My mastodon feed is still full of folks using the bitcoinhackers.org instance. Do y'all not realize that @nvk is gonna rug pull you soon?
Miniscript support fully merged in Bitcoin Core. Just for P2WSH now, but extending it to Taproot is being worked on.
I posted this on all my social media accounts. Here are the engagement stats:
Twitter (431,000 followers)
9 retweets
45 comments
125 likes
Nostr (4,800 followers)
41 reposts
75 comments
284 likes
Mastodon (2,800 followers)
3 retoots
2 comments
6 likes
It's grant-seeking season for me, and I wrote up what I have been working on in 2022 and what I plan to work on this year: continuing my current Bitcoin network monitoring efforts.
My 5th annual Bitcoin node performance report is now available: https://blog.lopp.net/2022-bitcoin-node-performance-tests/
Great article by @lopp: The Death of Decentralized Email: A historical review of the multi-decade centralization and capture of the email protocol.
https://blog.lopp.net/death-of-decentralized-email/
Its hard not to think Bitcoin has failed to provide meaningful end-user control or real societal value with a cursory glance at today's reality, but the fate of Bitcoin has not been sealed. Quite the opposite - it is still early, and by treating Bitcoin not as something which should be improved, but as something which should be taken out back and shot does a disservice to the entire cypherpunk movement.
Do not measure Bitcoin by the inspirational goals people assigned to it on its first release. If we measure the internet by the same metric, it, too, has failed. And maybe it has, but we cannot deny that it is used, daily, for many to communicate across the world instantly, even if more often than not via centralized platforms. Similarly, Bitcoin, today, allows many to transact across the world nearly instantly, even if more often than not via centralized platforms.
Like seemingly everything in this world, it is easier and more profitable for someone to build a centralized, controlling platform to extract rent and build a nice user interface than to build a decentralized, user-protecting product. The Internet only achieves user-protection when many people, like those building Mastodon, constantly build user-protecting systems which fill niches and promote their use. So too, Bitcoin only protects users when many people, preferably more from this community, build user-protecting systems on top of it - various privacy-focused wallets have seen increased adoption over the past years, lightning was created to allow for lower-value instant transactions, and also slowly sees increasing adoption. But these systems, like Bitcoin itself, are early and strapped for resources. Instead of dismissing their existence as useless, we should celebrate them, contribute code to them, and come up with new ideas.
Cypherpunks Write Code.
Tried setting up Whisper on my Windows gaming rig recently and it took me 3X as much work as on Linux due to multiple library compatibility issues. But I'm now ready to embark upon a massive transcription project! https://blog.lopp.net/openai-whisper-transcription-testing/
Now for something completely different: I wrote a dystopian short story! https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/under-cbdcs-bitcoin-is-outlawed
Fascinating read. Early mining pattern analysis via @lopp #satoshi #bitcoin
https://blog.lopp.net/was-satoshi-a-greedy-miner/
Cypherpunk · Co-founder & CTO of Casa · creator of http://bitcoin.page, http://lightning.how, http://statoshi.info