The Dark Knowledge Of The Lightning Dev

To become a truly powerful lightning developer there are cirtain things you must know. Even worse you must know how to do these things and to test them out. The public use of these skills could hurt, maybe even destroy the lightning networks great potential, if it is found to be fragile and humans to be untrustworthy. Sounds like something from a sci fi movie but it might be true. 

On a recent battle with the terminal I have been trying to recover a lightning node which I ran on  using some rare beta software and which I hastily thought i could simply recover with a seed phrase and a channel.db file. Its is not always the case, at the moment none of the funds are recovered. Somewhat luckily there where only small amounts on it and most of the channels are to known counterparties. Now if find my self digging into the darkest corners of the web to find out how to modifying commitment transations so that I can close channels with my self in favour of nodes that still work. Dangerous knowledge indeed, but I think I can call myself a lightning wizard should I pull it off.

Too Much Too Fast

Bitcoins next biggest problem durring global financial crisis may be that bitcoiners make too much money too fast.

Given a strong flow to sound money, the obvious advantages of bitcoin over gold and silver and the small current market cap of bitcoin.

If people get wealthy to quickly without any work other people get jealous and feel justified in taking the supposedly ill gotten gains away. Bitcoiners need to make sure they are deserving.

RBF?

RBF (replace by fee) has been put into Core v24 release. It's a non-committing change, but it does have some pretty major consequences on large parts of the bitcoin circular economy and UI. It allows people to change their transactions to make sure that they are confirmed on the blockchain, to adjust their fee proportion after you have set and submitted it. This is useful given the fee market is constantly changing and might go up and stay up for longer periods of time when you need an important large transaction to go through. 

I think it is more controversial than it seems. I don't think that the occasional bounced transaction is such a problem for anyone and I am concerned that it moves trust from miners to the providers/sellers with account models which, as is very current lately, we obviously don't like. Zero-confirmation transfers do work on the bitcoin mainchain and do allow for near-instant transactions with a high level of certainty. They are very practical for vendors of real products and provide a good simple, private, honey pot-free user experience. People have said that they are insecure (you don't know you have the money for sure until it is "confirmed" in the blockchain), but they don't understand that there are no absolutes in this world and that they are better than many alternatives. We could ask how many confirmations it takes before you are sure?

Listen to this podcast for the details https://www.podpage.com/citadeldispatch/cd80-building-a-bitcoin-circular-economy-with-ziggamon/. The controversy is ongoing and the subject needs much more discussion. I don't want to lose Muun and Bitrefil. This is something that shadowy super coders could always do, but should there be a toggle? should it be on by default?

Lightning Cards

The Bolt Card NFC Card Creator is so freaking cool https://www.boltcard.org/

Old Androids Come to Life

You can now run a full bitcoin node easily on an old android device. Dig out those tablets and solar panels lets get some mobile nodes on the road.  

Run a Full Bitcoin Node on an Android Device - BeInCrypto

Carrot on a Stick

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/learn

The 15 Year Old Jeabus Boys Matter

Back in the day, not so long ago a 15 year old boy makes a table and sells it to his neighbor. He makes $1000 profit.  He saves the money because he wants to be a good Christian saver has no real need for material things he doesn't already have and knows that he can get a good interest rate in a safe place. Savings frugality and hard work is admired and respected and some how this intrinsically makes sense when he looks around. 50 years later he still has that money he saved and with 12% interest its now worth 400k which in this time is, just in itself, an ok amount of money to retire on when he is 65.

In another world, a lot like the one we are in now, the same boy knows intuitively that there is little point in saving. 2% percent inflation (which is the lower bar) means that in 50 years that money will have almost completely evaporated in 50 years. So he takes the money and blows it on spray paint, booze, drugs and maybe gets a girlfriend. He really just wants to enjoy himself in the moment, retirement is irrelevant  savings is silly, you've got to spend money to make money and you've got to know some secretes and make some connections before its worthwhile working at it. People seem to spend money they don't have fast and on flashy stuff that breaks or goes out of fashion. Leverage and regulatory capture are the name of the game. This is the Fiat world,

The stark contrast between these two world is clear, and you can see the vast cultural effects of sound money. It touches so many parts of society and it also explains a lot of differences from the current world and the world of 100-300 years ago.

Very interesting but, guess what? neither of these worlds are real anymore! In the real world the effect is exaggerated for people who know about bitcoin. The 15 year old boy named Jeabus who knows about bitcoin makes a table and saves the $1000 as bitcoin. He goes straight to Bisq and writes his seed phrase on a piece of paper and in his mothers old diary and deletes the Samurai wallet from his phone. The process is easier than waiting in line to deposit it at the bank and he also knows the bank is only holding a small fraction of its deposits in reserve. The compound interest calculators online max out at 50% annual return which he knows is a low pall for his bitcoin stash. In 50 years time, his stashed bitcoin with nothing else, will be theoretically worth the equivalent to 70Trillion dollars!

$70,783,540,654,359

He's happy to save the money, keep working hard and can dream of grand glorious plans for a bright future. He is 70 trillion times belter of than a rebel without a cause. Sound money make Jeabus boys rich. 

(I think the price power parity appreciation rate of bitcoin is actually higher than what is shown here, more like 100-200% and 18% is a minimum average level because of the halvings)