We can (and need to) do much better, even if this is true.

There's a whole body of research to be created on deanonymizing and then combating that.

Bigger network, longer paths, less correlation, trampolines all help. But mainly we need reliability so good that users can reasonably trade it off for a harder-to-track payment (ie wallets can do this for them...)

What this feels like is hard to put into words. Once you have an idea, you have to code it. Whether it's a fix or a new solution, the urge to make it extant is incredibly powerful.

I've heard writers describe a kind of animal spirit that takes over them and forces their words into the page. This is the closest I relate to: it's almost painful for me to discuss a technical problem without itching to write up the solution I've found.

I had a junior colleague at a large company get admonished once for solving a problem "which had been assigned to someone else" (and had been for weeks). I get that from an organizational POV but: these are not your people, time to move on.

Also, time is limited, and deciding when and where to unleash this ability is the secret to being a functional (and happy!) being.

So, there's a place offering Bitcoin-denominated life insurance. Here's the problem though: they invest the funds to make return in *Bitcoin*.

But there are few if any Bitcoin-native opportunities. We also know that Bitcoin's gains are in a handful of market days per year.

IOW I cannot see a way of making "conservative" investments and outperforming Bitcoin, since such investments will be dollars.

If it seems too good to be true ...

Let's assume I can build an AMM. Now I need to understand exactly how they work in Eth, that makes this kind of thing impossible in Bitcoin. And I don't: it's not my thing.

Honestly, surprise on the up-side is nice. Unusual. But let's take our wins! ❤️

Exactly as expected. Also: disappointment will continue.

But CHECKTXHASH is still the wrong idea. You want to fix script then do full introspection, not this weird hash introspection which simply adds bloat.

Greg Maxwell, Pieter Wuille, to name two.

I've become a big believer in success spirals, but the converse, loser spirals, is also true.

Nobody tells you this, you have to learn. And that path can get really dark.

There are many arguments why it won't happen, but they're at a disadvantage because it *did* happen to Ethereum apparently.

Honestly, I'm still struggling with Bitcoin soft fork proposals. I believe we will end up with full introspection: there are too many things people want to build which require it.

But most current proposals are workarounds for current limitations, which will become vestigial when/if we actually fix things. They may be simply unused, or worse, not quite useful. And it's hard to know: if we had restored script and introspection, we could see what people build and then go "ah, this opcode would make this more efficient!", but without that we are guessing.

So I really have to figure out if mevil is real. Serious people have concerns, esp nostr:nprofile1qqsr6tj32zrfn7v0pu4aheaytdnnc6rluepq73ndc2tdjzus34gat9qpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhswulwwv, so they need serious consideration. If I can convince myself it is either not an issue or independent of script power, then I can reasonably purpose what Bitcoin would look like with maximal expressive power.

After that, I can look *backwards* and see if any subsets of that power make sense as stepping stones. I initially thought CTV (well, a more straightforward variant) made sense, as a common case, but brief discussions with Jonas Nick have me questioning whether it actually is still useful with full introspection (or, more clearly, what the right form would be).

As an aside: I think sponsors (done optimally) are necessary for any Bitcoin high-fee future. Feels like a side-quest though!

Sorry I don't have answers. This stuff is *not* simple, the details are critical, and some of our best minds from previous eras are absent :(

His Master's Voice

The realistic portrayal of a large militarized project, combined with an unsatisfied mystery: it still lives in my head...

It's very wise of you to run them as separate users, but you could have them all in the same group and make sure the directory for lightning RPC is accessible by that group as well as the file itself?

You get that from a random noisemaker? Do you see Jesus in your toast too?

I haven't tried lnbits, but glancing at the docs, I would usually use the CoreLightningWallet backend, but that is only if lnbits is on the same machine.

Biasing a channel you want to balance may give you some passive balancing, as other payments go out, but unless you do lots of payments I don't think it will be very effective. Most people use the rebalance plugin, but it's a bit primitive these days: we could write a better one...

FFS. Someone says someone said Trump said he holds a lot of Bitcoin.

There is no signal in that noise. None.

I understand this! We are definitely less polished in many areas. Progress can be slower than I want.

This is software, so there's always a chance if bugs, and xpay is new.

The main risk is that *none* of your payments work, because I missed some case which applies for you. But we could also have bugs which pay too much in fees, for example.

Hmmmm, there are screeds of text I could throw here: nullc on Reddit, describing various things. But two examples:

1. He described Bitcoin upgrades as like carving from a block of granite, in that you can reveal new things within the space but you can't add things. This captures the counter-intuitive nature of soft forks, where rules can be added but not removed.

2. He pushed back against the idea that Bitcoin was inherently anti-fragile, with an understanding that we, ourselves, are what makes us so! If we all stop pushing (say, because we believe it's inherently resilient!), it fails.

In general, he rejects over-simplification, preferring to understand details. I appreciate that!

I think it was after my first year at Blockstream I asked if I could have regular 1x1s with then-CTO Gregory Maxwell. I was, perhaps, too inexperienced at that point to take full advantage of that, but his form of thinking has been a model for me on how to think about Bitcoin, though I don't always agree with him.

Needless to say, his receipt of the #finneyprize along with Pieter Wuille is fully deserved. It's hard to think of who could even follow that pair, to be honest!

finneyprize.org

Wait, you haven't seen The Princess Bride?

(Now I'm trying to figure out the easiest way to stream this while on vacation...)