Bitcoin is dead. It consumes all the electricity produced in the world. Schroedinger would be proud. Or Goebbels.

Seems bitcoin devs have to pay at least 7% of their costs caused by the serial liar Faketoshi. If it is a settlement, the devs agreed to this, I wonder why. Maybe it is faster? Litigation about costs also costs non-trivial amounts? They could get a court order of 100% of costs, but it would be difficult to enforce, Faketoshi could pull some tricks to avoid paying? It is horrible if the devs have to suffer any financial loss because of this. As if the stress, uncertainty and waste of time they suffered wasn't sufficient. https://nitter.poast.org/bitnorbert/status/1799094332282093963#m

snowflake proxy in Debian 12 repositories is quite old. I wanted newer version, but compilation from source requires go-1.21, while Debian 12 has go-1.19 in standard repositories. I installed go-1.21 from bookworm-backports, this means adding deb

Index of /debian

bookworm-backports main contrib non-free to your /etc/sources.list, doing "apt update" and "apt install golang-1.21/stable-backports". Then you can compile snowflake by "/usr/lib/go-1.21/bin/go build", and run by "nohup ./proxy".

2 ways to protest the scandalous ruling against Alexey Pertsev. 1. run at least snowflake proxy (https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/snowflake/standalone/), it should work even behind CGNAT. If you have public IPv4 address, run tor non-exit relay or bridge. 2. run joinmarket as a maker and set your fee to lower than default, perhaps even zero. I wish I could do more...

Roger Ver may be screwed more than you think. If he stays more than 183 days in Spain, he becomes Spanish tax resident. (1) So he will to pay wealth tax, surely his net worth is more than 3M euros. Theoretically, if he stays more than 10 years, he will be subject to Spanish exit tax. The tax rate is complicated, there is the old wealth tax set by regions and abolished in Comunidad de Madrid and Andalucia, and there is new, so called temporary solidarity tax: - 0% for the first 3 million EUR NET worth - 7% of NET worth between 3 million EUR and 5 million EUR - 1% of NET worth between 5 million EUR and 10 million EUR - 5% of NET worth in excess of 10 million EUR But I still have doubts, because this creates some perverse incentives if true. Spanish authorities could just trump up charges on any millionaire on vacation in Spain, drag the process and be rewarded by the wealth tax. Yes, right to speedy trial, maybe they get slap on the wrist from European Court of Human Rights. (1) I checked the law and there is no exemption for being arrested, waiting for trial, extradition or similar. The only exemption is some cultural collaboration, see

BOE-A-2006-20764 Ley 35/2006, de 28 de noviembre, del Impuesto sobre la Renta de las Personas Físicas y de modificación parcial de las leyes de los Impuestos sobre Sociedades, sobre la Renta de no Residentes y sobre el Patrimonio.

BOE-A-2006-20764 Ley 35/2006, de 28 de noviembre, del Impuesto sobre la Renta de las Personas Físicas y de modificación parcial de las leyes de l...

(in Spanish).

Joinmarket has a big flaw: it happily spends all your funds in a particular mixdepth when doing coinjoin as maker. This can reveal common ownership . An analyst can try all combination of inputs and try to match "change" outputs. Say there are several 1M sats outputs - analyst cannot link them to particular input(s). But if you contributed with 800k and 400k inputs, then you'll get a 200k change output. So if there is no other way to combine inputs to get 1.2M sats, then those 800k and 400k inputs are linked. So if one input comes from Bisq purchase and another input comes from closing a channel of my node, then Bisq seller can deduce that I am the owner of one of the participating lighting nodes. Even worse, joinmarket spends together coinjoined coins. If they can be linked , it partially nullifies the previous coinjoin. Please tell me I misunderstood something. I vaguely remember that it sometimes creates 3 outputs (only for a taker perhaps?), this could save the day.

wow, DOJ tracked Roger Ver's bitcoins. Probably some Chainanalysis random generator, although they only say "clustering analysis". I hope he challenges those, at last he would do something useful. source: the indictment at

 

I observe crazy surge in joinmarket activity (I am running a join maker). Nothing for the past two weeks, and around 4 coinjoins just today. And they are paying crazy transaction fees, like 300 sats/vb. This must be related to Samourai crackdown. Natural explanation is just people who would use Samourai. But I wonder if it is some sort of sting operation. Although not sure if the latter makes sense.

I started a new lnd node, waiting for a weekend to catch lower fees and to open some channels tomorrow. First channels will be to those who returned me btc after penalty transactions. I made some improvements to avoid another data loss: - using Terramaster NAS and internal SSDs to store lnd data. So better cooling, and no half-functioning USB-to-SATA reductions. For example, one such reduction does not support TRIM, so who knows what it does with write caches. - disabled write cache - still using ZFS, but without encryption. There are several bugs related to encryption, Gentoo wiki warns against using encryption (

ZFS - Gentoo wiki

But those are mostly related to send/receive, still it should avoid one possible source of problems. - of course using 1 redundant disk - zfs mirror

The Samourai indictment is ridiculous. If public keys of users are now known to FBI, then Samourai didn't even provide much privacy to those users. So what is their crime again? Maybe fraud would be more fitting, but the weaknesses were well known before.

Using HDD for storage of bitcoin blockchain with some caching sounded like a good idea, no need for expensive SSDs. But now I need to rescan 300000 blocks to start lnd in recovery mode, and it takes around 4 days, literally. Already tried neutrino (which means leeching off someone's node) and it didn't seem faster. Perhaps lnd could be smarter and just use bitcoind's wallet for on-chain funds...

Hall of fame - list of node operators who returned or at least attempted to return my funds after their node published penalty transaction. In other words, those nodes have already shown that they are unlikely to steal from you, so I recommend to open a channel with them.

Gist

How to return money from penalty tx

How to return money from penalty tx. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

My lightning node is closing down:

Stacker News

Node xmrk closing down - for now at least \ stacker news ~lightning

This is an official statement about my node. TLDR: if you have channel with me, I recommend force-closing it. If your node did penalty/breach tx, p...

Punished for running tor relay again, this time by my bank, cannot connect even to their main webpage. But my position could be a bit stronger than in the case of Comcast, because I am their customer. Thinking about filing a complaint with them, although it feels like fighting windmills. Still, at least they have to respond and invent some excuse. Tried few other Spanish banks - Abanca, BBVA and Santander. All of them let me to login page. The bank is obsessed with ESG. Running tor relay helps people in Russia and Iran circumvent censorship - does this not belong to S in ESG? Ah, I forgot, the ESG is just a show.

@Warren Togami, any suggestions what should I do about the broken fee estimator / empty mempool problem you keep complaining about? Referring to those: https://nitter.net/wtogami/status/1708517076480975174#m https://nitter.net/wtogami/status/1699484964721492016#m However, I was told you can configure CLN to be more tolerant to differing fee estimates. Anyway, relevant lines of my bitcoin.conf: maxorphantx=200 txindex=1 dbcache=500M maxmempool=300M maxconnections=40 maxuploadtarget=20G maxreceivebuffer=400 maxsendbuffer=400 minrelaytxfee=0.000010 mempoolminfee=0.000010 par=0 mempoolfullrbf=1 permitbaremultisig=1 # changed from 0 around 09-12-2023 lnd.conf: bitcoin.node=bitcoind bitcoind.estimatemode=ECONOMICAL coop-close-target-confs=24 max-commit-fee-rate-anchors=40

Another idea: even with everything on ZFS you can fine-tune caching. I would put .bitcoin/blocks (historical data) on a separate ZFS dataset and allow only metadata caching on that dataset: zfs set primarycache=metadata $YOUR_DATASET Indexes like txindex probably deserve data caching, not sure. note1gxfn050dgsx45w0dyylsnts5548st8k3az6898l8yz6y7l4p4e8spfhd0m

I put .bitcoin/chainstate directory on ZFS, and quite satisfied with the result. Before, processing a block could take 4 minutes, lightning complained about failed healtcheck 10 times a day. After 23 hours with ZFS, I observe just 1 healtcheck failure, and block processing is < 30s. I also set /sys/module/zfs/parameters/zfs_arc_min and zfs_arc_max to 5.5 GB and 7 GB respectively. This is a laptop with 8 GB RAM and 2 HDDs, running just bitcoind, lnd is on another laptop. Just moving the chainstate to the other HDD did not help that much. In theory, this should keep most of chainstate in cache, even when peers do a lot of historical queries. (The rest of .bitcoin is NOT on ZFS, but on Btrfs.) Not the most elegant solution - ZFS help mostly because it has separate cache. But even if everything was on ZFS, I think ZFS's caching algo would notice that chainstate is read much more frequently than the rest, and keep most of it in cache - but I haven't tested this.

So I was wrong, you do need 2 txs for peerswap - (

GitHub

peerswap/docs/usage.md at master · ElementsProject/peerswap

Contribute to ElementsProject/peerswap development by creating an account on GitHub.

Only makes sense to use it with Liquid then. note1s37ty5pufvy5m7jtjj2s67qr80hpy3umyvrmltenj5sysu2cq4fsma3eg5

yay, I am famous, and in a positive way: https://nitter.net/notgrubles/status/1707916466626928733#m Not the best time to criticize PeerSwap, right? 1. No way to set on-chain fees. I ended up paying 24 sats/vB when 10 would be sufficient. So if you think you can save on fees, by doing 1 tx instead of 2 (closing channel and opening new one) - yes, you use less space, but you overpay on sats/vB. 2. Cannot choose UTXO to spend. Would be perfect for privacy. Now I am using private channels, but because of channel reserve, I cannot get rid of KYC coins completely, I am left with 1% of original coin when I later close the channel. This could be solved with peerswap. Also would need an option to spend the whole UTXO on swap-in. Still, both are fixable. Unfulfilled potential... yet.

Thinking about gold mining - is Greenpeace USA planning some campaign against hoarding gold by central banks? OK, mining of other metals can devastate the environment, too - but at least other metals can be useful. Gold mining devastates the environment just to have more gold siting idly in vaults. And there is no good reason for hoarding gold, it is just a "tradition": . What about "change the (reserve) asset, not the landscape"? Or "change the asset instead of changing river into poison" - referring to

2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill - Wikipedia

. I guess my slogans are lame, and surely this is the only reason such campaign will not take place.