If you want to start your own bitcoin exchange, is is easier than ever to deploy a robosats coordinator:

https://github.com/RoboSats/robosats-deploy

You can make money, virtue signal, and improve privacy all at once! Consider this a call to action

More instructions here: https://github.com/RoboSats/robosats/blob/main/setup.md

You horrible, horrible knotsii!

Spammers are people too, you know!

Knots Analytics: How Many Sybils?

Attached is a cool chart from Coindance re: the number of nodes in the past couple of months.

You can see an uptick in Knots nodes (the lower green line) at the beginning of May. Meanwhile, at that time, the "total" node count (the top line) was basically flat, while the count of Bitcoin Core nodes started to fall. This indicates organic choice by about 1500 users to switch from Core to Knots.

Then, around May 10, we see evidence of a spike: total node count AND the Core count start increasing in lockstep. This indicates that a significant number of nodes (500 or so) got spun up around that time and were all Core nodes.

Are these sybils? Probably a few are, but most of it is just probably noise -- the total node count barely exceeds the range it was in before.

In short, these charts provide evidence that Bitcoin Knots growth has been organic, and there may be a few sybils spinning up Bitcoin Core nodes in response, but not that many.

This is really cool! Can you make a demo video? I would love to share this work with others

Bitcoin exchanges are starting to take stances on the op_return drama

Apparently they see an economic advantage in taking a side

Which means there's an economic incentive to take the other side: who will be the first exchange that runs Knots? You may get thousands of users!

Context: https://x.com/erickuhn19/status/1922671059943166268

Great suggestion! I changed the warning to this:

Warning: for science only! Do not use this with real money. I only coded the "happy path" and there are lots of edge cases where you can lose funds, including if your internet connection is poor.

Today Ocean mined 3 blocks, and by dividing 3 over 144 I learned Ocean has 2.1% of hashrate

But that's only a reliable metric if they consistently get that many blocks per day (or more). Otherwise it's probably just luck.

I mean they want to log the times when I purchased a channel. Not my node's "entire" purchase history, just the times when I bought something "from them." They also want to direct me into a section of the webpage (my "account" page) where they can send me notifications. They can then see if I've read those notifications or not, and know that I didn't do this through an API, but manually. I think it's all part of an effort to get more data about me, and they do not need to have that data. Unnecessary data collection is hostile.

I've seen multiple references to teeth on bitcoin related social media today. Why is everyone talking about teeth?

When you make one! The code is free, do your thing!

Lnproxy did it before me but now it's easy to do it on a phone without needing to run a node

But it's not ready yet, it's just a PoC

Know what's even better than logging in with your node?

Not logging in with your node

They absolutely do not need me to create an account, they just want an easy way to log my purchase history and send me messages that I don't want

I used one of their competitors that didn't make me jump through hoops to use it

I managed to do it once by using lnproxy.org as a middleman

I created an invoice in lnd, wrapped it at lnproxy.org, and then paid the wrapped invoice in lnd

It didn't know it was paying itself!

Ah, smart! I may be able to build some useful data using that assumption...

The software accomplishes several goals: (1) lower the barrier for people to route payments even if they only have a cell phone that is off most of the time (2) make it easier to manually add such people to your routes on the lightning network (3) disrupt the assumptions LSPs use to guess who the senders and recipients of lightning payments are

My latest invention is Lightning Blinder: privacy software for the lightning network

Check out the video, I'd love to know what you think!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWBX68_2TQo

It requires you to create an account first

That is bad, they don't need an account so the only reasons for that are (1) to collect my info (2) to sell my info (3) to spam me

No thanks, I just used one of their competitors that doesn't require an account

would be a lot cooler if I didn't have to

I opted to use one of their competitors precisely because the friction was lower, no need to create an account, log in (even "log in with node") and then wonder if they're gonna spam me or sell my info later

nostr:nevent1qqswf9pww3pzlyez23juw7qtztly2eg6vlfnp8zd9qjz2yycg36lvdszyqsc8628tpyp6rcjf77e83tve2j9ulj5tnht34fgfrucy5l5j7uh2tphmfy

I made a list here:

https://supertestnet.github.io/list-of-channel-sellers/

They don't work unless you have an account

I've asked them to remove this requirement here:

https://x.com/SuperTestnet/status/1922766991061819817