Heh, I actually just ran into transaction pinning in real life: so LND v0.18 has a new sweeper scheme, that, long story short, is trying to "sweep" both nearly worthless anchor outputs, and valuable outputs, from some LN channels I closed in the same transaction. The anchor outputs are past their 16 block timeout, so someone else is trying to sweep them in a huge 3sat/vB transaction paying ~60,000 in fees. Far more than I can afford! But still a low fee-rate. On my replace-by-fee-rate nodes the sweep will eventually succeed once LND picks a high enough fee rate (it repeatedly RBFs the sweeps). It might even get mined, either on a pool like F2Pool with short mempool expiration, or in the near future when <BIG POOL> turns on RBFR like they told me they would Soon™.

Bitcoin Drain in the USA

Bitcoin in the USA - a hot bed for adoption and innovation, but a minefield for regulation. Bull Bitcoin's CEO and Founder, Francis Pouliot breaks ...

Good read.

Reason.com

Judge acquits Backpage co-founder Michael Lacey on most counts

The federal court found insufficient evidence to sustain 53 of 84 remaining counts against Lacey.

A bit of good news, finally.

Finally got around to just resetting Amethyst. For some reason it has a bug which just caused the app to crash a few seconds after loading. Probably should have opened an issue... but more important things to work on. 😂

TIL baleen whales are spectacularly successful. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2204892120

Good example of the economics of a replace-by-fee-rate replacement:

The Mempool Open Source Project®

Explore the full Bitcoin ecosystem with The Mempool Open Source Project®. See the real-time status of your transactions, get network info, and more.

While the absolute fee dropped from $82 to $3, the fee-rate increased from 5sat/vB to 18sat/vB: F2Pool mined a block with a minimum fee of 10sat/vB. So the truth is the $82 was worthless to them. Much better to take the $3 now; a 5sat/vB transaction might never be economical to mine. Note that I have no reason to think that F2Pool is running Libre Relay. This kind of situation happens periodically simply because mempools aren't a consensus, so they aren't always consistent. Of course, it helps that a few dozen Libre Relay nodes are out there relaying RBFR replacements when they happen; I know that at least some Libre Relay nodes are directly connected to F2Pool.

We won the identity trial against Craig Wright. Official transcript of the judge's bench ruling: MR JUSTICE MELLOR: Thank you. Well, I thank all the parties for their written closing and oral arguments, and they've been very helpful indeed. They will require me to prepare a fairly lengthy written judgment, which will be handed down in due course. And for all those who have already been hassling my clerk as to when the judgment will be ready, the short answer is as follows: it will be ready when it's ready and not before. However, having considered all the evidence and submissions presented to me in this trial, I've reached the conclusion that the evidence is overwhelming. Therefore, for the reasons which will be explained in that written judgment in due course, I will make certain declarations which I am satisfied are useful and are necessary to do justice between the parties. First, that Dr Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin White Paper. Second, Dr Wright is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in the period 2008 to 2011. Third, Dr Wright is not the person who created the Bitcoin System. And, fourth, he is not the author of the initial versions of the Bitcoin software. Any further relief will be dealt with in my written judgment. I will extend time for filing any appellant's notice until 21 days after the form of order hearing, which will be appointed following the hand down of my written judgment and I ask the parties to seek to agree an order giving effect to what I have just stated. So I'm afraid, for any further information, you'll to wait for the written judgment.

“Various people have pointed out massive deficiencies in his proposals.” Good time to remind people that Libre Relay nodes are running pure replace-by-fee-rate on mainnet. The majority of RBFR replacements get mined. If RBFR is so broken, you guys should actually attack it. 😁

One-Shot Replace-by-Fee-Rate

Currently Bitcoin Core implements a Replace-by-Fee (RBF) policy, wheretransactions are not replaced unless the new transaction pays at least a high...

Over Half of Replace-by-Fee-Rate Replacements Are Mined

I recently released a prototype Libre Relay fork of Bitcoin Core v26.0, that amongother things, implements Pure Replace-By-Fee-Rate (RBFR)with a 2x...