This is America. 🤦‍♂️

77 meshtastic nodes at #thotcon (and counting!)

@kidwarp see you at Thotcon?

Future work: set up a lightnning address for my self-hosted node No point of putting it on Nostr until I get some inbound liquidity, but that will come in due time.

Today I opened 4 lightning channels, all .onion addresses. I then sent someone 1K using a lightning address, from my phone. Which means that it was able to lookup the address, get an invoice created, route properly, and actually transfer the loot. And I'm not directly connected to any large lightning nodes (AFAIK). This feels way cooler than I expected, and I'm probably enjoying it far more than is reasonable. 😆 Thank you to the plebs who joined forces with me to grow the network! You are the real heros of this story. You have earned zero fees from me for life. Next up, we'll see if I can route to people I am not directly connected to. Should be fun. I'll have a good time or a food story.

Any home LND noderunners out there who would let me open a 100K sats channel to them? Give me a pubkey & address (DM or publuc if you like). I'd rather open a channel with a random person on nostr than a random person on the internet at large. Plus I'm seeing minimum channel sizes of 5M and that's too rich for me right now. Someday, maybe. No catch, just free incoming liquidity for you (well, once I get some inbound liquidity myself). I get to learn. That's the benefit to me.

"Model Checking the Security of the Lightning Network" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15568

I have not been impressed by the security papers posted on arxiv in a while.

Cryptography and Security

It's always been a bit buzzwordy and chasing whatever is already being discussed, but it feels like it's getting worse... "Quantum-Resilient Blockchain for Secure Transactions in UAV-Assisted Smart Agriculture Networks" "LLM-Driven APT Detection for 6G Wireless Networks: A Systematic Review and Taxonomy" "A Novel Zero-Trust Identity Framework for Agentic AI: Decentralized Authentication and Fine-Grained Access Control" I mean, did the authors train an LLM on all the clickbait sites in the world and ask it to generate the spiciest possible title? If I was deciding who gets funding, these would be at the bottom of the pile at best. It's more likely they'd just get pitched in the bin.

I've been tinkering with an LND node for a few months now and the #1 issue is getting out of sync with the chain data. Even when it has the blocks, it sometimes hasn't processed them. This same problems happened to me with the lightning node in Zeus. And it's a troublesome problem to detect too because uptime monitors are going to report the service is up. Systemd is going to say the service is running. The blockheight might even be up to date! It'd take some custom code to dig deep and detect this as soon as it happens. Sure, something could be written, but I haven't come across it yet. As I understand it, a watchtower is looking for channel closures with old channel state. This is not at all the same as detecting that your node is falling behind and payments are going to fail (sometimes silently) if someone tries to move any money. The only explanation I can muster for this being the state of lightning after 5+ years is that laws must have had a severe chilling effect and kept developers away. It's hard to understand why the quality would be so low unless there just aren't enough devs to go around. I know the people who are working on these projects are incredibly passionate, so I don't believe for a moment that it's a lack of caring on their part.

An ex-Army buddy of mine is considering putting together gunshot wound (GSW) kits that aren't made of a bunch of cheap garbage like the commercial ones and selling them for for bitcoin. He's worried nobody will be interested. Give this note a boost and a react if you think he's wrong. Or reply with what you want (backpack full of supplies, something small and lightweight, etc.). I want to show him that it'd be worth the significant upfront investment and he should go for it.

New heltec v3 case & holster are siiiick! That neon green screams #cyberpunk, the purple reminds me of the joker, and an unstoppable mesh network oozes #cypherpunk It's also very functional. The holster really locks the device in place. There's no risk of it falling out just by moving around. I don't think I could have possibly done any better with this. I re-used parts I already had (except having to buy a $10 battery because the ones I have are all too big), but if I started with nothing more than heat shrink tubing, a soldering iron and some solder, it'd cost about $68 for the parts (but only around $42 without the holster). With the amount of cleanup I had to do on the 3D-print to get the buttons moving smoothly and the board to snap into place, I have no interest in making these for other people. 😆 Y'all can DIY. 💪 #meshtastic #mesh #radio #3Dprinting