I would feel very judged. 😆

As long as you didn't mind the government listening to every conversation.

Tired: Hating DST.

Wired: Hating time zones.

#UTCorGTFO

Did you embed some ecash in that emoji?

Also the third amendment. Take that, France!

But, seriously, my phone's keyboard won't let me type "retard" even when my language is set to French for my Duolingo practice. /me places palm over face

Yes, but clout with nostriches is the only clout that matters.

Twitter is down. But you know what's not down?

GM

https://youtu.be/T6bZ37nexSY

No cap?

Here's a Dick pic.

r u hax0r?

1. Get old version of Kindle Desktop and download the azw files

2. Install the DeCRM plug-in in Calibre

3. Import azw files into Calibre and convert to EPUB

Sorry, best I can do is economist/sysadmin.

I'm betting it's a load-bearing call in some ancient batch file without which the entire government collapses.

Reposting this Twitter thread here, where I don't have to break it into a dozen pieces. ;) https://x.com/szarka/status/1894048207396639169

This Peter K. Todd post is interesting, & provides a nice jumping-off point to discuss/ask about something I've been thinking a lot about lately: https://petertodd.org/2025/fake-channels-and-rgb-lightning

I fully expect someone to tell me that it already exists, & this post points to a similar idea, but I still haven't found exactly what I'm thinking about: https://x.com/OrangeSurfBTC/status/1883280652524761139

Lightning is a great protocol that gets us part way to fully scaling Bitcoin. One big drawback, however, is that it requires locking up a lot of liquidity. Worse, this results in some pressure to centralize.

Lightning is also sometimes *too* good of a solution! One way it's too good is that final settlement is virtually instantaneous. Necessary for some use cases, but definitely not all. Another way that Lightning is "too good" is that it requires no* trust. (* Except in edge cases where value is small, so close enough.) Sometimes a middle ground between trusting a custodian and full trustlessness is OK. In business, you often have trusted partners.

What if you want to route a payment via Lightning that doesn't need instant settlement and/or where you're dealing with a trusted partner? ("Trusted" is relative, of course. I'd trust most of my channel partners with 100k sats. Some with 1mm sats. Etc.) Possibly repeatedly? In this case, tying up enough liquidity to handle the maximum balance of funds between us is horribly inefficient! I assume large centralized exchanges already have ad hoc methods of handling this, but there seems to be (?) a lacuna in the Lightning protocol space.

Traditional payments systems often handle this use case via net settlement: instead of exchanging the full amount of each payment, the balance of payments is periodically (daily or even intraday) netted and only the difference has to be exchanged.

So why doesn't Lightning have something like a Net Settlement Channel? As @PeterKTodd's post observes, such a channel doesn't even have to correspond to a UTXO. The two "peers" wouldn't even have to have *any* "real" Lightning channel between them to route payments.

Imagine Alice & Bob are LSPs whose customers frequently exchange payments, & sometimes customers would be willing to wait 5 minutes or an hour for settlement, if the fee were lower. Maybe they typically route 100mm sats back & forth every hour, but payments roughly balance. Over a shorter time frame, though, the channel balance can move to one side or the other. So, with today's approach they either need a big channel or a way to rebalance (either on Lightning or off-chain) frequently.

With a net settlement channel, the partners could set up (& even advertise) a large virtual channel supported by a smaller private channel (or even no channel) to make payments periodically of the net balance due after netting accumulated invoices. The partners might even agree to settle small invoices immediately whenever the net balance isn't greater than some amount they agree to trust one another for, saving liquidity in exchange for a small amount of risk.

So, I'm wondering, is there some reason we can't have nice things like this? And are instead tying up too much capital and/or doing weird crap like rebalancing out-of-band over Liquid?

Does nostr have a key revocation protocol yet? I'll confess that I haven't kept up…

West Virginia. Not even the very rural part!

Dude has come a long way

So, tonight's project was downloading over 4000 Kindle books, stripping off the DRM, and converting them to EPUB so I can have a backup of the books I bought before Amazon makes that impossible on Monday.

I wish I'd realized that Calibre was going to beep after every book before starting a batch conversion right before going to bed. Will I fall asleep or will I get out of bed to mute the sound on my computer? I guess we'll find out…