algorithms and heuristics for path finding. I'm happy that Rene Pickhardt's work on payment flows and reliability took off like it did because it's a reminder that the most basic research tools (methods) we have in math and network science aren't being applied on the LN yet. I hope and expect a lot more to happen in this field.

What if electronwall took off? Well, I think before that we'd have to ask whether the Lightning network as it is being "deployed" today is the right and responsible way. Should we be pushing for non-technical people running a node with potentially risky financial software in their homes? Are these people responsible for building a network with random topology? This happens at the same time as big professional node operators are using sophisticated security software and are mainly opening big channels to other big players.

I really don't know but I think the random network approach is not sustainable as long as there is considerable risk in running a node.

I was just looking at that PR a couple of minutes ago! I still need to sit down and crunch through it, so many things happening in LNbits at the same time! It's crazy.

Also curious how you view centralization risks of a few large players routing the majority of transactions.

Hi! Yes, redundancy can be implemented quite easily. The mint has only one state which is the list of tokens it has seen in the past. You can have many mints (who MUST trust each other) accessing the same database of seen tokens, that way you can add redundancy very cheaply.

That's an interesting paper! I'm not an expert in cell biology but I must admit that I'm not very surprised that they found chaotic behavior in such a high-dimensional system but the experimental observation is fascinating nonetheless!

I'm much more common with chaos in dynamical systems than in maps. One of the most intriguing observations that I came across is the fact that you need a minimum of three dimensions to observe chaos in a dynamical system. Two dimensions mean that you'll be limited to either stable limit cycles, fixed points, or a divergence to infinity. Only with three dimensions, you can "escape the circle" into another dimension. The simplest one I know of such systems is the Lorenz Attractor.

Sounds like you could be a pro for building wallets! Actually, if you're interested in helping out with Cashu with exactly those two skills (JS and React) you could be the first person to implement a native mobile wallet! It's fairly easy to do, the only complicated part is the token cryptography but that's all already implemented in the LNbits web wallet and basically copy and paste.

Let me know what you think, you can hit me up on Telegram or Twitter under the handle "callebtc".

Received!

Pizza. I ate the best tacos of my life a couple of days ago but pizza until the end of time.

Off we go with a new torch!

Automated payments for all of your subscriptions, on the hour. Be it video streaming or the electricity bill. Why would you ever have monthly payments if you could have them hourly? As Bitcoin grows, I'm sure we will see that happening more often.

Just accepting payment for stuff online, really. Killer app.

Imagine you build a small tool and put it on the internet but it costs money to run the service. What do you do? Apply for a credit card payments thing and wait 3 months for it to happen? Never gonna happen. Lightning it is.

Cashu wallets are meant to be Lightning wallets really. The difference being that you can't be tracked. The tokens only replace the ledger.

No lies detected 👆

Thank you!

Depends. For maximum security, many LSPs only connect to peers that they know and can hold accountable somehow. You might also have a whole network of nodes and want to make sure that you only open internal channels. That's what many Lightning service providers are already doing with their infrastructure.

For users and LSPs that want to keep their network open, choices could be dependent on node age (i.e. open channels with nodes that are at least 6 months old), high availability, channel capacity measures (only nodes with big channels as opposed to many small ones), network ping, Tor availability, etc.

Allow me to c/p from a similar question someone else asked:

Backups and security. I wish we wouldn't have to worry about them as much. If I could choose anything, even unrealistic things, I would want the Lightning network to be as simple as on-chain: Backup your keys properly and you'll be ok.

I think we're on a good path with Eltoo (which eliminates huge parts of the headache that backups cause today) and things like the Blockstream's Greenlight and VLS.

🧡

It would be devastating but then again, Bitcoin is designed for exactly those kind of adversarial scenarios. I'm not going to stop coding like many others!

Coding it by hand :)

Hi! No, unfortunately there is no way to make that happen, even fedimint does not support that (that would be paying with tokens from one federation in the other).

We don't need to solve that though, because the idea is to use Lightning and handle the ecash exchange with multiple mints in the background. I hope we can get there, as I imagine an ecash future with a wallet having a multitude of smaller balances all over the place that you can easily move from a to b using Lightning.

🙏

Interesting question. I think it's important to distinguish between two things that people refer to as "spiritual". There is the (cult-like?) group spirituality (like religion) and there is the more personal ethics-type spirituality (like ancient philosophy). While I consider the second one as an important part of life (and Bitcoin can very well be part of that), I'm much more suspicious of the the first type.

I once heard that every movement that grows too large invariably attracts new people in who bring their own ideology and belief system with them and will try to put those things into the center, often diverging from the original visions of a movement. I think it's similar in Bitcoin. Nevertheless, Bitcoin, thankfully, doesn't care.