Would live to chat about anything lightning, working in bitcoin, btc++ past or present, Base58 and the bitcoin LARP, what we’re planning for 2025 and beyond
oh man i actually have a pretty cool story for this one. it took me a week to get my core-lightning node up and funded and a channel setup.
the first thing i did was go to an online lightning store someone was running out of china 🇨🇳 and buy a lightning lamp. it was sooo cool because there’s no way i could have made that payment without lightning. it showed up in my mailbox a week later and has been hanging in my office ever since!!
I don't know why it stopped posting those nice articles about LN.
Do you have something like this to recommend? Something that anybody can understand, not just super technical stuff?
we’re working on moving to zero-fee commitment txs, thanks to the work the bitcoin core devs have been doing on mempool and v3 txs. this should cut down on the number of spurious closures that happen due to onchain fee mismatches!
i’m not really sure what the total root cause of all force closes are, so not really sure what percent of all force closes that will help avoid but i suspect it’ll be a majority of them
i’m a lot more excited about getting stack traces. when i was new in my career, the program blowing up felt like a personal failure, and a good sign that programming wasn’t something i should be doing. now i get excited about stack traces because i like solving problems
conferences and classes and more content!! i feel like i really learned a lot about the power of working with other projects this year and I’m really excited about doing more collaborations next year
2025 is going to be 🤝
specifically though, some things I’m hoping to get done next year:
btc++ conferences in brazil, austin, turkey, berlin, taiwan
relaunch base58 classes, with a focus on building a network of base58 powered educators and education projects. maybe do our first collab or two for a in-depth class
get liquidity ads shipped on core lightning!! ⚡️ ⚡️ ⚡️
the best thing is making new friends everywhere in the world. i’ve realized that my favorite way to build relationships is through shared projects, and btc++ has been an amazingly great one to expand my friend graph.
the worst part is all the stress about how to pay for them. i’ve been very lucky to have countless other sponsors and supporters who show up to help make the events possible. if this is you, a million thanks for showing up to participate and make these events possible. here’s to hoping the bull market makes sponsorships an easier thing for partner orgs to say yes to 😅 we started in the 2022 bull run and its been a long bear market to make it through (but we did it, thanks to our friends and community) ❤️
As a lightning app dev, I’m especially interested in the lightning class. But since I don’t know yet how well versed I already am in bitcoin since it’s been all self-taught so far1, I definitely want to take the basic class first to make sure I’m properly prepared.
I’m just wondering if it’s better to take that basic class online now and then the lightning one in-person when it’s offered or wait for both. Maybe I can do both together if both are available around the same time? It feels a little like a gamble though haha
I also don’t mind the price tag on the in-person courses anymore. I think it would be a good investment into myself :)
Footnotes
Basically all my knowledge about bitcoin and lightning is from Mastering Bitcoin and Mastering the Lightning Network. ↩
I will have to look into that
Didn't have anything in particular in mind but thought it was a fun question. I like this kind of thought experimenting stretching metaphors and exploring which parts might map back and forth
A little out of my depth to be honest
chris guida had a really great analogy at the btc++ in Mexico City back in Dec 2022.
physical lightning apparently does a path finding down to the ground and then the charge actually shoots upwards from the earth? (or something like that)
the HTLC path works similarly in how it makes a lock-in path first and then a unlock to make the payment
Can a fedimint token issuer give a cryptographic proof of reserves?
Is is it possible for a fedimint mint to demonstrate that the tokens exist one-to-one with bitcoin locked in lightning contracts?
Is it possible for the user-base to collectively prove this to themselves?
the fedimint observer project is working on helping solve these questions i think.
one thing that isn’t well known about fedimints is that the federation members actually have a whole lil blockchain that records the state of ecash tokens in the system. I’m assuming it also has an audit log of funds locked in and signed for. so that’d probably be the most obvious place to start looking for details about the funds in a mint
At 7 transactions per second every one of 8 billion people could have an on-chain transaction every 36 years.
What are some bitcoin lightning scaling scenarios you see as likely?
E.g. increase the blocksize 10-fold and have every person move funds between checking account and saving account on average every 4 years.
Or an uncle Jim model where most people never touch on-chain.
Or a model where large trusted stores offer lightning banking functionality and most people never touch on-chain.
Or ...
it’s been really cool to see people contributing code to bitcoin in a new language. as more languages pop up, it creates a opportunity for new devs to implement bitcoin protocols, which in turn creates a bigger community of devs that really understand bitcoin 🚀
so yes, really exciting to have a huge rust ecosystem taking off, but I’m equally excited about new projects across all languages haha
This is extremely hard. I think Rusty Russell is the wisest person I know, based on how i’ve seen him manage open source communities and the lightning spec process. absolutely the goat at interfaces and apis too.
there’s a million ways to be brilliant, but i really appreciate how emotionally smart rusty is. i dont even know if he realizes how good he is at it. maybe its ingrained after working at IBM forever idk haha
Footnotes