🤣 
On days like this I sometimes get a message from friends or family thanking me for helping them understand bitcoin. I read the awful economic news and so many people are suffering. It feels good to be able to help people.
I continue to see how bitcoin is the great reset. Big Wall Street BSDs, or those who have benefited from the current system usually don’t “get” bitcoin. Their big egos won’t let them do the work to understand.
It’s interesting how little the halving matters this year. Dropping from 900 or 450 bitcoin a day pales to the thousands of bitcoin a day being sucked up by the ETFs.
A bigger factor to price (than the halving) might be the long bear market and the fact that most coins are now in strong hodlr hands. There will need to be a big jump in price to entice some of these people to sell.
Every time someone says I should sell some I’m reminded that everything else is a shitcoin and why would I sell the best asset for something lesser?
Running a bitcoin node does not put your bitcoin at risk.
Running a lightning node does put your bitcoin at risk. It is quite difficult right now to run a lightning node. The biggest risk seems to be forced channel closings that consume bitcoin as fees.
This post explains some of the gotchas that happen when you’re running your own Lightning node:
Apologies, I realize from your question that I gave your a partial answer. I assumed that when you said “node” you were referring to a node on the bitcoin network.
I see from your question that you’re thinking about a Lightning node.
Yes, if you open up a channel with your own liquidity you are slightly helping the network. To make a difference you will need to open multiple channels to other relevant nodes so that your node is a relevant participant in the network.
You should also get the other side of the channel to add liquidity too so the channel is more balanced.
Your Lightning node will need to be online and reliable to make a difference (so you can’t just run it on your phone).
I’m not a Lightning node expert so perhaps others can weigh in here.
You only don’t have access to user funds because you choose not to access them, correct?
It seems from your knowledge base that your software could change the payment details to access funds if you wanted.
Anyway, sounds like a cool and useful solution but my point is that if you have control over funds it’s not self custodial. Perhaps “trust-minimized” would be a more accurate term.
I haven’t dug into your source code so I might be totally wrong about whether your software has control over payment funds. Please let me know if I’m wrong about that.
Unfortunately no. I understand why you might think so but running a node is primarily for your own benefit.
Running a node helps you to verify your account balances and transactions while preserving your privacy. It doesn’t increase the overall transactional capacity of the bitcoin network.
I’m happy to drill down into these concepts if you would like further detail. Just let me know!
I don’t view Breez as self custodial. They appear to manage liquidity by being a “man in the middle” for payments. It seems like they don’t custody payments for very long, but for a brief period they take possession of your funds.
I think it’s great that they do so because self-custodial Lightning is difficult to manage. I just don’t think they should say they are self-custodial when they aren’t 100% self-custodial.
I maintain that we’re moving now into a custodial world for most people. We’ll need to limit the custodial touch points and risks through smart technology (like Breez) and geo-distributed federations. 
I think people are referring to self custodial lighting. You’re right that everything works well when you’re using a custodial solution.
Most people are going to use custodial solutions. It’s the unfortunate reality. Most people will never have a UTXO or independently manage their own Lightning channels and liquidity.
Yes, bitcoin and Lightning will scale but just not in the way that we would all prefer.
Me: Fees are too expensive now on Lightning. We need to move your bitcoin to Liquid.
Them: Why is Lightning raising fees? I thought you said that this is how we can pay for coffee using bitcoin.
Me: People are bidding a lot for block space on the main chain and that’s causing Lightning to be more expensive.
Them: I don’t understand. I already deposited my bitcoin into my Lightning account. Why do I need to pay more fees?
Me: It’s not actually an account. It’s a channel-based system… Actually, never mind. We should just move the sats.
Them: If we move to Liquid, are they going to raise fees later too?
Me: Maybe. Hard to predict but there is no point to staying with Lightning now. Soon your entire balance will be eaten by fees.
Them: Ok, let’s do it. I have my bitcoin in Muun right now. I’ll send my full balance.
Me: No, don’t. We’ll need to try different transfer amounts to try to minimize fees. Fees can be nonlinear.
Them: Sorry, what?
Me: Nevermind, I’ll do it for you.
There, done. I was able to move everything except $3. Which seems trapped in Muun. Maybe we’ll be able to move it in the future.
Them: wow, that was expensive. I just lost 20% of my bitcoin in the transfer.
Me: :(
100m all out sprint
If IP privacy is optional then it doesn’t really exist. Maybe you’ll reuse the same npub in another insecure client. Maybe you’ll forget to reenable the proxy selection after testing. Eventually a opsec mistake will be made and you’ll dox your entire history.
Brutally transparent development is fine. My perspective is that you shouldn’t be responsible for privacy. It should be fundamentally built into the platform — always on.
Nostr is great for random social chat but privacy is an afterthought.
IMHO not suitable for secure private software development.
nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a out here orange-pilling boomers
62 y/o father went from thinking I was laundering money (so what if I am?) to asking me to help him start a full node after reading Broken Money
Book of the year. Incredible work.
I’m working on the problem from another direction.
IMHO, Nostr isn’t the right platform for this because it doesn’t guarantee IP privacy.
I expect devs will be increasingly persecuted in the future. There needs to be a system that devs can use to publish code pseudonymously - with IP privacy by default. Other devs should be able to subscribe and access code privately by default too.
I’m not specifically chasing the bounty so I’m happy others are working on it. I’m hopeful we can learn and improve the options available to protect devs.