https://open.substack.com/pub/orangewindjammer/p/5-on-ecash-dns-and-configuration

Unfortunately, despite the server and keys for these guardians being intact, there is no way for the DNS of a guardian to be swapped out after the fact. We became aware of this issue last week and then became aware that multiple federations are experiencing this: https://github.com/fedimint/fedimint/issues/5482/

Given the critical state of these federations, with one guardian out of four being permanently offline, it's essential that if you have funds in these federations, you should withdraw them immediately. Unfortunately, we're unaware of other public federations, so you must withdraw to another lightning or on-chain wallet.

From our experiences, intermittent/connectivity issues can occur with guardians, and this may result in errors if not all three remaining guardians are consistently online. No other guardian of these federations has XYZ or other domains like it. So, if you're having issues, please try again later.

Unfortunately, not much can be done on the Mutiny side, so we're removing the federation setup flow in the UI as a first step. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Mandatory read for all Nostr users: http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/petnames/IntroPetNames.html

Hey nostr:npub1zmc6qyqdfnllhnzzxr5wpepfpnzcf8q6m3jdveflmgruqvd3qa9sjv7f60 l, @npub1lh273a4wpkup00stw8dzqjvvrqrfdrv2v3v4t8pynuezlfe5vjnsnaa9nk, and @npub1wnlu28xrq9gv77dkevck6ws4euej4v568rlvn66gf2c428tdrptqq3n3wr, I watched the announcement yesterday but came away with a lot of unanswered questions that I'll detail below. I would legitimately love to hear the answers to these if at all possible!

How is Ocean non-custodial for the average miner?

On the stream it was mentioned that payout thresholds are 0.0108 BTC (but nostr:npub1wnlu28xrq9gv77dkevck6ws4euej4v568rlvn66gf2c428tdrptqq3n3wr was unsure), a number that would take a pleb miner with an S9 ~470d to reach.

Until he reaches that payout point, all of his mined sats seem to be entirely custodied by Ocean.

How does Ocean decentralize mining today?

I was so excited by the teases and pre-announcements for Ocean as it sounded like exactly what I wanted in a Bitcoin pool. Unfortunately, it sounds like all of the decentralization possible is yet to be release, including StratumV2 and any ability for miners to submit block templates themselves.

Did I miss anything that makes Ocean more decentralized than other pools today?

Why is Ocean not open source?

If Ocean is as revolutionary and decentralizing as it's being made out to be, wouldn't the best thing for Bitcoin be that all pools switch over time to the same mode?

If so, why isn't Ocean open-sourcing any of it's protocol or code? In the announcement it seemed that nostr:npub1wnlu28xrq9gv77dkevck6ws4euej4v568rlvn66gf2c428tdrptqq3n3wr was bragging that no competitor would be able to "reproduce" their lead dev's code, thus keeping their competitive edge.

There was no mention to my knowledge of open source, but it's possible I missed it!

What guarantee do miners have that you won't censor transactions?

As miners cannot submit their own block templates right now and the source is not open code, miners have to rely on manually checking a visual block template on your site to find censorship.

nostr:npub1lh273a4wpkup00stw8dzqjvvrqrfdrv2v3v4t8pynuezlfe5vjnsnaa9nk has a history of censoring what he viewed as "spam," and there was a lot of time spent in the conference talking about how bad Ordinals are and how bad pools are that mine them.

What guarantees or promises do miners have that you won't censor transactions you don't like?

How will Ocean handle regulatory pressure to enact KYC?

In the event that regulators of the Feds come knocking and want you to implement KYC (as seems to be the case with other pools), what will you do?

What will Ocean's fee model be after the 0% period?

There was a lot of talk about how most pools subsidize larger miners and charge exhorbitant fees to smaller miners during the conference. One thing that wasn't ever mentioned was what Ocean's fee policy will be after the 2mo 0% fee period.

Could you explain how the fee model will work?

Conclusion

That's enough questions for now, I think, but I look forward to getting answers to these! We have a desperate need for decentralized mining in Bitcoin and a massive gap today.

I look forward to hearing back 🙂

https://store.blockstream.com/product/preorder-blockstream-jade-hardware-wallet/

https://spritely.institute/static/papers/petnames.html

Some clients should implement this kind of stuff.