Yes. 🤣🤣 30 minutes praising Lyn 💜💜

The fact that Bitcoin isn't yet accepted everywheree and for everything really underlines for me how few people have actually used Lightning. Whenever I show somebody how it works, there's always that "wow" moment. But why was it a surprise?

The problem is that normal people still understand BTC from the one half-remembered opinion piece they read in 2017, and are operating under the belief that transactions still take an hour to settle, rather than being instantaneous and irreversible — money transmission without the Paypal Problem. The public mind needs a cache refresh.

gm and pv nostr 🤙 #coffeechain

“Coffee is poison”

me:

SIGNED EVENTS GOOD

Kevin Gosztola / Guilty of Journalism

Nils Melzer / The Trial of Julian Assange

In case you don’t know:

Wikileaks did publish the unredacted material after it was already in the public domain.

Let‘s have a look at the chronology:

Summer 2010:

WikiLeaks gives investigative journalist David Leigh access to the US diplomatic cables which are stored on a website as encrypted file with the filename “xyz_z.gpg”.

28 November 2010:

The Guardian, El Pais, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and the New York Times begin publishing redacted cables from WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is subjected to a denial-of-service attack.

2 December 2010:

WikiLeaks service provider EveryDns.net terminates DNS hosting for WikiLeaks to protect its other customers against the denial-of-service attack on WikiLeaks.

4 December 2010:

Third-party organisations begin to mirror information from WikiLeaks by creating mirrors of the information on websites and BitTorrent. Some of the mirrors include the encrypted file given to David Leigh “xyz_z.gpg”.

1 February 2011:

David Leigh publishes his book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s war on secrecy. The book disclosed the passphrase for accessing the encrypted file containing the unredacted diplomatic cables.

25 August 2011:

Der Freitag reports that it has discovered a copy of the full archive on the internet and was able to decrypt it using a passphrase found on the internet.

31 August 2011:

The website Cryptome publishes a report on the passphrase and which file it decrypts. A searchable copy of the decrypted cables appears on the website mrkva.eu. WikiLeaks makes a public statement about the disclosure of the passphrase in Leigh’s book.

1 September 2011:

A user called “droehein” creates a BitTorrent on the Pirate Bay website sharing the decrypted cables.

2 September 2011: Wikileaks republished the unredacted cables on the WikiLeaks site.

Source: Christian Grothoff, an expert in network security from the University of Applied Sciences in Bern, Switzerland

“We should change Bitcoin now in a contentious way to fix the security budget” is basically the same tinkering mentality that central bankers have.

It begins with an overconfident assumption that they know fees won’t be sufficient in the future and that a certain “fix” is going to generate more fees. But some “fixes” could even backfire and create less fees, or introduce bugs, or damage the incentive structure.

The Bitcoin fee market a couple decades out will primarily be a function of adoption or lack thereof. In a world of eight billion people, only a couple hundred million can do an on chain transaction per year, or a bit more with maximal batching. The number of people who could do a monthly transaction is 1/12th of that number. In order to be concerned that bitcoin fees will be too low to prevent censorship in the future, we have to start with the assumption that not many people use bitcoin decades out.

Fedwire has about 100x the gross volume that Bitcoin currently does, with a similar number of transactions. What will Bitcoin’s fee market be if volumes go up 5x or 10x, let alone 50x or 100x? Who wants to raise their hand with a confident model of what bitcoin volumes will be in 2040?

What will someone pay to send a ten million dollar equivalent on chain settlement internationally? $100 in fees per million dollar settlement transaction would be .01%. $300 to get it in a quicker block would be 0.03%. That type of environment can generate tens of billions of dollars of fees annually. The fees that people pay to ship millions of dollars of gold long distances, or to perform a real estate transaction worth millions of dollars, are extremely high. Even if bitcoin is a fraction of that, it would be high by today’s standards. And in a world of billions of people, if nobody wants to pay $100 to send a million dollar settlement bearer asset transaction, then that’s a world where not many people use bitcoin period.

In some months the “security budget” concern trends. In other months, the “fees will be so high that only rich people can transact on chain” concern trends. These are so wildly contradictory and the fact that both are common concerns shows how little we know about the long term future.

I don’t think the fee market can be fixed by gimmicks. Either the network is desirable to use in a couple decades or it’s not. If 3 or 4 decades into bitcoin’s life it can’t generate significant settlement volumes, and gets easily censored due to low fees, then it’s just not a very desirable network at that point for one reason or another.

Some soft forks like covenants can be thoughtfully considered for scaling and fee density, and it’s good for smart developers to always be thinking about low risk improvements to the network that the node network and miners might have a high consensus positive view toward over time. But trying to rush VC-backed softforks, and using security budget FUD to push them, is pretty disingenuous imo.

Anyway, good morning.