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813 sats \ 4 replies \ @elvismercury 20h \ on: Things I learned about Luke Dashjr bitcoin
What this is missing from the vibe of this post, and many of the comments, is that Luke has been an absolute giant in the history of btc development; you say you don't want him to bring his values to btc -- bad news for you, bro, he's been bringing them since forever. You have him to thank for SegWit, more than almost anyone else.
Btc attracts nutjobs and weirdos. (Look in the mirror.) They are brilliant, insane, and also sometimes idiots -- even in the same person, all at once. (Look in the mirror.) Without them (us) there would be no btc.
It's good to recall Bitstein's Everyone's a Scammer -- not because I particularly doubt what Megalithic is saying, but just because nobody is here "for the good of Bitcoin."
Spark sure seems to have a lot of corporate backing. And there pushing it everywhere. Yet, Bitcoin is an open monetary protocol. I welcome anyone building anything they possibly can that uses it.
People will build shit custodial systems and they will build cool self sovereign stuff. I see things like Spark in the same camp as the etfs. I'm not too interested, but some people are. It's an open system.
Nah, actually that was the result of a lot of prep.
The thing to remember here is I was scheduled to go second. Doing a big pre-prepared formal statement in that circumstance is something I really dislike in a debate like this: my role is to respond to Jimmy. Hence why I tried to get him to nail down what he actually meant by "spam", so I could respond appropriately. Which is a strategy that has worked well in other cases for me. But in this case I really threw off the moderator.
The way I (and many like me) prep for this kind of debate is to go over the likely arguments from the other side and 1) come up with responses, 2) make sure you have the facts memorized. Jimmy repeatedly made basic technical mistakes; he either clearly did not do #2 properly.
Fundamentally an error I think a lot of people are making here is treating this like a highschool debate team. I'm not trying to win points in a scored debate where rhetoric matters more than facts. I'm trying to actually sway an audience. It looked like slightly more people agreed with me on the end than before, so on that basis I'm happy.
I built the open LSP standard he builds his products on. Our entire code base is completely open source. We provide multiple options with no vendor lock. I got Boltz to open source their stack. He's the one building custodial services. He's the one spreading, pushing his LSP services which has similar trade-offs to spark (which he clearly don't understand because he doesn't understand Lightning). Don't legitimize this behavior.
442 sats \ 0 replies \ @rizful_com 1 Nov \ parent \ on: I saw this tweet reply about spark lightning
"mixing criticisms of SSP and SO" -- sure, you could look microscopically at these definitions and try to untangle them......and I started down that road when I was looking into Spark, but then I had the realization that it didn't really matter....
What matters is so much more simple: To actually USE any of this, in ANY capacity, requires using an API that LightSpark solely controls, and has the unique power to invite others to (or censor others from.)
It's extremely simple.
Spark has GraphQL endpoints -- basically, a web server. You need to use those GraphQL endpoints to actually do anything. Your device has to make a network connection to LightSpark's computers. You have no alternative.
What is worrying is that many observers have somehow missed this very important fact, and now..... we are seeing that influencers (Stephan Livera, whose work I usually like, for one....) continue to muddy the waters by calling Spark an "L2" -- making it sound fancy and sophisticated, and maybe something that isn't just a website controlled by a company that does some stuff.
Spark is an API. It's completely unlike technology that Bitcoiners should be using -- Lightning, for one.
Spark is GREAT for what LightSpark is focusing most of its energy on right now -- gambling, tokens, memecoins, etc. None of those user care about decentralization or privacy, and honestly, if we can get some of these degens to pay for their gambling with Bitcoin instead of Solana or a credit card --- I have absolutely no problem with that.
But we all need to be very clear here: Spark is the OPPOSITE of decentralized -- it's fully controlled by one company, who has full surveillance (and censorship) powers on all transactions.
Spark is controlled by LightSpark, who spent, as far as I can tell, all of 2023 and 2024 claiming that it was a "compliance"-focused Lightning company... which enabled it to get Coinbase and other casinos on its client list.
The fact that now, an unsuspecting Wallet Of Satoshi user, will (quietly) have his data shared with LightSpark -- his transactions, his IP address -- everything. This is completely fucked up and never should have happened.
This is what txin verification performance looks like on an RPi4 (charted for blocks 790k-815k)
There seems to be some relation between the mean size of txs in a block (in terms of inputs) and the performance of IBD. Moving on to running benches.
Perfect because I don't care if people like me, I'm not trying to win a popularity contest, some of the most popular people in the space are bad people. I want better tech adopted.
LNC is really bad
Same reason NWC and BOLT12 are bad, they took ideas I put out freely in demos and implemented their own version without ever bothering to understand how I arrived at those ideas in the first place.
What do you think of the election, siggy?
Personally, I think it will be interesting to watch A) whether he's actually able to get anything done; B) whether he gets co-opted by money interests; and if A is yes and B is no, whether New York rapidly sides into deterioration
I see Bitbox and Bitkey being shilled constantly on podcasts, on the spectrum of custody, with many doomers predicting mass use of custodial products, this seems to sit in the middle between non custodial and custodial, so pushing their product closer to the sovereignty side of the fence improves their sales pitch for sure
I suspect that the amount of effort to craft a convincing deepfake is still fairly substantial.
Not to mention most of the major AI providers have safeguards built in against this kind of thing. I can't get Chat or Grok to generate images of Xi Jinping for example, or of copyrighted content.
This story stands in for a lot of stories, I think, that the btc world needs to come to terms with: if people don't have a real felt need for the thing, you trying to talk them into it is unlikely to work. It turns it into the usual hard-sell, like when those guys come to your door and try to convince you that your house is infested and you need them to come in and spray chemicals everywhere to kill whatever is infesting it.
The response to this is usually educate them, so they develop an urgent need for the thing and there's something to be said for that; but jesus, could there be anything more plentiful than examples of where this is fruitless? The least controversial advice in the universe is probably that if you eat well and exercise most kinds of disease are optional, and you will feel better almost immediately in every aspect of life, and it doesn't even matter tremendously what "eat right" means to you, and "exercise" means to you, since anything aside from the current default would be a vast improvement for almost everyone.
And yet even this behavior, which should provide the most visceral possible lesson than every self-interested person should embrace, goes ignored.
I am evolving toward a new understanding, and it involves looking at what is the real, honest-to-god, actual use case for btc, as demonstrated by the actual humans inhabiting the actual world, and not how imaginary people ought to behave according to us. That understanding has implications that I'm trying to work out.
so it moves into the "temporary soft fork" territory, that while possible and legit in itself is clearly suboptimal in terms of communication and education: many users don't understand it
A temporary soft fork is not new. It has already happened in 2013:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0050#Immediately
Done: Release a version 0.8.1, forked directly from 0.8.0, that, for the next two months has the following new rules:
- Reject blocks that would probably cause more than 10,000 locks to be taken.
- Limit the maximum block-size created to 500,000 bytes
- Release a patch for older versions that implements the same rules, but also increases the maximum number of locks to 537,000
- Create a web page on bitcoin.org that will urge users to upgrade to 0.8.1, but will tell them how to set DB_CONFIG to 537,000 locks if they absolutely cannot.
- Over the next 2 months, send a series of alerts to users of older versions, pointing to the web page.
Also, this reproduction of "after block 800k it goes insane" is why I'm looking at this in the first place after @SimpleStacker reported it on the raspiblitz GH:
Note that y-axis is
log10.2, your own and a miner, and then you connect to that miner. It's policy, not constrained by any threshold activation.
If you want to reliably be able to send a tx under the new policy, with outgoing connections only, at 32% adoption you would be able to do that reliably 95% of the time. With 125 connections, you need 0.3% adoption, much less than there is for v30 right now. But, you don't know how the v30 is configured.
For the inverse, to block every node with only outgoing transaction 95% of the time, you need about 99.4% of nodes to have a declining policy. With 125 connections, 99.96% of nodes is needed to block 95% of nodes from transmitting their txs.
I think it was someone named Milo Cress, a 9 year old who led a crusade against plastic straws.
Like, why do we listen to kids on these issues?
Springer is a big deal, I saw a deal with them. They're privately held too, so less likely to disclose all the terms.
Good stuff, keep the hits coming
I encourage anyone testing this stuff to repeat anything that might have been said already too, more signal the better
i don't think you are going to find a node in the phone wallet that supports sub-wallets. That seems like you are gonna need a server or device that is online all the time.
Running an albyhub is quite user-friendly (you can do so on a start9 in a few clicks or run it on a lap top you devote to being on all the time with one copy paste script into a linux terminal) and would provide you the ability to create sub wallets for friends / family. they could then load that sub wallet into the goalby or zeus apps quite easily. Albyhub is nice too because you can run it without a btc core node as the backend, so very light weight.
If you wanna know more let me know but that might be too much / not remotely what you were hoping for.
“There are people that have developed enormous confidence in Warren Buffett,” says Meyer Shields, who co-wrote the note. “For them, that’s where the investment thesis starts and stops.”
Sure you want to know about the fundamentals, but companies can change, so what's really important is who's in charge.
I'm no kind of seasoned investor, but this kind of heuristic is probably better than most.
In that sense, maybe we should understand the treasury mania this way: Saylor started it off and because of his particular qualities, there is a large group of investors who are willing to pay more for MicroStrategy than it is worth. It's not necessarily because of the Bitcoin, so much as it is because of the Bitcoiner.1
So the Treasury Company fervor during the summer was actuly people trying to copy the wrong thing: they should have been putting bitcoiners in charge of their companies, rather than solely focusing on putting Bitcoin on their balance sheets.
To be fair, a few of the treasury companies did try to copy this: Jack Mallets at Twenty One, Dylan LeClaire at Metaplanet, David Bailey at Nakamoto -- but I'm not sure the public followed the plot, nor that they were the "right" bitcoiners for the job.
Perhaps the real edge here isn't Bitcoin Treasury Companies so much as it is companies run by Bitcoiners.
Footnotes
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I have no opinion on how "good" of a bitcoiner Saylor is. If you buy, sell, or trade Bitcoin, you are a bitcoiner in my book. ↩
If there is a difference between the supply curves of bitcoin, gold, and fiat, I'd say it's that fiat has no connection to the real world, while gold and bitcoin do. So I'd expect the supply curves of gold and bitcoin to be similar, while the supply curve for fiat should be insane.
From the Alex Salter article:
All else equal, a higher relative price of gold means a larger quantity supplied of monetary gold.
This is the kind of thing that I find very confusing. When we talk about stock of gold, we might say there are ~290k tonnes of gold that are accessible to humans. Barring alchemy or some golden asteroid, this is the total stock of gold (I've heard there is a lot of other gold, such as gold dissolved in the oceans or in the Earth's core, but supposedly it's unlikely it will ever be worth reclaiming).
Now, as the price of gold goes up, we might see gold deposits that couldn't be mined profitably get turned into meaningful sources of gold on the market. Additionally, we might see gold that was being used for other things get (jewelry, industrial uses) get sold for monetary uses. These kind of transformations seem like they are of the same kind to me: it's just somebody owning gold who wasn't previously willing to sell it, but now is.
Okay, so higher prices can't really increase the stock (that 290k tonne number from above) but they certainly can increase the supply of gold for sale in the market.
This seems like it would be more or less the same for Bitcoin: there are only ever going to be 21 million bitcoins.
But as the price of bitcoin goes up, we might begin to see new sellers (for instance among long term holders who had some number in their head at which they would trade some of their holdings for a nicer house or a fancy boat or whatever other thing they want).
So, no matter how much the price of bitcoin increases, we aren't changing the 21 million cap, but there certainly are sellers who weren't willing to trade their coins earlier, but are now. In my mind this seems very similar to the way you described gold's supply curve.
I have a really hard time with where economists draw the distinction between stock and supply.
For instance, you say above:
Bitcoin has a vertical supply curve, as its supply responds in no way to changes in its price.
More bitcoin will not be mined whether the price is $10 per coin or $100k per coin, but more gold might be mined if the price is $10k an ounce. This makes me think that you are right and that there is a difference between the supply curves of bitcoin and gold.
Okay, but I think maybe my problem is that I'm thinking about it backwards. Who cares how much of a thing there is? What matters is how badly people want it. If people want gold so badly that they are willing to pay $10k an ounce for it, there will certainly be people who raid their jewelry drawers (do people keep jewelry in drawers?) and if bitcoin hits $150k per coin, there will be people who are willing to sell who weren't willing to sell now.
Is there any relationship that can be determined from this? In the case of bitcoin it seems like people wanting it more would lead to higher price. In the case of gold, it seems like the same is true. The only thing that would change this is if gold that is sitting on the sidelines (in the ground or in drawers) comes into play. But then, if we have to count gold that sits on the sidelines, we have to count bitcoin that sits on the sidelines. So, I'm back to the only thing we can conclude is that people wanting it more means a higher price.
Now, fiat. People wanting more dollars should mean that dollars have a higher price. But...there actually is a way for dollars that didn't exist before to suddenly appear and get into people's hands. It's not just a matter of dollars that were sitting on the sidelines (stuffed in mattresses, or stashed away in safe deposit boxes), but actually new, magically created fresh dollars. And these new fresh dollars can be created ad infinitem. They aren't even made from paper, there is no real limit to how many can exist.
But honestly, I'm probably too ignorant of economics. I always feel like these concepts are kinda broken ways to talk about what we actually want to talk about and I just end up going in circles with myself.