Switzerland is a waste of energy. It could be used to mine bitcoin instead.

Releasing today, ParmaKnots ™ - A home ParmanodL server in MiniPC form. ParmanodLs also available here. I did a custom web design, hope you like it, feedback welcome.

Parman Home

For those who are not in to clicking...

New Essay on opening port 8333 for Bitcoin nodes.

Open Port 8333 for Bitcoin? – Bitcoin Guides

Parmanode runs Bitcoin Knots by default. It's possible to run Bitcoin Core if you must. Version 30 will not be supported. If you want that, install it yourself, you're not going to use my software to do it.

Could of*

White to play and win. Winner earns 1 #ƨat zapped from Parman. Wrong answers must zap me1 sat.

It's happening. I'm moving away from VSC and Cursor to a full VIM IDE. Wasn't satisfied with VIM integration in VSC/Cursor, needing mouse more often than I'd like. Combined with some tools including Tmux, I see a bright mouseless future, and Holy Panda keys.

With a Parmanode, you can spoof your MAC address for extra privacy, you know, in case you wanted to break the law and be left in peace to speak your mind on the internet, or buy #Bitcoin - please update Parmanode to v3.64.0 and find this option in the tools menu.

Did you know that BTCPay server with Parmanode is freakin great and will continue to improve? Installing is easy AF. Connecting lightning liquidity to BTCPay is made easy AF. Back up and restoring database is made easy AF with Parmanode custom backup script. Lightning channel backups are easy AF. Lightning Watchtower easy AF. Might do automated backups next, and then ParmaSync to a ParmaTwin (yours or a friend's remote encrypted server) nightly. Be entertained.

ParmanodL for Pi 4/5 image available on the Dark Web, because fuck surveillance. https://7hy7ryv6t2w4i43efo6ucfpd22vjhh4xo4rkryvlon42juulzr7vrqqd.onion:7777

I make friends by viciously picking a fight with someone, and then apologise 😅

IQ is 0x80

Sometimes you find out, without ever having had fucked around... Lost a computer to hardware failure the other day. Recovery practices are good, got another up an running the next day, and then that died too. Fuck. Suspecting voltage issues through a 30m ethernet cable - I didn't know that could be an issue. Painful lesson. Server is down, btcpay is down, please don't try to by anything while I'm asleep 😬, I'll fix it tomorrow, bed time. "Parman's Free Bitcoin Guides" is hosted, so that is going strong, your toilet reading shouldn't be interrupted.

THE PROBLEM To flourish, humanity needs to go back to free market money (not issued by central banks or governments, but arising from the market) that can’t be manipulated by central banks and/or governments, nor eradicated. This money also needs to be digital, to facilitate international value transfer, yet scarce (digital tokens have always been “copyable”). Gold used to work well, but being physical, as trade expanded beyond the local town to international trade, peer-to-peer exchange of gold became impractical. The solution to that weakness was to centralize it (using bank ledgers instead, or bank “notes”), and digitize it (digitization of notes/contracts), allowing banks to become intermediaries of all non-P2P transfers of money. Gold’s physical nature led to the introduction of gold-backed paper/digital money, but then ultimately to fiat money — government-issued money not backed by anything at all, not even gold. Fiat money costs nothing to produce, is not scarce, and allows governments to avoid market forces. It allows the government to always expand, facilitating a relentless and gradual march to worldwide totalitarianism. Satoshi Nakamoto solved this problem with Bitcoin. THE SOLUTION Using a distributed ledger (ledger, meaning a record of all the transactions; distributed, meaning existing in many places at once, all in synchrony), and disappearing from the public, he spawned a money that has no central authority, no CEO — no one at all, who can be asked/forced to shut it down. Every single node needs to be eradicated to eliminate Bitcoin, and there are thousands scattered all over the planet. That lack of central authority in a digital token would leave a problem — double-spending. How can anyone be sure of the true state of the ledger? What if a token existing in wallet number one that has been spent, is spent again from wallet number one? Who decides which payment was first, and which was later (and is illegitimate)? This was solved partly by creating the timechain (“blockchain”). Transactions are put in blocks — data grouped together, like pages in a book — and each block includes the hash of the previous block. With the blockchain, the order of these blocks can’t simply be changed around without anyone noticing. If somebody changes transactions in block number one, then the hash of block one will change. The hash of block one is part of the data of block two. That means changing block one will cause the data (the hash) in block two to be wrong. That makes block two invalid. If block two is invalid, then every block after that would be invalid. You can’t have block 750,000 be valid if block two was not valid: The blockchain makes the ledger tamper-evident. The second part of the solution to double-spending was proof-of-work. Note that a re-ordering (or rewriting) of blocks is actually quite easy (and almost costless) to do — it just requires a computer to redo the hashes and link the blocks together. If a new version was presented to you, there isn’t a way for you to know which version is correct — without proof-of-work. What Satoshi Nakamoto did was use PoW (invented previously by Dr. Adam Back) to make these hashes costly to produce. This costliness was introduced by adding a rule to the Bitcoin protocol, placing restrictions on what hash results are valid, necessitating multiple brute-force attempts at hashing in order to meet the requirement. Random brute force attempts by a computer, that cost electricity, is how it’s done, but it is often explained in a way that’s wrong and hated by informed Bitcoiners. “Bitcoin miners are looking for solutions to difficult math problems.” They are not math problems. If attackers were to modify block one, they’d have to also find a valid hash (by entering and iterating some meaningless data until the hash is valid), then enter the new hash into block two and in doing so invalidate the hash of block two. They’d have to change block two in such a way to make it hash correctly, and then put that hash in block three, modifying block three. Then they’d have to repeat the work done to hash block three, and so on, all the way to the current block. The energy expended in mining Bitcoin blocks thus protects the network from attack by making it too expensive to repeat all the energy use. To rewrite Bitcoin from block one would require a repetition of the entire world’s cumulative energy expended on Bitcoin so far. Proof-of-work makes the blockchain tamper-proof. The other purpose of PoW is to solve the “Byzantine Generals’ Problem.” This arises in a distributed network of computers all needing to know the current state of affairs, and no message between computers can be trusted to report the current state (just like the predicament of the Byzantine Generals). The Byzantine Generals’ problem is solved by creating a rule that the chain of Bitcoin blocks with the most cumulative work is the valid chain (often approximated as “the longest chain”). This eliminates any requirement to trust an authority to state which version of the timechain is the valid one, should there be any discrepancy, and simply relies on everyone agreeing to that rule of “most work = the valid chain.” Another problem that Nakamoto considered when creating new money is the problem of fair issuance, and how to do it in such a way to maximize adoption. Nakamoto achieved this by staggering the release of new coins, allowing some of the later adopters access to newly issued coins. 50 bitcoins are released to miners every block, which occurs on average every 10 minutes, and that number of coins issued is halved every 210,000 blocks which is roughly every 4 years. Due to the programmed halving of issuance, there will come a day (estimated in the year 2140) where no further division is possible past the smallest unit (1 Satoshi = 0.00000001 bitcoin), and therefore the supply is mathematically capped and very close to 21 million coins. The difficulty adjustment was also crucial to prevent the supply cap of 21 million coins from being brought in ahead of schedule — it’s interesting to note, for the experienced Bitcoiner, that the difficulty adjustment does not affect the supply cap of bitcoin as such — it just prevents a change to the schedule of release. Even if there was no difficulty adjustment, the 21 million cap can not be breached. Finally, the creation of this money affected something outside the code – game theory. In the same way that the human genome is ultimately responsible for magnificent monuments and works of art, those things are not actually found in our genetic code. This is described by “The Extended Phenotype,” a book and term coined by Richard Dawkins. Bitcoin’s code results in humans acting in such a way to ensure its success. When you learn about Bitcoin in-depth, and the game theory surrounding it, you naturally come to this conclusion: The only thing that can stop Bitcoin is worldwide coordinated authoritarianism, and the only thing that can stop worldwide coordinated authoritarianism is Bitcoin.

The Problem With Money and the Solution Explained – Bitcoin Guides

Termites. Fuck. Gonna cost me sats.

I just spent 4 hrs carefully migrating my home server which was set up years ago as Ubuntu (before I knew any better) to a Debian ParmaDrive, and loved every damn minute of it. Bitcoin, LND and channels, btcpay server (making use of Parmanode database backup & restore feature) with domain and reverse proxy, electrs, fulcrum, RTL, Tor services/onions/configs, home directory files, SSH keys, and new drive encryption with VPS unlock (ParmaGaurd). I feel like I'm forgetting something. Oh shit, I lost my private keys. 4 hours and is not bad actually. Once upon a time this would have taken me about a few days maybe a week. I didn't jump right in though, I did spend a few days thinking about it in the back of my mind, just to make sure I don't fuck it up.

I just opened a fresh new packet of cassia bark, best before date: 2017.

I dream of a day when there's nobody wrong on the internet.

I'm enjoying being a maths teacher for my daughter in self-custody homeschooling. Today I introduced polynomials and manipulating curves on 2D axes. Tomorrow I think I'm going to whip out, "It's just math" 😂