There's a whole lot of transactions in no hurry to make it into a block, I suppose.

Occasionally have issues with long load times. As evidenced by your profile image not having loaded yet. It eventually did.

I know what he's talking about with the relay not responding message. I have seen that before, but not often.

Can zap notes just fine, but zapping directly on your profile I get this:

I was getting an error when trying to zap on Primal using Alby extension. Let me check now.

Coracle or Nostrudel

What's the advantage of having a local backup rather than a personal relay that doubles as a local backup, but can also more easily be used to rebroadcast your notes to other relays if you are censored off of the ones where you currently post?

You're not wrong! But it's less work than a real bonsai. 😂

I have that same Lego Bonsai on my desk at work.

Ok, say I control a mining pool in the future with a substantial amount of the overall hash rate. 5% or more, for the sake of the conversation. While the pool is compiling and sending the transactions for a block full of transactions, one of the miners in my pool gets lucky and finds a valid hash for an empty block, and the block subsidy is now negligible amount of a few hundred sats.

I now have a decision to make. I can go ahead and send that block out and start mining the next block with all the transactions I was going to include in the current block and a bit of a head start on my competition, because they don't even know a block has been found yet, or I can discard the empty block for which I already have a valid hash, and try to find a hash for that block with the transactions included.

It's not like I have MORE chance of finding a block with the transactions included in either scenario. My chances should still be proportional to my share of the total hashrate. BUT, I will have a few seconds head start vs my competition if I immediately start looking for the next block and submit the empty block that I already have a valid hash for, even though the sats I would receive from it are negligible.

So, I still think the practice will be to submit the empty block to the network, regardless of the small size of the reward. Not submitting it doesn't make the pool any more likely to find a block with the transactions included, and submitting it actually gives a very slight advantage, unless I am entirely wrong about how that works.

Not necessarily. If you find a valid hash for an empty block, receiving SOME sats is always preferable to no sats. Discarding the empty block that you have a valid hash for will risk (read "virtually guarantee") that you don't find the block with the transactions included, and then you get NOTHING.

Even once the block reward is only a few hundred sats, which won't be for a LONG time, it's still better to get those few hundred sats than to get nothing.

Yes, but if they had discarded the empty block template that they HAD found a valid hash on, and then started trying to find a valid hash for the template that included all the transactions, they very likely would not have been lucky enough to find it, and therefore lost out on not only the transaction fees, but the block reward as well.

Block reward without transaction fees beats risking not getting either any day.

You bet!

If you look, block 823924 was mined 1 minute prior.

It takes some time for transactions to be compiled into the template. While this is occurring, miners try to solve for an empty template, in case they get really lucky and find a valid hash before the transactions can be compiled.

It is more profitable to go ahead and submit the empty block that a valid hash was found for than to discard it and try to find a new valid hash with the transactions included. The likelihood is that it would be found by a different pool, and the miners on the pool that found the hash for the empty block would get nothing.

There is a tension here that we should embrace, I think.

Yes, we ought to live in the moment and be present with the people we care about here and now.

Yet, low time-preference and living with an eye to the future is also to be encouraged.

Sure, the goals, dreams, and plans you have today are very likely to change between now and 5 years from now, but not all of them. Moreover, steps you take to better yourself now in preparation for a particular goal you have can often be applied to different goals, should they change in the interim.

I know for a fact that the goals and plans I have and am working toward today are very different from what I was working toward 5 years ago. Yet, not so entirely different that the effort I put toward them was wasted.

My very optimistic take on this would be that Alby is about to drop their own mobile app, so we won't need to connect via Zeus or BlueWallet anymore.

Just went to connect my nostr:npub1getal6ykt05fsz5nqu4uld09nfj3y3qxmv8crys4aeut53unfvlqr80nfm wallet to Zeus on my phone and can't find the QR anywhere.

The guide says to go to the Wallet tab and choose "Show your connection credentials", but that option is nowhere to be found.

Has Alby removed the ability to connect to Zeus and BlueWallet with LNDHub and simply hasn't updated their guides?

As long as there are mining pools incentivized to include them, inscriptions will continue to crowd the blockspace, making it more expensive for those who want to use Bitcoin as money (you know... what it was designed for), rather than as file storage.

That said, if something cannot continue, it will not. And the reality is that in the not so distant future, most people will not be able to transact on the base chain at all. How long it will be before this takes place depends on how fast adoption of Bitcoin occurs, and there could be black swan events or coordinated attacks between now and then that would greatly slow it down.

Yet, eventually that time will come, and at some point before it occurs, inscriptions clutter will simply be priced out, if it managed to survive being more than a passing fad in the first place. I am inclined to agree with those who believe inscriptions will die out on their own.

We all know this stuff is nonsense. It is merely the latest example of how easily a fool is parted from his money. The thing is, even fools eventually catch on that they are being duped, and scammers will move on to some new way to pull the wool over their eyes.

That said, I am 100% in support of miners (or mining pools, until we have Stratum V2) having the tools to filter this garbage out of the blocks they mine. Yes, it will likely die on its own, but miners who don't want to have any part in supporting it in the meantime ought to be able to conscientiously exclude inscriptions from their block templates, even if it means they are less profitable as a result. Some things are more important than profitability.

I am sure there are all sorts of things we could start including in blocks that would make miners more profitable, but we don't, because Bitcoin has one laser-focused purpose: The separation of money and state. I wonder if many have lost that, having been blinded by the drive to maximize profits above all else.

Someone help me understand what is so great about pairing Bitcoin with eCash as a scaling solution.

As I understand it, there is no inherent supply constraint built into eCash. Lightning, at least, cannot operate without locking UTXOs into payment channels, which means that it can never inflate the supply of Bitcoin. Am I missing how eCash relies on Lightning to constrain its supply in some way, or is it the case that a mint could operate like a fractional reserve bank?

Is there any way to audit a mint in order to know whether it is inflating the supply of its tokens?

Why don't more clients have something like this implemented for automatically supporting the devs whenever you zap?

Snort:

Just wait until you try the anonymous mode on noStrudel. Hides all profile pics and usernames. You'll be zapping yourself left and right!