Gossip 0.6 has been packaged for MacOS on Intel. I would appreciate it if someone would let me know if it works on said hardware.

Is it Lightning's time to shine now when the onchain transaction fee is so high?

Well yes, partly.

But please understand that Lightning ceases to work if the fees are too high!

To understand why, let’s go back to the saying that “Lightning is just Bitcoin transactions”.

Yes, this is true. Lightning in the end relies on normal Bitcoin transactions.

So by knowing this, you should have already realized why Lightning under a high onchain fee market is fragile, but let me explain:

The primary problem I’m referring to is the economical viability to sweep HTLCs.

An HTLC is the thing that gets added as an output to your lightning commitment transaction when you are doing Lightning payment.

It gets cleared out by making a new commitment transaction once the payment has goes through.

But the problem here is that if the onchain transaction fee is $100 and the cost of the sweeping an HTLC output is $100, then that means it’s not actually economically possible to redeem these funds.

Under normal circumstances you would never have to force-close and redeem this onchain, but it _can_ happen.

How LN circumvents this problem is by giving the payment amount to miners instead as a substitute for a real HTLC output. Giving the sats to miners means no more bytes are added to the commitment transaction, but it also means that if a force-close happens, these sats will just be given to miners instead.

This was already the case for all smaller payments (21 sats and so on) including virtually _all_ zaps here on nostr.

But for smaller micro-transactions it’s not a big deal if a payments gets lost, because no one would cry over 21 sats.

But if it’s about 210 000 sats, then we’re in a BIG problem if this isn’t secure and trustless.

We need to find a sweet spot for onchain transaction fees and we need more scaling solutions that work together with LN in order to fix this.

My favorite solution is a Lightning Network deployed over multiple Drivechains, fully interoperable, but I’m open for more suggestions. What do you think?

I write the principles I want to live by on a regular basis. They’ve remained fairly consistent over the years.

1. Everything is connected.

Therefore, I want to be mindful that every action I take will eventually come back to me.

2. Everyone knows everything, eventually.

Therefore, I want to be sure I act with transparency with a desire to be fair.

3. I know nothing.

Therefore, I want to be curious and always seek to listen and learn.

I fail at some of these regularly. But it’s been important to come back to them and validate my actions and consider ways to improve.

Relay is paid now

It's not a problem if transactions have to wait one or a few extra cycles to get into a block. -Satoshi 2008-11-09

All mutings are not spam. Some people are muted by some coz their content may be offensive to them.

Muting is not a solution. I don't want to download spam and filter it locally. I also don't want this job of muting people forever.

Neural Networks over Nost!

How much spam do you see in replies? It's time to start reading replies only from relays that have some form of spam control. And when replying clients should keep that in mind and be sure to publish the reply to a relay where it is likely to be read.

Nostr Emergency & Public Service Alerts?

What do folks think about getting emergency alerts and public service alerts on to nostr. All the public service alerts on twitter started as people just setting up their own bots and running them. Twitter’s been demanding that public agencies pay thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a month and most are dropping twitter in response.

There’s no way to do bots on bluesky’s at_protocol, because it’s still got closed membership and has no open protocol yet. But we could easily do it on Nostr!

There’s been a bunch of bluesky hype lately, which is cool because I’d rather them then closed twitter clones like T2, tribel, post.news, cohost, counter social, wt.social, substack notes, etc….

Most of these services run RSS feeds and have other open API’s for publishing, so it’s just a matter of creating bots, accounts, giving them profiles, maybe a page / directory of them…. We can do this quickly.

Let’s do Nostr Emergency & Public Service Alerts!

Bits vs Sats

Or Bits and Sats?