I love learning from people who have nothing to sell to me.

NEW EPISODE OUT NOW! ⚡ Proof of Work ⚡

'BITCOIN & LIBERTARIANISM: QUOTE BY QUOTE'

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Ready to contribute to an open-source Bitcoin project?

Core Lightning Bounties have moved to the Build On L2 platform.

With over a million sats available, it’s your chance to make a real impact on the Lightning Network while earning.

The other day on Twitter/X, I paid out a 2,100,000 sat or $1,700 USD Lightning bounty.

Over the past couple years, I’ve offered an occasional challenge on Twitter/X.

When people tell me Lightning doesn’t work, I often ask them in random comments for their Lightning details so I can pay them in the next 5-10 minutes on the spot, permissionlessly, wherever they are, with this payment method that supposedly doesn’t work.

Every single time, they can’t do it. Because they haven’t even tried it. They’re just talking. I’ve done this a ton of times and nobody ever takes the sizable sat offerings.

In Dan Held’s anti-Nostr thread, Mark Jeffrey was critical of Lightning.

Unlike most who I offer the challenge to as 99% sure they won’t take it, I offered it to Mark despite knowing he had a much higher probability of accepting it, since he’s tech savvy and active in the broad crypto space. But in my view, if he accepts, then that’s also evidence on the spot that it works.

He declined my 21,000 sat offer and politely still talked anti-Lightning.

So, I said since I like him, I’d up it to 210,000 sats. He still declined and talked more anti-Lightning. He spoke about how he *wanted* it to work, but the problem just isn’t solved yet.

My inner Nostr Lyn couldn't help it, so I upped it to 2,100,000 sats, or $1,700+ USD, if he would just post a way to pay him on Lightning within the next ten minutes. Nobody had ever taken me up on my challenge, so I pressed to my highest offer ever just to see, out of sheer curiosity. He’s a multi-time published novelist, which with my recent fiction hobby, interests me. So, if there’s someone I want to claim the bounty, might as well be him.

And then you know what? He did. Of course he had a Lightning address.

He went from “want it to work but…” to digging through his past experiences and finding an old Lightning address, within a few minutes. The first person on Twitter/X to accept my challenge.

I paid him 2,100,000 sats on the spot, or $1700+ USD.

The JFK files will be released tomorrow un redacted ( Thanks to Tulsi Gabbard effort ) on this link :

Cairo’s still got some vibes.

For better or worse, I never forget what city I’m in while I’m there.

Everytime I zap someone vie Lightning from my wallet, it takes 5-10 seconds for the zap to settle and for everyone to see it happen on nostr.

Everytime, I think "this could've been an instant nutzap". "Tap, boom. Tap, boom. Zap zap zap. I would be zapping so much more."

The reason a nutzap is instant is obvious. At this point, I hope that everyone knows that a Cashu nutzap is just an instant transfer of an IOU from one user to another.

Let's step back and look at a pure Lightning zap on nostr for a second. We all know that the vast majority of Lightning zaps is effectively an exchange of one custodial IOU against another one as well. Most people use custodial wallets. So why is it still so slow? It's the Lightning settlement between the two custodians that often takes 5-10s to complete. Note, some users actually do run their own node, manage channels, run LNURL servers, etc. But they still get the same UX.

Here is an idea. Let's say a user doesn't want to use Cashu. Pure Lighting maxi which I think is great. I've been a Lightning dev for years before I started working on Cashu. This user could still be nutzapped and even remain fully self-sovereign if they run their own node.

What if the receiving user's Lightning wallet (custodial or non-custodial) was able to melt all nutzaps it receives by watching the nostr wallet ("nutsack") of its user? Either for every nutzap or whenever enough nuts are accumulated, the service could withdraw the nuts to the user's real Lightning wallet.

Effectively, this would improve the zap UX by showing everyone an instant zaps. The receiving user's custodian (or themselves) would have to run something like a nostr-cashu-wallet-watcher on a server to receive while being offline, but they have to run a Lightning node and LNURL and all that anyway (they already have a server).

Even without a server, normal nostr clients without true nutzap support could withdraw all nuts accumulated while they were offline back to their Lightning wallet everytime they come back online. The only real difference to a normal zap is that noe it's the receiver's job to settle via Lightning, not the zap sender's.

Nevertheless, zaps on permissionless social media like in nostr will never be completely trustless. They can't solve the sybil problem for instance. If you want, you can zap yourself an infinite amount of normal Lightning zaps on nostr without moving s single Satoshi. We faked zaps in the early days like crazy just to have fun.

But it actually turns out, all that doesn't really matter too much at all. First, people seem not to abuse the sybil issue. We had fun for a few weeks but then it got uninteresting There is not enough to gain, no algorithm to fool, no benefit of lying (at least not yet). Second, zaps are literally free money given to you from a random person. Why would someone rug you if they want to literally gift you money? It doesn't make much sense.