Why the sudden increase?
Merging of two rivers in #Geneva #Switzerland
#World #Travel #Photography 
I tried last week to load offers, wasn’t even possible. Robosats a year ago was great, now it sucks!
Try the android app, their new addition. Works perfectly fine here.
I'm using robosats and have encountered no issues in terms of user experience. Tor makes things a but slower but it adds best privacy. Ditching TOR is not a good option, they CSB however provide an alternative for those who wish to use NWS.
#Quote of the day
Good people are empathic, hardworking and generous. Poems of heroes are not sung because they were egocentric lazy schmucks.
One can easily set up a decent node under 250 USD. Its not that much.
In dummsty, every point made falls back to the usual volatility tricks (liquidity and volatility are inverse in relationship).
Regarding the second assertion made regarding the analogy to gold and the distortions created by "fake derivative market", a refutation to this easily be demonstrated in the block chain. If you don't settle on-chain, you don't own the bitcoin. All the ETFs are supposed to be backed 100% by on-chain bitcoins.
The more liquidity enters into bitcoin, the more resilient it will become to the only slippery slope it has: volatility.
As they say, volatility is the price we pay.
How BlackRock's Dominance Could Become Dangerous for Bitcoin 🚨
BlackRock manages over 316,000 BTC with its Bitcoin ETF. The dominance of this U.S. financial giant is steadily increasing. Is this concentration a threat to Bitcoin? 🤔 Just a few years ago, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink was a declared Bitcoin skeptic.
https://m.primal.net/JTmZ.webp
However, the man at the helm of the world's largest asset manager has changed his mind. Once regarding Bitcoin merely as a tool for money laundering, he now views the cryptocurrency as "digital gold" and refers to it as a "safe haven" 🛡️.
The company’s own iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) now controls over 318,000 BTC, leaving all other Bitcoin ETF competitors far behind. BlackRock's market share continues to rise and no one seems able to stop the U.S. financial behemoth. What does this concentration of economic power mean for Bitcoin?
This rising control brings several concerns. Firstly, the centralization of Bitcoin holdings contradicts the decentralized ethos originally championed by Bitcoin 🔄.
Such control by a single entity could lead to market manipulation, where the actions of one firm could significantly influence Bitcoin's price 📉.
Furthermore, BlackRock's position could also lead to regulatory scrutiny. Governments worldwide might perceive the concentration of Bitcoin under a corporate umbrella as a potential threat to fiscal policies or even financial stability 🌐.
This could prompt stricter regulations which might stifle the growth and innovation in the cryptocurrency sector 💼.
#bitcoin #hedgefond #crypto #invest #bitnewstoday
Thanks for the post.
How exactly can BR influence the bitcoin network through their holdings apart from the usual volatility increase in case they decide to dump their holdings?
Chop your wood, it'll warm you twice.
Mine your sats ⚡
How is this achieved? Who's doing the settlement and is it done on daily basis? How can we be sure that the provider is not just bucketing trades?
My Experience with nostr:npub1ex7mdykw786qxvmtuls208uyxmn0hse95rfwsarvfde5yg6wy7jq6qvyt9
**TL;DR Strike is garbage.**
I started using Strike in the middle of March this year.
My first impression was that it was a great app. It had Lightning integrated, on-chain withdrawals were free, and the setup was pretty easy, even though I had to do a full KYC. After all, they are regulated and that is to be expected.
I began using Strike to send and receive BTC and buy gift cards directly within the app. I was pretty amazed at how easy everything worked. I loved the app. I even recommended it as an onboarding app for pre-coiner friends. Well, not anymore.
One day in May, about two months later, I wanted to send some BTC to an exchange or buy a gift card (which was basically all I did with the app in those previous two months). However, the app denied access to my BTC. All I got was a cartoon lightning bolt saying, “We need to review your account. Contact support.”
At first, I was shocked. I didn't have my life savings in the app, but it wasn’t a trivial amount of sats either. So, there it was, right in my face for the first time: Not your keys, not your coins. I got angry with myself and with Strike too.
I contacted support.
Support wrote that to comply with regulations, they needed additional information (remember, I already did full KYC), like a pay stub, signed employee agreement, or tax statement.
This was my response:
Hey, the Bitcoin with which I funded my Strike account are savings from the past. I don't work currently, and I also have no tax statement because I just moved to Brazil last year. What exactly is the problem? I didn't do anything illegal or wrong. I expect this issue to be resolved immediately or you will lose a customer. I already regret using your service. I'm very disappointed.
Yeah, I was really pissed because I couldn’t access my sats. They locked me out. Just like that.
Strike answered:
Dear User,
Upon careful review, we have determined that your account has engaged in prohibited use. We regret to inform you that we can no longer provide you with access to our service.
At this time, your account has been permanently disabled. Please withdraw all remaining assets from your account within one week from receiving this message, and confirm with us when the withdrawal has been completed. After this timeframe, the account will be closed permanently. Please be advised that this decision is final.
Best regards,
The Strike Team
Okay… So now Strike accused me of “prohibited use” of their app.
I asked them to be kind and specify what prohibited use I engaged in. Because obviously, I don’t want to get in trouble or do anything illegal.
Their answer:
This decision is based on an assessment of different qualifications. Our customer support team can only confirm that we sent this message and assist with technical issues only. Support cannot reverse this decision, nor can they share any more details related to this matter.
Thank you for that great answer. I can really see you care about your customers and their experience. But I guess at that point, I wasn’t their customer anymore anyway.
Still, I sent them another message and asked who I could talk to. If there was anybody who could clarify what I did wrong. Remember, all I did was send and receive BTC and buy gift cards.
Their answer? Well, they never answered again. Just like that. That was it.
After this beautiful experience, I posted about it on Nostr.
And guess what? nostr:npub1cn4t4cd78nm900qc2hhqte5aa8c9njm6qkfzw95tszufwcwtcnsq7g3vle answered.
Woohooo!
He said I should send him a DM and he would happily look into the issue.
Cool! Now that’s what I call customer service.
So, I did. No answer.
I sent him another one. Again, no answer.
I sent another one or two. Still no answer.
This was 5 weeks ago.
I guess he is very busy.
What a joke Strike is.
I had the same thing with Revolut. A scammer called the bank and asked to reverse the translation where he paid me for Bitcoin sold through p2p exchange. He accused them of facilitating illicit activities (accusing me of something illicit). The bank reversed his payment without lettinge me know and later sent me an email saying they are terminating the ralationship with me without any further details.
Ok, so how’s the balance upheld? Someone takes the opposite position?
So basically hedge against fiat the amount of sats you took out for something? And it involves a bit of trust placed in the mint on the other hand?
AND… WE ARE SOLD OUT! No more USD cashu tokens...!
What started as a proof-of-concept (POC) test last month with stable channels and Cashu mints turned out to be a huge success!
TL;DR: If you want us to keep this going and add more liquidity, please like and repost this for visibility.
We are actively working on increasing liquidity to continue this initiative. If you are interested in providing liquidity and earning some satoshis (sats), please DM me!
Stable Channel: The goal is to maintain a balanced channel by pegging the amount of sats to $1000 on one end. From May 13th until now, the stable channel has remained exceptionally stable, maintaining $1000 while the BTC price fluctuated from $63,000 to $71,000 and back down to $60,887. The channel balance on the stable receiver side never fell below $1000.
Stats on Stable channel:
Days uptime: 44
Payments made: 10,333
Largest Stable Receiver Amount: $1,014
Smallest Stable Receiver Amount: $984
Cumulative Payments: $17,912
Mean Payment: $1.73
Median Payment: $1.52
Standard Deviation: 1.26
Almost $18,000 in payments back and forth!
Cashu Mint: umint.cash is the only cashu mint that supports USD tokens now. Anyone can use a supported wallet to mint tokens by paying a lightning invoice. While many big stablecoin projects struggle to show proof of reserves/liabilities, we provide that info real time on the mint website. Dollar balance stays the same and not subject to volatility...!
Stats on Cashu USD Mint:
Casu tokens minted: 18,059
Cashu tokens melted: 13,997
USD value of cashu tokens minted: $5,500
USD value of cashu tokens melted: $4,501
Number of cashu wallets supported: 3
And the good thing is that these statistics are available real-time on the mint website https://umint.cash/ All we need to do now is to keep increasing the liquidity..! We are not bounded by exchanges or treasuries.. All within Bitcoin...
Please like and repost for visibility…!
Thanks for everyone involved in making this a success…!
Stablechannels by nostr:npub1m0st2r43ph6ftu9az8sm69n5357jx5qkcyj09jmaucr6vvy3w5yqueqp5h
Boardwalk cash wallet by nostr:npub1cd0l3s6qgj0s6690rtkys39mgj5upwxpm4856nhmce0pyqu6xj9qh7xlvx
Master of cashu nostr:npub12rv5lskctqxxs2c8rf2zlzc7xx3qpvzs3w4etgemauy9thegr43sf485vg
What are benefits to this? What's the added value?
That's a normal evolution of a log curve and other side of the coin where the market becomes more liquid and volatility decreases.
Luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation.
— Seneca
I continue to work on my hedgehog protocol and I've figured out how to add some cool features to it. I wrote a "bridge server" which helps "translate" hedgehog payments into lightning payments, and it works right now, which means a hedgehog wallet can pay regular lightning invoices. I also added support for something I call "unilateral channels."
What that means is, someone can be fully offline, not even talking to you, not even aware of you, and if you have their pubkey you can send them $100 in bitcoin (for example) in such a way that they "receive" it in a new hedgehog channel. You just use their pubkey to create a multisig and fund it with the $100, then send them a string of text containing signatures for the "force closure" transactions that they need in case they have to unilaterally exit from the multisig. Then, whenever they next get online, they can paste that string into their wallet and instantly start using the money in their (already confirmed!) new hedgehog channel to make hedgehog payments and lightning payments.
You you could also use the unilateral channel feature to "make up" a bunch of keypairs, get some business cards, print out channel opening/closing information on the business cards (using the pubkeys from each of the keypairs you made up to create the multisigs), fund the multisigs yourself, and then "gift" them to people by just handing them the business card. Each recipient gets a new, prefunded hedgehog wallet with full support for sending and receiving lightning payments, with two simple steps: (1) visit a webpage (or download an app) that runs hedgehog wallet software and (2) scan the qr code to import the channel data.
All of these features have some interesting side effects. For example, since you can receive money into a new hedgehog channel without being online, you can keep your private keys fully offline in an airgapped hardware wallet, and whenever you want to send money over hedgehog or lightning, you can just prepare the transaction in your software wallet, encode it as a series of several psbts, pass those to your hardware wallet for signing, and let your software wallet send the newly signed transactions to the bridge server.
You could also *receive* money over lightning into a separate hot wallet, and regularly withdraw it to a cold hedgehog wallet by using your hardware wallet to individually sign the various transactions that are involved in receiving lightning payments and revoking old state (but this requires implementing support for receiving lightning payments on hedgehog, which I haven't done yet -- see below).
I am currently working on a feature that I call "virtual channels" which allow you to make a unilateral channel without going on chain. This lets you cheaply give people hedgehog channels that "fully" work, with the tradeoff that you (the sender) have a copy of this virtual channel's private keys, so you have custody of the recipient's funds. But the channel works just like a regular hedgehog channel, with the same interface, its own balance, full support for sending and receiving hedgehog payments, and sending lightning payments. So it's sort of like you're hosting an lnbits wallet for someone, only with hedgehog's ability to effectively emulate asynchronous payments. Which means you don't need a server to host this software, a regular phone or even a web browser should work fine, because you don't need to be online all the time, only the bridge server does.
Once virtual channels are ready I want to add support for "receiving" lightning payments into a hedgehog channel. I wrote up a specification for it here (https://github.com/supertestnet/hedgehog-advanced) but I haven't implemented it yet. Once that is done I think hedgehog will be ready to implement in a "real" wallet. It will have so many cool features:
- keep your keys airgapped and still (a) send hedgehog payments (b) receive hedgehog payments (c) send lightning payments (d) regularly withdraw lightning payments from a "hot" wallet into .your airgapped hedgehog wallet without needing to do any base layer transactions
- if exchanges like kraken or swan add support for hedgehog, any user who has monthly or weekly autobuy enabled could receive these regular purchases of bitcoin directly into a hedgehog wallet -- hot or cold -- and be able to spend the money on lightning or hedgehog as soon as it confirms, without needing to come online til they want to actually spend the money
- if you are sending someone money and your recipient is *on*line, you can use a hedgehog wallet as a regular lightning wallet
- if your recipient is *not* online, you can pay them by making a unilateral channel for them on the base layer, and to do that you just need to be willing to pay a base layer tx fee and know one of their pubkeys (technically that part is optional, as you can just make up a keypair for them -- though I personally wouldn't trust a keypair that some rando made up for me and I would sweep all funds from such a channel whenever I next got online)
- if your recipient is not online and you don't want to incur a base layer fee, you can make a "virtual" (i.e. custodial) unilateral channel for them and deposit whatever amount you want to pay them into that. You can then send them its details and go offline, and they can sweep it whenever they next get online, without any further help from you (i.e. you don't need to be online when they sweep the funds! They just need the bridge server to be online)
- this emulates asynchronous lightning payments pretty effectively, without the need for the sender to run a server or rely on a third party custodian. But there is a "first party" custodian -- the sender retains custody of the funds in a virtual channel until the recipient sweeps them. And there is a third party bridge server, who can censor payments, though if that happens, the sender can just retry with a different bridge server and stop using the old one
- it also emulates "pull" payments, which are useful for subscriptions. If you want to subscribe to twelve months of bitflix, you can send bitflix twelve virtual channels where each one has a timelock on the virtual channel opening transaction. This effectively means that the first virtual channel cannot be used til 1 month goes by, the second one cannot be used til 2 months go by, etc. As each timelock expires once per month, a single virtual channel becomes usable each month. This allows bitflix to sweep funds from one channel per month, thus "pulling" pre-authorized funds from your wallet according to a predetermined schedule
- if you ever want to cancel such a subscription, just make a new transaction with the bridge server overwriting all the remaining virtual channels you gave to bitflix. The bridge server will then stop treating the virtual channels as valid, because they can no longer redeem the money in them even if it comes to their side of the virtual channel, so bitflix can't use them anymore either, and thus your subscription is effectively canceled
- all of this can work just fine today without waiting for bitcoin *or* lightning to upgrade -- which I think is just amazing!
This is very interesting. Thanks for the excellent work.
nostr:note12p5ysxr3nj4rl804usw96nha062fgf0pht8ys3ff92e7wk4fg56svu0rc4
I deleted Amethyst because it was impossible to use. Any other good alternatives for android apart from primal ?