Monero is important to remind us that we need to fix fungibility in Bitcoin. eCash is great but custodial. Lightning is of questionable benefit to one's privacy.
I don't know where Monero stands right now but its price vs. Bitcoin's price is a direct indicator of relative fungibility issues.
lightning can be extended to all other assets, including lines of credit between parties that trust each other so there is nothing stopping devs from building a monero wallet that can receive from bitcoin lighting wallets via some exchange nodes. Mixing on-chain with lightning is the problem here, as on-chain payments are not final, so the one exchanging lightning payments for monero pay-outs needs to be trusted.
My biggest problem with Trump is that he lies with every sentence because of the style he uses. He can't form a sentence with less than three superlatives and if you take him by his word, he misrepresents the past and over-promises the future all the time. So his words are just a word salad with no promises one can take seriously. Free Ross on day one? Yeah, things are complicated and "day one" is just one of his exaggerations.
Well, I'm in a complete Trump bubble. I see not one Harris advocate so I guess, Trump-voters are preaching to Trump-voters and Harris-voters are preaching to Harris-voters. Great.
While this is not only dull and stupid, I think it's also dangerous as no matter who gets elected, the other side will be convinced that all the country was betrayed and they need to save democracy now.
Should I follow more communists 🤔
TIL: The open interest is way lower than that number polymarket features front and center when you look on a bet.
https://i.nostr.build/JlOx6T8Gq8ToZmzb.png
The symbology here is confusing. I thought the cup with the amount meant that the winning bets will go home with a total of $3B. Far from that. Apparently the "open interest" is only $200M.
Now both are small change for a nation state wanting to throw the country into chaos but $200M is even peanuts for some Dr. Evil billionaire.
Prediction markets are nowhere near as big as they should be :(
Building alone doesn't get you zaps.
If you are a socially awkward introvert who has an issue with sharing anything on social media, you won't get zaps no matter how good you are at building whatever you are building.
On the other hand, if you are a big extrovert and get the feel of the community, you get tons of zaps for shitposting alone.
How much do you use the word highlighting? I'm on Linux and thought about a tool like that and had no idea it existed. How good is it actually?
My main problem with such an editor would be that I wouldn't bother writing for example this nostr reply in a different tool. I'd want it integrated in the browser with it having access to the full context. Then, the possibilities would be endless.
It is a way of getting yourself into complete bankruptcy but to say it never ends well is wrong, too. There is many degens that ape in with leverage and come out ahead.
Literally any computer will do. As a general rule of thumb, you might have compatibility issues if you use the very latest chips as they were not well tested with Linux yet but I also think that's less and less of an issue.
https://i.nostr.build/F0XepWi7uT1qJQmP.png
Three years ago, Bitcoin was traded for $69k. Adjusted for inflation that's (at least) $80k today. How long do you think it will take for Bitcoin to get from $80k to $100k? Is two weeks™ optimistic or pessimistic?
To defend shitcoins is just stupid and not worth a debate. If anybody "diversifies" into 200 shitcoins, he's just lost and either hoping to randomly bet on "the next bitcoin" or he knows they are all shit but thinks to understand the market better than the bigger fool that will buy his bags.
It gets more nuanced with proponents of specific shitcoins that are 100% convinced that their shitcoin is better than bitcoin and it's arrogant to dismiss this possibility blindly. It's not arrogant to not look into shitcoins though, as looking into them is not for free neither, so the precise "why" for the different coins to being pointless might differ but with a 99.99% accuracy, "if it's not Bitcoin it's a shitcoin" is a good heuristic.
I saw "temporary mint" and immediately thought "rug pull".
Your thoughts are precisely why I am against popularity rankings for mints. Popularity contests can be gamed and will get gamed most by those who have most to profit from being on top.
I see mints as ways to manage community funds. Uncle Jim model. My kids will want e-cash cause UTXOs will be too expensive for them early on. Also it's great for privacy.
I wonder how far from an exploit that was if it managed to brick the machines beyond re-boots. Was it the data in his passport or the data the machine got back from some server? Which part could an attacker actually control?
I love my cat! She fell into our backyard as a baby, together with 4 siblings and we found them homes.
Still I genuinely wonder what needs to happen for her to learn that a human foot can be dangerous and I worry a bit about her learning curve with cars.
Trump is fascinating! There is no adjectives. Only superlatives. Ever. And if you don't know that, he sounds like a liar non-stop but it's actuall a language issue.
It is. I think AirBnB and other apps tell you when it's night in the recipient's timezone when you send a message. Check here if you want to send anyway.
Holy smokes. His comment at first sounds like he's a rambling deplatformer of anything Russian, justifying it with his nationality but the second part sounds more nuanced. So authorities forced his hands? But he doesn't sound particularly opposed to it neither.
I like to consume stuff that's right on the edge of what I know and I guess others feel the same but to find that requires to have a register of what I know and how well. Some personal AI assistant could have some idea of what would fall into that category and sure, public posts hint at it, too, so a nostr DVM could find me interesting stuff based on what I interacted with but I think it's really hard to find the right stuff.
You would if all the powerful people in the world (central bankers, politicians and billionaires) would unite to destroy bitcoin. We need to orange pill at least some of them, too, to secure Bitcoin's long term success. I don't like politicians as a class and none in particular but once two major and opposing nations are on board with Bitcoin like El Salvador, Bitcoin's long term success would be much better secured than right now.
Well, it's in line with how he talks. It does not come as a surprise to me at all. In how far it is Machiavellian talk to appease his Wallstreet friends I don't know.
In an interview, Elon Musk recently said that Earth has just the right gravity at which space travel [with chemical rockets] is theoretically possible. A bit less gravity and it would be easy. A bit more and it would be impossible.
I'm not sure what the limit would be but the fact that we have enough in the tank to do a propelled landing tells me there is still some margin. But not much, as much of the breaking before landing is done by air friction.
So while a bit bigger planet would not be able to land as smoothly, a much bigger planet basically needs nuclear propulsion to get off the ground.
So what are the actual limits here? Earth invented life and went through snowball times and global extinction events. Bigger planets' intelligent life cannot get off their surface - or might not have a solid surface at all that's not covered by liquid hydrogen. Could intelligent life develop on a gas giant? If so, what would be the hurdles to even communicate out? How would one go about sending a radio signal from Jupiter? Would life on Jupiter even come up with radio technology given it's probably useless on their planet? Or can more complex molecules not develop at all on gas giants?
In the other extreme, smaller planets, getting to space is "easy" but getting to life or intelligent life probably not. With less of an atmosphere, comets are more frequent to hit the surface. It needs less rock for "global" events.
I don't understand enough about the origins of life to rule out non-carbon based chemistry but I would find it hard to believe life to spring into existence on a planet that has no liquid for chemistry to happen in.
Great way to look at it! But somehow I'm not convinced the whole argument is as rigid as Elon puts it. 4% payload is just the state of the art and the rocket equation would allow to lift much more to space if we further improved the tech. Saturn V didn't land any boosters, so Starship is way ahead already. They could get well above 4% to orbit if they wouldn't carry fuel for the landing.
But for a bit more outlandish plan: Let's launch the vehicles from a platform in 30km altitude to almost completely eliminate the atmospheric drag at launch. If ChatGPT is right, 130t of helium would suffice to offset the 5000t of a fully loaded starship. Helium costs $100k/t, so for the mere starship weight we would need $13million. Make that $130million for a full 350 million cubic meters zeppelin/balloon/structure - costs of the order of magnitude of a single launch to LEO. At that altitude, winds are below 120km/h and drag less than 2% of an equally strong wind at sea level.
How can we anchor a lighter-than-air platform of that size? It's size would be equivalent to a sphere with a radius of 440m - almost 900m across, so quite a mega structure. But a balloon or zeppelin shape would probably be the best, with the platform hanging below it. The rocket could dangle below it and enter into free fall before igniting the engines. It would lose as little altitude as necessary to safely fly around our platform. No trouble with blown up concrete at the launch site. The anchor site could be a single site so the zeppelin would align with the wind direction but the tether would need enormous tensile strength and provide for transport of parts, liquids, gas, data, electricity and ultimately humans.
Catch at 30km or on the ground? I think, once it works well, returning boosters could be caught below the zeppelin again. Maybe not too close to not lose that mega structure but the maneuver would be quite similar apart from the zeppelin not having a static geo location and the booster needing to go a few meters sideways in the final approach.
For space travel, escape velocity and cost to leave the atmosphere are the main factors.
I've seen estimates for earth-like planets but wonder if venus and mars are earth-like by their count. Mars might have had a more hospitable past but was it long enough to get anywhere near the time scales we had to develop intelligent life and space travel? Was it closer to asteroid belts? Does Venus provide conditions for complex molecules?
A dense atmosphere sure helps to protect the surface but it also holds back rockets on their way out. But then again, dense atmospheres might not be a problem if lighter-than-air platform launches work: nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzq3huhccxt6h34eupz3jeynjgjgek8lel2f4adaea0svyk94a3njdqqstjpnthcg63v35v2gx5ls80m3nl4yc0yn5ufr63zkphta4d9yhhmguf0rcn
Searching for this, all I can find is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockoon where the balloon is lost with each launch.
What's the catch? Is such a cable not feasible? A 35km Zylon cable would weigh 50t to only support its own weight. Increase that cable weight budget by x20 to 1kt and it should still be little compared to the above example of 50kt of lift capacity. Zylon is commercially available at about $200/kg. For this project that would cost $200M. For a reusable rocket launch platform, that's still peanuts, right?
Ok, I spent way too much time these past days on this but I learned a lot.
I learned that my original assumption that atmospheric drag was significant to Starship was wrong. Some Wikipedia article quoted the drag loss with "1500 to 2000 m/s" while a Saturn V which is most comparable to Starship reduces this to a mere 40m/s on ascent.
I learned that there is such a thing as gravity loss. The idea here is that due to the atmosphere, the rocket cannot accelerate horizontally as would be ideal to quickly accumulate orbital speed. It has to start vertically and fly at a steep angle for a while, which contributes little to nothing to the orbital speed. All components that only fight gravity without adding speed are "gravity loss" and that is also quoted with 1534m/s for the Saturn V. With a high launch this could be lowered but by how much? A space nerd guessed 500 to 1000 m/s given the atmosphere up there is less than 1% of ground level. 1000m/s would translate to an extra 18 tons of payload to LEO per launch. According to https://aerospace.csis.org/data/space-launch-to-low-earth-orbit-how-much-does-it-cost/ that would be worth $27M per launch.
Getting to 30km height ideally costs just the potential energy and electric lifts are pretty close to achieving that, so it would be desirable to get out of thick atmosphere that way.
Is it possible with today's materials to build a blimp that can just float for years without needing a full replacement? I think it could be compartmentalized. If the blimp has individual chambers such that a sever damage in one point can be compensated by pumping gas to a different chamber while fixing that spot, while smaller damage gets repaired by autonomous robots, while using at least one redundant tether so you can maintenance or replace these, too, ... you could have the whole structure maintainable. Then it comes down to leakage cost and longevity of the materials.
If you have 50 launches per year, you get a life time budget for construction and maintenance of $1.35B/year.
Rockets expend about 20% of their fuel just to get out of the thick atmosphere.
TIL there was/is a company that tried to glide all the way to space ...
Two weeks ago, I had explored how to get to the edge of space with lighter-than-air vehicles:
nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzq3huhccxt6h34eupz3jeynjgjgek8lel2f4adaea0svyk94a3njdqy88wumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmv9uq3uamnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3dwp6kytnhv4kxcmmjv3jhytnwv46z7qpqzdv2qavyr8ayje5k3gjge77l96nupl73pe2swjfuw02k6vwfaujq5x4nua
I learned so much about rocket science exploring the idea of a 30km high "zeppelin" or blimp ... but got attacked viciously on reddit's r/askEngineers and r/rocketry:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/1g700qg/why_are_heavy_lifter_rockets_not_launched_from/ (OP got deleted)
https://www.reddit.com/r/rocketry/comments/1g7qwug/how_much_would_access_to_space_improve_if_we_had/
But I learned that the biggest of rockets have virtually no drag loss but they still have a loss from atmospheric launches called gravity "loss" which comes from the fact that in the initial phase, the rocket has to go up and not sideways while sideways is what you need to get orbital speed. The flatter it accelerates, the more it accelerates in the right direction. That loss is easily 20% of the total budget to low earth orbit. Given that payload makes up only 4% of the total "wet" mass of a rocket, that's a big deal and I still believe, building a 30km high platform held in place by tethers to launch heavy lifter rockets is an idea worth exploring.
Anyway, today I found out there was a company that went even one step further. At 30km, the rocket would still have to start at an angle and could not use ion thrusters from the start Ion thrusters would allow higher top speeds with the same amount of fuel. That company - http://www.jpaerospace.com suggested a platform 42km high with the space ship being a giant, lighter than air mono wing that would gently accelerate and climb from there all the way to orbit. And they did not stop at reddit posts. They did build some small scale models but it looks more like rudimentary hobby scientist builds than the future of space travel.
Can you monetize music on SoundCloud and Youtube as an Iranian? I suspect it might be due to monetization that they reject you as the OFAC has a pretty draconian regime in the US, where tipping even just one cent could get you in jail for terrorist financing if you tipped a citizen of a sanctioned country like Iran.
VPN I understand as it helps Iranians receive US propaganda but VPS and domains? As for the legality of what NC is doing ... I guess there is zero leverage for you and they just cut ties with sanctioned individuals to avoid trouble.
I think the argument is that any economic activity that brings funds into the country leads to the regime getting money to fund terrorists. Clearly if you pay taxes on those funds and also if you don't but buy tomatoes and the tomatoes guy pays taxes ...
You know I want these sanctions to end but being scared by OFAC rules myself, I understand how US companies don't take them lightly.
With these sanctions they can't stop aggression. Quite the opposite is true. "When goods don't cross borders, soldiers will."
Good luck for you and your family ❤️.
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