I don't think I can emphasize this enough. Too many Bitcoiners are focused on things like number go up and adoption at all costs And not realizing that what we're doing is trying to change the world's power structures and they aren't going to go fucking quietly. They are going to use every nasty trick in the book and then some. People are going to go to jail. Hell, people might even die. Its not going to be easy or fast. And while I do believe that Bitcoin is a peaceful revolution, The powers that be do not see it that way. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.

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This helps prevent plebs from gossiping spam to others, but eventually won’t the mining pools provide APIs for submitting transactions directly to them?

A more viable path might be to have a fee structure that doesn’t scale linearly. Can we weight OP_RETURN higher? Scale it quadratically?

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Learn about and support Stratum V2


If mining pool centralization gets worse then demand for layer 2 and 3 will grow exponentially.


Ultimately you have to play the long game. Everyone who cares for privacy needs to be vocal, effective advocates to our families, friends, and neighbors. We need to teach people why it’s important.

It’s not going to be easy, but it’s worth preserving.


Which falling empire? The two biggest economies in the world are competing to see who can surveil the most. Europe is well on the way too.


🚨 We need more tor relays ‼

https://github.com/0xtrr/onion-service-nostr-relays


The US and China regions control the vast majority of the hashrate.

Two observations:

1. Wtf is the rest of the world waiting on?

2. The American culture is one of individuality and the Chinese is collectivism. The battle over hashrate will be the first time in history such competition can take place overtly and digitally.

For the American model to continue it will require many individuals to agree to row in the same direction for a common cause. We have a common cause worth uniting for.


Privacy is a human right.


It’s not enough for the protocol to be open and decentralized.

If the rails on which the protocol rides are compromised then the protocol is compromised as well.


Europeans have 3 years to migrate to Bitcoin

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Great stuff, thank you for all the hard work!


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I made a proposal for a global telecommunications service facilitated by #lightning and #ecash

https://stacker.news/items/516446


It’s amazing to see so many applications and use cases competing for Bitcoin. We’ve got Nostr, Lightning, various eCash projects, Liquid, etc

Each one will compete to bring sats into their network thus increasing the value of Bitcoin for everyone.


Are there any incentives to keep a mint honest? For example, if a mint charged a small fee per day or month it incentivizes them to not rug their users since they’d lose revenue.

Are there other ways? Forced transfer to a random mint at random intervals?


I’m still paranoid my seed generator had insufficient entropy 😩


Yes please!


This would be a zero conf lightning channel except it’s not even submitted to a mempool. There’s more trust involved but also more privacy.

If fees are high enough and your channel is small then your channel opening transaction would likely get pruned before being added to a block anyway. In that scenario you’ve leaked your intentions to the network and didn’t get the security of settlement.


MachuPikacchu

Interested in bitcoin and physics and their intersection


Are there any #Nostr clients with embedded LLMs for filtering content?

Would be nice to have a client organize posts into channels where you can mute some, get notifications on others, etc


Is there any utility in creating lightning channels and all subsequent transactions without broadcasting to the network? Skip the mempool entirely?

For example in extremely high fee environments and with relatively trusted counterparties you could sign transactions and settle when fees come down. Effectively a credit system.


These spam attacks are basically just fund raisers for miners. Are there any incentives against this from the miners’ perspective? Are they inevitably going to promote these protocols? Is there anything we can do aside from education?


Is there any utility in creating lightning channels and all subsequent transactions without broadcasting to the network? Skip the mempool entirely?

Yes there’s more risk but if you except some reasonable degree of trust in the parties (for example family members keeping tabs over many years) then you can save a lot on fees. Might work if you can expect that over the long term the economic relationship is balanced and there’s minimal expectation of dishonesty.


nostr:npub12rv5lskctqxxs2c8rf2zlzc7xx3qpvzs3w4etgemauy9thegr43sf485vg any plans for a simple air gapped device to transfer eCash? Phones are susceptible to spyware. A nice option could be an NFC only device or maybe something like the cold card Q?

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Miners are incentivized to drive their energy costs down as much as possible. The most viable ones will be net energy producers since their the marginal cost of energy to power their rigs is zero. Therefore you’ll see the mining industry merge with the global energy industry.

As bigger players come into the scene and the cost of going to space drops dramatically, then it’s a matter of time before governments start mining in space as a matter of national security.  They’d deploy mining rigs in orbit as they’ll have limitless and mostly unobstructed sunlight at all times and there’s limited physical access to the hardware.

In the far distant future this could turn into an arms race to capture more solar energy as it’s far more abundant than any other source by far. Could bitcoin get us a Dyson Sphere? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere


The amount of energy required to maintain a lie over time compounds.


An input to the market clearing price of a good or service is the transaction cost. Different layers of bitcoin have different transaction costs. As you ascend the layers from on chain, to lightning, to eCash the fees come down by orders of magnitude.

A cup of coffee can be priced at 3 sats if transaction costs are less than a sat. There’s no reason a car can’t cost 20,000 sats if purchased with eCash. Maybe having high fees on the base layer provides the right incentive and urgency for us to build viable ecosystems on Lightning and eCash protocols.

Mass adoption can’t happen unless people can transact with bitcoin as easily as cash. I’m inspired by the community here and know we can make that a reality.


How do you foresee this playing out? Do fees continue to rise up permanently above 2,000 sats/vbyte?

Seems like fees will be a function of the distribution of sats per UTXO. For example, if 1 million sat UTXOs become dust then the network strands a lot of adopters which seems unsustainable.


At a time when runes are driving up fees to insane levels, I’m grateful for your work on e-cash. Thank you!


https://m.primal.net/HxhK.png

# Halving Fee Chaos

The Bitcoin halving is an anticipated event, one of those Bitcoin holidays that happen every once in a while. Along with Soft Fork Activation and various financial instrument introduction days, it's one of those not-quite-predictable days that occur every few years which give Bitcoiners reason to pay attention and mainstream media to speculate.

This year's halving was much anticipated, as halvings usually are, but we had a bit of an incident that requires some further explanation. The block subsidy decreased from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC on block 840,000 as expected, but what wasn't expected was the 37.626 BTC in fees that came along with it. To give some context, that's easily the highest ratio of fees to block subsidy that Bitcoin has *ever* had. [One transaction](https://mempool.space/tx/152b928e97bb9e874da1bd4abdf766ae0cdc7a2f260dad5542967cb414c58489) paid nearly 8 BTC in fees by itself.

## More Fees

It wasn't just block 840,000 that had high fees, over the next 5 blocks, we had fees of 4.486, 6.99, 16.068, 24.008 and 29.821 BTC respectively. The fees are the highest it's ever been. This situation in Bitcoin is unprecedented.

Up to this point in Bitcoin's history a block whose fees were higher than block subsidy were pretty rare. There were a few in the 50 and 25 BTC eras, but these were mistakes by the user (usually forgetting to put in a change address) and almost all of the fee came from a single error transaction. In the 12.5 BTC subsidy era, there were a few transactions toward the end of 2017 when the cumulative fees exceeded the 12.5 subsidy. In the just-ended 6.25 BTC subsidy era, there were many blocks during the ordinals craze which exceeded the 6.25 BTC subsidy.

Still, these were relatively rare, and most blocks even in the most recently completed era mostly didn't exceeded 1.5 BTC. Yet in this new era of 3.125 BTC subsidy, every single block as of this writing (block 840018) has had fees exceed the subsidy, some by many multiples. So what happened? Why was the halving block getting so much in fees?

## Runes

The reason has to do with a new protocol called Runes. It's yet another colored coins protocol on top of Bitcoin that Casey Rodarmor designed back in [September of 2023](https://rodarmor.com/blog/runes/). The main idea is to allow coin issuance on Bitcoin that uses the UTXO set natively.

Now to back up a bit, colored coins have been around for a long time. The main idea is that you can "color" certain Bitcoin transaction outputs as meaning something in addition to the Bitcoin amount in the output. It could be another "asset" and issued as a token. The first implementation of such a protocol happened 11 *years* ago in 2013 and there have been many attempts since, including MasterCoin (renamed Omni), CounterParty, and more recently, RGB, Taro Assets and BRC-20.

As Rodarmor states in his blog, his motivation for making another protocol is to bring some of the asset issuing from other chains to Bitcoin. To make the launch of this protocol more interesting, Rodarmor decided to start the issuance on block 840,000, leading to the chaos we saw.

## Simplification vs Game Theory

Casey Rodarmor is also the creator of ordinals, and he took one of the concepts, which was to name assets using the capital latin alphabet on Runes. This is a normal fine choice, but what happens when there's a conflict? If two assets have the same name, how do we distinguish between them?

To simplify things, the protocol just looks up what assets exist already and if the name conflicts with something that exists, then the new asset isn't issued. This indeed simplifies the client and gives a global unique name to each asset. Unfortunately, it also makes for some terrible incentives.

## Sniping Asset Issuance

The first incentive problem is that if the transaction issuing the asset is sent out to the Bitcoin mempool, then as that transaction is gossiped to nodes around the network, other observers can snipe the name by getting the transaction in earlier.

Now "earlier" in Bitcoin is a strict concept. Blocks are ordered and transactions within a block are ordered. Whichever comes first gets the symbol and the asset issuance. But if you want to squat on a good symbol name, you can just look for mempool transactions that are attempting to create a new asset and create your own with a bigger fee. That's the essence of sniping.

What's really terrible about a situation like this is that *both* transactions will likely go into the block, but only the first will successfully issue the asset. The second will not issue the asset but *still pay the fee*.

Miners generally order transactions by fee rate, so a higher fee likely means that they'll get to issue the asset. I say likely, because there's a second incentive problem here I'll discuss later. But game-theoretically, both participants are incentivized to increase fees continually to one-up each other. The dynamic is similar to the [One Dollar Auction](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction), where participants end up making rational choices, but end up with an irrational result (like paying $1.50 for $1). Every loser pays lots in fees for nothing.

## Second order Game Theory

Now given this first-order incentive playing out, it's not a surprise that a lot of issuers purposefully put in a very high fee initially to discourage anyone from trying to snipe the symbol. After all, if your sniping attempt fails, then you lose out on the fees you tried to snipe with. There's also a significant uptick in the usage of RBF for this reason, so that you have the option to one-up the sniper and the sniper to do the same to the issuer.

Note that RBF isn't useful here to *get out* of paying the fee, as a replacement transaction has to pay more than the previous transaction in fees. Either way, the miner ends up with the fees.

Now back to the miner's role. The miner can, if it so desires, give preference to the *lower* fee transaction by including it earlier in the block. Indeed, the incentive is to give miners off-band fees if possible to order transactions in such a way as to win by not revealing how much you've paid. Miners in this protocol have a lot of leverage.

## Conclusion

Runes have resulted in some really high fees, though it's hard to know if the design was intentional or unintentional. What we do know is that Runes have been hyped up for the last few months and have been anticipated for a while, and certainly being one of the first assets issued under the protocol has some marketing value for the eventual goal of getting them listed on an exchange.

Sadly, in addition to the normal scamming of altcoins being completely centralized, there is a deeper cost in terms of block space congestion, where fees of 1000 sats/vbyte are currently not enough to get into certain blocks. The Runes asset issuance has overridden almost every other use case at the moment.

That said, the current rate of Runes issuance is completely unsustainable. Just in the first 18 blocks, there's been over $20M in fees spent, most of that in Runes issuance. At this rate, Runes issuers would be spending $150M a day or $1B a week. I honestly can't see them doing this for much longer than a month or two. In the meantime, it must be great to be a miner finding these blocks.


And the amount to be mined during a cycle, expressed as a percentage of the total supply, is the block subsidy of that cycle.

This cycle produced 6.25% of all bitcoin. Next cycle will produce 3.125%


More apps should strive for this and more consumers should demand it. https://image.nostr.build/b9b23cb06e5db05a12b502b64db393ebb19722a47ad170f5aa09fa1f935f83b8.jpg


TL;DR There is no safe way to use TikTok, and our strong recommendation is to delete the app from all your devices.

Learn more here: https://protonvpn.com/blog/is-tiktok-safe/

https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/241/834/130/314/704/original/93545b8b62d326f2.png


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Google released a paper for a large scale distributed AI system called DiPaCo (https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.10616v1).

it seems desirable for a globe spanning powerful AI to be decentralized and openly accessible. to prevent DDoS prompts could be collateralized with bitcoin. the nodes running the computations would be compensated with the bitcoin payments. a virtuous cycle in some ways.

what would it take to marry a system like that with the lightning network?


Upgrade your systems now!

https://archlinux.org/news/the-xz-package-has-been-backdoored/