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I'm rooting for the hacker at this point...
I was so surprised to hear so many bitcoiners this week making endless excuses for Blockstream. “They’re such good people, yada yada…”
Maybe its because I've never interacted with a blocksteam employee (knowingly), but I tend to judge a company based on their work and products alone.
First PeerSwap has a ton of vulns patched, then CLN, now LBTC
Three failures in three separate products is a pattern worth discussing, diagnosing, and destroying the underlying conditions that led to this.
Our legal system does not hold Blockstream accountable, so the "free market" gave us the vigilante we needed.
CDs and DVDs are starting to enter their "Vinyl" era of Collectability
Found a $200 DVD at a thrift store the other day, they wanted $1 for it
Couldn't just leave that on the shelf...
SN is open source: https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news
learn the rules, play the game, be selfish, if you invest well, you can earn dozens of sats per day
jk, just get a real job and stop playing silly games with internet strangers
some underlying deep and recurring anxiety in us of being replaced
I think this anxiety comes from ignorance. Anyone who actually uses AI understands that it only works well when a human drives it.
Or it comes from a scarcity mindset -- there is a fixed amount of work to do. Those with abundance mindset know that work expands to one's capability.
Or it comes from ego -- I'm too special to compete alongside a machine
in my experience young people are the most AI-averse of all
A steep technological curve can break the 0-15-30 year-old heuristic. But on a long enough timeline, it plays out the same. Those born today will never know a world without AI, they will build a new mental frame of reality. And the next major technolocal break-thru will likely break their minds as well.
That is a nice cherry-picked collection of cases where concerns turned out to be considered unfounded eventually.
Its actually not a collection of cases. It's a collection of categories of technology.
Technology is neutral. Only applications of the tech can have positive/negative outcomes.
Plastic bags, leaded gasoline, lead based paint, DDT, CFC, asbestos.
The "technology" behind lead-containitng products is "mixing"
Mixing, as a technology, is neutral. You can make good mixtures and bad ones. Those specific mixtures of lead and paint or lead and gasoline are examples of a bad mix.
Plastic bags are a bad (arguable) application of plastics technology (neutral).
DDT, CFC, asbestos are products of chemical process (neutral technologies).
I can also imagine an evil/bad AI or photograph, or novel, or book, or written text. But it does not make the underlying tech bad.
It happens every generation: techno-anxiety
Writing itself (4th century BCE): Socrates thought written language was going to destroy human memory
The printing press (1492): The monk Johannes Trithemius wrote an entire treatise, In Praise of Scribes, defending hand-copying manuscripts against Gutenberg's invention. He argued that books were a fad and would physically decay because parchment paper was more durable.
The fiction novel (18th–19th century): Reading fiction, especially by women, was treated as a public health crisis. Critics called it "moral poison". Before this, written language was strictly for education, passing on traditional stories, and religious texts.
Photography (1859) : Baudelaire called photographs "deceptive, nothing more than a phony simulacrum of reality", and famously branded the whole industry as art's "most mortal enemy."
Recorded music (1906): John Philip Sousa, the march composer, wrote a magazine essay called "The Menace of Mechanical Music," warning that phonographs and player pianos were a mechanical substitute "for human skill, intelligence, and soul."
What's up with that?
If you're under 15 years old, new tech isn't interesting, it's always been this way, right?
If you're 15-30 years old, the new tech is punk rock, you're probably trying to get a job with it.
If you're over 30 years old, the new tech is destroying the Earth and humanity is doomed
The point is that your view on new tech has more to do with the plasticity of your brain and your willingness to adapt than anything intrinsic to the tech itself.
I want to know which node the invoice is coming from.
A BOLT11 does not have to necessarily reveal this with certainty. Phantom node payments allow lightning nodes to generate invoices that can be paid to one of multiple nodes.
This is a feature in LDK that is marketed towards enterprise load-balancers, but it also can be used to get some deniability that you received a transaction. Other implementations could add this phantom invoice feature trivially (but they won't), or you can DIY it today with one LLM prompt.
Would a lightning address be better?
Lightning address is just a protocol to request BOLT11 invoices (which could be phantoms BOLT11 invoices)
Using lightning address requires DNS, but it doesn't have to be your IP-address hosting it. Likewise with BOLT11 phantoms, you can loadbalance/distribute the lightning address server itself.
Nothing stops you from hosting the lightning address server over a .onion (well, except that none of the wallets will actually query it correctly) Be the change you want to see!
I am not really someone who sits in a room and learns
I believe it is possible to learn how to learn in different ways
Each way of learning has benefits and weaknesses
some are overlapping but some are distinct
You are unlikely to learn the underlying math from a podcast or a conversation in a forum
There is no substitute for the source material and learning to read it, and learning to learn that way is just a matter of repetition
There is no such thing as skill or ability, only reps
I struggle to get this, a RGB implementation of lightning using LDK? Does mean it runs over RGB instead of running over mainnet?
https://github.com/RGB-Tools/rgb-lightning-node
https://docs.rgb.info/rgb-over-lightning-network/lightning-network-compatibility
I think we're about to witness a Cambrian explosion of LN implementations...
And then decide if you really think it is a good idea to do this.
... only tradeoffs
a few benefits of writing/running your own LN node implementation:
- You control the feature priority
No need to wait for LND to add splicing or BOLT12. No need to wait for CLN to add AMP. Your implementation can support all or none if you want it to. The vast majority nodes can only collaborate using certain features with a subset of nodes that run the same implementation.
You can add all the features (or none), making your node easier to collaborate with if you can support more protocols, or more secure/hardened if you only support the bare minimum.
- You can "hack" the protocol
The existing lightning protocol leaves lots of room for creativity that no current implementation is currently using.
The mainstream implementations are open source so you know exactly how those nodes will behave in response to a custom message your implementation sends them. This let's you fingerprint and exploit (somewhat) the implementation a node on the network is likely running.
- You can keep the source hidden (if you want)
Nobody needs to know what source your node is running! So you're harder to hack (in theory). Security using obscurity is real (with tradeoffs).
Or maybe you publish it and hope to get some expert review before someone with better LLMs exploit it :)
No solutions, only tradeoffs...
Don't mistake 'theoretical audibility' for an actual audit
The benefit of Opensource was always based in statistics: more eyes, more stakeholders, more audits, and more fixes produces better software (probably)
Alternatively, apply statistics through AI to vibe-slop fork your own node implementation with off-the-shelf library like LDK and watch it very closely
it’s just hard for me to fathom because I worked for a large company where nobody’s funds were at risk… even still we would get torn apart for any TODOs in the code and had quarterly sprints to eliminate tech debt
I guess not every company has their coding standards sized appropriately for the consequences of getting it wrong
Does Blockstream get to put their name on something then excuse their responsibility because it's FOSS?
Most of the critical issues are clearly called out in the source code with comments like TODO or FIXME
How does a well-known bitcoin software accumulate so much tech debt?
PeerSwap also had a lot of new releases lately. Is this pattern showing a hole in Blockstream's dev process?
dismorphology - the study of how certain pyhsical birth defects, syndromes, and diseases affect the brain's thought patterns via observations of a specific behavioral phenotype
For example, those with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Disorder tend to exhibit certain facial deformities while also being associated with heightened suggestibility, acquiescence, and confabulation, there's also a ton of forensic literature on false confessions in FASD individuals for exactly this reason.
As a fun exercise, create a lineup of faces of loud/public BIP-110 supporters and you'll find many of them share these features:
https://freemedicaljournals.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Fetal-Alcohol-Syndrome-Face-in-Adults.png
1.) financial sovereignty can't stand on a worthless asset
2.) $0 Bitcoin kills the financial argument, but not the sovereignty argument (assume USD still has some market value)
3.) self-custody is really just cryptographic key management, and crypto-keys already secure your entire digital life
4.) if you don't own the keys that secure your interactions online. then someone else does...
5.) every third-party holding your keys or data is a honeypot: leakable, sellable, or ransomable
6.) the same discipline that protects a seed phrase and maintains a bitcoin node is what protects your online freedom, internet identity, communications, and access to infrastructure that isn't trying to control you
7.) cryptography is a modern miracle of mathematics that tyrants and authoritarians hate. That's enough of a reason for further study...
information is duplicated not consumed
there's no 'market price' to depress or inflate
prices are a market coordination mechanism
philanthropy is a resource allocation decision
"hate" doesn't have to be a factor
If a normal company suffered a loss on behalf of customers like this, someone in the C-suite is getting fired, and/or there's a large government-imposed fine/penalty, and lawsuits headed their way.
Just because your Money is FOSS doesn't excuse you from accountability (morally). It just means the legal system and government won't pursue you. But the free market might...
It just happens that blockstream's negligence, in this case, put them in the perfect position to be held accountable. Where previous examples of negligence only affected their users.