Before Bitcoin existed, I worked on a project that tried to create decentralized multiplayer games with SIM cards using similar techniques.

I love seeing this technology now being adopted for self custodial Bitcoin!

I've been wanting to start a campaign with my kids for similar reasons. But do you use just paper/pencil or do you use character sheet aids on a tablet/phone?

It sort of defeats the purpose, but also might make it easier for my kids to get into it.

I'm also curious to hear from any parents who have tried to get their kids into table top RPGs. It has not been as easy as I had hoped.

My daughter's class is talking about economics this week and in particular inflation. I told her to ask what causes inflation, and if they don't mention government printing new money to ask her teacher about it.

Teenagers don't like to do that kind of thing, so I glibbly offered her $10 if she asked.

That changed her mind, but the joke is on her - $10 ain't worth what it used to be.

Yes - but I don't see it happening until the US empire has fallen much further.

I recently noticed that I'm bi-lingual in metric/empirial temperature measurement. Internal chicken temps I remeber in F, and outdoor temps in C. ¯\_😀_/¯

Check out this post from ACINQ on the new "Swaproot" system that lowers swap-in fees and increases privacy using Taproot/MuSig!

https://acinq.co/blog/phoenix-swaproot

A normy friend, who isn't in to Bitcoin, independently sent me this nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a interview to watch today and was listening to the audiobook of Broken Money without me suggesting it.

https://youtu.be/nrIcy_vgl1I

"Sorted Wallet" is a fully custodial shitcoin app that runs natively on KaiOS feature phones. They had 50,000 installs in their first 6 month last year (2023). Africa in particular has a large base of feature phone users and there does not seem to be any barriers to deploying "crypto wallets" on their app stores.

Current apps seem to be built with js but the KaiOS roadmap is to support WebAssembly, which would unlock the possiblity of building efficient Rust apps with the full Bitcoin-Rust stack.

Is there anyone developing a non-custodial Bitcoin only app for KaiOS? Rust can target asm.js which should run on most KaiOS phones, so development with the Bitcoin-Rust stack is possible - even if it might not be as secure or efficient as Wasm.

https://sortedwallet.com/

https://kaios.dev/2023/11/guest-post-building-a-crypto-wallet-on-kaios/

#KaiOS #Rust #Africa

Hejsan 👋

Murch's new coingrinder is a big improvement when fees are high. It will be interesting to see how having it out there changes the utxo set.

I tapered - half-caf for awhile, then switched to herbal tea. I never did just decaf coffee though - taste was too bad. I've been off caffeine now for about about a year. My biggest problem is that it's awkward at social gatherings, so I usually have herbal tea in those cases. I can't say how long it took to be back to baseline because I tapered, but my sleep has improved over the last 12 months for sure.

I feel less stress after quiting, but hard to know if it's the coffee or other factors. Good luck on your coffee free journey!

What are your thoughts on the SC agreeing to take the social media moderation cases? Will their decision impact nostr relays? users?

https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/02/social-media-content-moderation-laws-come-before-supreme-court/

I find myself in the awkward position of agreeing with the NYT and opposing any laws that categorize social media companies like FB and Twitter as some sort of common carriers.. I want them to burn in a 🔥, not because they are biased and censor alt views, but because they suck. I think they should also not have any more legal protection than publishers do when they publish slander, promote illegal investment schemes or post copyrighted cat videos. You can't have the right to censorship without also taking the responsibility that comes with it. My only concern is how such a ruling would impact Nostr relays. Perhaps we'll need to add some mechanism to make it impossible for relays to censor so that they are not in the same category as publishers.

Summer house has one, and it works great. Some once a season maintenance required but otherwise a good option if you have electricity but no sewage hookup. Don't run out of the paper liners though...

"Everyone is talking about Covenants as the next important upgrade to Bitcoin. But what happened to Schorr Cross Signature Input Aggregation (CISA)"

An excellent question, answered by @n1ckler here:

https://github.com/BlockstreamResearch/cross-input-aggregation

Great article from nostr:npub1k7tcreyu0w970fxsht8ccw54az2yh27agf4x2s92crwam9mw9cws558edl on the possible legal challenges to the EIAs absurd request for information from US Bitcoin miners.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/legal/resisting-the-eia-one-possible-playbook

What is the development budget for TCPIP? Ethernet? it's not zero. Companies around the world pay employees to participate in maintaining the code that implements these protocols. They also pay people to participate in standards committees to make changes around the edges of these protocols, though not to change their fundamental behavior. If these Internet protocols were more complex the development budget would have to be correspondingly larger and might not be enough to rapidly adapt the protocol to new situations. Current internet protocols initially beat out more centralized, complex and (arguably) featureful protocols partially because of their simplicity. I'm happy to see industries supporting Bitcoin development and there is a huge unmet need for more full time support, but keeping the code and protocol simple is a way to prevent reliance on these funding sources and from centralized funding sources controlling the protocol.

Chaumian mint based ecash requires connecting to the mint to transfer ownership of tokens. You could pass them around offline, but not trustlessly.

I am only aware of hardware solutions for true offline transactions - coinkites opendime, etc.

You could do it with payment channels (eg. Lightning ) but you would need to go online at some point to confirm the channel wasn't closed and potentially publish a revocation tx.

#m=image%2Fjpeg&dim=1152x896&blurhash=%23QC%3Fr%5Eayt7t7%7Eqxu%25Mj%5B%3Fb-%3BayM%7Bj%5B%25Mj%5BRjfRayazayj%5BofofWBj%5Bt7ayRjayt7ayRjj%5Bj%5Bofj%5BRjj%5BogWBayfQWBofofj%5BayayofofWBRjoft7WBayofj%5BWBofj%5BWBof&x=9ad5eb361f159281653456decb6e156282b98b55789876c7d058342928b820e0

Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people’s savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments.

-- Ayn Rand, 1962

I would expect multi-party channels that include end user nodes to update less frequently than multi-party channels between routing nodes. But a 2 of 2 channel that settles to a multi-party channel could update whenever both parties are online - even when the other multi-party signers are offline.

If updating the multi-party channel isn't possible, then you have to go onchain.

How do you splice out a particular channel party that isn't responding in a fair/safe/fee efficient way? That's what seems to be where more work is needed.

Is this a solved problem with other covenant schemes? I think they all could use more detailed investigation.

In recent discussions around proposed soft-forks I am most attracted to the goal of creating a way to share ownership of a UTXO. This was one of the things that APO would enable via multiparty channels (aka channel factories), but with caveats. Multiparty channels are rarely discussed as the primary feature of APO because there are tremendous technical hurdles that need to be solved to scale up multiparty channels. Instead APO work has focused on the more near term advantage of simplifed and safer lightning channels. Any proposal that claims to enable shared UTXO ownership among large groups has significant details to discuss and problems to solve. I hope this current wave of soft-fork discussions will lead to a technical consensus around a proposal that can enable shared UTXO ownership. We're not there yet though.

@instagibbs posting pure signal about his LN-Symetry (aka eltoo) work. His in-depth implementation has yielded useful details about this long talked about Lightning channel design and added support for the research on pinning prevention via V3 transactions. This is how you build consensus for a soft-fork. Measure twice, cut once.

https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/ln-symmetry-project-recap/359/1

I'm talking about Phoenix, but actually it's not RBF but alternative fee rates that I was thinking of:

https://github.com/ACINQ/lightning-kmp/pull/553

No one uses the old mobile Eclair.

Phoenix exchanges signatures at different fee rates with Eclair so RBF can be used. As the channel initiator, the Acinq LSP pays the onchain fees for an uncooperative close.

I would like to read this from a more established source, or perhaps from a publication in Taiwan. Any thoughts nostr:npub1kznjv5rsa5hkvpmhz3wrlwztd8kwa7aa00afwucux98dtpldzvrs487zc4 ?

This is good supporting material for the technical determinism/inevitability argument for Bitcoin made by nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a in "Broken Money".

The cautionary part of this argument is to consider how lucky it was that Bitcoin's founder disappeared and wasn't a premine scammer or some other flavor of asshole like we saw in later projects. An honest founder/team was far from assured.

Danny Kaye nailed this phenomenon in 1958 with his song, "Mommy, gimme a drinka water"

What's the significance of 2016-20 as the start of their data dump? did they not keep records before then?

The Swedish central bank (the Riksbank) must ask parliment for funding if their balance sheet goes more than 40B kronor negative. They are currently 18B kronor in the hole. This recent Swedish law related to funding the Riksbank was alledgedly passed to ensure the central bank's independence...

https://www.thelocal.se/20231025/swedish-central-bank-seeks-billions-to-restore-capital-base

In the US the Fed is allowed to count their negative balance as an *asset* because they can use it to offset profits they would theoretically be required to pay the US Treasury in the future. ht nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a

https://www.lynalden.com/broke-federal-reserve/

In March the tax payers in Sweden will get a request for the equivalent of $7B to fund the Riksbank. This may be a a hard sell when inflation is running hot, interest rates are high, home prices are down and the economy is generally faultering. Keep in mind also that the government will need to issue bonds to pay to recapitalize the Riksbank at a time when the Swedish Krona is at an all time low. Coincidentally, a few weeks ago the Riksbank pledge to spend up to $8B USD in reserves to prop up the Krona by March.

https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/markets/the-gold-and-foreign-currency-reserve/currency-hedging--sales-of-dollars-and-euros/

These two programs taken together do not install a feeling of bank independence to my mind. Has anyone seen this discussed elsewhere? I would love to read more analysis about how these moves by the Riksbank will interact. Any thoughts on this nostr:npub1sv4zk080fvt4f3982u5kffzdkex3nm0kylky29um2xws5h4wsxvswtsrw4 ?

"My *deflation* target is the rate of technological progress: 2% minimum"

What she is describing is something like the mobile phone based BankID system in Sweden (and other equivalents in the nordics). It's called 'BankID' because you initially used it to log into your bank acccount, but now also every other government institution and many online shopping sites too. You need to KYC at a bank to get it and without it you're basically unpersonned.

There are alternate ways to access services and buisnesses, but they are cumbersome and not well supported. BankID is very convienent and ubiquitous, but there are down sides. I've read stories of old people being tricked into approving a login over the phone and having their bank accounts drained with no recourse due to the agreements you sign to get a BankID. It's also a good first step towards turn key totalitarianism and panopticon surveilance.

I like how LNURL logins are a decentralized version of the BankID system. It gives you a similar convience, but you control your own keys. You also do not tie your online grocery store id and video rental id with your government tax id.