I've been reading more about Tor's 'hidden services' system, in order to include them in my MONAD protocol, my Cashu-funded Tor/VPN alternative (name subject to change) Blinded paths are kinda obvious - and easy to implement - and I'll add them to MONAD, but instead of carrying the whole traffic on the blinded path, MONAD will - like Tor - use the blinded path to coordinate the data connection I might still tweak the design a bit, but I think I understand Tor's design and motivation now This won't be in the first versions of MONAD, I'm just doing this research in advance so that I know the direction to go in View quoted note →

The pleb slop of economics There's a lot of interesting stuff to learn, including - but not limited to - Austrian economics, on credit creation and inflation and balance sheets and so on But this isn't a serious observation from Friedman View quoted note →

STRC will cause deflation, not inflation Central banks increase interest rates (by selling Treasuries) in order to discourage the creation of credit. They do that in order to decrease inflation STRC will be seen as the de facto interest rate and therefore it will discourage credit creation So even if the US government prints money, the credit destruction in the banking sector could lead to a net decrease in the money supply

I've been a bit lazy on open source in recent weeks, mostly due to needed recovery after all the excitement at @Sovereign Engineering 😀; I'm too old to create and demo six new things in six weeks. But I think my strength is recovering again. I'm attending meetings and spamming Github with multiple comments on other people's PRs. (I'm being active without really solving problems, but I guess I need to restart somewhere 😀)

I finally set up my work laptop to use AI for coding Since September, I've spent a lot of my work time actually coding for Bitcoin on my personal laptop, but I should remember to do fiat-mining too It took a lot of hacking to get a good setup funded by my employer, but it's working now. OpenCode, using my employer's Copilot subscription to get access to Opus and GPT and so on (But I won't use that for any Bitcoin stuff, I don't want any complications around rights to the open source code that I write) For those who are in conventional fiat-mining jobs, what's your setup and does your employer give you enough tokens

An idea for @FIPS , to allow more (transitive) signing within ancestries, while retaining the obfuscation/privacy benefit of hiding the 'real' npub: TL/DR: the node_addr should be a tweaked public key, not just an arbitrary hash of the pubkey key. Your node has a keypair: the secret s and the corresponding public key p. We usually see the p in it bech32 representation (npub...) Currently, the node_addr is the (first 16 bytes of the) sha256sum of the pubkey. I propose to change that First, define a tweak: t = sha256("FIPS_node_addr" || pubkey) Then we have a tweaked pubkey p' = p + tG and the corresponding tweaked secret (don't forget BIP-340), which will allow your node to sign for p' just as easily as it can sign for p. Now, let's define the node_id as p', and the node_addr as the first 16 bytes of that. With this scheme, if my node tells you that my ancestry is [node_id(me), node_id(A), node_id(B), node_id(Root)], then the ancestry will include multiple relevant signatures. You won't directly see the pubkey B, but you'll B'=node_id(B). And you will see a signature by B' that it's parent is node_id(Root). Of course, signatures don't prove that all the data is genuine. But over time, we can see which node_ids are reliable and which are not. For example, the signature will stop a hacker from pretending that you (a reliable) node has selected the hacker as its parent