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.
The bank did unblock tor relays, albeit I needed to file a second reclamation after they hadn't responded to the first one. So please don't just give up in similar situation, you can win.
I was preparing another complaint based on GDPR - the bank processes my IP without my consent and without other legitimate reason - I guess "we don't understand tor" is not a legitimate reason. Didn't need to go this way obviously.
I do not enjoy threatening anyone with violence (even indirectly and the violence would be carried out by the state), but we are talking about banks, privileged by the state. Especially in Spain, where you cannot pay more than 1000 euros in cash, so you almost have to use bank. End those privileges, and I don't care whether bank blocks connections from an IP address which contains 13, or any other stupid rule. Well, and the bank should inform in advance: "we consider 13 an unlucky number, we block anything related".
note1ka0frsrj6hk8td0s5ukwrftl5hsfxpxsrl0tmssvvq7mxl3gsfxqxzs2wf
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.
My lightning node is closing down:
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.
nostr:npub1pfezegswrn8lpt0aerp2hvyhj4lsuzln9kcccs5p7qch2m2sawxsxcelvf, 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
well, on Linux it is only half of RAM by default, and configurable. And not sure what is wrong with that either. After all, Linux without ZFS also fills whole free RAM with cached data.
Perhaps you are misled by output of "free" - ZFS caches count as "used", while other caches count, more logically, as "buff/cache".
Devil could be in details - if you have much more non-ZFS data than ZFS data, you probably don't want to give ZFS cache half of your RAM. And I am not sure how nicely ZFS plays when kernel needs to evict something.
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 - (https://github.com/ElementsProject/peerswap/blob/master/docs/usage.md#swaps). 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": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dj9v9s9buk .
What about "change the (reserve) asset, not the landscape"? Or "change the asset instead of changing river into poison" - referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Baia_Mare_cyanide_spill .
I guess my slogans are lame, and surely this is the only reason such campaign will not take place.
Cannot believe those Greenpeace USA clowns keep attacking bitcoin: https://nitter.net/lopp/status/1681750013724983296#m
"Bitcoin causes x tons of CO2 emissions." So without bitcoin, there would be x tons less CO2 emissions, right? Sure, if you assume that people who buy bitcoin would instead never spend those funds. In other words, money have alternative uses, so if people cannot spend money on bitcoin, they would spend money on other stuff. And this other stuff will probably consume energy and cause CO2 emissions. The alternatives may cause less CO2, so destroying bitcoin may prevent some CO2, but not the whole x tons. And given that btc mining consumes much higher percentage of renewables than the average consumer, btc mining should cause less CO2 than alternatives. BTC mining freezes the oceans!
There are some complications. We are only interested in net inflow of funds to bitcoin, which should be equal to the cost of electricity used for mining. We only need to stop spending those funds in the world without bitcoin. So if someone bought some btc for $100, sold that btc for $600, we have an outflow of $500, which must proceed from someone buying btc, but this buyer may freely spend his $500 in the alternative world without bitcoin. Meanwhile, look at a miner selling his mined btc for say $100 - buyer of those btc must not spend those $100 in the alternative world without bitcoin . Still a laughable assumption.
And yes, instead of buying btc people may spend those funds planting trees. See - now we cut CO2 emissions by more than x tons. But this is unfair argument, basically assuming best-case scenario, you would need some good evidence to claim this.
Much more likely destination of those funds is gold. So without bitcoin we probably have more gold mining, which is not particularly environmentally-friendly process.
Of course there are millions other arguments - flaring, grid balancing, lowering time preference.... I just never saw this particular argument.
#BanksSuck Like a good obedient sheep, I wanted to inform N26 of my postal address change. I was able to change "shipping address" without problems. But to change my "legal address" I have to talk to some stupid chatbot. OK, but you are trying my patience already. And then the chatbot says no, not without proof of address. I want to give them info and they make me jump 2 hoops already?
Scan or photo of utility bill or residence certificate? So it must be a paper version, right? Third hoop, going to file a reclamation probably.
Well, but how do you distinguish between terrorists and law-obedient serfs of other governments? French or Japanese serfs have no US tax ID. A coordinated attack by FATF? Any country which doesn't implement registration ends up on a black list? Or it doesn't matter much, because bitcoin is used mostly for hodling, and no one cares about a few angry foreign weirdos who cannot pay by BTC in US, or few importers/exporters?
Then there is Lightning: the recipient has no was of knowing the origin of the funds. You would need to be drastic here, cutting the network in two. An US entity is only allowed to have channels with other US entities, and all the funding of those channels must come from registered wallets. Again, FATF or some other international cooperation could help a lot, so the walled garden includes say whole OECD, not just USA.
Spain is heading slowly towards the step 1. They have their FBAR, and this or next year they extend it to bitcoin and cryptocurrencies held on foreign exchanges. (https://cincodias.elpais.com/cincodias/2022/12/30/economia/1672404046_312886.html) The idea is that local (Spanish) exchanges do KYC and report directly about their customers, and Spanish tax residents report about their bitcoin held by foreign custodians. Strangely, they exempt self-custody. Probably because they have no idea how things work: they originally proposed reporting public keys of your bitcoins held by foreign custodian. (https://cincodias.elpais.com/cincodias/2022/06/29/economia/1656506084_005184.html).
But I wouldn't count on this lack of knowledge, it is easily solvable, they have the motivation.
Unpopular opinion: I found 2 cases where bitcoin investment funds *may* be useful, even for an individual (not just some pension funds who have to invest in regulated things). Note that by investment funds I mean both ETFs and mutual funds
Case 1: you have already invested in an investment fund. Then, you pay less taxes if you move your investment to a bitcoin fund than if you sell / redeem your old fund and buy btc. I am sure this is the case for mutual funds (seems fidelity has something like that, see https://marketrealist.com/p/crypto-mutual-fund-fidelity/), not sure about ETFs. Moving between funds is generally not taxed, only the final redemption is.
Case 2: You have some old cheap KYC btc, and your beloved county applies FIFO to compute capital gains tax. (Spain does, USA also.) You want to buy more btc, expect the price to rise sharply and plan to sell in 1-2 years. If you buy real BTC, you have to sell your cheap old BTC in those 1-2 years because of FIFO (well, at least you have to declare it so for tax purposes). If you instead buy a derivative now (such as an ETF) and sell it later, you are selling that derivative, not your precious old btc.
You could buy and sell the new stack non-kyc - additionally you should sell for cash or another untracable method - you do not need ETF then.
So those paper BTC may be worth it in some limited circumstances, and if you carefully weight the risks.
Wonder if the state will use some tax advantages to lure people into paper BTC ... and then rugpull. Can you redeem your paper BTC before the rugpull?
sorry, but there are bigger travesties that that in Spain. Here the wrongdoer effectively gets a discount 20% on the damages it has to pay, because the wrongdoer is AEAT/Spanish IRS.
I mean, at least the wrongdoer has to pay and the victim is compensated. Compare it to the Spanish criminal "justice". You get accused of a crime, so you are obliged to hire an attorney (except petty crimes - "delitos leves"), and you are obliged to pay that attorney (exepct if you are poor and cannot afford it). Even if you are found *innocent*. You are effectively fined for the "crime" of being accused. And the state indirectly gets its cut, too - the attorney likely pays VAT and your payment raises his income and hence his income tax. Because errors have to be rewarded. Worse, I think (but this is me theorizing, not aware of any such case) it could lead to a situation when an innocent person pleads guilty to avoid the trial and some attorney fees - the prison time of less than 2 years may be conditionally postponed, so the innocent criminal may avoid prison altogether.
I am dreaming of commiting a crime against all attorneys. I wonder who would defend me then as an attorney - one of my victims? Surely he would be very effective and motivated /s. But not sure if it is possible to commit such crime, I though something like provoking hatred against all attorneys would count (art. 510 of Criminal Code), but seems occupation is not a protected class - it is crime to incite hatred against Christians or Spaniards, but not against attorneys. And crime against all Spaniards means they could find a foreign-born attorney with license in Spain - not a Spaniard, so not my victim.
I think I am done with bitcoin. It sounded like an interesting idea, but:
- it can only handle 7-10 tps. And Lightning does not exist and never will.
- there is constant fraud - MtGox, FTX, Prime Trust. And self-custody does not exits.
- the 21M limit is an illusion, anyone can create a new shitcoin. And network effects do not exits, so any shitcoin will eventually reach market cap of bitcoin, diluting the value of btc infinitely.
/s if not awfully obvious. Perhaps I should be done with browsing https://money.stackexchange.com/ instead - I got those bright ideas from there.
But to be honest, I am not totally content with the last point, whether invoking network effects is sufficient.
With growing mainstream acceptance of bitcoin, I wonder whether those geniuses will keep criticizing bitcoin indefinitely, and if not, how will they justify their change of mind.