What's most depressing about the almost-certain fact that multiple nations are currently silently stacking sats, is that the UK is in one of the best positions to do so! It is already printing so many billions of pounds that diverting a few of them into BTC would make litterally no difference at all to it's crippling debt problem. And yet we are almost certainly not among the countries doing it. It's very like how Kodak wouldn't invest in digital photography because they owned film photography and didn't wanna cut into their own business. Only the GBP is already defunct to the dollar and double-ducked coz of Brexit, so it's like next generation squared of that.

Been ages lying dormant, but I finally got around to trying to get my #lightning node working again. There is a thing called autopilot which will handle the opening of channels etc if you know to enable it. No button to do so with #umbrel, had to edit config files that didn't even exist until I created them in the magic places, and reboot. It opened a channel for me, putting 80 percent of the wallet balance into it. That means I can send in theory, but still can't receive coz of lack of inbound liquidity. There's an app for that. "Loop out" is what they call it. On umbrel you install "lightning terminal", and it has the option to do a loop out. Loop-out means using your ability to pay with lightning in order to pay someone to do an on-chain transaction that gives you your money back. I think they say this is "trustless" but :shrug:, I just trusted it anyway and wouldn't have any idea how to check if they were crooks first. I sent 70% or so of that channel back to myself onchain that way, and then the autopilot opened a second channel. That gives me a fairly good position in the network. Outbound and inbound liquidity about balanced, multiple connections. It even did some routing, earning me 5 sats on day one. The autopilot keeps some of your balance on-chain, since there will be on-chain fees to pay to close channels down and do loop-outs and stuff. The 5 sats that I earned put me back in the zone of the autopilot have too much capacity so wanting to open channels. It opened a third tiny one that will probably become too small for the fees to close it this bull run. :eyeroll: With the wallet finally working it was time to go try and buy Lyn Alden's book again. I scanned the QR code on the site excited to do my first lightning transaction with it,k and only after the transaction was submitted realized I was doing an on-chain transaction anyway. Not a lightning one. Doh. Apparently with fees low enough it took 12 hours to confirm too. But I'm legit with Lyn now. Turns out I needn't have checked I could pirate the book first, it is indeed DRM-free anyway so I can put it on my Remarkable even without having to pirate or break any codes. There is much more work to be done to get Nostr able to "zap" money back and forth. I think I have to expose LNBits to the internet somehow first? And my plan of just using a reverse ssh tunnel for that didn't work. In short: you still gotta be really really keen and geeky to run a lightning node. Even with Umbrel and 30 years industry experince. It's hard. Still. Five sats a day. In only 50 thousand years I'll have a whole bitcoin!

No social network *at all* has the account portability of Nostr. Nothing will ever come close either. Your key IS you. Which is of course, incredibly dangerous. I've definitely fed mine into all kinds of sketchy web forms.

You see the highlighted number "9" on the top of the peak of the price today? That is the count of the number of days for which it has been true that the price is higher than the price four days ago. Sort-of. Instead of going to 10, it wraps-around to 1. Note that: 1, not even zero. No candles are zero candles. Nor tens. Which means every candle is labelled with 1 of 9 possible digits. The people who believe in the TD Sequential method would have you believe that the price is more likely to turn around if it's a 9 than any other number. They generally seem to count 8s and 1s as close. You know, plus or minus one. Give or take. On the balance of probabilities. Maybe. If the moon is right and the stars align. If the labels were instead just assigned randomly, then tops would happen on a bar which was randomly labelled "9" about one out of every nine times. One in three, give or take. If the stars align. The TD people think you will then have a few days of pull back. But.... I really do think that they are right on this occasion at least. We are indeed way over-extended, there hasn't been a down-week in ages. As a measure of it going up too much and so it should surely go down for a bit, yeah! My main problem with the method is the wrap-around and the lack of a zero. I like it as a measure of how extended price is: The number of days in which the price is higher/lower than the price a week ago. But when you modulate your count by 9 you make it into a basically 1/3 random number thing. Still. They'll be right anyway. If you are a swing trader, (I am not), short for a day or two I guess? Also on that picture you will see that the bottom was at a red 9. Sort of. If 2 candles later counts. Which it will if you are a price horrocopist. And honestly, even though it's horroscope bullshit, it would have turned your short into a long at about the right time. [Nobody mention the time it turned around on a 5ish like you'd expect it to do about half the time also]

Microstrategy and Cleanspark both pumping way harder than bitcoin itself today. Both of them like 3x more than bitcoin proper. Microstrategy's strategy of buying and holding bitcoin, and then using the collateral to borrow and buy more, and then hold that too is paying off at 14% today so far. Cleanspark's strategy of building solar panels and wind turbines and buying microchips and using them to try and claim bitcoin directly from the block-chain paying off slightly less well at only 11%. Bitcoin's actual price moved about 3% to 5% depending where you draw the lines. Breakout technicals look incredible for all these things. Demand is increasing. Supply is reducing. What kind of idiot sells their bitcoin to Microstrategy or Blackrock for less than 100k?

Does anyone here like DIY hacking programming projects? I've been programming my #pinetime smart-watch in python this month and I'm pretty pleased with the results.

Dalliance

Introducing Monolith and Mood for WaspOS / PineTime

I have had a ball this month programming the PineTime I got around christmas time. Micropython in a memory constrained controller is a fascinating ...

In pete asks the question "Why 21 million" and Aaron does not know. I know. Do you know? There are 6 ten-minute blocks in an hour. There are 24 hours in a day. There are 365 days in a year. That's 210240, rounded down to 210000 blocks per cycle. The infinite sum of those halving rewards, starting at 50 and halving every 210000 blocks: 21000000. Even if you decide to divide each Satoshi still further, and eek out sub-satoshi subsidy, the sum will never reach 21000001. So it's 21 million because it starts at 50, and we have ten minute blocks, plus a halving every four years. The magic numbers picked are 50 and 4, the rest comes from the calendar and maths. It's about the actual number of blocks in the revolution and an the orbit of the planet.

Question: How big will the blockchain be when the last satoshi is mined?

I can't support people posting in all caps, unfollowed.

Doctor Who Star-Beast #spoilers ... It was Amazing. RTD and Tenant and Tate are all so good at what they each do. Tenant is so energetic and mad and confused and Tate is so indignant and haughty. They are brilliant. Sonic screwdrivers seem to have developed new powers, really it's a sonic multi-tool by this point. Might as well call it his sonic phone. Cute Monsters and modern themes with energy and pace and heart. Two of 'em. The tardis is so shiny and big and white now. Even bigger on the inside. I was getting fed up with steam punk so it's ace to have it back to the roundrells. But like the show it's always the same on the outside. Even as the faces change. I like 'em not revealing trailers of what's in next week's show like usual and ending with the line "we could end up anywhere in time and space." Coz that's the core of the show there. That's why it can last 60 years. I love Doctor Who I do. It's so silly. Why that face again? The main reason of course is to keep the fans asking the central question. Doctor who? But also because with the relaunch and extra effort to push the show into America they're gonna want a mid-season re-generation to get them used to the idea while also giving the callbacks to all the entire history which is probably all there on Netflix to watch now I guess. And coz he's objectively the best after maybe Tom Baker. But in the cannon? Someone is manipulating things. Playing games with time. #watching #tv #bbc #doctorWho

Remember everyone, commit as much financial fraud as you like so long as you give Uncle Sam their cut. In the Binance case, that's a mere four billion dollars.

Bloomberg.com

US Is Seeking More than $4 Billion From Binance to End Case

The US Justice Department is seeking more than $4 billion from Binance Holdings Ltd. as part of a proposed resolution of a years-long investigation...

Which is bullish news I guess, especially for BNB. They can pay a four billion dollar fine no problem.

One of the things which made Bitcoin different from traditional wire transfers was that the fee for the transfer isn't related to the amount moved. It's only related to the amount of data needed to record the movement. Moving a hundred dollars can cost more than moving a billion if the billion is in one utxo and the hundred is in fifty of them. But with lightning the fee is related to the amount of liquidity in the channels used for the transfer, so we're back to the fee being much more closely related to to the amount moved.

I had lunch with my parents today. My mum asked me if I still had my bitcoins, because she was under the impression that the guy who invented bitcoin was in jail for fraud now. I tried to explain that he just used bitcoin money for doing fraud just the same as most fraud continues to use dollars but I dunno if she got it. She still didn't seem to believe that nobody knows who satoshi is. Someone must know, she reckons. Someone.

This week I stayed up till 5am on thursday night playing with the level-editor for VR shootng rhythm game Pistol Whip. The game gets closer to the feeling of being in an action movie than any of the other VR shooters because of the way it's all synched to the music, making it more of a choreographed dance game really. Careful chirography and matching music is how they get those movies looking so cool too. So the level-design is mostly about track selection really. I went with Pendulum's "Slam", because it fucking slams. Here's a video of me playing the level I built aroud it.

Dalliance Network

PistolMix - Pistol Whip - Pendulum Slam - Dalliance

@pre@boing.world playing through his remix/mod level on Pistol Whip. The song is Pendulum

You can play my level in the Remix section of the game if you want. Last time I looked that was all filled with unfinished trash and I thought I might be the best on in there, but actually there's loads of other cool work in there now too.

Did you know, I do an occasional tarot-show on Peertube. For example, this week, Suella #Braverman, the #UK home secretary, has seen all the people who are forced to live out on the streets in #tents, so she has decided to fix the problem by banning their tents. So I did a five minute #tarot reading on that, and found the country was once actually very prosperous and generous, until a bunch of drunken rapacious crooks took charge and turned everything to death. Take heart, that at least may soon change! Watch it here:

Braverman Banning Tents

Braverman Banning Tents - The Word Cloud Tarot Show - 06 Nov 2023 This week Suella #Braverman the #UK home secretary has seen all the people forced...

One of the things that annoys me most about Brexit is that when the EU is proposing it's insane privacy-invasive security-sacrificing cryptography-breaking laws there's no MEP I can write to. I can only write to my own MP. And she can't do anything, and probably voted for the encryption-banning the UK did this month too. Even though she's in opposition. Wankers, at all levels. I despair.

I wonder which of the countries that we have right now is the most genocidal of all the states that there are? There's a few contenders, and of course it's normal for states to be genocidal. A non-genocidal state would be quite an achievement! But there's always a ranking.