@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

O Planetinha

Fumaça verde me entrando pelas narinas e um coro desafinado fazia uma base melódica.

nos confins da galáxia havia um planetinha isolado. Era um planeta feliz.

O homem vestido de mago começava a aparecer por detrás da fumaça verde.

O planetinha recebeu três presentes, mas o seu habitante, o homem, estava num estado de confusão tão grande que ameaçava estragá-los. Os homens já havia escravizado o primeiro presente, a vida; lutavam contra o segundo presente, a morte; e havia alguns que achavam que deviam destruir totalmente o terceiro, o amor, e com isto levar a desordem total ao pobre planetinha perdido, que se chamava Terra.

O coro desafinado entrou antes do "Terra" cantando várias vezes, como se imitasse um eco, "terra-terra-terraaa". Depois de uma pausa dramática, o homem vestido de mago voltou a falar.

Terra, nossa nave mãe.

Neste momento eu me afastei. À frente do palco onde o mago e seu coral faziam apelos à multidão havia vários estandes cobertos com a tradicional armação de quatro pernas e lona branca. Em todos os cantos da praça havia gente, gente dos mais variados tipos. Visitantes curiosos que se aproximavam atraídos pela fumaça verde e as barraquinhas, gente que aproveitava o movimento para vender doces sem pagar imposto, casais que se abraçavam de pé para espantar o frio, os tradicionais corredores que faziam seu cooper, gente cheia de barba e vestida para imitar os hippies dos anos 60 e vender colares estendidos no chão, transeuntes novos e velhos, vestidos como baladeiros ou como ativistas do ônibus grátis, grupos de ciclistas entusiastas.

O mago fazia agora apelos para que nós, os homens, habitantes do isolado planetinha, passássemos a ver o planetinha, nossa nave mãe, como um todo, e adquiríssemos a consciência de que ele estava entrando em maus lençóis. A idéia, reforçada pela logomarca do evento, era que parássemos de olhar só para a nossa vida e pensássemos no planeta.

A logomarca do evento, um desenho estilizado do planeta Terra, nada tinha a ver com seu nome: "Festival Andando de Bem com a Vida", mas havia sido ali colocada estrategicamente pelos organizadores, de quem parecia justamente sair a mensagem dita pelo mago.

Aquela multidão de pessoas que, assim como eu, tinham suas próprias preocupações, não podiam ver o quadro caótico que formavam, cada uma com seus atos isolados, ali naquela praça isolada, naquele planeta isolado. Quando o hippie barbudo, quase um Osho, assustava um casal para tentar vender-lhes um colar, a quantidade de caos que isto acrescentava à cena era gigantesca. Por um segundo, pude ver, como se estivesse de longe e acima, com toda a pretensão que este estado imaginativo carrega, a cena completa do caos.

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Uma nave-mãe, dessas de ficção científica, habitada por milhões de pessoas, seguia no espaço sem rumo, e sem saber que logo à frente um longo precipício espacial a esperava, para a desgraça completa sua e de seus habitantes.

Acostumados àquela nave tanto quanto outrora estiveram acostumados à sua terra natal, os homens viviam as próprias vidas sem nem se lembrar que estavam vagando pelo espaço. Ninguém sabia quem estava conduzindo a nave, e ninguém se importava.

No final do filme descobre-se que era a soma completa do caos que cada habitante produzia, com seus gestos egoístas e incapazes de levar em conta a totalidade, é que determinava a direção da nave-mãe. O efeito, no entanto, não era imediato, como nunca é. Havia gente de verdade encarregada de conduzir a nave, mas era uma gente bêbada, mau-caráter, que vivia brigando pelo controle da nave e o poder que isto lhes dava. Poder, status, dinheiro!

Essa gente bêbada era atraída até ali pela corrupção das instituições e da moral comum que, no fundo no fundo, era causada pelo egoísmo da população, através de um complexo -- mas que no filme aparece simplificado pela ação individual de um magnata do divertimento público -- processo social.

O homem vestido de mago era mais um agente causador de caos, com sua cena cheia de fumaça e sua roupa estroboscópica, ele achava que estava fazendo o bem ao alertar sua platéia, todos as sextas-feiras, de que havia algo que precisava ser feito, que cada um que estava ali ouvindo era responsável pelo planeta. A sua incapacidade, porém, de explicar o que precisava ser feito só aumentava a angústia geral; a culpa que ele jogava sobre seu público, e que era prontamente aceita e passada em frente, aos familiares e amigos de cada um, atormentava-os diariamente e os impedia de ter uma vida decente no trabalho e em casa. As famílias, estressadas, estavam constantemente brigando e os motivos mais insignificantes eram responsáveis pelas mais horrendas conseqüências.

O mago, que após o show tirava o chapéu entortado e ia tomar cerveja num boteco, era responsável por uma parcela considerável do caos que levava a nave na direção do seu desgraçado fim. No filme, porém, um dos transeuntes que de passagem ouviu um pedaço do discurso do mago despertou em si mesmo uma consiência transformadora e, com poderes sobre-humanos que lhe foram então concedidos por uma ordem iniciática do bem ou não, usando só os seus poderes humanos mesmo, o transeunte -- na primeira versão do filme um homem, na segunda uma mulher -- consegue consertar as instituições e retirar os bêbados da condução da máquina. A questão da moral pública é ignorada para abreviar a trama, já com duas horas e quarenta de duração, mas subentende-se que ela também fora resolvida.

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No planeta Terra real, que não está indo em direção alguma, preso pela gravidade ao Sol, e onde as pessoas vivem a própria vida porque lhes é impossível viver a dos outros, não têm uma consciência global de nada porque só é possível mesmo ter a consciência delas mesmas, e onde a maioria, de uma maneira ou de outra, está tentando como pode, fazer as coisas direito, o filme é exibido.

Para a maioria dos espectadores, é um filme que evoca reflexões, um filme forte. Por um segundo elas têm o mesmo vislumbre do caos generalizado que eu tive ali naquela praça. Para uma pequena parcela dos espectadores -- entre eles alguns dos que estavam na platéia do mago, o próprio mago, o seguidor do Osho, o casal de duas mulheres e o vendedor de brigadeiros, mas aos quais se somam também críticos de televisão e jornal e gente que fala pelos cotovelos na internet -- o filme é um horror, o filme é uma vulgarização de um problema real e sério, o filme apela para a figura do herói salvador e passa uma mensagem totalmente errada, de que a maioria da população pode continuar vivendo as suas própria vidinhas miseráveis enquanto espera por um herói que vem do Olimpo e os salva da mixórdia que eles mesmos causaram, é um filme que presta um enorme desserviço à causa.

No dia seguinte ao lançamento, num bar meio caro ali perto da praça, numa mesa com oito pessoas, entre elas seis do primeiro grupo e oito do segundo, discute-se se o filme levará ou não o Oscar. Eu estou em casa dormindo e não escuto nada.

@ f977c464:32fcbe00

Kendisini aynada ilk defa gördüğü o gün, diğerleri gibi olduğunu anlamıştı. Oysaki her insan biricik olmalıydı. Sözgelimi sinirlendiğinde bir kaşı diğerinden birkaç milimetre daha az çatılabilirdi veya sevindiğinde dudağı ona has bir açıyla dalgalanabilirdi. Hatta bunların hiçbiri mümkün değilse, en azından, gözlerinin içinde sadece onun sahip olabileceği bir ışık parlayabilirdi. Çok sıradan, öyle sıradan ki kimsenin fark etmediği o milyonlarca minik şeyden herhangi biri. Ne olursa.

Ama yansımasına bakarken bunların hiçbirini bulamadı ve diğer günlerden hiç de farklı başlamamış o gün, işe gitmek için vagonunun gelmesini beklediği alelade bir metro istasyonunda, içinde kaybolduğu illüzyon dağılmaya başladı.

İlk önce derisi döküldü. Tam olarak dökülmedi aslında, daha çok kıvılcımlara dönüşüp bedeninden fırlamış ve bir an sonra sönerek külleşmiş, havada dağılmıştı. Ardında da, kaybolmadan hemen önce, kısa süre için hayal meyal görülebilen, bir ruhun yok oluşuna ağıt yakan rengârenk peri cesetleri bırakmıştı. Beklenenin aksine, havaya toz kokusu yayıldı.

Dehşete düştü elbette. Dehşete düştüler. Panikle üstlerini yırtan 50 işçi. Her şeyin sebebiyse o vagon.

Saçları da döküldü. Her tel, yere varmadan önce, her santimde ikiye ayrıla ayrıla yok oldu.

Bütün yüzeylerin mat olduğu, hiçbir şeyin yansımadığı, suyun siyah aktığı ve kendine ancak kameralarla bakabildiğin bir dünyada, vagonun içine yerleştirilmiş bir aynadan ilk defa kendini görmek.

Gözlerinin akları buharlaşıp havada dağıldı, mercekleri boşalan yeri doldurmak için eriyip yayıldı. Gerçeği görmemek için yaratılmış, bu yüzden görmeye hazır olmayan ve hiç olmayacak gözler.

Her şeyin o anda sona erdiğini sanabilirdi insan. Derin bir karanlık ve ölüm. Görmenin görmek olduğu o anın bitişi.

---

Ben geldiğimde ölmüşlerdi.

Yani bozulmuşlardı demek istiyorum.

Belleklerini yeni taşıyıcılara takmam mümkün olmadı. Fiziksel olarak kusursuz durumdaydılar, olmayanları da tamir edebilirdim ama tüm o hengamede kendilerini baştan programlamış ve girdilerini modifiye etmişlerdi.

Belleklerden birini masanın üzerinden ileriye savurdu. Hınca hınç dolu bir barda oturuyorlardı. O ve arkadaşı.

Sırf şu kendisini insan sanan androidler travma geçirip delirmesin diye neler yapıyoruz, insanın aklı almıyor.

Eliyle arkasını işaret etti.

Polislerin söylediğine göre biri vagonun içerisine ayna yerleştirmiş. Bu zavallılar da kapı açılıp bir anda yansımalarını görünce kafayı kırmışlar.

Arkadaşı bunların ona ne hissettirdiğini sordu. Yani o kadar bozuk, insan olduğunu sanan androidi kendilerini parçalamış olarak yerde görmek onu sarsmamış mıydı?

Hayır, sonuçta belirli bir amaç için yaratılmış şeyler onlar. Kaliteli bir bilgisayarım bozulduğunda üzülürüm çünkü parasını ben vermişimdir. Bunlarsa devletin. Bana ne ki?

Arkadaşı anlayışla kafasını sallayıp suyundan bir yudum aldı. Kravatını biraz gevşetti.

Bira istemediğinden emin misin?

İstemediğini söyledi. Sahi, neden deliriyordu bu androidler?

Basit. Onların yapay zekâlarını kodlarken bir şeyler yazıyorlar. Yazılımcılar. Biliyorsun, ben donanımdayım. Bunlar da kendilerini insan sanıyorlar. Tiplerine bak.

Sesini alçalttı.

Arabalarda kaza testi yapılan mankenlere benziyor hepsi. Ağızları burunları bile yok ama şu geldiğimizden beri sakalını düzeltip duruyor mesela. Hayır, hepsi de diğerleri onun sakalı varmış sanıyor, o manyak bir şey.

Arkadaşı bunun delirmeleriyle bağlantısını çözemediğini söyledi. O da normal sesiyle konuşmaya devam etti.

Anlasana, aynayı falan ayırt edemiyor mercekleri. Lönk diye kendilerini görüyorlar. Böyle, olduğu gibi...

Nedenmiş peki? Ne gerek varmış?

Ne bileyim be abicim! Ahiret soruları gibi.

Birasına bakarak dalıp gitti. Sonra masaya abanarak arkadaşına iyice yaklaştı. Bulanık, bir tünelin ucundaki biri gibi, şekli şemalı belirsiz bir adam.

Ben seni nereden tanıyorum ki ulan? Kimsin sen?

Belleği makineden çıkardılar. İki kişiydiler. Soruşturmadan sorumlu memurlar.

─ Baştan mı başlıyoruz, diye sordu belleği elinde tutan ilk memur.

─ Bir kere daha deneyelim ama bu sefer direkt aynayı sorarak başla, diye cevapladı ikinci memur.

─ Bence de. Yeterince düzgün çalışıyor.

Simülasyon yüklenirken, ayakta, biraz arkada duran ve alnını kaşıyan ikinci memur sormaktan kendisini alamadı:

─ Bu androidleri niye böyle bir olay yerine göndermişler ki? Belli tost olacakları. İsraf. Gidip biz baksak aynayı kırıp delilleri mahvetmek zorunda da kalmazlar.

Diğer memur sandalyesinde hafifçe dönecek oldu, o sırada soruyu bilgisayarın hoparlöründen teknisyen cevapladı.

Hangi işimizde bir yamukluk yok ki be abi.

---

Ama bir son değildi. Üstlerindeki tüm illüzyon dağıldığında ve çıplak, cinsiyetsiz, birbirinin aynı bedenleriyle kaldıklarında sıra dünyaya gelmişti.

Yere düştüler. Elleri -bütün bedeni gibi siyah turmalinden, boğumları çelikten- yere değdiği anda, metronun zemini dağıldı.

Yerdeki karolar öncesinde beyazdı ve çok parlaktı. Tepelerindeki floresan, ışığını olduğu gibi yansıtıyor, tek bir lekenin olmadığı ve tek bir tozun uçmadığı istasyonu aydınlatıyorlardı.

Duvarlara duyurular asılmıştı. Örneğin, yarın akşam kültür merkezinde 20.00’da başlayacak bir tekno blues festivalinin cıvıl cıvıl afişi vardı. Onun yanında daha geniş, sarı puntolu harflerle yazılmış, yatay siyah kesiklerle çerçevesi çizilmiş, bir platformdan düşen çöp adamın bulunduğu “Dikkat! Sarı bandı geçmeyin!” uyarısı. Biraz ilerisinde günlük resmi gazete, onun ilerisinde bir aksiyon filminin ve başka bir romantik komedi filminin afişleri, yapılacakların ve yapılmayacakların söylendiği küçük puntolu çeşitli duyurular... Duvar uzayıp giden bir panoydu. On, on beş metrede bir tekrarlanıyordu.

Tüm istasyonun eni yüz metre kadar. Genişliği on metre civarı.

Önlerinde, açık kapısından o mendebur aynanın gözüktüğü vagon duruyordu. Metro, istasyona sığmayacak kadar uzundu. Bir kılıcın keskinliğiyle uzanıyor ama yer yer vagonların ek yerleriyle bölünüyordu.

Hiçbir vagonda pencere olmadığı için metronun içi, içlerindekiler meçhuldü.

Sonrasında karolar zerrelerine ayrılarak yükseldi. Floresanın ışığında her yeri toza boğdular ve ortalığı gri bir sisin altına gömdüler. Çok kısa bir an. Afişleri dalgalandırmadılar. Dalgalandırmaya vakitleri olmadı. Yerlerinden söküp aldılar en fazla. Işık birkaç kere sönüp yanarak direndi. Son kez söndüğünde bir daha geri gelmedi.

Yine de etraf aydınlıktı. Kırmızı, her yere eşit dağılan soluk bir ışıkla.

Yer tamamen tele dönüşmüştü. Altında çapraz hatlarla desteklenmiş demir bir iskelet. Işık birkaç metreden daha fazla aşağıya uzanamıyordu. Sonsuzluğa giden bir uçurum.

Duvarın yerini aynı teller ve demir iskelet almıştı. Arkasında, birbirine vidalarla tutturulmuş demir plakalardan oluşan, üstünden geçen boruların ek yerlerinden bazen ince buharların çıktığı ve bir süre asılı kaldıktan sonra ağır, yağlı bir havayla sürüklendiği bir koridor.

Diğer tarafta paslanmış, pencerelerindeki camlar kırıldığı için demir plakalarla kapatılmış külüstür bir metro. Kapının karşısındaki aynadan her şey olduğu gibi yansıyordu.

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Bir konteynırın içini andıran bir evde, gerçi gayet de birbirine eklenmiş konteynırlardan oluşan bir şehirde “andıran” demek doğru olmayacağı için düpedüz bir konteynırın içinde, masaya mum görüntüsü vermek için koyulmuş, yarı katı yağ atıklarından şekillendirilmiş kütleleri yakmayı deniyordu. Kafasında hayvan kıllarından yapılmış grili siyahlı bir peruk. Aynı kıllardan kendisine gür bir bıyık da yapmıştı.

Üstünde mavi çöp poşetlerinden yapılmış, kravatlı, şık bir takım.

Masanın ayakları yerine oradan buradan çıkmış parçalar konulmuştu: bir arabanın şaft mili, üst üste konulmuş ve üstünde yazı okunamayan tenekeler, boş kitaplar, boş gazete balyaları... Hiçbir şeye yazı yazılmıyordu, gerek yoktu da zaten çünkü merkez veri bankası onları fark ettirmeden, merceklerden giren veriyi sentezleyerek insanlar için dolduruyordu. Yani, androidler için. Farklı şekilde isimlendirmek bir fark yaratacaksa.

Onların mercekleri için değil. Bağlantıları çok önceden kopmuştu.

─ Hayatım, sofra hazır, diye bağırdı yatak odasındaki karısına.

Sofrada tabak yerine düz, bardak yerine bükülmüş, çatal ve bıçak yerine sivriltilmiş plakalar.

Karısı salonun kapısında durakladı ve ancak kulaklarına kadar uzanan, kocasınınkine benzeyen, cansız, ölü hayvanların kıllarından ibaret peruğunu eliyle düzeltti. Dudağını, daha doğrusu dudağının olması gereken yeri koyu kırmızı bir yağ tabakasıyla renklendirmeyi denemişti. Biraz da yanaklarına sürmüştü.

─ Nasıl olmuş, diye sordu.

Sesi tek düzeydi ama hafif bir neşe olduğunu hissettiğinize yemin edebilirdiniz.

Üzerinde, çöp poşetlerinin içini yazısız gazete kağıtlarıyla doldurarak yaptığı iki parça giysi.

─ Çok güzelsin, diyerek kravatını düzeltti kocası.

─ Sen de öylesin, sevgilim.

Yaklaşıp kocasını öptü. Kocası da onu. Sonra nazikçe elinden tutarak, sandalyesini geriye çekerek oturmasına yardım etti.

Sofrada yemek niyetine hiçbir şey yoktu. Gerek de yoktu zaten.

Konteynırın kapısı gürültüyle tekmelenip içeri iki memur girene kadar birbirlerine öyküler anlattılar. O gün neler yaptıklarını. İşten erken çıkıp yemyeşil çimenlerde gezdiklerini, uçurtma uçurduklarını, kadının nasıl o elbiseyi bulmak için saatlerce gezip yorulduğunu, kocasının kısa süreliğine işe dönüp nasıl başarılı bir hamleyle yaşanan krizi çözdüğünü ve kadının yanına döndükten sonra, alışveriş merkezinde oturdukları yeni dondurmacının dondurmalarının ne kadar lezzetli olduğunu, boğazlarının ağrımasından korktuklarını...

Akşam film izleyebilirlerdi, televizyonda -boş ve mat bir plaka- güzel bir film oynayacaktı.

İki memur. Çıplak bedenleriyle birbirinin aynı. Ellerindeki silahları onlara doğrultmuşlardı. Mum ışığında, tertemiz bir örtünün serili olduğu masada, bardaklarında şaraplarla oturan ve henüz sofranın ortasındaki hindiye dokunmamış çifti gördüklerinde bocaladılar.

Hiç de androidlere bilinçli olarak zarar verebilecek gibi gözükmüyorlardı.

─ Sessiz kalma hakkına sahipsiniz, diye bağırdı içeri giren ikinci memur. Söylediğiniz her şey...

Cümlesini bitiremedi. Yatak odasındaki, masanın üzerinden gördüğü o şey, onunla aynı hareketleri yapan android, yoksa, bir aynadaki yansıması mıydı?

Bütün illüzyon o anda dağılmaya başladı.

Not: Bu öykü ilk olarak 2020 yılında Esrarengiz Hikâyeler'de yayımlanmıştır.

@ 8fb140b4:f948000c

Embarking on the journey of operating your own Lightning node on the Bitcoin Layer 2 network is more than just a tech-savvy endeavor; it's a step into a realm of financial autonomy and cutting-edge innovation. By running a node, you become a vital part of a revolutionary movement that's reshaping how we think about money and digital transactions. This role not only offers a unique perspective on blockchain technology but also places you at the heart of a community dedicated to decentralization and network resilience. Beyond the technicalities, it's about embracing a new era of digital finance, where you contribute directly to the network's security, efficiency, and growth, all while gaining personal satisfaction and potentially lucrative rewards.

In essence, running your own Lightning node is a powerful way to engage with the forefront of blockchain technology, assert financial independence, and contribute to a more decentralized and efficient Bitcoin network. It's an adventure that offers both personal and communal benefits, from gaining in-depth tech knowledge to earning a place in the evolving landscape of cryptocurrency.

Running your own Lightning node for the Bitcoin Layer 2 network can be an empowering and beneficial endeavor. Here are 10 reasons why you might consider taking on this task:

1. Direct Contribution to Decentralization: Operating a node is a direct action towards decentralizing the Bitcoin network, crucial for its security and resistance to control or censorship by any single entity.

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7. Personalized Fee Structures: You have the flexibility to set your own fee policies, which can balance earning potential with the service you provide to the network.

8. Empowerment Through Knowledge: The process of setting up and managing a node provides deep learning opportunities, empowering you with knowledge that can be applied in various areas of blockchain and fintech.

9. Boosting Transaction Capacity: By running a node, you help to increase the overall capacity of the Lightning Network, enabling more transactions to be processed quickly and at lower costs.

10. Community Leadership and Reputation: As an active node operator, you gain recognition within the Bitcoin community, which can lead to collaborative opportunities and a position of thought leadership in the space.

These reasons demonstrate the impactful and transformative nature of running a Lightning node, appealing to those who are deeply invested in the principles of bitcoin and wish to actively shape its future. Jump aboard, and embrace the journey toward full independence. 🐶🐾🫡🚀🚀🚀

@ 8fb140b4:f948000c

Chef's notes

Serving these two dishes together will create a delightful centerpiece for your Thanksgiving meal, offering a perfect blend of traditional flavors with a homemade touch.

Details

• ⏲️ Prep time: 30 min
• 🍳 Cook time: 1 - 2 hours
• 🍽️ Servings: 4-6

Ingredients

• 1 whole turkey (about 12-14 lbs), thawed and ready to cook
• 1 cup unsalted butter, softened
• 2 tablespoons fresh thyme, chopped
• 2 tablespoons fresh rosemary, chopped
• 2 tablespoons fresh sage, chopped
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 1 onion, quartered
• 1 lemon, halved
• 2-3 cloves of garlic
• Apple and Sage Stuffing
• 1 loaf of crusty bread, cut into cubes
• 2 apples, cored and chopped
• 1 onion, diced
• 2 stalks celery, diced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/4 cup fresh sage, chopped
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter
• 2 cups chicken broth
• Salt and pepper, to taste

Directions

1. Preheat the Oven: Set your oven to 325°F (165°C).
2. Prepare the Herb Butter: Mix the softened butter with the chopped thyme, rosemary, and sage. Season with salt and pepper.
3. Prepare the Turkey: Remove any giblets from the turkey and pat it dry. Loosen the skin and spread a generous amount of herb butter under and over the skin.
4. Add Aromatics: Inside the turkey cavity, place the quartered onion, lemon halves, and garlic cloves.
5. Roast: Place the turkey in a roasting pan. Tent with aluminum foil and roast. A general guideline is about 15 minutes per pound, or until the internal temperature reaches 165°F (74°C) at the thickest part of the thigh.
6. Rest and Serve: Let the turkey rest for at least 20 minutes before carving.
7. Next: Apple and Sage Stuffing
8. Dry the Bread: Spread the bread cubes on a baking sheet and let them dry overnight, or toast them in the oven.
9. Cook the Vegetables: In a large skillet, melt the butter and cook the onion, celery, and garlic until soft.
10. Combine Ingredients: Add the apples, sage, and bread cubes to the skillet. Stir in the chicken broth until the mixture is moist. Season with salt and pepper.
11. Bake: Transfer the stuffing to a baking dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for about 30-40 minutes, until golden brown on top.

@ 8fb140b4:f948000c

Testing a brand new YakiHonne native client for iOS. Smooth as butter (not penis butter 🤣🍆🧈) with great visual experience and intuitive navigation. Amazing work by the team behind it! * lists * work

Bold text work!

Images could have used nostr.build instead of raw S3 from us-east-1 region.

Very impressive! You can even save the draft and continue later, before posting the long-form note!

🐶🐾🤯🤯🤯🫂💜

@ 8fb140b4:f948000c

As the title states, scratch behind my ear and you get it. 🐶🐾🫡

@ 8fb140b4:f948000c

Test Bounty Note

@ 8fb140b4:f948000c

Intro

This short tutorial will help you set up your own Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) on your own LND Node that is not using Umbrel. If you are a user of Umbrel, you should use their version of NWC.

Requirements

You need to have a working installation of LND with established channels and connectivity to the internet. NWC in itself is fairly light and will not consume a lot of resources. You will also want to ensure that you have a working installation of Docker, since we will use a docker image to run NWC.

• Working installation of LND (and all of its required components)
• Docker (with Docker compose)

Installation

For the purpose of this tutorial, we will assume that you have your lnd/bitcoind running under user bitcoin with home directory /home/bitcoin. We will also assume that you already have a running installation of Docker (or docker.io).

Prepare and verify

git version - we will need git to get the latest version of NWC. docker version - should execute successfully and show the currently installed version of Docker. docker compose version - same as before, but the version will be different. ss -tupln | grep 10009- should produce the following output: tcp LISTEN 0 4096 0.0.0.0:10009 0.0.0.0: tcp LISTEN 0 4096 [::]:10009 [::]:**

For things to work correctly, your Docker should be version 20.10.0 or later. If you have an older version, consider installing a new one using instructions here: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/

Create folders & download NWC

In the home directory of your LND/bitcoind user, create a new folder, e.g., "nwc" mkdir /home/bitcoin/nwc. Change to that directory cd /home/bitcoin/nwc and clone the NWC repository: git clone https://github.com/getAlby/nostr-wallet-connect.git

Creating the Docker image

In this step, we will create a Docker image that you will use to run NWC.

• Change directory to nostr-wallet-connect: cd nostr-wallet-connect
• Run command to build Docker image: docker build -t nwc:$(date +'%Y%m%d%H%M') -t nwc:latest . (there is a dot at the end)
• The last line of the output (after a few minutes) should look like => => naming to docker.io/library/nwc:latest
• nwc:latest is the name of the Docker image with a tag which you should note for use later.

Creating docker-compose.yml and necessary data directories

• Let's create a directory that will hold your non-volatile data (DB): mkdir data
• Indocker-compose.ymlfile, there are fields that you want to replace (<> comments) and port “4321” that you want to make sure is open (check with ss -tupln | grep 4321which should return nothing).
• Create docker-compose.ymlfile with the following content, and make sure to update fields that have <> comment:

version: "3.8" services: nwc: image: nwc:latest volumes: - ./data:/data - ~/.lnd:/lnd:ro ports: - "4321:8080" extra_hosts: - "localhost:host-gateway" environment: NOSTR_PRIVKEY: <use "openssl rand -hex 32" to generate a fresh key and place it inside ""> LN_BACKEND_TYPE: "LND" LND_ADDRESS: localhost:10009 LND_CERT_FILE: "/lnd/tls.cert" LND_MACAROON_FILE: "/lnd/data/chain/bitcoin/mainnet/admin.macaroon" DATABASE_URI: "/data/nostr-wallet-connect.db" COOKIE_SECRET: <use "openssl rand -hex 32" to generate fresh secret and place it inside ""> PORT: 8080 restart: always stop_grace_period: 1m

Starting and testing

Now that you have everything ready, it is time to start the container and test.

• While you are in the nwcdirectory (important), execute the following command and check the log output, docker compose up
• You should see container logs while it is starting, and it should not exit if everything went well.
• At this point, you should be able to go to http://<ip of the host where nwc is running>:4321 and get to the interface of NWC
• To stop the test run of NWC, simply press Ctrl-C , and it will shut the container down.
• To start NWC permanently, you should execute docker compose up -d , “-d” tells Docker to detach from the session.
• To check currently running NWC logs, execute docker compose logs to run it in tail mode add -f to the end.
• To stop the container, execute docker compose down

That's all, just follow the instructions in the web interface to get started.

Updating

As with any software, you should expect fixes and updates that you would need to perform periodically. You could automate this, but it falls outside of the scope of this tutorial. Since we already have all of the necessary configuration in place, the update execution is fairly simple.

• Change directory to the clone of the git repository, cd /home/bitcoin/nwc/nostr-wallet-connect
• Run command to build Docker image: docker build -t nwc:$(date +'%Y%m%d%H%M') -t nwc:latest . (there is a dot at the end)
• Change directory back one level cd ..
• Restart (stop and start) the docker compose config docker compose down && docker compose up -d
• Done! Optionally you may want to check the logs: docker compose logs

@ 82341f88:fbfbe6a2

There’s a lot of conversation around the #TwitterFiles. Here’s my take, and thoughts on how to fix the issues identified.

I’ll start with the principles I’ve come to believe…based on everything I’ve learned and experienced through my past actions as a Twitter co-founder and lead:

1. Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control.
2. Only the original author may remove content they produce.
3. Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.

The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020. I no longer had hope of achieving any of it as a public company with no defense mechanisms (lack of dual-class shares being a key one). I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company.

The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves. This burdened the company with too much power, and opened us to significant outside pressure (such as advertising budgets). I generally think companies have become far too powerful, and that became completely clear to me with our suspension of Trump’s account. As I’ve said before, we did the right thing for the public company business at the time, but the wrong thing for the internet and society. Much more about this here: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1349510769268850690

I continue to believe there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time. Of course mistakes were made. But if we had focused more on tools for the people using the service rather than tools for us, and moved much faster towards absolute transparency, we probably wouldn’t be in this situation of needing a fresh reset (which I am supportive of). Again, I own all of this and our actions, and all I can do is work to make it right.

Back to the principles. Of course governments want to shape and control the public conversation, and will use every method at their disposal to do so, including the media. And the power a corporation wields to do the same is only growing. It’s critical that the people have tools to resist this, and that those tools are ultimately owned by the people. Allowing a government or a few corporations to own the public conversation is a path towards centralized control.

I’m a strong believer that any content produced by someone for the internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to delete it. It should be always available and addressable. Content takedowns and suspensions should not be possible. Doing so complicates important context, learning, and enforcement of illegal activity. There are significant issues with this stance of course, but starting with this principle will allow for far better solutions than we have today. The internet is trending towards a world were storage is “free” and infinite, which places all the actual value on how to discover and see content.

Which brings me to the last principle: moderation. I don’t believe a centralized system can do content moderation globally. It can only be done through ranking and relevance algorithms, the more localized the better. But instead of a company or government building and controlling these solely, people should be able to build and choose from algorithms that best match their criteria, or not have to use any at all. A “follow” action should always deliver every bit of content from the corresponding account, and the algorithms should be able to comb through everything else through a relevance lens that an individual determines. There’s a default “G-rated” algorithm, and then there’s everything else one can imagine.

The only way I know of to truly live up to these 3 principles is a free and open protocol for social media, that is not owned by a single company or group of companies, and is resilient to corporate and government influence. The problem today is that we have companies who own both the protocol and discovery of content. Which ultimately puts one person in charge of what’s available and seen, or not. This is by definition a single point of failure, no matter how great the person, and over time will fracture the public conversation, and may lead to more control by governments and corporations around the world.

I believe many companies can build a phenomenal business off an open protocol. For proof, look at both the web and email. The biggest problem with these models however is that the discovery mechanisms are far too proprietary and fixed instead of open or extendable. Companies can build many profitable services that complement rather than lock down how we access this massive collection of conversation. There is no need to own or host it themselves.

Many of you won’t trust this solution just because it’s me stating it. I get it, but that’s exactly the point. Trusting any one individual with this comes with compromises, not to mention being way too heavy a burden for the individual. It has to be something akin to what bitcoin has shown to be possible. If you want proof of this, get out of the US and European bubble of the bitcoin price fluctuations and learn how real people are using it for censorship resistance in Africa and Central/South America.

I do still wish for Twitter, and every company, to become uncomfortably transparent in all their actions, and I wish I forced more of that years ago. I do believe absolute transparency builds trust. As for the files, I wish they were released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider. And along with that, commitments of transparency for present and future actions. I’m hopeful all of this will happen. There’s nothing to hide…only a lot to learn from. The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn’t solve anything. If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof.

As far as the free and open social media protocol goes, there are many competing projects: @bluesky is one with the AT Protocol, nostr another, Mastodon yet another, Matrix yet another…and there will be many more. One will have a chance at becoming a standard like HTTP or SMTP. This isn’t about a “decentralized Twitter.” This is a focused and urgent push for a foundational core technology standard to make social media a native part of the internet. I believe this is critical both to Twitter’s future, and the public conversation’s ability to truly serve the people, which helps hold governments and corporations accountable. And hopefully makes it all a lot more fun and informative again.

💸🛠️🌐 To accelerate open internet and protocol work, I’m going to open a new category of #startsmall grants: “open internet development.” It will start with a focus of giving cash and equity grants to engineering teams working on social media and private communication protocols, bitcoin, and a web-only mobile OS. I’ll make some grants next week, starting with $1mm/yr to Signal. Please let me know other great candidates for this money.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Drivechain

Understanding Drivechain requires a shift from the paradigm most bitcoiners are used to. It is not about "trustlessness" or "mathematical certainty", but game theory and incentives. (Well, Bitcoin in general is also that, but people prefer to ignore it and focus on some illusion of trustlessness provided by mathematics.)

Here we will describe the basic mechanism (simple) and incentives (complex) of "hashrate escrow" and how it enables a 2-way peg between the mainchain (Bitcoin) and various sidechains.

The full concept of "Drivechain" also involves blind merged mining (i.e., the sidechains mine themselves by publishing their block hashes to the mainchain without the miners having to run the sidechain software), but this is much easier to understand and can be accomplished either by the BIP-301 mechanism or by the Spacechains mechanism.

How does hashrate escrow work from the point of view of Bitcoin?

A new address type is created. Anything that goes in that is locked and can only be spent if all miners agree on the Withdrawal Transaction (WT^) that will spend it for 6 months. There is one of these special addresses for each sidechain.

To gather miners' agreement bitcoind keeps track of the "score" of all transactions that could possibly spend from that address. On every block mined, for each sidechain, the miner can use a portion of their coinbase to either increase the score of one WT^ by 1 while decreasing the score of all others by 1; or they can decrease the score of all WT^s by 1; or they can do nothing.

Once a transaction has gotten a score high enough, it is published and funds are effectively transferred from the sidechain to the withdrawing users.

If a timeout of 6 months passes and the score doesn't meet the threshold, that WT^ is discarded.

What does the above procedure mean?

It means that people can transfer coins from the mainchain to a sidechain by depositing to the special address. Then they can withdraw from the sidechain by making a special withdraw transaction in the sidechain.

The special transaction somehow freezes funds in the sidechain while a transaction that aggregates all withdrawals into a single mainchain WT^, which is then submitted to the mainchain miners so they can start voting on it and finally after some months it is published.

Now the crucial part: the validity of the WT^ is not verified by the Bitcoin mainchain rules, i.e., if Bob has requested a withdraw from the sidechain to his mainchain address, but someone publishes a wrong WT^ that instead takes Bob's funds and sends them to Alice's main address there is no way the mainchain will know that. What determines the "validity" of the WT^ is the miner vote score and only that. It is the job of miners to vote correctly -- and for that they may want to run the sidechain node in SPV mode so they can attest for the existence of a reference to the WT^ transaction in the sidechain blockchain (which then ensures it is ok) or do these checks by some other means.

What? 6 months to get my money back?

Yes. But no, in practice anyone who wants their money back will be able to use an atomic swap, submarine swap or other similar service to transfer funds from the sidechain to the mainchain and vice-versa. The long delayed withdraw costs would be incurred by few liquidity providers that would gain some small profit from it.

Why bother with this at all?

Drivechains solve many different problems:

It enables experimentation and new use cases for Bitcoin

Issued assets, fully private transactions, stateful blockchain contracts, turing-completeness, decentralized games, some "DeFi" aspects, prediction markets, futarchy, decentralized and yet meaningful human-readable names, big blocks with a ton of normal transactions on them, a chain optimized only for Lighting-style networks to be built on top of it.

These are some ideas that may have merit to them, but were never actually tried because they couldn't be tried with real Bitcoin or inferfacing with real bitcoins. They were either relegated to the shitcoin territory or to custodial solutions like Liquid or RSK that may have failed to gain network effect because of that.

It solves conflicts and infighting

Some people want fully private transactions in a UTXO model, others want "accounts" they can tie to their name and build reputation on top; some people want simple multisig solutions, others want complex code that reads a ton of variables; some people want to put all the transactions on a global chain in batches every 10 minutes, others want off-chain instant transactions backed by funds previously locked in channels; some want to spend, others want to just hold; some want to use blockchain technology to solve all the problems in the world, others just want to solve money.

With Drivechain-based sidechains all these groups can be happy simultaneously and don't fight. Meanwhile they will all be using the same money and contributing to each other's ecosystem even unwillingly, it's also easy and free for them to change their group affiliation later, which reduces cognitive dissonance.

It solves "scaling"

Multiple chains like the ones described above would certainly do a lot to accomodate many more transactions that the current Bitcoin chain can. One could have special Lightning Network chains, but even just big block chains or big-block-mimblewimble chains or whatnot could probably do a good job. Or even something less cool like 200 independent chains just like Bitcoin is today, no extra features (and you can call it "sharding"), just that would already multiply the current total capacity by 200.

Use your imagination.

It solves the blockchain security budget issue

The calculation is simple: you imagine what security budget is reasonable for each block in a world without block subsidy and divide that for the amount of bytes you can fit in a single block: that is the price to be paid in satoshis per byte. In reasonable estimative, the price necessary for every Bitcoin transaction goes to very large amounts, such that not only any day-to-day transaction has insanely prohibitive costs, but also Lightning channel opens and closes are impracticable.

So without a solution like Drivechain you'll be left with only one alternative: pushing Bitcoin usage to trusted services like Liquid and RSK or custodial Lightning wallets. With Drivechain, though, there could be thousands of transactions happening in sidechains and being all aggregated into a sidechain block that would then pay a very large fee to be published (via blind merged mining) to the mainchain. Bitcoin security guaranteed.

It keeps Bitcoin decentralized

Once we have sidechains to accomodate the normal transactions, the mainchain functionality can be reduced to be only a "hub" for the sidechains' comings and goings, and then the maximum block size for the mainchain can be reduced to, say, 100kb, which would make running a full node very very easy.

Can miners steal?

Yes. If a group of coordinated miners are able to secure the majority of the hashpower and keep their coordination for 6 months, they can publish a WT^ that takes the money from the sidechains and pays to themselves.

Will miners steal?

No, because the incentives are such that they won't.

Although it may look at first that stealing is an obvious strategy for miners as it is free money, there are many costs involved:

1. The cost of ceasing blind-merged mining returns -- as stealing will kill a sidechain, all the fees from it that miners would be expected to earn for the next years are gone;
2. The cost of Bitcoin price going down: If a steal is successful that will mean Drivechains are not safe, therefore Bitcoin is less useful, and miner credibility will also be hurt, which are likely to cause the Bitcoin price to go down, which in turn may kill the miners' businesses and savings;
3. The cost of coordination -- assuming miners are just normal businesses, they just want to do their work and get paid, but stealing from a Drivechain will require coordination with other miners to conduct an immoral act in a way that has many pitfalls and is likely to be broken over the months;
4. The cost of miners leaving your mining pool: when we talked about "miners" above we were actually talking about mining pools operators, so they must also consider the risk of miners migrating from their mining pool to others as they begin the process of stealing;
5. The cost of community goodwill -- when participating in a steal operation, a miner will suffer a ton of backlash from the community. Even if the attempt fails at the end, the fact that it was attempted will contribute to growing concerns over exaggerated miners power over the Bitcoin ecosystem, which may end up causing the community to agree on a hard-fork to change the mining algorithm in the future, or to do something to increase participation of more entities in the mining process (such as development or cheapment of new ASICs), which have a chance of decreasing the profits of current miners.

Another point to take in consideration is that one may be inclined to think a newly-created sidechain or a sidechain with relatively low usage may be more easily stolen from, since the blind merged mining returns from it (point 1 above) are going to be small -- but the fact is also that a sidechain with small usage will also have less money to be stolen from, and since the other costs besides 1 are less elastic at the end it will not be worth stealing from these too.

All of the above consideration are valid only if miners are stealing from good sidechains. If there is a sidechain that is doing things wrong, scamming people, not being used at all, or is full of bugs, for example, that will be perceived as a bad sidechain, and then miners can and will safely steal from it and kill it, which will be perceived as a good thing by everybody.

What do we do if miners steal?

Paul Sztorc has suggested in the past that a user-activated soft-fork could prevent miners from stealing, i.e., most Bitcoin users and nodes issue a rule similar to this one to invalidate the inclusion of a faulty WT^ and thus cause any miner that includes it in a block to be relegated to their own Bitcoin fork that other nodes won't accept.

This suggestion has made people think Drivechain is a sidechain solution backed by user-actived soft-forks for safety, which is very far from the truth. Drivechains must not and will not rely on this kind of soft-fork, although they are possible, as the coordination costs are too high and no one should ever expect these things to happen.

If even with all the incentives against them (see above) miners do still steal from a good sidechain that will mean the failure of the Drivechain experiment. It will very likely also mean the failure of the Bitcoin experiment too, as it will be proven that miners can coordinate to act maliciously over a prolonged period of time regardless of economic and social incentives, meaning they are probably in it just for attacking Bitcoin, backed by nation-states or something else, and therefore no Bitcoin transaction in the mainchain is to be expected to be safe ever again.

Why use this and not a full-blown trustless and open sidechain technology?

Because it is impossible.

If you ever heard someone saying "just use a sidechain", "do this in a sidechain" or anything like that, be aware that these people are either talking about "federated" sidechains (i.e., funds are kept in custody by a group of entities) or they are talking about Drivechain, or they are disillusioned and think it is possible to do sidechains in any other manner.

No, I mean a trustless 2-way peg with correctness of the withdrawals verified by the Bitcoin protocol!

That is not possible unless Bitcoin verifies all transactions that happen in all the sidechains, which would be akin to drastically increasing the blocksize and expanding the Bitcoin rules in tons of ways, i.e., a terrible idea that no one wants.

What about the Blockstream sidechains whitepaper?

Yes, that was a way to do it. The Drivechain hashrate escrow is a conceptually simpler way to achieve the same thing with improved incentives, less junk in the chain, more safety.

Isn't the hashrate escrow a very complex soft-fork?

Yes, but it is much simpler than SegWit. And, unlike SegWit, it doesn't force anything on users, i.e., it isn't a mandatory blocksize increase.

Why should we expect miners to care enough to participate in the voting mechanism?

Because it's in their own self-interest to do it, and it costs very little. Today over half of the miners mine RSK. It's not blind merged mining, it's a very convoluted process that requires them to run a RSK full node. For the Drivechain sidechains, an SPV node would be enough, or maybe just getting data from a block explorer API, so much much simpler.

What if I still don't like Drivechain even after reading this?

That is the entire point! You don't have to like it or use it as long as you're fine with other people using it. The hashrate escrow special addresses will not impact you at all, validation cost is minimal, and you get the benefit of people who want to use Drivechain migrating to their own sidechains and freeing up space for you in the mainchain. See also the point above about infighting.

See also

• Podcast episode with Ruben Somsen and Aaron van Wirdum explaining Drivechain
• Alternatives to Drivechain
• Drivechain comparison with Ethereum

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

bitcoind decentralization

It is better to have multiple curator teams, with different vetting processes and release schedules for bitcoind than a single one.

"More eyes on code", "Contribute to Core", "Everybody should audit the code".

All these points repeated again and again fell to Earth on the day it was discovered that Bitcoin Core developers merged a variable name change from "blacklist" to "blocklist" without even discussing or acknowledging the fact that that innocent pull request opened by a sybil account was a social attack.

After a big lot of people manifested their dissatisfaction with that event on Twitter and on GitHub, most Core developers simply ignored everybody's concerns or even personally attacked people who were complaining.

The event has shown that:

1) Bitcoin Core ultimately rests on the hands of a couple maintainers and they decide what goes on the GitHub repository[^pr-merged-very-quickly] and the binary releases that will be downloaded by thousands; 2) Bitcoin Core is susceptible to social attacks; 2) "More eyes on code" don't matter, as these extra eyes can be ignored and dismissed.

Solution: bitcoind decentralization

If usage was spread across 10 different bitcoind flavors, the network would be much more resistant to social attacks to a single team.

This has nothing to do with the question on if it is better to have multiple different Bitcoin node implementations or not, because here we're basically talking about the same software.

Multiple teams, each with their own release process, their own logo, some subtle changes, or perhaps no changes at all, just a different name for their bitcoind flavor, and that's it.

Every day or week or month or year, each flavor merges all changes from Bitcoin Core on their own fork. If there's anything suspicious or too leftist (or perhaps too rightist, in case there's a leftist bitcoind flavor), maybe they will spot it and not merge.

This way we keep the best of both worlds: all software development, bugfixes, improvements goes on Bitcoin Core, other flavors just copy. If there's some non-consensus change whose efficacy is debatable, one of the flavors will merge on their fork and test, and later others -- including Core -- can copy that too. Plus, we get resistant to attacks: in case there is an attack on Bitcoin Core, only 10% of the network would be compromised. the other flavors would be safe.

Run Bitcoin Knots

The first example of a bitcoind software that follows Bitcoin Core closely, adds some small changes, but has an independent vetting and release process is Bitcoin Knots, maintained by the incorruptible Luke DashJr.

Next time you decide to run bitcoind, run Bitcoin Knots instead and contribute to bitcoind decentralization!

---

See also:

• How to attack Bitcoin, Anthony Towns' take

[^pr-merged-very-quickly]: See PR 20624, for example, a very complicated change that could be introducing bugs or be a deliberate attack, merged in 3 days without time for discussion.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Gerador de tabelas de todos contra todos

I don't remember exactly when I did this, but I think a friend wanted to do software that would give him money over the internet without having to work. He didn't know how to program. He mentioned this idea he had which was some kind of football championship manager solution, but I heard it like this: a website that generated a round-robin championship table for people to print.

It is actually not obvious to anyone how to do it, it requires an algorithm that people will not reach casually while thinking, and there was no website doing it in Portuguese at the time, so I made this and it worked and it had a couple hundred daily visitors, and it even generated money from Google Ads (not much)!

First it was a Python web app running on Heroku, then Heroku started charging or limiting the amount of free time I could have on their platform, so I migrated it to a static site that ran everything on the client. Since I didn't want to waste my Python code that actually generated the tables I used Brython to run Python on JavaScript, which was an interesting experience.

In hindsight I could have just taken one of the many round-robin JavaScript libraries that exist on NPM, so eventually after a couple of more years I did that.

I also removed Google Ads when Google decided it had so many requirements to send me the money it was impossible, and then the money started to vanished.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/tabelas.alhur.es
• https://tabelas.alhur.es/

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

How being "flexible" can bloat a protocol

(A somewhat absurd example, but you'll get the idea)

Iimagine some client decides to add support for a variant of nip05 that checks for values at /.well-known/nostr.yaml besides /.well-known/nostr.json. "Why not?", they think, "I like YAML more than JSON, this can't hurt anyone".

Then some user makes a nip05 file in YAML and it will work on that client, they will think their file is good since it works on that client. When the user sees that other clients are not recognizing their YAML file, they will complain to the other client developers: "Hey, your client is broken, it is not supporting my YAML file!".

The developer of the other client, astonished, replies: "Oh, I am sorry, I didn't know that was part of the nip05 spec!"

The user, thinking it is doing a good thing, replies: "I don't know, but it works on this other client here, see?"

Now the other client adds support. The cycle repeats now with more users making YAML files, more and more clients adding YAML support, for fear of providing a client that is incomplete or provides bad user experience.

The end result of this is that now nip05 extra-officially requires support for both JSON and YAML files. Every client must now check for /.well-known/nostr.yaml too besides just /.well-known/nostr.json, because a user's key could be in either of these. A lot of work was wasted for nothing. And now, going forward, any new clients will require the double of work than before to implement.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

idea: Custom multi-use database app

Since 2015 I have this idea of making one app that could be repurposed into a full-fledged app for all kinds of uses, like powering small businesses accounts and so on. Hackable and open as an Excel file, but more efficient, without the hassle of making tables and also using ids and indexes under the hood so different kinds of things can be related together in various ways.

It is not a concrete thing, just a generic idea that has taken multiple forms along the years and may take others in the future. I've made quite a few attempts at implementing it, but never finished any.

I used to refer to it as a "multidimensional spreadsheet".

Can also be related to DabbleDB.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

idea: a website for feedback exchange

I thought a community of people sharing feedback on mutual interests would be a good thing, so as always I broadened and generalized the idea and mixed with my old criticue-inspired idea-feedback project and turned it into a "token". You give feedback on other people's things, they give you a "point". You can then use that point to request feedback from others.

This could be made as an Etleneum contract so these points were exchanged for satoshis using the shitswap contract (yet to be written).

In this case all the Bitcoin/Lightning side of the website must be hidden until the user has properly gone through the usage flow and earned points.

If it was to be built on Etleneum then it needs to emphasize the login/password login method instead of the lnurl-auth method. And then maybe it could be used to push lnurl-auth to normal people, but with a different name.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

bolt12 problems

• clients can't programatically build new offers by changing a path or query params (services like zbd.gg or lnurl-pay.me won't work)
• impossible to use in a load-balanced custodian way -- since offers would have to be pregenerated and tied to a specific lightning node.
• the existence of fiat currency fields makes it so wallets have to fetch exchange rates from somewhere on the internet (or offer a bad user experience), using HTTP which hurts user privacy.
• the vendor field is misleading, can be phished very easily, not as safe as a domain name.
• onion messages are an improvement over fake HTLC-based payments as a way of transmitting data, for sure. but we must decide if they are (i) suitable for transmitting all kinds of data over the internet, a replacement for tor; or (ii) not something that will scale well or on which we can count on for the future. if there was proper incentivization for data transmission it could end up being (i), the holy grail of p2p communication over the internet, but that is a very hard problem to solve and not guaranteed to yield the desired scalability results. since not even hints of attempting to solve that are being made, it's safer to conclude it is (ii).

bolt12 limitations

• not flexible enough. there are some interesting fields defined in the spec, but who gets to add more fields later if necessary? very unclear.
• services can't return any actionable data to the users who paid for something. it's unclear how business can be conducted without an extra communication channel.

bolt12 illusions

• recurring payments is not really solved, it is just a spec that defines intervals. the actual implementation must still be done by each wallet and service. the recurring payment cannot be enforced, the wallet must still initiate the payment. even if the wallet is evil and is willing to initiate a payment without the user knowing it still needs to have funds, channels, be online, connected etc., so it's not as if the services could rely on the payments being delivered in time.
• people seem to think it will enable pushing payments to mobile wallets, which it does not and cannot.
• there is a confusion of contexts: it looks like offers are superior to lnurl-pay, for example, because they don't require domain names. domain names, though, are common and well-established among internet services and stores, because these services have websites, so this is not really an issue. it is an issue, though, for people that want to receive payments in their homes. for these, indeed, bolt12 offers a superior solution -- but at the same time bolt12 seems to be selling itself as a tool for merchants and service providers when it includes and highlights features as recurring payments and refunds.
• the privacy gains for the receiver that are promoted as being part of bolt12 in fact come from a separate proposal, blinded paths, which should work for all normal lightning payments and indeed are a very nice solution. they are (or at least were, and should be) independent from the bolt12 proposal. a separate proposal, which can be (and already is being) used right now, also improves privacy for the receiver very much anway, it's called trampoline routing.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Sol e Terra

A Terra não gira em torno do Sol. Tudo depende do ponto de referência e não existe um ponto de referência absoluto. Só é melhor dizer que a Terra gira em torno do Sol porque há outros planetas fazendo movimentos análogos e aí fica mais fácil para todo mundo entender os movimentos tomando o Sol como ponto de referência.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

IPFS problems: Community

I was an avid IPFS user until yesterday. Many many times I asked simple questions for which I couldn't find an answer on the internet in the #ipfs IRC channel on Freenode. Most of the times I didn't get an answer, and even when I got it was rarely by someone who knew IPFS deeply. I've had issues go unanswered on js-ipfs repositories for year – one of these was raising awareness of a problem that then got fixed some months later by a complete rewrite, I closed my own issue after realizing that by myself some couple of months later, I don't think the people responsible for the rewrite were ever acknowledge that he had fixed my issue.

Some days ago I asked some questions about how the IPFS protocol worked internally, sincerely trying to understand the inefficiencies in finding and fetching content over IPFS. I pointed it would be a good idea to have a drawing showing that so people would understand the difficulties (which I didn't) and wouldn't be pissed off by the slowness. I was told to read the whitepaper. I had already the whitepaper, but read again the relevant parts. The whitepaper doesn't explain anything about the DHT and how IPFS finds content. I said that in the room, was told to read again.

Before anyone misread this section, I want to say I understand it's a pain to keep answering people on IRC if you're busy developing stuff of interplanetary importance, and that I'm not paying anyone nor I have the right to be answered. On the other hand, if you're developing a super-important protocol, financed by many millions of dollars and a lot of people are hitting their heads against your software and there's no one to help them; you're always busy but never delivers anything that brings joy to your users, something is very wrong. I sincerely don't know what IPFS developers are working on, I wouldn't doubt they're working on important things if they said that, but what I see – and what many other users see (take a look at the IPFS Discourse forum) is bugs, bugs all over the place, confusing UX, and almost no help.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

A list of things artificial intelligence is not doing

If AI is so good why can't it:

• write good glue code that wraps a documented HTTP API?
• make good translations using available books and respective published translations?
• extract meaningful and relevant numbers from news articles?
• write mathematical models that fit perfectly to available data better than any human?
• play videogames without cheating (i.e. simulating human vision, attention and click speed)?
• turn pure HTML pages into pretty designs by generating CSS
• predict the weather
• calculate building foundations
• determine stock values of companies from publicly available numbers
• smartly and automatically test software to uncover bugs before releases
• predict sports matches from the ball and the players' movement on the screen
• continuously improve niche/local search indexes based on user input and and reaction to results
• control traffic lights
• predict sports matches from news articles, and teams and players' history

This was posted first on Twitter.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

ijq

An interactive REPL for jq with smart helpers (for example, it automatically assigns each line of input to a variable so you can reference it later, it also always referenced the previous line automatically).

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/ijq

See also

• jiq
• jq-web

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Trelew

A CLI tool for navigating Trello boards. It used vorpal for an "immersive" experience and was pretty good.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/trelew

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY and the "covenants" drama

There are many ideas for "covenants" (I don't think this concept helps in the specific case of examining proposals, but fine). Some people think "we" (it's not obvious who is included in this group) should somehow examine them and come up with the perfect synthesis.

It is not clear what form this magic gathering of ideas will take and who (or which ideas) will be allowed to speak, but suppose it happens and there is intense research and conversations and people (ideas) really enjoy themselves in the process.

What are we left with at the end? Someone has to actually commit the time and put the effort and come up with a concrete proposal to be implemented on Bitcoin, and whatever the result is it will have trade-offs. Some great features will not make into this proposal, others will make in a worsened form, and some will be contemplated very nicely, there will be some extra costs related to maintenance or code complexity that will have to be taken. Someone, a concreate person, will decide upon these things using their own personal preferences and biases, and many people will not be pleased with their choices.

That has already happened. Jeremy Rubin has already conjured all the covenant ideas in a magic gathering that lasted more than 3 years and came up with a synthesis that has the best trade-offs he could find. CTV is the result of that operation.

---

The fate of CTV in the popular opinion illustrated by the thoughtless responses it has evoked such as "can we do better?" and "we need more review and research and more consideration of other ideas for covenants" is a preview of what would probably happen if these suggestions were followed again and someone spent the next 3 years again considering ideas, talking to other researchers and came up with a new synthesis. Again, that person would be faced with "can we do better?" responses from people that were not happy enough with the choices.

And unless some famous Bitcoin Core or retired Bitcoin Core developers were personally attracted by this synthesis then they would take some time to review and give their blessing to this new synthesis.

To summarize the argument of this article, the actual question in the current CTV drama is that there exists hidden criteria for proposals to be accepted by the general community into Bitcoin, and no one has these criteria clear in their minds. It is not as simple not as straightforward as "do research" nor it is as humanly impossible as "get consensus", it has a much bigger social element into it, but I also do not know what is the exact form of these hidden criteria.

This is said not to blame anyone -- except the ignorant people who are not aware of the existence of these things and just keep repeating completely false and unhelpful advice for Jeremy Rubin and are not self-conscious enough to ever realize what they're doing.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

idea: clarity.fm on Lightning

Getting money from clients very easily, dispatching that money to "world class experts" (what a silly way to market things, but I guess it works) very easily are the job for Bitcoin and the Lightning Network.

EDIT 2020-09-04

My idea was that people would advertise themselves, so you would book an hour with people you know already, but it seems that clarify.fm has gone through the route of offering a "catalog of experts" to potential clients, all full of verification processes probably and marketing. So I guess this is not a thing I can do.

Actually I did https://s4a.etleneum.com/ (on Etleneum) that is somewhat similar, but of course doesn't have the glamour and network effect and marketing -- also it's just text, when in Clarity is fancy calls.

Thinking about it, this is just a simple and obvious idea: just copy things from the fiat world and make them on Lightning, but maybe it is still worth pointing these out as there are hundreds of developers out there trying to make yet another lottery game with Lightning.

It may also be a good idea to not just copy fiat-businesses models, but also change them experimenting with new paradigms, like idea: Patreon, but simple, and without subscription.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Channels without HTLCs

HTLCs below the dust limit are not possible, because they're uneconomical.

So currently whenever a payment below the dust limit is to be made Lightning peers adjust their commitment transactions to pay that amount as fees in case the channel is closed. That's a form of reserving that amount and incentivizing peers to resolve the payment, either successfully (in case it goes to the receiving node's balance) or not (it then goes back to the sender's balance).

SOLUTION

I didn't think too much about if it is possible to do what I think can be done in the current implementation on Lightning channels, but in the context of Eltoo it seems possible.

Eltoo channels have UPDATE transactions that can be published to the blockchain and SETTLEMENT transactions that spend them (after a relative time) to each peer. The barebones script for UPDATE transactions is something like (copied from the paper, because I don't understand these things):

OP_IF # to spend from a settlement transaction (presigned) 10 OP_CSV 2 As,i Bs,i 2 OP_CHECKMULTISIGVERIFY OP_ELSE # to spend from a future update transaction <Si+1> OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY 2 Au Bu 2 OP_CHECKMULTISIGVERIFY OP_ENDIF

During a payment of 1 satoshi it could be updated to something like (I'll probably get this thing completely wrong):

OP_HASH256 <payment_hash> OP_EQUAL OP_IF # for B to spend from settlement transaction 1 in case the payment went through # and they have a preimage 10 OP_CSV 2 As,i1 Bs,i1 2 OP_CHECKMULTISIGVERIFY OP_ELSE OP_IF # for A to spend from settlement transaction 2 in case the payment didn't went through # and the other peer is uncooperative <now + 1day> OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY 2 As,i2 Bs,i2 2 OP_CHECKMULTISIGVERIFY OP_ELSE # to spend from a future update transaction <Si+1> OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY 2 Au Bu 2 OP_CHECKMULTISIGVERIFY OP_ENDIF OP_ENDIF

Then peers would have two presigned SETTLEMENT transactions, 1 and 2 (with different signature pairs, as badly shown in the script). On SETTLEMENT 1, funds are, say, 999sat for A and 1001sat for B, while on SETTLEMENT 2 funds are 1000sat for A and 1000sat for B.

As soon as B gets the preimage from the next peer in the route it can give it to A and them can sign a new UPDATE transaction that replaces the above gimmick with something simpler without hashes involved.

If the preimage doesn't come in viable time, peers can agree to make a new UPDATE transaction anyway. Otherwise A will have to close the channel, which may be bad, but B wasn't a good peer anyway.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

A response to Achim Warner's "Drivechain brings politics to miners" article

I mean this article: https://achimwarner.medium.com/thoughts-on-drivechain-i-miners-can-do-things-about-which-we-will-argue-whether-it-is-actually-a5c3c022dbd2

There are basically two claims here:

1. Some corporate interests might want to secure sidechains for themselves and thus they will bribe miners to have these activated

First, it's hard to imagine why they would want such a thing. Are they going to make a proprietary KYC chain only for their users? They could do that in a corporate way, or with a federation, like Facebook tried to do, and that would provide more value to their users than a cumbersome pseudo-decentralized system in which they don't even have powers to issue currency. Also, if Facebook couldn't get away with their federated shitcoin because the government was mad, what says the government won't be mad with a sidechain? And finally, why would Facebook want to give custody of their proprietary closed-garden Bitcoin-backed ecosystem coins to a random, open and always-changing set of miners?

But even if they do succeed in making their sidechain and it is very popular such that it pays miners fees and people love it. Well, then why not? Let them have it. It's not going to hurt anyone more than a proprietary shitcoin would anyway. If Facebook really wants a closed ecosystem backed by Bitcoin that probably means we are winning big.

2. Miners will be required to vote on the validity of debatable things

He cites the example of a PoS sidechain, an assassination market, a sidechain full of nazists, a sidechain deemed illegal by the US government and so on.

There is a simple solution to all of this: just kill these sidechains. Either miners can take the money from these to themselves, or they can just refuse to engage and freeze the coins there forever, or they can even give the coins to governments, if they want. It is an entirely good thing that evil sidechains or sidechains that use horrible technology that doesn't even let us know who owns each coin get annihilated. And it was the responsibility of people who put money in there to evaluate beforehand and know that PoS is not deterministic, for example.

About government censoring and wanting to steal money, or criminals using sidechains, I think the argument is very weak because these same things can happen today and may even be happening already: i.e., governments ordering mining pools to not mine such and such transactions from such and such people, or forcing them to reorg to steal money from criminals and whatnot. All this is expected to happen in normal Bitcoin. But both in normal Bitcoin and in Drivechain decentralization fixes that problem by making it so governments cannot catch all miners required to control the chain like that -- and in fact fixing that problem is the only reason we need decentralization.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

A entrevista da Flávia Tavares com o Olavo de Carvalho

Não li todas as reclamações que o Olavo fez, mas li algumas. Também não li toda a matéria que saiu na Época, porque não tive paciência, mas assisti aos dois vídeos da entrevista que o Olavo publicou.

Tendo lido primeiro as muitas reclamações do Olavo, esperei encontrar no vídeo uma pessoa falsa, que fingiu-se de amigável para obter informações que usaria depois para destruir a imagem do Olavo, mas não vi nada disso.

Claro que ela poderia ter me enganado também, se enganou ao Olavo. Mas na matéria em si, também não vi nada além de sinceridade -- talvez não excelência jornalística, mas nada que eu não esperasse de qualquer matéria de qualquer revista. Flavia Tavares não entendeu muitas coisas, mas não fingiu que não entendeu nada, foi simples e honestamente Flavia Tavares, como ela mesma declarou no final do vídeo da entrevista: "olha, eu não fingi nada aqui, viu?".

---

O mais importante de tudo isso, porém, são as partes da matéria que apresentam idéias difíceis de conceber, como as que Olavo tem sobre o governo mundial ou a disseminação da pedofilia. Em toda discussão pública ou privada, essas idéias são proibidas. Muita gente pode concordar que a esquerda não presta, mas ninguém em sã consciência admitirá a possibilidade de que haja qualquer intenção significativa de implantação de um governo mundial ou da disseminação da pedofilia. A mesma carinha de deboche que seu amigo esquerdista faria à simples menção desses assuntos é a que Flavia Tavares usa no seu texto quando quer mostrar que Olavo é meio tantã. A carinha de deboche vem desacompanhada de qualquer reflexão séria ou tentativa de refutação, sempre.

---

Link da tal matéria: http://epoca.globo.com/sociedade/noticia/2017/10/olavo-de-carvalho-o-guru-da-direita-que-rejeita-o-que-dizem-seus-fas.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=post Vídeos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0TUsKluhok, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR0F1haQ07Y&t=5s

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Lightning and its fake HTLCs

Lightning is terrible but can be very good with two tweaks.

How Lightning would work without HTLCs

In a world in which HTLCs didn't exist, Lightning channels would consist only of balances. Each commitment transaction would have two outputs: one for peer A, the other for peer B, according to the current state of the channel.

When a payment was being attempted to go through the channel, peers would just trust each other to update the state when necessary. For example:

1. Channel AB's balances are A[10:10]B (in sats);
2. A sends a 3sat payment through B to C;
3. A asks B to route the payment. Channel AB doesn't change at all;
4. B sends the payment to C, C accepts it;
5. Channel BC changes from B[20:5]C to B[17:8]C;
6. B notifies A the payment was successful, A acknowledges that;
7. Channel AB changes from A[10:10]B to A[7:13]B.

This in the case of a success, everything is fine, no glitches, no dishonesty.

But notice that A could have refused to acknowledge that the payment went through, either because of a bug, or because it went offline forever, or because it is malicious. Then the channel AB would stay as A[10:10]B and B would have lost 3 satoshis.

How Lightning would work with HTLCs

HTLCs are introduced to remedy that situation. Now instead of commitment transactions having always only two outputs, one to each peer, now they can have HTLC outputs too. These HTLC outputs could go to either side dependending on the circumstance.

Specifically, the peer that is sending the payment can redeem the HTLC after a number of blocks have passed. The peer that is receiving the payment can redeem the HTLC if they are able to provide the preimage to the hash specified in the HTLC.

Now the flow is something like this:

1. Channel AB's balances are A[10:10]B;
2. A sends a 3sat payment through B to C:
3. A asks B to route the payment. Their channel changes to A[7:3:10]B (the middle number is the HTLC).
4. B offers a payment to C. Their channel changes from B[20:5]C to B[17:3:5]C.
5. C tells B the preimage for that HTLC. Their channel changes from B[17:3:5]C to B[17:8]C.
6. B tells A the preimage for that HTLC. Their channel changes from A[7:3:10]B to A[7:13]B.

Now if A wants to trick B and stop responding B doesn't lose money, because B knows the preimage, B just needs to publish the commitment transaction A[7:3:10]B, which gives him 10sat and then redeem the HTLC using the preimage he got from C, which gives him 3 sats more. B is fine now.

In the same way, if B stops responding for any reason, A won't lose the money it put in that HTLC, it can publish the commitment transaction, get 7 back, then redeem the HTLC after the certain number of blocks have passed and get the other 3 sats back.

How Lightning doesn't really work

The example above about how the HTLCs work is very elegant but has a fatal flaw on it: transaction fees. Each new HTLC added increases the size of the commitment transaction and it requires yet another transaction to be redeemed. If we consider fees of 10000 satoshis that means any HTLC below that is as if it didn't existed because we can't ever redeem it anyway. In fact the Lightning protocol explicitly dictates that if HTLC output amounts are below the fee necessary to redeem them they shouldn't be created.

What happens in these cases then? Nothing, the amounts that should be in HTLCs are moved to the commitment transaction miner fee instead.

So considering a transaction fee of 10000sat for these HTLCs if one is sending Lightning payments below 10000sat that means they operate according to the unsafe protocol described in the first section above.

It is actually worse, because consider what happens in the case a channel in the middle of a route has a glitch or one of the peers is unresponsive. The other node, thinking they are operating in the trustless protocol, will proceed to publish the commitment transaction, i.e. close the channel, so they can redeem the HTLC -- only then they find out they are actually in the unsafe protocol realm and there is no HTLC to be redeemed at all and they lose not only the money, but also the channel (which costed a lot of money to open and close, in overall transaction fees).

One of the biggest features of the trustless protocol are the payment proofs. Every payment is identified by a hash and whenever the payee releases the preimage relative to that hash that means the payment was complete. The incentives are in place so all nodes in the path pass the preimage back until it reaches the payer, which can then use it as the proof he has sent the payment and the payee has received it. This feature is also lost in the unsafe protocol: if a glitch happens or someone goes offline on the preimage's way back then there is no way the preimage will reach the payer because no HTLCs are published and redeemed on the chain. The payee may have received the money but the payer will not know -- but the payee will lose the money sent anyway.

The end of HTLCs

So considering the points above you may be sad because in some cases Lightning doesn't use these magic HTLCs that give meaning to it all. But the fact is that no matter what anyone thinks, HTLCs are destined to be used less and less as time passes.

The fact that over time Bitcoin transaction fees tend to rise, and also the fact that multipart payment (MPP) are increasedly being used on Lightning for good, we can expect that soon no HTLC will ever be big enough to be actually worth redeeming and we will be at a point in which not a single HTLC is real and they're all fake.

Another thing to note is that the current unsafe protocol kicks out whenever the HTLC amount is below the Bitcoin transaction fee would be to redeem it, but this is not a reasonable algorithm. It is not reasonable to lose a channel and then pay 10000sat in fees to redeem a 10001sat HTLC. At which point does it become reasonable to do it? Probably in an amount many times above that, so it would be reasonable to even increase the threshold above which real HTLCs are made -- thus making their existence more and more rare.

These are good things, because we don't actually need HTLCs to make a functional Lightning Network.

We must embrace the unsafe protocol and make it better

So the unsafe protocol is not necessarily very bad, but the way it is being done now is, because it suffers from two big problems:

1. Channels are lost all the time for no reason;
2. No guarantees of the proof-of-payment ever reaching the payer exist.

The first problem we fix by just stopping the current practice of closing channels when there are no real HTLCs in them.

That, however, creates a new problem -- or actually it exarcebates the second: now that we're not closing channels, what do we do with the expired payments in them? These payments should have either been canceled or fulfilled before some block x, now we're in block x+1, our peer has returned from its offline period and one of us will have to lose the money from that payment.

That's fine because it's only 3sat and it's better to just lose 3sat than to lose both the 3sat and the channel anyway, so either one would be happy to eat the loss. Maybe we'll even split it 50/50! No, that doesn't work, because it creates an attack vector with peers becoming unresponsive on purpose on one side of the route and actually failing/fulfilling the payment on the other side and making a profit with that.

So we actually need to know who is to blame on these payments, even if we are not going to act on that imediatelly: we need some kind of arbiter that both peers can trust, such that if one peer is trying to send the preimage or the cancellation to the other and the other is unresponsive, when the unresponsive peer comes back, the arbiter can tell them they are to blame, so they can willfully eat the loss and the channel can continue. Both peers are happy this way.

If the unresponsive peer doesn't accept what the arbiter says then the peer that was operating correctly can assume the unresponsive peer is malicious and close the channel, and then blacklist it and never again open a channel with a peer they know is malicious.

Again, the differences between this scheme and the current Lightning Network are that:

a. In the current Lightning we always close channels, in this scheme we only close channels in case someone is malicious or in other worst case scenarios (the arbiter is unresponsive, for example). b. In the current Lightning we close the channels without having any clue on who is to blame for that, then we just proceed to reopen a channel with that same peer even in the case they were actively trying to harm us before.

What is missing? An arbiter.

The Bitcoin blockchain is the ideal arbiter, it works in the best possible way if we follow the trustless protocol, but as we've seen we can't use the Bitcoin blockchain because it is expensive.

Therefore we need a new arbiter. That is the hard part, but not unsolvable. Notice that we don't need an absolutely perfect arbiter, anything is better than nothing, really, even an unreliable arbiter that is offline half of the day is better than what we have today, or an arbiter that lies, an arbiter that charges some satoshis for each resolution, anything.

Here are some suggestions:

• random nodes from the network selected by an algorithm that both peers agree to, so they can't cheat by selecting themselves. The only thing these nodes have to do is to store data from one peer, try to retransmit it to the other peer and record the results for some time.
• a set of nodes preselected by the two peers when the channel is being opened -- same as above, but with more handpicked-trust involved.
• some third-party cloud storage or notification provider with guarantees of having open data in it and some public log-keeping, like Twitter, GitHub or a Nostr relay;
• peers that get paid to do the job, selected by the fact that they own some token (I know this is stepping too close to the shitcoin territory, but could be an idea) issued in a Spacechain;
• a Spacechain itself, serving only as the storage for a bunch of OP_RETURNs that are published and tracked by these Lightning peers whenever there is an issue (this looks wrong, but could work).

Key points

1. Lightning with HTLC-based routing was a cool idea, but it wasn't ever really feasible.
2. HTLCs are going to be abandoned and that's the natural course of things.
3. It is actually good that HTLCs are being abandoned, but
4. We must change the protocol to account for the existence of fake HTLCs and thus make the bulk of the Lightning Network usage viable again.

See also

• Ripple and the problem of the decentralized commit
• The Lightning Network solves the problem of the decentralized commit

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

On HTLCs and arbiters

This is another attempt and conveying the same information that should be in Lightning and its fake HTLCs. It assumes you know everything about Lightning and will just highlight a point. This is also valid for PTLCs.

The protocol says HTLCs are trimmed (i.e., not actually added to the commitment transaction) when the cost of redeeming them in fees would be greater than their actual value.

Although this is often dismissed as a non-important fact (often people will say "it's trusted for small payments, no big deal"), but I think it is indeed very important for 3 reasons:

1. Lightning absolutely relies on HTLCs actually existing because the payment proof requires them. The entire security of each payment comes from the fact that the payer has a preimage that comes from the payee. Without that, the state of the payment becomes an unsolvable mystery. The inexistence of an HTLC breaks the atomicity between the payment going through and the payer receiving a proof.
2. Bitcoin fees are expected to grow with time (arguably the reason Lightning exists in the first place).
3. MPP makes payment sizes shrink, therefore more and more of Lightning payments are to be trimmed. As I write this, the mempool is clear and still payments smaller than about 5000sat are being trimmed. Two weeks ago the limit was at 18000sat, which is already below the minimum most MPP splitting algorithms will allow.

Therefore I think it is important that we come up with a different way of ensuring payment proofs are being passed around in the case HTLCs are trimmed.

Channel closures

Worse than not having HTLCs that can be redeemed is the fact that in the current Lightning implementations channels will be closed by the peer once an HTLC timeout is reached, either to fulfill an HTLC for which that peer has a preimage or to redeem back that expired HTLCs the other party hasn't fulfilled.

For the surprise of everybody, nodes will do this even when the HTLCs in question were trimmed and therefore cannot be redeemed at all. It's very important that nodes stop doing that, because it makes no economic sense at all.

However, that is not so simple, because once you decide you're not going to close the channel, what is the next step? Do you wait until the other peer tries to fulfill an expired HTLC and tell them you won't agree and that you must cancel that instead? That could work sometimes if they're honest (and they have no incentive to not be, in this case). What if they say they tried to fulfill it before but you were offline? Now you're confused, you don't know if you were offline or they were offline, or if they are trying to trick you. Then unsolvable issues start to emerge.

Arbiters

One simple idea is to use trusted arbiters for all trimmed HTLC issues.

This idea solves both the protocol issue of getting the preimage to the payer once it is released by the payee -- and what to do with the channels once a trimmed HTLC expires.

A simple design would be to have each node hardcode a set of trusted other nodes that can serve as arbiters. Once a channel is opened between two nodes they choose one node from both lists to serve as their mutual arbiter for that channel.

Then whenever one node tries to fulfill an HTLC but the other peer is unresponsive, they can send the preimage to the arbiter instead. The arbiter will then try to contact the unresponsive peer. If it succeeds, then done, the HTLC was fulfilled offchain. If it fails then it can keep trying until the HTLC timeout. And then if the other node comes back later they can eat the loss. The arbiter will ensure they know they are the ones who must eat the loss in this case. If they don't agree to eat the loss, the first peer may then close the channel and blacklist the other peer. If the other peer believes that both the first peer and the arbiter are dishonest they can remove that arbiter from their list of trusted arbiters.

The same happens in the opposite case: if a peer doesn't get a preimage they can notify the arbiter they hadn't received anything. The arbiter may try to ask the other peer for the preimage and, if that fails, settle the dispute for the side of that first peer, which can proceed to fail the HTLC is has with someone else on that route.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

jq-finder

Made with jq-web, a tool to explore JSON using jq queries that build intermediate results so you can inspect each step of the process.

• https://jq.alhur.es/finder/
• https://github.com/fiatjaf/jq-finder

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superform.xyz

This was an app that allowed people to create micro apps powered by forms. Actually just one form I believe. The idea was for the micro apps to be really micro.

For example, you want a list of people, but you can only have at most 10 people in the list. Your app could keep a state with list of people already added and reject any other submissions above the specified limit. This would be done with 3 lines of code and provide an automatic form for people to fill with expected data.

Another example, you wanted to create a list of people that would go to an event and each would have to bring one item from a list: you created an initial state of a list of the items that should be brought, then specified a form where people could write their names and select the item they would bring, then code that for each submitted form added the name of the person plus the item they would bring to the state while also removing the selected item from the available items. Also 3 or 4 lines of data.

Something like this can't be done anywhere else. But also of course it would be arcane and frighten normal people and so on (although I do believe some "normal" people would be able to use such a thing if they needed it, just like they learn to write complex Excel formulas and still don't call themselves programmers).

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/superform.xyz

See also

• Etleneum, as it is basically the same core idea of a mutable state that is affected by calls, but Etleneum introduces (and actually forces the usage of) money, both in the sense that it acts as an escrow for contract results and that it mandates the payment of a small amount with each call, so it ends up not serving the same purposes.

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Timeu

Os quatro elementos, a esfera como a forma mais perfeita, os cinco sentidos, a dor como perturbação e o prazer como retorno, o demiurgo que cria da melhor maneira possível com a matéria que tem, o conceito de duro e mole, todas essas coisas que ensinam nas escolas e nos desenhos animados ou sei lá como entram na nossa consciência como se fossem uma verdade, mas sempre uma verdade provisória, infantil -- como os nomes infantis dos dedos (mata-piolho, fura-bolo etc.) --, que mesmo as crianças sabem que não é verdade mesmo.

Parece que todas essas coisas estão nesse livro. Talvez até mesmo a classificação dos cinco dedos como mata-piolho e tal, mas talvez eu tenha dormido nessa parte.

Me pergunto se essas coisas não eram ensinadas tradicionalmente na idade média como sendo verdade absoluta (pois afinal estava lá o Platão dizendo, em sua única obra) e persistiram até hoje numa tradição que se mantém aos trancos e barrancos, contra tudo e contra todos, sem ninguém saber como, um conhecimento em que ninguém acredita mas acha bonito mesmo assim, harmonioso, e vem despida de suas origens e fontes primárias e de todo o seu contexto perturbar o entendimento do mundo pelas crianças.

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IPFS problems: Conceit

IPFS is trying to do many things. The IPFS leaders are revolutionaries who think they're smarter than the rest of the entire industry.

The fact that they've first proposed a protocol for peer-to-peer distribution of immutable, content-addressed objects, then later tried to fix that same problem using their own half-baked solution (IPNS) is one example.

Other examples are their odd appeal to decentralization in a very non-specific way, their excessive flirtation with Ethereum and their never-to-be-finished can-never-work-as-advertised Filecoin project.

They could have focused on just making the infrastructure for distribution of objects through hashes (not saying this would actually be a good idea, but it had some potential) over a peer-to-peer network, but in trying to reinvent the entire internet they screwed everything up.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

lnurl-auth explained

You may have seen the lnurl-auth spec or heard about it, but might not know how it works or what is its relationship with other lnurl protocols. This document attempts to solve that.

Relationship between lnurl-auth and other lnurl protocols

First, what is the relationship of lnurl-auth with other lnurl protocols? The answer is none, except the fact that they all share the lnurl format for specifying https URLs.

In fact, lnurl-auth is very unique in the sense that it doesn't even need a Lightning wallet to work, it is a standalone authentication protocol that can work anywhere.

How does it work

Now, how does it work? The basic idea is that each wallet has a seed, which is a random value (you may think of the BIP39 seed words, for example). Usually from that seed different keys are derived, each of these yielding a Bitcoin address, and also from that same seed may come the keys used to generate and manage Lightning channels.

What lnurl-auth does is to generate a new key from that seed, and from that a new key for each service (identified by its domain) you try to authenticate with.

That way, you effectively have a new identity for each website. Two different services cannot associate your identities.

The flow goes like this: When you visit a website, the website presents you with a QR code containing a callback URL and a challenge. The challenge should be a random value.

When your wallet scans or opens that QR code it uses the domain in the callback URL plus the main lnurl-auth key to derive a key specific for that website, uses that key to sign the challenge and then sends both the public key specific for that for that website plus the signed challenge to the specified URL.

When the service receives the public key it checks it against the challenge signature and start a session for that user. The user is then identified only by its public key. If the service wants it can, of course, request more details from the user, associate it with an internal id or username, it is free to do anything. lnurl-auth's goals end here: no passwords, maximum possible privacy.

FAQ

• What is the advantage of tying this to Bitcoin and Lightning?

  One big advantage is that your wallet is already keeping track of one seed, it is already a precious thing. If you had to keep track of a separate auth seed it would be arguably worse, more difficult to bootstrap the protocol, and arguably one of the reasons similar protocols, past and present, weren't successful.

• Just signing in to websites? What else is this good for?

  No, it can be used for authenticating to installable apps and physical places, as long as there is a service running an HTTP server somewhere to read the signature sent from the wallet. But yes, signing in to websites is the main problem to solve here.

• Phishing attack! Can a malicious website proxy the QR from a third website and show it to the user to it will steal the signature and be able to login on the third website?

  No, because the wallet will only talk to the the callback URL, and it will either be controlled by the third website, so the malicious won't see anything; or it will have a different domain, so the wallet will derive a different key and frustrate the malicious website's plan.

• I heard SQRL had that same idea and it went nowhere.

  Indeed. SQRL in its first version was basically the same thing as lnurl-auth, with one big difference: it was vulnerable to phishing attacks (see above). That was basically the only criticism it got everywhere, so the protocol creators decided to solve that by introducing complexity to the protocol. While they were at it they decided to add more complexity for managing accounts and so many more crap that in the the spec which initially was a single page ended up becoming 136 pages of highly technical gibberish. Then all the initial network effect it had, libraries and apps were trashed and nowadays no one can do anything with it (but, see, there are still people who love the protocol writing in a 90's forum with no clue of anything besides their own Java).

• We don't need this, we need WebAuthn!

  WebAuthn is essentially the same thing as lnurl-auth, but instead of being simple it is complex, instead of being open and decentralized it is centralized in big corporations, and instead of relying on a key generated by your own device it requires an expensive hardware HSM you must buy and trust the manufacturer. If you like WebAuthn and you like Bitcoin you should like lnurl-auth much more.

• What about BitID?

  This is another one that is very similar to lnurl-auth, but without the anti-phishing prevention and extra privacy given by making one different key for each service.

• What about LSAT?

  It doesn't compete with lnurl-auth. LSAT, as far as I understand it, is for when you're buying individual resources from a server, not authenticating as a user. Of course, LSAT can be repurposed as a general authentication tool, but then it will lack features that lnurl-auth has, like the property of having keys generated independently by the user from a common seed and a standard way of passing authentication info from one medium to another (like signing in to a website at the desktop from the mobile phone, for example).

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A Lightning penalty transaction

It was a cold day and I remembered that this lightningd node I was running on my local desktop to work on poncho actually had mainnet channels in it. Two channels, both private, bought on https://lnbig.com/ a while ago when I was trying to conduct an anonymous griefing attack on big nodes of the network just to prove it was possible (the attempts proved unsuccessful after some hours and I gave up).

It is always painful to close channels because paying fees hurts me psychologically, and then it hurts even more to be left with a new small UTXO that will had to be spent to somewhere but that can barely pay for itself, but it also didn't make sense to just leave the channels there and risk forgetting them and losing them forever, so I had to do something.

One of the channels had 0 satoshis on my side, so that was easy. Mutually closed and I don't have to think anymore about it.

The other one had 10145 satoshis on my side -- out of a total of 100000 satoshis. Why can't I take my part all over over Lightning and leave the full channel UTXO to LNBIG? I wish I could do that, I don't want a small UTXO. I was not sure about it, but if the penalty reserve was 1% maybe I could take out abou 9000 satoshis and then close it with 1000 on my side? But then what would I do with this 1000 sat UTXO that would remain? Can't I donate it to miners or something?

I was in the middle of this thoughts stream when it came to me the idea of causing a penalty transaction to give those abundant 1000 sat to Mr. LNBIG as a donation for his excellent services to the network and the cause of Bitcoin, and for having supported the development of https://sbw.app/ and the hosted channels protocol.

Unfortunately lightningd doesn't have a command triggerpenaltytransaction or trytostealusingoldstate, so what I did was:

First I stopped lightningd then copied the database to elsewhere: cp ~/.lightningd/bitcoin/lightningd.sqlite3 ~/.lightning/bitcoin/lightningd.sqlite3.bak then I restarted lightningd and fighted against the way-too-aggressive MPP splitting algorithm the pay command uses to pay invoices, but finally managed to pull about 9000 satoshis to my Z Bot that lives on the terrible (but still infinitely better than Twitter DMs) "webk" flavor of the Telegram web application and which is linked to my against-bitcoin-ethos-country-censoring ZEBEDEE Wallet. The operation wasn't smooth but it didn't take more than 10 invoices and pay commands.

With the money out and safe elsewhere, I stopped the node again, moved the database back with a reckless mv ~/.lightning/bitcoin/lightningd.sqlite3.bak ~/.lightningd/bitcoin/lightningd.sqlite3 and restarted it, but to prevent my lightningd from being super naïve and telling LNBIG that it had an old state (I don't know if this would happen) which would cause LNBIG to close the channel in a boring way, I used the --offline flag which apparently causes the node to not do any external connections.

Finally I checked my balance using lightning-cli listfunds and there it was, again, the 10145 satoshis I had at the start! A fantastic money creation trick, comparable to the ones central banks execute daily.

I was ready to close the channel now, but the lightning-cli close command had an option for specifying how many seconds I would wait for a mutual close before proceeding to a unilateral close. There is no forceclose command like Éclair hasor anything like that. I was afraid that even if I gave LNBIG one second it would try to do boring things, so I paused to consider how could I just broadcast the commitment transaction manually, looked inside the SQLite database and the channels table with its millions of columns with cryptic names in the unbearable .schema output, imagined that lightningd maybe wouldn't know how to proceed to take the money from the to-local output if I managed to broadcast it manually (and in the unlikely event that LNBIG wouldn't broadcast the penalty transaction), so I decided to just accept the risk and call lightning-cli close 706327x1588x0 1

But it went well. The --offline flag apparently really works, as it just considered LNBIG to be offline and 1 second later I got the desired result.

My happiness was complete when I saw the commitment transaction with my output for 10145 satoshis published on the central database of Bitcoin, blockstream.info.

Then I went to eat something and it seems LNBIG wasn't offline or sleeping, he was certainly looking at all the logs from his 274 nodes in a big room full of monitors, very alert and eating an apple while drinking coffee, ready to take action, for when I came back, minutes later, I could see it, again on the single source of truth for the Bitcoin blockchain, the Blockstream explorer. I've refreshed the page and there it was, a small blue link right inside the little box that showed my to-local output, a notice saying it had been spent -- not by my lightningd since that would have to wait 9000 blocks, but by the same transaction that spent the other output, from which I could be very sure it was it, the glorious, mighty, unforgiving penalty transaction, splitting the earth, showing itself in all its power, and taking my 10145 satoshis to their rightful owner.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Trello Attachment Editor

A static JS app that allowed you to authorize with your Trello account, fetch the board structure, find attachments, edit them in the browser then replace them in the cards.

Quite a nice thing. I believe it was done to help with Websites For Trello attached scripts and CSS files.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/trello-attachments
• https://fiatjaf.github.io/trello-attachments/#/login

See also

• Temperos

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Soft-fork activation through bitcoind competition

Or: how to activate Drivechain.

Imagine a world in which there are 10 different bitcoind flavors, as described in bitcoind decentralization.

Now how do you enable a soft-fork?

Flavor 1 enables it. Seeing that nothing bad happened, flavor 2 enables it. Then flavor 3 enables it.

And so on.

When what is perceived by miners to be a big chunk of support for the proposal, a miner can try to mine a block that contains the new feature.

No need for a flag day or a centralized decision making process that depends on one or two courageous leaders to enable a timer.

---

This probably sounds silly, and maybe is.

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localchat

A server that creates instant chat rooms with Server-Sent Events and normal HTTP POST requests (instead of WebSockets which are an overkill most of the times).

It defaults to a room named as your public IP, so if two machines in the same LAN connect they'll be in the same chat automatically -- but then you can also join someone else's LAN if you need.

This is supposed to be useful.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/localchat
• https://localchat.bigsun.xyz/

See also

• Filemap

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Who will build the roads?

Who will build the roads? Em Lagoa Santa, as mais novas e melhores ruas -- que na verdade acabam por formar enormes teias de bairros que se interligam -- são construídas pelos loteadores que querem as ruas para que seus lotes valham mais -- e querem que outras pessoas usem as ruas também. Também são esses mesmos loteadores que colocam os postes de luz e os encanamentos de água, não sem antes terem que se submeter a extorsões de praxe praticadas por COPASA e CEMIG.

Se ao abrir um loteamento, condomínio, prédio um indivíduo ou uma empresa consegue sem muito problema passar rua, eletricidade, água e esgoto, por que não seria possível existir livre-concorrência nesses mercados? Mesmo aquela velha estória de que é ineficiente passar cabos de luz duplicados para que companhias elétricas possam competir já me parece bobagem.

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sitio

A static site generator that works with imperative code instead of declarative templates and directory structures. It assumes nothing and can be used to transform anything into HTML pages.

It uses React so it can be used to generate single-page apps too if you want -- and normal sites that work like single-page apps.

It also provides helpers for reading Markdown files, like all static site generator does.

A long time after creating this and breaking it while trying to add too many features at once I realized Gatsby also had an imperative engine underlying the default declarative interface that could be used and it was pretty similar to sitio. That both made me happy to have arrived at the same results of such an acclaimed tool and sad for the same reason, as Gatsby is the worse static site generator ever created considering user experience.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/sitio

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

A podridão

É razoável dizer que há três tipos de reações à menção do nome O que é Bitcoin? no Brasil:

1. A reação das pessoas velhas

Muito sabiamente, as pessoas velhas que já ouviram falar de Bitcoin o encaram ou como uma coisa muito distante e reservada ao conhecimento dos seus sobrinhos que entendem de computador ou como um golpe que se deve temer e do qual o afastamento é imperativo, e de qualquer modo isso não as deve afetar mesmo então para que perder o seu tempo. Essas pessoas estão erradas: nem o sobrinho que entende de computador sabe nada sobre Bitcoin, nem o Bitcoin é um golpe, e nem é o Bitcoin uma coisa totalmente irrelevante para elas.

É razoável ter cautela diante do desconhecido, no que as pessoas velhas fazem bem, mas creio eu que também muito do medo que essas pessoas têm vem da ignorância que foi criada e difundida durante os primeiros 10 anos de Bitcoin por jornalistas analfabetos e desinformados em torno do assunto.

1. A reação das pessoas pragmáticas

"Já tenho um banco e já posso enviar dinheiro, pra que Bitcoin? O quê, eu ainda tenho que pagar para transferir bitcoins? Isso não é vantagem nenhuma!"

Enquanto querem parecer muito pragmáticas e racionais, essas pessoas ignoram vários aspectos das suas próprias vidas, a começar pelo fato de que o uso dos bancos comuns não é gratuito, e depois que a existência desse sistema financeiro no qual elas se crêem muito incluídas e confortáveis é baseada num grande esquema chamado Banco Central, que tem como um dos seus fundamentos a possibilidade da inflação ilimitada da moeda, que torna todas as pessoas mais pobres, incluindo essas mesmas, tão pragmáticas e racionais.

Mais importante é notar que essas pessoas tão racionais foram também ludibriadas pela difusão da ignorância sobre Bitcoin como sendo um sistema de transferência de dinheiro. O Bitcoin não é e não pode ser um sistema de transferência de dinheiro porque ele só pode transferir-se a si mesmo, não pode transferir "dinheiro" no sentido comum dessa palavra (tenho em mente o dinheiro comum no Brasil, os reais). O fato de que haja hoje pessoas que conseguem "transferir dinheiro" usando o Bitcoin é uma coisa totalmente inesperada: a existência de pessoas que trocam bitcoins por reais (e outros dinheiros de outros lugares) e vice-versa. Não era necessário que fosse assim, não estava determinado em lugar nenhum, 10 anos atrás, que haveria demanda por um bem digital sem utilidade imediata nenhuma, foi assim por um milagre.

Porém, o milagre só estará completo quando esses bitcoins se tornarem eles mesmo o dinheiro comum. E aí assim será possível usar o sistema Bitcoin para transferir dinheiro de fato. Antes disso, chamar o Bitcoin de sistema de pagamentos ou qualquer coisa que o valha é perverter-lhe o sentido, é confundir um acidente com a essência da coisa.

1. A reação dos jovens analfabetos

Os jovens analfabetos são as pessoas que usam a expressão "criptos" e freqüentam sítios que dão notícias totalmente irrelevantes sobre "criptomoedas" o dia inteiro. Não sei muito bem como eles vivem porque não lhes suporto a presença, mas são pessoas que estão muito empolgadas com toda a "onda das criptomoedas" e acham tudo muito incrível, tão incrível que acabam se interessando e então comprando todos os tokens vagabundos que inventam. Usam a palavra "decentralizado", um anglicismo muito feio que deveria significar que não existe um centro controlador da moeda x ou y e que o seu protocolo continuaria funcionando mesmo que vários operadores saíssem do ar, mas como o aplicam aos tokens que são literalmente emitidos por um centro controlador com uma figura humana no centro que toma todas as decisões sobre tudo -- como o Ethereum e conseqüentemente todos os milhares de tokens ERC20 criados dentro do sistema Ethereum -- essa palavra não faz mais sentido.

Na sua empolgação e completo desconhecimento sobre como um ente nocivo poderia destruir cadauma das suas criptomoedas tão decentralizadas, ou como mesmo sem ninguém querer uma falha fundamental no protocolo e no sistema de incentivos poderia pôr tudo abaixo, sem imaginar que toda a valorização do token XYZ pode ter sido fabricada de caso pensado pelos seus próprios emissores ou só ser mesmo uma bolha, acabam esses jovens por igualar o token XYZ, ou ETH, BCH ou o que for, ao Bitcoin, ignorando todas as diferenças qualitativas e apenas mencionando de leve as quantitativas.

Misturada à sua empolgação, e como um bônus, surge a perspectiva de ficar rico. Se um desses por algum golpe de sorte surfou em alguma bolha como a de 2017 e conseguiu multiplicar um dinheiro por 10 comprando e vendendo EOS, já começa logo a usar como argumento para convencer os outros de que "criptomoedas são o futuro" o fato de que ele ficou rico. Não subestime a burrice humana.

---

Há jovens no grupo das pessoas velhas, velhas no grupo das pessoas jovens, pessoas que não estão em nenhum dos grupos e pessoas que estão em mais de um grupo, isso não importa.

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A crappy course on torrents

In 8 points[^twitterlink]:

1. You start seeding a file -- that means you split the file in a certain way, hash the pieces and wait.
2. If anyone connects to you (either by TCP or UDP -- and now there's the webRTC transport) and ask for a piece you'll send it.
3. Before downloading anything leechers must understand how many pieces exist and what are they -- and other things. For that exists the .torrent file, it contains the final hash of the file, metadata about all files, the list of pieces and hash of each.
4. To know where you are so people can connect to you[^nathole], there exists an HTTP (or UDP) server called "tracker". A list of trackers is also contained in the .torrent file.
5. When you add a torrent to your client, it gets a list of peers from the trackers. Then you try to connect to them (and you keep getting peers from the trackers while simultaneously sending data to the tracker like "I'm downloading, I have x bytes already" or "I'm seeding").
6. Magnet links contain a tracker URL and a hash of the metadata contained in the .torrent file -- with that you can safely download the same data that should be inside a .torrent file -- but now you ask it from a peer before requesting any actual file piece.
7. DHTs are an afterthought and I don't know how important they are for the torrent ecosystem (trackers work just fine). They intend to replace the centralized trackers with message passing between DHT peers (DHT peers are different and independent from file-download peers).
8. All these things (.torrent files, tracker messages, messages passed between peers) are done in a peculiar encoding format called "bencode" that is just a slightly less verbose, less readable JSON.

[^twitterlink]: Posted first as this Twitter thread. [^nathole]: Also your torrent client must be accessible from the external internet, NAT hole-punching is almost a myth.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

"Você só aprendeu mesmo uma coisa quando consegue explicar para os outros"

Mentira. Tá certo que existe um ponto em que você acha que sabe algo mas não consegue explicar, mas não necessariamente isso significa não saber. Conseguir explicar não depende de saber, mas de verbalizar. Podemos saber muitas coisas sem as conseguir verbalizar. Aliás, para a maior parte das experiências humanas verbalizar é que é a parte difícil. Por último, é importante dizer que a verbalização é uma abstração e portanto quando alguém tenta explicar algo e se força a fazer uma abstração está arriscando substituir a experiência concreta ou mesmo o conhecimento difuso de algo por aquela abstração e com isso ficar mais burro -- me parece que esse é risco é maior quanto mais prematura for a tentativa de explicação e quando mais sucesso a abstração improvisada fizer.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Multi-service Graph Reputation protocol

The problem

1. Users inside centralized services need to know reputations of other users they're interacting with;
2. Building reputation with ratings imposes a big burden on the user and still accomplishes nothing, can be faked, no one cares about these ratings etc.

The ideal solution

Subjective reputation: reputation based on how you rated that person previously, and how other people you trust rated that person, and how other people trusted by people you trust rated that person and so on, in a web-of-trust that actually can give you some insight on the trustworthiness of someone you never met or interacted with.

The problem with the ideal solution

1. Most of the times the service that wants to implement this is not as big as Facebook, so it won't have enough people in it for such graphs of reputation to be constructed.
2. It is not trivial to build.

My proposed solution:

I've drafted a protocol for an open system based on services publishing their internal reputation records and indexers using these to build graphs, and then serving the graphs back to the services so they can show them to users when it is needed (as HTTP APIs that can be called directly from the user client app or browser).

Crucially, these indexers will gather data from multiple services and cross-link users from these services so the graph is better.

https://github.com/fiatjaf/multi-service-reputation-rfc

The first and single actionable and useful feedback I got, from @bootstrapbandit was that services shouldn't share email addresses in plain text (email addresses and other external relationships users of a service may have are necessary to establish links from users accross services), but I think it is ok if services publish hashes of these email addresses instead. At some point I will update the spec draft and that may have been before the time you're reading this.

Another issue is that services may lie about their reputation records and that will hurt other services and users in these other services that are relying on that data. Maybe indexers will have to do some investigative job here to assert service honesty. Or maybe this entire protocol is just failed and we will actually need a system in which users themselves will publish their own records.

See also

• P2P reputation thing
• idea: Graph subjective reputation as a service
• https://github.com/jangerritharms/reputation_systems

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

WelcomeBot

The first bot ever created for Trello.

It invited to a public board automatically anyone who commented on a card he was added to.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/welcomebot
• https://trello.com/welcomebot

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

O que é Bitcoin?

Todo guia infeliz sobre Bitcoin começa com esta pergunta manjada, e normalmente já vai respondendo que é uma "moeda virtual"[^moeda_virtual], um conceito estúpido que não esclarece nada.

Esqueça esse papo. Bitcoin não é uma moeda. Bitcoin é um protocolo[^protocolo].

Por que então dizem que é uma moeda? Porque essas pessoas muito apressadinhas gostam de dizer que tudo que é facilmente divisível e transferível, e cujas várias unidades são idênticas umas às outras, é uma moeda. Então, nesse sentido, Bitcoin é uma moeda, mas ignore esse papo de moeda.

O protocolo Bitcoin diz que existem "créditos" (ou "pontos", ou "unidades") que podem ser transferidas entre os participantes, e vários computadores, cada um operando independentemente do outro, desde que sigam o protocolo (ou seja: que estejam todos rodando o mesmo programa, ou programas compatíveis), estarão sempre em acordo a respeito de quem gastou cada crédito e como gastou.

É basicamente essa a idéia: um monte de "pontos virtuais" que são transferidos de uns para outros, sem que exista uma entidade organizadora, "o dono do Bitcoin", "o chefe supremo do Bitcoin", que controle nada, coordene nada, ou tenha poder sobre essas transferências.

Como funciona

Imagine vários computadores rodando o mesmo programa (ou programas compatíveis). Agora imagine que esses programas se comunicam entre si através da internet: eles enviam mensagens uns para os outros e esperam respostas. De vez em quando a resposta não vem, ou vem num formato que o programa não entende, isso significa que o outro computador saiu do ar, ou está rodando uma versão incompatível do programa, e aí todos os outros vão ignorá-lo. Mas em geral a resposta vem certinha e todos conseguem falar com todos.

Agora que você imaginou isso, fica fácil imaginar, por exemplo, que cada um desses computadores mantém uma lista de todos os bitcoins existentes e quem tem cada um. Eles pegam a lista dos outros computadores na rede e depois a vão atualizando à medida que novas transações vão sendo feitas. Toda vez que alguém quer fazer alguma transação, ele deve fazê-la por meio de um desses computadores, a pessoa chega no computador que está rodando o programa e diz: "sou fulano, tenho x bitcoins, e quero enviá-los para tal lugar", o programa vai lá e envia essa mensagem para os outros computadores, que atualizam a sua lista. Fim.

Essa seria uma versão ingênua do protocolo, que funcionaria se todos os participantes fossem muito honestos e ninguém jamais tentasse gastar os bitcoins que não têm.

Pra uma coisa dessas funcionar no mundo real teve de entrar a grande invenção do Bitcoin, o insight genial do Satoshi Nakamoto, que é a tal cadeia de blocos, conhecida por aí como blockchain.

Funciona assim: ao invés de cada computador manter uma lista de onde está cada bitcoin, cada computador mantém a tal cadeia de blocos. Um "bloco" é só um nome bonitinho para um conjunto de dados. Cada bloco é composto por uma referência ao bloco anterior e uma lista de transações. Como eles contém uma referência ao anterior, existe uma seqüência, uma fila indiana, e o computador pode ficar tranqüilo sabendo a ordem das transações (as transações que aconteceram no terceiro bloco são posteriores às que aconteceram no segundo bloco, por exemplo) e saber que os mesmos bitcoins não foram gastos duas vezes seguidas pela mesma pessoa, o que seria inválido. Quando aparece um novo bloco, é só todos os computadores conferirem se não existe nenhuma transação inválida ali e, caso exista, rejeitarem aquele bloco por inteiro e esperarem que o próximo descarte aquela transação inválida e venha certinho.

Quem faz os blocos

Em tese, qualquer um dos computadores pode fazer o próximo bloco. A idéia é que cada pessoa que queira fazer uma transação vai lá e usa um computador da rede para enviar a sua proposta de transação ("quero transferir bitcoins para tal lugar e tal") para todos os demais, e que, quando alguém for fazer um bloco, pegue todas essas propostas de transação que forem válidas e as coloque no bloco que então será aceito por todos os outros computadores e incluído na cadeia global de blocos. Essa cadeia global tem que ser exatamente igual em todos os computadores.

Na prática, existe uma regra que faz com que nem todos consigam fazer blocos: é que o hash dos dados do bloco + um número mágico deve ser menor do que um valor muito pequeno x. O número mágico é um número qualquer que o computador que está tentando fazer o bloco pode ajustar, por tentativa e erro, para que o hash saia de um jeito que ele queira. O x pode ser maior ou menor de acordo com a freqüência dos últimos blocos produzidos. Quanto menor for x, mais estatisticamente difícil é encontrar um número mágico que, junto com os dados do bloco, tenha um hash menor do que x.

Ou seja: para fazer um bloco, muitos números mágicos diferentes devem ser tentados até que seja encontrado algum que satisfaça as condições.

O que é um hash? Um hash é uma função matemática que é fácil fazer para um lado e difícil de fazer para o outro. A multiplicação, por exemplo, é fácil de fazer e fácil de fazer, e sua operação contrária, a divisão, também (tanto é que qualquer um com papel e caneta consegue, tem aquela coisa de ir passando os números pra baixo e subtraindo e tal). Já uma operação de exponenciação -- um número elevado a 1000, por exemplo -- é fácil de fazer, mas pra desfazer só com tentativa e erro (e é por tentativa e erro que o computador ou a calculadora fazem).

No caso do Bitcoin, o computador que está tentando produzir um bloco tem que achar um número tal que (esse número mágico + fatores predeterminados do bloco) elevados a 50 resultem num valor menor do que fator de dificuldade, um outro fator predeterminado pelo estado geral da cadeia de blocos.

Suponha que um computador acha um número 1798465042647412146620280340569649349251249, por exemplo, e ele é menor do que o fator de dificuldade. Ele então diz para os outros: "aqui está meu bloco, o hash do meu bloco é 1798465042647412146620280340569649349251249, os fatores predeterminados do bloco são 4 (esses fatores todo mundo pode conferir), e meu número mágico é 3. (4 + 3) elevado a 50 é 1798465042647412146620280340569649349251249, como todos podem conferir, então meu bloco é válido". Então todos aceitam aquele bloco como válido e começam a tentar achar o número mágico para o próximo bloco (e desta vez os fatores do bloco são diferentes, já que um novo bloco foi adicionado à cadeia e fez com que tudo mudasse).

As regras para a definição de x fazem com que na média cada novo bloco fique pronto em 10 minutos. Logo, se há apenas um computador tentando produzir blocos, o protocolo dirá que x seja relativamente alto, de modo que esse computador conseguirá, em 10 minutos, na média, encontrar um número mágico. Se, porém, milhares de computadores superpotentes estiverem tentando produzir blocos, x será ajustado para um valor muito mais baixo, de modo que o esforço de todos esses computadores fazendo milhares de tentativas-e-erros por segundo só conseguirá encontrar um número mágico a cada 10 minutos.

Hoje existem computadores feitos especialmente para procurar números mágicos que conseguem calcular hashes muito mais rápido do que o seu computador caseiro, o que torna inviável que qualquer pessoa não especializada tente produzir blocos, veja este gráfico da evolução da quantidade de hashes que são tentados a cada segundo.

Por algum motivo convencionou-se chamar os computadores que se empenham em fazer novos blocos de "mineradores".

Se dois computadores da rede fizerem blocos ao mesmo tempo, qual dos dois vale?

Se você já sabe quem faz os blocos fica fácil imaginar que isso é um pouco improvável. Mas mesmo assim pode acontecer. Mesmo que os blocos não fiquem prontos exatamente no mesmo instante, problemas podem acontecer porque os outros computadores da rede receberão os dois novos blocos em ordens diferentes, e aí não vai dar pra determinar qual vale ou qual deixa de valer assim, pela ordem.

Os computadores então ficam num estado de indeterminação acerca das duas cadeias de blocos possíveis, A e B, digamos, ambas idênticas até o bloco de número 723, mas diferentes no que diz respeito ao bloco 724, para o qual há duas alternativas. O protocolo determina que a cadeia que tenha mais trabalho realizado é a que vale, mas durante algum tempo podemos ter um estado em que alguns computadores da rede só sabem da existência do bloco A, enquanto outros só sabem da existência do bloco B, o que é uma grande confusão que só pode ser resolvida pelo advento do próximo bloco, o 725.

Como cada bloco se refere a um bloco anterior, é necessário que um desses dois blocos 724 seja escolhido pelos mineradores para ser o "pai" do bloco 725 quando o número mágico for encontrado e ele for feito. Mesmo que cada minerador escolha um pai diferente, desse processo sairá provavelmente apenas um bloco 725, e quando ele for espalhado ele determinará, pela sua ascendência, qual foi o bloco 724 que ficou valendo. Caso dois ou mais blocos 725 sejam produzidos ao mesmo tempo, o sistema continua nesse estado de indecisão até o 726, e assim por diante.

Por este motivo não se deve confiar que uma transação está concretizada pra valer mesmo só porque ela foi incluída num bloco. Você não tem como saber se existe um outro bloco alternativo que será preferido ao seu até que pelo menos mais alguns blocos tenham sido adicionados.

Transações

Muitas pessoas acreditam que existem endereços e que esses endereços têm um dono e ele é o dono dos bitcoins. Esta crença errônea é resultado de uma analogia com bancos tradicionais e contas bancárias (as contas são endereços que têm um dono e guardam dinheiro).

Na verdade assim que as transações são incluídas num bloco elas não "ficam em um endereço", mas vagando num grande limbo de transações. Deste limbo elas podem ser retiradas por qualquer pessoa que cumpra as condições que foram previamente especificadas pelo criador da transação.

Uma analogia mais útil do que a analogia das contas bancárias é a analogia do dinheiro: imagine que você tem uma nota de 20 dinheiros e você quer usá-la pra pagar 10 dinheiros a outrem. Você precisa quebrar aquela nota de 20 em duas de 10 e aí uma fica com você e a outra com a outra pessoa, ou, se você tiver duas notas de 5, você pode juntar as duas e dar para a outra pessoa. Todas essas notas que você está gastando têm uma história prévia: elas vieram de algum lugar em algum momento para o seu controle.

Transações com Bitcoin também são assim: você precisa mencionar especificamente uma transação anterior.

Por exemplo,

1. Carlos paga 10 bitcoins a Dandara, Dandara agora tem uma transação no valor de 10
2. Elisa paga 17 bitcoins a Dandara, Dandara tem uma transação no valor de 10 e uma no valor de 17
3. Dandara paga 23 bitcoins a Felipe, ela junta suas duas transações e faz duas novas, uma no valor de 23, que vai para o controle de Felipe, e outra no valor de 4, que volta para o seu controle, Dandara agora tem uma transação no valor de 4, Felipe tem uma transação no valor de 23
4. Felipe paga 14 bitcoins a Geraldo, ele divide sua transação em duas, uma no valor de 14 e outra no valor de 9, e assim por diante

Uma diferença, porém, é que no Bitcoin ninguém sabe quem é o dono da nota, você apenas sabe que pode gastá-la, caso você realmente possa (se uma transação prévia especifica uma condição que você pode cumprir, você deve cumprir aquela condição no momento em que estiver mencionando a transação prévia). Por isso uma carteira Bitcoin pode dizer que você "tem" um número x de bitcoins: a carteira sabe quais chaves privadas você controla e quais transações, dentre todas as transações não-gastas de toda a blockchain, podem ser gastas usando aquela chave.

Uma forma comum de transação é que especifica a condição qualquer pessoa que tiver a chave privada capaz de assinar a chave pública cujo hash vai aqui dito pode gastar esta transação. Outras condições comuns são as que especificam n chaves, das quais m precisam assinar a transação para que ela seja gasta (por exemplo, entre Fulano, Beltrano e Ciclano, quaisquer dois deles precisam concordar, mas não um só), o famoso multisig.

Canal de pagamento

Um payment channel, ou via de pagamento, ou canal de pagamento é uma seqüência de promessas de pagamento feitas entre dois usuários de Bitcoin que não precisam ser publicados na blockchain e por isso são instantâneas e grátis.

Antes que você se pergunte o que acontece se alguém descumprir a promessa, devo dizer que "promessa" é um termo ruim, porque promessas de verdade podem ser quebradas, mas estas promessas são auto-cumpríveis, elas são transações assinadas que podem ser resgatadas a qualquer momento pelo destinatário bastando que ele as publique na blockchain.

A idéia é que na maioria das vezes você não vai precisar disso, e pode continuar fazendo transações novas que invalidam as antigas até que você decida publicar a última transação válida. Deste modo seu dinheiro está seguro numa via de pagamento

O grande problema é que caso a outra parte decida roubar e publicar uma transação antiga, você precisa aparecer num espaço de tempo razoável (isto depende do combinado entre os dois usuários, mas acho que o padrão é 24 horas) e publicar a última transação. Existem incentivos para impedir que alguém tente roubar (por exemplo, quem tentar roubar e for pego perde todo o dinheiro que estava naquela via) e outros mecanismos, como as atalaias que vigiam as vias de pagamentos dos outros pra ver se ninguém está roubando.

Exemplo:

1. Ângela e Bóris decidem criar uma via de pagamento, pois esperam realizar muitos pagamentos de pequeno valor entre eles, tanto de ida quanto de volta, ao longo de vários meses
2. Ângela cria uma transação para um endereço compartilhado entre ela e Bóris, no valor de 1000 satoshis, e desse endereço ela e Bóris criam uma transação devolvendo os 1000 para Ângela
3. Ao resolver pagar 200 satoshis para Bóris, eles criam uma nova transação que transfere 800 para Ângela e 200 para Bóris
4. Agora Bóris quer pagar 17 satoshis para Ângela, eles criam uma nova transação que transfere 817 para Ângela e 173 para Bóris
5. E assim por diante eles vão criando novas transações que invalidam as anteriores e vão alterando o "saldo" da via de pagamento. Quando qualquer um dos dois quiser sacar o dinheiro que tem no saldo é só publicar a última transação e pronto.

A rede Relâmpago é uma grande rede de canais de pagamento que permite que pessoas façam pagamentos para pessoas não diretamente ligadas a elas por canais diretos, mas através de uma rota que percorre vários canais de outrem e ajusta seus saldos.

Existem outras criptomoedas além do Bitcoin?

Pra começar, jamais use essa palavra de novo. "criptomoeda" é ainda pior do que "moeda virtual"[^moeda_virtual].

Agora, respondendo: sim, de certo modo existem, são chamadas as "altcoins" ou "shitcoins" ("moedas de cocô", tradução amigável), porque elas são, de fato, grandes porcarias.

De outro modo, pode-se dizer que elas não são comparáveis ao Bitcoin, porque só pode haver uma moeda num livre mercado de moedas, e esse posto já é do Bitcoin, e também porque o Bitcoin é livre, sem donos, sem grandes poderes que o controlam, o que não se pode dizer de nenhuma altcoin.

Depois que o Bitcoin foi inventado e seu insight genial foi assimilado pela comunidade interessada, milhares de pessoas copiaram o protocolo, com pequenas modificações, para criar suas próprias moedas.

Assim surgiram Litecoin, Ethereum e muitas outras. No fundo são apenas cópias do Bitcoin que tentam melhorá-lo de algum modo ou adicionar outras funções.

Veja também:

• Aos poucos, e aí tudo de uma vez, Parker Lewis
• Não tem solução
• A podridão
• O Bitcoin como um sistema social humano
• Rede Relâmpago

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[^protocolo]: Neste contexto, um protocolo é um conjunto de regras (inventadas arbitrariamente ou surgidas dos usos e costumes ao longo do tempo) que permitem que dois computadores diferentes se entendam e saibam que tipo de mensagens e comportamentos esperar dos demais. [^moeda_virtual]: Virtual? Virtual era pra significar uma coisa que não é ainda "atual", ou seja, que ainda não se concretizou na realidade. Mas como nossos amigos falantes da língüa portuguesa quiseram que isso passasse também a significar qualquer coisa que aconteça em um computador, "moeda virtual" ficou sendo uma moeda que existe no computador. O Bitcoin claramente é uma moeda que existe no computador, mas mesmo assim esse conceito é confuso. Uma transferência bancária tradicional também não é "dinheiro virtual"? Ela acontece no computador, mas você ainda não pegou as notas de papel ali na sua mão, então é virtual. Chamar só o Bitcoin de moeda virtual pode talvez criar a impressão de que é o Bitcoin é um brinquedinho, como por exemplo as moedas virtuais que existem dentro do universo de jogos de simulação, como, sei lá, World of Warcraft.

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Personagens de jogos e símbolos

A sensação de "ser" um personagem em um jogo ou uma brincadeira talvez seja o mais próximo que eu tenha conseguido chegar do entendimento de um símbolo religioso.

A hóstia consagrada é, segundo a religião, o corpo de Cristo, mas nossa mente moderna só consegue concebê-la como sendo uma representação do corpo de Cristo. Da mesma forma outras culturas e outras religiões têm símbolos parecidos, inclusive nos quais o próprio participante do ritual faz o papel de um deus ou de qualquer coisa parecida.

"Faz o papel" é de novo a interpretação da mente moderna. O sujeito ali é a coisa, mas ele ao mesmo tempo que é também sabe que não é, que continua sendo ele mesmo.

Nos jogos de videogame e brincadeiras infantis em que se encarna um personagem o jogador é o personagem. não se diz, entre os jogadores, que alguém está "encenando", mas que ele é e pronto. nem há outra denominação ou outro verbo. No máximo "encarnando", mas já aí já é vocabulário jornalístico feito para facilitar a compreensão de quem está de fora do jogo.

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A estrutura lógica do livro didático

Todos os livros didáticos e cursos expõem seus conteúdos a partir de uma organização lógica prévia, um esquema de todo o conteúdo que julgam relevante, tudo muito organizadinho em tópicos e subtópicos segundo a ordem lógica que mais se aproxima da ordem natural das coisas. Imagine um sumário de um manual ou livro didático.

A minha experiência é a de que esse método serve muito bem para ninguém entender nada. A organização lógica perfeita de um campo de conhecimento é o resultado final de um estudo, não o seu início. As pessoas que escrevem esses manuais e dão esses cursos, mesmo quando sabem do que estão falando (um acontecimento aparentemente raro), o fazem a partir do seu próprio ponto de vista, atingido após uma vida de dedicação ao assunto (ou então copiando outros manuais e livros didáticos, o que eu chutaria que é o método mais comum).

Para o neófito, a melhor maneira de entender algo é através de imersões em micro-tópicos, sem muita noção da posição daquele tópico na hierarquia geral da ciência.

• Revista Educativa, um exemplo de como não ensinar nada às crianças.
• Zettelkasten, a ordem surgindo do caos, ao invés de temas se encaixando numa ordem preexistentes.

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jiq-web

Made with jq-web, a tool to explore JSON using jq that works like jiq.

• https://jq.alhur.es/jiq/
• https://github.com/fiatjaf/jiq-web

See also

• jq-finder

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There's a problem with using Git concepts for everything

We've been seeing a surge in applications that use Git to store other things than code, or that are based on Git concepts and so enable "forking, merging and distributed collaboration" for things like blogs, recipes, literature, music composition, normal files in a filesystem, databases.

The problem with all this is they will either:

1. assume the user will commit manually and expect that commit to be composed by a set of meaningful changes, and the commiter will also add a message to the commit, describing that set of meaningful, related changes; or
2. try to make the committing process automatic and hide it from the user, so will producing meaningless commits, based on random changes in many different files (it's not "files" if we are talking about a recipe or rows in a table, but let's say "files" for the sake of clarity) that will probably not be related and not reduceable to a meaningful commit message, or maybe the commit will contain only the changes to a single file, and its commit message would be equivalent to "updated <name of the file>".

Programmers, when using Git, think in Git, i.e., they work with version control in their minds. They try hard to commit together only sets of meaningful and related changes, even when they happen to make unrelated changes in the meantime, and that's why there are commands like git add -p and many others.

Normal people, to whom many of these git-based tools are intended to (and even programmers when out of their code-world), are much less prone to think in Git, and that's why another kind of abstraction for fork-merge-collaborate in non-code environments must be used.

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Que vença o melhor

Nos esportes e jogos em geral, existe uma constante preocupação em balancear os incentivos e atributos do jogo, as regras do esporte em si e as regras das competições para que o melhor vença, ou, em outras palavras, para que sejam minimizados os outros fatores exceto a habilidade mais pura quanto possível no jogo em questão.

O mundo fora dos jogos, porém, nem sempre pode ter suas regras mudadas por um ente que as controla e está imbuído da vontade e dos meios para escolher as melhores regras possíveis para a obtenção dos resultados acima. Aliás, é muitas vezes essa possibilidade é até impensável. Mesmo quando ela é pensável e levada em conta os fatores que operam no mundo real não são facilmente identificáveis, eles são muitos, e mudam o tempo todo.

Mais do que isso, ao contrário de um jogo em que o objetivo é praticamente o mesmo para todo mundo, os objetivos de cada agente no mundo real são diferentes e incontáveis, e as "competições" que cada um está disputando são diferentes e muitas, cada minúsculo ato de suas vidas compreendendo várias delas simultaneamente.

Da mesma forma, é impossível conceber até mesmo o conceito de "melhor" para que se deseje que ele vença.

Mesmo assim é comum encontrarmos em várias situações gente que parte do princípio de que se Fulano está num certo lugar (por exemplo, um emprego muito bom) e Beltrano não isso se deve ao fato de Fulano ter sido melhor que Beltrano.

Está aí uma crítica à idéia da meritocracia (eu tinha me esquecido que essa palavra existia).

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Module Linker

A browser extension that reads source code on GitHub and tries to find links to imported dependencies so you can click on them and navigate through either GitHub or package repositories or base language documentation. Works for many languages at different levels of completeness.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/module-linker
• https://module-linker.alhur.es/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/module-linker
• https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dglofghjinifeolcpjfjmfdnnbaanggn

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Things a coalition of evil miners can do on Bitcoin

If a miner coalition has 75% of hashrate for 6 months they can steal coins from a Drivechain without any risk, that's what the drivechain haters say.

What other evil things can a coalition of 75% hashrate do in 6 months?

• steal money from all open Lightning nodes on the network by opening channels to them, mining 3 blocks, spending the funds out on Lightning instantly, then rolling back the 3 blocks and canceling the channel.
• the above would eventually -- but not instantly and only after many steals have happened (even if they're not all perfectly coordinated and instant) -- cause Lightning to shrink in size a lot and become more of a closed friends network than truly open.
• only mine empty blocks and cause the mempool to be enormously clogged.
• refuse to use the mempool, force a proprietary API for transaction propagation with zero transparency and force other miners to use that same infrastructure too and extract a fee from them.
• censor anything and force other miners to censor too, at the threat of orphaning their blocks.
• easily cause so much confusion in the mining process that Bitcoin is deemed unusable and price falls drastically, miners can then buy at low price.

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hyperscript-go

A template rendering library similar to hyperscript for Go.

Better than writing HTML and Golang templates.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/hyperscript-go

See also

• tempreites

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The unit test bubble

Look at the following piece of Go code:

func NewQuery(query []rune) *Query { q := &Query{ query: &[]rune{}, complete: &[]rune{}, } _ = q.Set(query) return q } func NewQueryWithString(query string) *Query { return NewQuery([]rune(query)) }

It is taken from a GitHub project with over 2000 stars.

Now take a look at these unit tests for the same package:

``` func TestNewQuery(t *testing.T) { var assert = assert.New(t)

v := []rune(".name")
q := NewQuery(v)

assert.Equal(*q.query, []rune(".name"))
assert.Equal(*q.complete, []rune(""))

}

func TestNewQueryWithString(t *testing.T) { var assert = assert.New(t)

q := NewQueryWithString(".name")

assert.Equal(*q.query, []rune(".name"))
assert.Equal(*q.complete, []rune(""))

} ```

Now be honest: what are these for? Is this part of an attack to eat all GitHub storage and head them to bankruptcy?

Also

• my personal approach on using let, const and var in javascript

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IPFS problems: Inefficiency

Imagine you have two IPFS nodes and unique content, created by you, in the first one. From the second, you can connect to the first and everyhing looks right. You then try to fetch that content. After some seconds it starts coming, the progress bar begins to move, that's slow, very slow, doing an rsync would have been 20 times faster.

The progress bar halts. You investigate, the second node is not connected to the first anymore. Why, if that was the only source for the file we're trying to fetch? It remains a mistery to this day. You reconnect manually, the progress bar moves again, halts, you're disconnected again. Instead of reconnecting you decide to add the second node to the first node's "Bootstrap" list.

I once tried to run an IPFS node on a VPS and store content on S3. There are two S3 datastore plugins available. After fixing some issues in one of them, recompiling go-ipfs, figuring out how to read settings from the IPFS config file, creating an init profile and recompiling again I got the node running. It worked. My idea was to host a bunch of data on that node. Data would be fetched from S3 on demand so there would be cheap and fast access to it from any IPFS node or gateway.

IPFS started doing hundreds of calls to S3 per minute – something I wouldn't have known about if I hadn't inserted some log statements in the plugin code, I mean before the huge AWS bill arrived. Apparently that was part of participation on the DHT. Adjusting some settings turned my node into a listen-only thing as I intended, but I'm not 100% sure it would work as an efficient content provider, and I'll never know, as the memory and CPU usage got too high for my humble VPS and I had to turn it down.

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Gold is not useless

If there's something all common people believe about gold is that it is useless[^1]. Austrian economists and libertarians in general that argue against central banks or defend a primitive gold standard are often charged with that accusation: that gold is useless, it has no use in the industry, it serves no purpose besides ornamental, so it is a silly commodity, a luxurious one, and that it would be almost immoral to have such a thing in a so central position in an economy such as the position of money.

I've seen libertarians in general argue such things as: "it is used in some dental operations", which means people make dental prosthesis of gold, something that fits in same category of jewelry, I would say.

There's also the argument of electronic connectors. That's something that appears to be true, but wouldn't suffice the anti-gold arguments. The fact remains that, besides its uses as money -- because gold is still considered to be a form money even now that it doesn't have that position formally in any country (otherwise it wouldn't be considered as an "investment" or "value store" everywhere) -- gold is used mainly for ornamental purposes[^2].

All that is a hassle for libertarians in general. Even the Mises Regression Theory wouldn't solve that problem of people skeptical of gold due to its immoral nature. That problem is solved once you read what is written in the chapter 17 from Richard Cantillon's Essay on Economic Theory^3 (page 103):

Gold and silver are capable of serving not only the same purpose as tin and copper, but also most of the purposes of lead and iron. They have this further advantage over other metals in that they are not consumed by fire and are so durable that they may be considered permanent. It is not surprising, therefore, that the men who found the other metals useful, valued gold and silver even before they were used in exchange.

So gold is indeed useful. Everybody should already know that. You can even do forks and spoons with gold. You can do furniture with gold, and many other useful stuff. As soon as you grasp this, gold is useful again. It is an useful commodity.

Answering the next question becomes easy: why isn't anyone making gold forks anywhere? The questioner already knows the answer: because it is too expensive for that.

And now the Regression Theory comes with its full force: why is it expensive? Because it has gained a lot of value in the process of becoming money. The value of gold as money is much greater than as a metal used in fork production.

---

[^1]: see http://www.salon.com/2014/02/02/ignore_sean_hannity_gold_is_useless_partner/ or all answers on https://www.quora.com/Why-is-gold-considered-so-precious-and-why-does-it-have-such-high-prices. [^2]: this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold#Modern_applications section on the Wikipedia page for gold is revealing.

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Revista Educativa

Uma revista que traz resumos de grandes descobertas ciêntíficas e explica sua utilidade e relevância, explica os problemas e os "desafios" da sociedade moderna, faz propaganda de reciclagem e outras coisas supostamente boas ao meio-ambiente, e uma seção: "Quero ser cientista para... ajudar o mundo? Descobrir uma coisa muito boa? Escrever uma revista como esta?".

Que grande bobagem.

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The problem with DIDs

Decentralized Identifiers are supposedly a standard that will allow anyone (or anything) to have an online identity. The DID is a URI like did:<method>:<data> in which <method> determines how to interpret the <data>. The data is generally a public key in some cryptographic system or shitcoin blockchain, or a naked key, or a DNS-backed web address.

Some of the DID proponents argue that this is for maximum interoperability, since any new system can be supported under the same standard, i.e. supposedly an application could "support DIDs" (as some would say) and that would allow anyone to just paste their DID string there and that would refer to something.

There are a gazillion of different DID "methods", most of them are probably barely used. What does it mean for an application to "support" DIDs, then? For the interoperability argument to make any sense that must mean that the application must understand all the "methods" -- which involves understanding all cryptographic protocols and reading and interpreting data from a gazillion different blockchains and also understanding the specifics of each method, since the data of each blockchain or website and so on must also be interpreted according to the rules of the method.

It must be clear from the paragraph above that the DID goal is is unimplementable and therefore will either fail horribly by lack of adoption; or it will have to be changed to something else (for example everybody will start accepting just did:key and ignore others and that will be the standard); or it will become a centralized thing with all supporting applications using a single set of libraries that have built-in support for all methods by calling centralized servers that return the final product of processing the DID data for each method.

See also:

• The problem with ION

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Rede Relâmpago

Ao se referir à Lightning Network do O que é Bitcoin?, nós, brasileiros e portugueses, devemos usar o termo "Relâmpago" ou "Rede Relâmpago". "Relâmpago" é uma palavra bonita e apropriada, e fácil de pronunciar por todos os nossos compatriotas. Chega de anglicismos desnecessários.

Exemplo de uma conversa hipotética no Brasil usando esta nomenclatura:

– Posso pagar com Relâmpago?

– Opa, claro! Vou gerar um boleto aqui pra você.

Repare que é bem mais natural e fácil do que a outra alternativa:

– Posso pagar com láitenim?

– Leite ninho?

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Ripple and the problem of the decentralized commit

This is about Ryan Fugger's Ripple.

The summary is: unless everybody is good and well-connected at all times a transaction can always be left in a half-committed state, which creates confusion, erodes trust and benefits no one.

If you're unconvinced consider the following protocol flow:

1. A finds a route (A--B--C--D) between her and D somehow;
2. A "prepares" a payment to B, tells B to do the same with C and so on (to prepare means to give B a conditional IOU that will be valid as long as the full payment completes);
3. When the chain of prepared messages reaches D, D somehow "commits" the payment.
4. After the commit, A now really does owe B and so on, and D really knows it has been effectively paid by A (in the form of debt from C) so it can ship goods to A.

The most obvious (but wrong) way of structuring this would be for the entire payment chain to be dependent on the reveal of some secret. For example, the "prepare" messages could contain something like "I will pay you as long as you know p such that sha256(p) == h".

The payment flow then starts with D presenting A with an invoice that contains h, so D knows p, but no one else knows. A can then send the "prepare" message to B and B do the same until it reaches D.

When it reaches D, D can be sure that C will pay him because he knows p such that sha256(p) == h. He then reveals p to C, C now reveals it to B and B to A. When A gets it it has a proof that D has received his payment, therefore it is happy to settle it later with B and can prove to an external arbitrator that he has indeed paid D in case D doesn't deliver his products.

Issues with the naïve flow above

What if D never reveals p to C?

Then no one knows what happened. And then 10 years later he arrives at C's house (remember they are friends or have a trust relationship somehow) and demands his payment, and shows p to her in a piece of paper. Or worse: go directly to the court and shows C's message that says "I will pay you as long as you know p such that sha256(p) == h" (but with an actual number instead of "h") and the corresponding p. Now the judge has to decide in favor of D.

Now C was supposed to do the same with B, but C is not playing with this anymore, has lost all contact with B after they did their final settlement many years ago, no one was expecting this.

This clearly can't work. There must be a timeout for these payments.

What if we have a timeout?

Now what if we say the payment expires in one hour. D cannot hold the payment hostage and reveal p after 10 years. It must either reveal it before the timeout or conditional IOU will be void. Solves everything!

Except no, now it's the time we reach the most dark void of the protocol, the flaw that sucks its life into the abyss: subjectivity and ambiguity.

The big issue is that we don't have an independent judge to assert, for example, that D has indeed "revealed" p to C in time. C must acknowledge that voluntarily. C could do it using messages over the internet, but these messages are not reliable. C is not reliable. Clocks are not synchronized. Also if we now require C to confirm it has received p from D then the "prepare" message means nothing, as for D now just knowing p is not enough to claim before an arbitrator that C owes her -- because, again, D also must prove it has shown p to C before the timeout, therefore it needs a new signed acknowledgement from C, or from some other party.

Let's see a few examples.

Subjectivity and perverse incentives

D could send p to C, and C acknowledge it, but then when C goes to B and send it B will not acknowledge it, and claim it's past the time. Now C loses money.

Maybe C can not acknowledge it received anything from D before checking first with B? But B will have to check with A too! And it subverts the entire flow of the thing. And now A has a "proof of payment" (knowledge of p) without even having to acknowledge anything! In this case knowing p or not becomes meaningless as everybody knows p without acknowleding it to anyone else.

But even if A is honest and sends an "acknowledge" message to B, now B can just sit quiet and enjoy the credit it has just earned from A without ever acknowleding anything to C. It's perverted incentives in every step.

Ambiguity

But isn't this a protocol based on trust?, you ask, isn't C trusting that B will behave honestly already? Therefore if B is dishonest C just has to acknowledge his loss and break his chain of trust with B.

No, because C will not know what happened. B can say "I could have sent you an acknowledgement, but was waiting for A, and A didn't send anything" and C won't ever know if that was true. Or B could say "what? You didn't send me p at all", and that could be true. B could have been offline when A sent it, there could have been a broken connection or many other things, and B continues: "I was waiting for you to present me with p, but you didn't, therefore the payment timed out, you can't come here with p now, because now A won't accept it anymore from me". That could be true or could be false, who knows?

Therefore it is impossible for trust relationships and reputations to be maintained in such a system without "good fences".[^ln-solution][^ln-issue]

[^ln-solution]: The Lightning Network has a solution for the problem of the decentralized commit. [^ln-issue]: Ironically this same ambiguity problem is being faced by the Lightning Network community when trying to create a reputation/payment system to prevent routing abuses. It seems simple when you first think about it: "let each node manage its own trust", but in fact it is somewhat impossible.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Boardthreads

This was a very badly done service for turning a Trello list into a helpdesk UI.

Surprisingly, it had more paying users than Websites For Trello, which I was working on simultaneously and dedicating much more time to it.

The Neo4j database I used for this was a very poor choice, it was probably the cause of all the bugs.

-https://github.com/fiatjaf/boardthreads

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Reclamações

• Como não houve resposta, estou enviando de novo
• Democracia na América
• A "política" é a arena da vitória do estatismo
• A biblioteca infinita
• Família e propriedade
• Memórias de quando eu aprendi a ler
• A chatura Kelsen
• O VAR é o grande equalizador
• Não tem solução
• A estrutura lógica do livro didático
• "House" dos economistas e o Estado
• Revista Educativa
• Cultura Inglesa e aprendizado extra-escolar
• Veterano não é dono de bixete
• Personagens de jogos e símbolos
• Músicas grudentas e conversas
• Obra aqui do lado
• Propaganda
• Ver Jesus com os olhos da carne
• Processos Antifrágeis
• Cadeias, crimes e cidadãos de bem
• Castas hindus em nova chave
• Método científico
• Xampu
• Thafne venceu o Soletrando 2008.
• Empreendendorismo de boteco
• Problemas com Russell Kirk
• Pequenos problemas que o Estado cria para a sociedade e que não são sempre lembrados

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mcldsp

A tool that migrates data from a c-lightning SQLite3 database into PostgreSQL so one can keep Lightning channels and everything but change the underlying database.

It's a mostly manual thing, and I keep following changes in the database schema on c-lightning's GitHub repo so I can update the migration specs whenever needed.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/mcldsp

See also

• Sparko
• trustedcoin

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jq-web

I took jq's C code and compiled it with Emscripten, then added a wrapper so it would run on a browser with either asm.js or WebAssembly.

I believe I needed it for requesthub.xyz but I'm not sure I ever used it there. I also intended to use it on another (secret) project that relied on heavy data manipulation on the client, but it turned out to be too slow for that so I opted to use JavaScript directly. Later I used it for a client-side Etleneum simulator, but removed it later as it was impossible to replicate most of the Etleneum functionality on the client so the simulator was too broken and confusing.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/jq-web

See also

-

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Cadeias, crimes e cidadãos de bem

A idéia de ficar dentro duma dessas penitenciárias superlotadas é aterrorizante para qualquer cidadão de bem, logo, nenhum cidadão de bem comete crimes puníveis dessa maneira. Mas os cidadãos de bem já não os cometeriam de qualquer modo, é um outro tipo de gente, que não o cidadão de bem, que comete os piores crimes (não quero dizer que o "cidadão de bem" é melhor do que o outro absolutamente, estou só usando um conceito mais-ou-menos identificável).

O problema disso é que todos esses mesmos cidadãos de bem imaginam que a existência da cadeia e da punição-padrão movida pelo Estado afasta do crime milhões de pessoas que, sem isso, cometeriam crimes horríveis, mas que com isso vivem vidas normais.

A verdade, me parece, é que quem fica assim tão aterrorizado com a idéia da cadeia e da punição-padrão é a pessoa que já por natureza não cometeria esses crimes.

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The flaw of "just use paypal/coinbase" arguments

For the millionth time I read somewhere that "custodial bitcoin is not bitcoin" and that "if you're going to use custodial, better use Paypal". No, actually it was "better use Coinbase", but I had heard the "PayPal" version in the past.

There are many reasons why using PayPal is not the same as using a custodial Bitcoin service or wallet that are obvious and not relevant here, such as the fact that you can't have Bitcoin balances on Bitcoin (or maybe now you can? but you can't send it around); plus all the reasons that are also valid for Coinbase such as you having to give all your data and selfies of yourself and your government documents and so on -- but let's ignore these reasons for now.

The most important reason why it isn't the same thing is that when you're using Coinbase you are stuck in Coinbase. Your Coinbase coins cannot be used to pay anyone that isn't in Coinbase. So Coinbase-style custodianship doesn't help Bitcoin. If you want to move out of Coinbase you have to withdraw from Coinbase.

Custodianship on Lightning is of a very different nature. You can pay people from other custodial platforms and people that are hosting their own Lightning nodes and so on.

That kind of custodianship doesn't do any harm to anyone, doesn't fracture the network, doesn't reduce the network effect of Lightning, in fact it increases it.

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My personal experience (as a complete ignorant) of the blocksize debate in 2017

In the beginning of 2017 I didn't know Bitcoin was having a "blocksize debate". I had stopped paying attention to Bitcoin in 2014 after reading Tim Swanson's book on shitcoineiry and was surprise people even care about Bitcoin still while Ethereum and other fancy things were around.

My introduction to the subject was this interview with Andrew Stone and Andrew Clifford from Bitcoin Unlimited (still don't know who these guys are). I've listened to it and kinda liked the conspiracy theory about "a group of developers trying, against miners and users, to control the whole ecosystem by not allowing blocks to grow" (actually, if you listen to this interview that announced the creation of Blockstream and the sidechains whitepaper it does sound like a government agent bribing all the Core developers into forming a consortium that will turn Bitcoin into an Ethereum-like shitcoin under their control -- but this is just a useless digression).

Some time later I listened to this interview with Jimmy Song and was introduced to two hard forks and conspiracies and New York Agreement and got excited because I didn't care about Bitcoin (I'm ashamed to remember this feeling) and wanted to see things changing, people fighting, Bitcoin burning, for no reason. Oddly, what I grasped from the interview was that Jimmy Song was defending the agreement and expecting everybody to fulfill it.

When the day actually come and "Bitcoin Cash" forked I looked at it with pity because it looked clearly a failure from the beginning, but I still cheered for it a bit, still not knowing anything about the debate, besides the fact that blocks were bigger on BCH, which looked like a very reductionist explanation to me.

"Of course it's not just making blocks bigger, that would be too simple, they probably have a very complex plan I'm not apt to understand", I thought.

To my surprise the entire argument was actually just that: bigger blocks bigger blocks. I came to that conclusion by listening to tomwoods.com/1064, a debate in which reasonable arguments faced childish claims. That debate gave me perspective and was a clear, undisputed win from Jameson Lopp against Roger Ver.

Actually some time before that I had listened to another Tom Woods Show episode thinking it was going to be an episode about Bitcoin, but in fact it was just propaganda about a debate I had almost forgotten. And nothing about Bitcoin, everything about "Bitcoin Cash" and how there were two Bitcoins, one legitimate and the other unlegitimate.

So, from the perspective of someone that came to the debate totally fresh and only listens to the big-blocker arguments for a long time, they still don't convince anyone with some common sense (as I would like to think of myself), they just sound like mad dogs and everything goes against themselves.

---

Fast forward to the present and with much more understanding of the issues in place I started digging some material from 2016-2017 about the debate to try to get more context, and found this ridiculous interview with Mike Hearn. It isn't a waste of time to listen to it if you're not familiar with the debate from that time.

As I should have probably expected from my experience with Epicenter.tv, both the interviewers agree with Mike Hearn about his ridiculous claims about how (not his words) we have to subsidize the few thousand current Bitcoin users by preventing fees from increase and there are no trade-offs to doing that -- and even with everybody agreeing they all manage to sound stupid. There's not a single phrase that is defendable in the entire interview, no criticisms make any sense, it makes me feel bad for the the guy as he feels so self-assured and obviouslyright.

After knowing about these and other adventures of stupid people with high influences in the Bitcoin world trying to impose their idiocy on others it feels even more odd and unexpected to find Bitcoin in the right track. Generally in politics the most dumb wins, but apparently not in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a miracle.

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Alternatives to Drivechain

If Drivechain doesn't get soft-forked into Bitcoin, the alternatives people are left with are:

• Altcoins. People who want super-powers (privacy, smart contracts, cheap transactions) move their stake to shitcoins. This doesn't make much sense because even if altcoins had the necessary technology they wouldn't have the base money with which to use the technology, but still this remains an option.
• Fully-custodial and trusted systems. Instead of moving their money to a sidechain secured by Drivechain people can use a centralized service with much less safety and subject to all kinds of regulations, hacks and government takedowns.
• Federated sidechains, which are the same as custodial systems, but with distributed trust and maybe less, maybe more government involvement.
• Less secure sidechain-like constructions, like sidechains secured by a multisig of a fixed set of entities with names, or BTC tokens in other blockchains guaranteed by a collateral denominated in shitcoins which tends to zero.
• Corporate takeover. Big banks and giant corporations start buying all the coins and exposing part of them through their closed systems to normal people. Instead of an open network and free market as everybody expected, all meaningful activity now happens inside these legacy evil entities that are already sold to governments from the start.

Every time one person goes against Drivechain without proposing something else better, they're condemning bitcoiners to one or many of the above forever.

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Como não houve resposta, estou enviando de novo

Recebi um email assim, dizendo a mesma coisa repetida. Eu havia recebido já da primeira vez, mas como era só uma informação já esperada, julguei que não precisava responder dizendo "chegou, obrigado!" e não o fiz.

Reconheço, porém, que dada a instabilidade desses serviços de email nunca ninguém sabe se a mensagem chegou ou não. Ela pode ter sido jogada na lixeira do spam, ou pode ter falhado por outros motivos, e aí não existe um jeito garantido de saber se houve falha, é um enorme problema sempre. Por isso a necessidade de uma resposta "chegou, obrigado!".

Mas não podemos parar por aí. A resposta "chegou, obrigado!" também está sujeita aos mesmos trâmites e riscos da mensagem original. Seria necessário, porém, que assim que a outra pessoa recebesse o "chegou, obrigado!" deveria então responder com um "recebi a sua confirmação". Caso não o fizesse, eu poderia achar que a minha mensagem não havia chegado e dias depois enviá-la de novo: "como não houve resposta à minha confirmação, estou enviando de novo".

E assim por diante (eu ia escrever mais um parágrafo só pelo drama, mas desisti. Já deu pra entender).

---

• Ripple and the problem of the decentralized commit, esta situação que acabo de viver é mais um exemplo prático disto.

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Per Bylund's insight

The firm doesn't exist because, like Coase said, it is inefficient to operate in a fully open-market and production processes need some bubbles of central planning.

Instead, what happens is that a firm is created because an entrepreneur is doing a new thing (and here I imagine that doing an old thing in a new context also counts as doing a new thing, but I didn't read his book), and for that new thing there is no market, there are no specialized workers offering the services needed, nor other businesses offering the higher-order goods that entrepreneur wants, so he must do all by himself.

So the entrepreneur goes and hires workers and buys materials more generic than he wanted and commands these to build what he wants exactly. It is less efficient than if he could buy the precise services and goods he wanted and combine those to yield the product he envisaged, but it accomplishes the goal.

Later, when that specific market evolves, it's natural that specialized workers and producers of the specific factors begin to appear, and the market gets decentralized.

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Obra aqui do lado

Tem quase um ano que estão fazendo uma obra aqui do lado e eu não ganhei nenhuma indenização. Numa sociedade sem Estado isso jamais teria acontecido.

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idea: Patreon, but simple, and without subscription

Basically instead of a subscription and becoming member of something, you just get a forum for your inner circle and people get lnurl-pay codes they can use to donate. Some amount of donations is required to remain in the group (like x per month), but if you donate more than that on the beginning you can stay until your credits expire.

Every time someone donates a notice is posted in the group page.

Perhaps that could be an @lntxbot feature.

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On "zk-rollups" applied to Bitcoin

ZK rollups make no sense in bitcoin because there is no "cheap calldata". all data is already ~~cheap~~ expensive calldata.

There could be an onchain zk verification that allows succinct signatures maybe, but never a rollup.

What happens is: you can have one UTXO that contains multiple balances on it and in each transaction you can recreate that UTXOs but alter its state using a zk to compress all internal transactions that took place.

The blockchain must be aware of all these new things, so it is in no way "L2".

And you must have an entity responsible for that UTXO and for conjuring the state changes and zk proofs.

But on bitcoin you also must keep the data necessary to rebuild the proofs somewhere else, I'm not sure how can the third party responsible for that UTXO ensure that happens.

I think such a construct is similar to a credit card corporation: one central party upon which everybody depends, zero interoperability with external entities, every vendor must have an account on each credit card company to be able to charge customers, therefore it is not clear that such a thing is more desirable than solutions that are truly open and interoperable like Lightning, which may have its defects but at least fosters a much better environment, bringing together different conflicting parties, custodians, anyone.

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O custo-Ricardinho

Sei que o Atlético tem vários problemas. Sei que várias reclamações que vários atleticanos diferentes fazem têm fundamento e que os vários problemas do Atlético se misturam e fazem o time jogar mal, absurdamente mal, como jogou hoje contra o Internacional. Mas vou me dar o direito de ignorar todas os diversos tipos de falhas e problemas do Atlético e atribuir tudo de mau que nos aconteceu recentemente a um único elemento: Ricardinho. Breve história do campeonato atleticano O campeonato começou com o Atlético jogando bonito e vencendo com facilidade os inimigos, com um time leve, que passava a bola rápido, jogava no contra-ataque, um ataque rápido, toques rápidos ou enfiadas de bola dos volantes faziam com que Tardelli e Éder saíssem na cara do gol a todo instante e tudo era felicidade.

Mas aí vieram os problemas, aos poucos: o time não conseguia utilizar toda a sua rapidez contra adversários muito fechados. Dessa maneira veio o empate contra o Santo André, o empate com o Botafogo, o empate contra o Vitória, uma vitória suada contra o Fluminense (que jogou fechado no Mineirão), a derrota catastrófica para um Goiás que nem encostou na bola direito. E a derrota para o Flamengo no Maracanã.

Nessas, inventaram que o Atlético ia mal contra times fechados porque não sabia tocar a bola, tocar a bola de lado, "procurando um espaço", faltava ao Atlético, diziam, uma figura centralizadora, que parasse o jogo, parasse a correria, distribuisse com inteligência a bola, para que o Atlético furasse a defesa adversária com inteligência e paciência, e não com correria como vivia tentando. Inventaram isso, e começaram a acreditar - acho que todas as pessoas começaram a acreditar, inclusive o Celso Roth e eu mesmo.

E onde estava a solução: no camisa 10.

A paciência ricardiana

Jamais apreciei a idéia fixa que havia (e talvez, infelizmente, ainda haja) na cabeça da maioria dos torcedores do Atlético, de que um time só é bom quando tem um "camisa 10", cujas características são conhecidas por todos: tem o poder mágico de arrumar o meio-de-campo, dar criatividade ao time, lançar a bola e passá-la com plasticidade e leveza e resolver todos os problemas; mas cujos exemplos no futebol brasileiro e mundial são muito escassos. Essa fixação, creio eu, não é um fenômeno natural: é conseqüência direta do imbróglio Ziza-Gallardo do ano do centenário. Foi lá que inventaram esse negócio de camisa 10 e aí ficou nessa até recentemente (ou até agora). O próprio presidente do Atlético, Alexandre Kalil, disse em entrevista concedida antes de contratar Ricardinho que o único exemplo que era apontado quando se perguntava sobre quem poderia ser o tal camisa 10 que a torcida tanto queria era Ricardinho. Ricardinho, Ricardinho, Ricardinho. O nome se confunde com o número da camisa. Ricardinho, essa entidade mística, pirilâmpica e luminosa que transforma times rápidos e burros em times inteligentes.

E trouxeram o tal camisa 10. O único exemplar vivo e o único que a torcida aceitaria: Ricardinho. E ele foi saudado exatamente como a solução para o problema da correria. Ricardinho era a expressão da "paciência".

Segue a história

Se esqueceram, porém, que a inteligência de Ricardinho não era gratuita. Ela nos era dada em troca da velocidade, da leveza do time, dos passes rápidos, das enfiadas de bola, da correria que confundia o adversário, das jogadas que surgiam sem que os próprios jogadores soubessem como. As jogadas do Atlético pararam de surgir naturalmente. Agora teriam que partir todas elas da cabeça da mente pensante centralizada: Ricardinho.

Mas isso era secundário. Agora o problema principal estava resolvido: havia o camisa 10 e poderíamos "passar a bola" e "encontrar um espaço".

As vitórias vieram de novo. Contra Barueri e Santos, que foram times abertos, o Atlético jogou sem seu camisa 10 e foi muito bem. Contra São Paulo, jogou na retranca, e aí funcionou a paciência ricardiana. E contra Vitória o Atlético passou a bola, passou a bola, passou a bola o jogo inteiro e conseguiu fazer um mísero gol, contra um time atestadamente ruim, e justamente numa jogada de velocidade louca e não-pensada que não contou com a participação de Ricardinho.

E aí Ricardinho passou a ser o centro do time. E simultaneamente a coisa desandou. Fluminense, Flamengo, Coritiba e Internacional. Ricardinho, por melhor jogador que seja (perceba: eu jamais diria que se trata de um mal jogador, pelo contrário), não consegue, sozinho, pensar em tudo, arrumar espaços onde não se pode arrumar, com o time todo lento e parado. O time joga em função dele, e por isso está parado, sempre parado, morto. E não há espaço que apareça. É por isso que perdemos jogos em que dominamos completamente a bola: dominamo-la, mas não há mais o que fazer com a bola, porque as jogadas loucas da correria não saíam mais, porque não havia correria, porque tudo o que se deve fazer quando se tem um camisa 10 no time é tocar para o camisa 10. E passar a bola. Passar a bola, passar a bola.

Os times fechados

A coisa desandou com Ricardinho, é certo, porque o Atlético não consegue vencer times fechados. Os que discordarem de meu ponto vão lembrar que o time sem Ricardinho - que era outro time, era a correria e tal - também não conseguia vencer adversários fechados. É verdade. Mas deve-se levar em conta não só o resultado final, mas as chances, porque futebol não é exato, mas também não é aleatório, é probabilístico: em um duelo entre dois times, um bom e um ruim, não se pode afirmar que o bom vai vencer, mas se pode ter quase certeza de que, em se jogando 10 vezes, o time melhor vencerá mais de 5 partidas, só pra dar um exemplo.

Então a pergunta é: o time antigo do Atlético, aquele que perdeu para aquele Goiás retrancado até a alma no Mineirão, era ou não era melhor do que o atual, que perdeu, pelo mesmo placar para o incrivelmente retrancado Internacional no Mineirão? E a resposta é: Era. O time antigo, o time da correria e da burrice, o time sem camisa-10-pensante, era melhor. Eu sei disso, você sabe disso, toda a torcida sabe disso. Naquela ocasião [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvY9G3975MA] a torcida não vaiou o time como o fez contra o Internacional, e isso é a indicação de que a torcida preferia aquele time, e de que aquele era um time melhor do que o atual e também melhor do que o Goiás, mesmo tendo perdido - o que não se pode dizer do time atual em relação ao Internacional. O total de chances criadas naquele jogo por aquele time, criadas quase que sem se saber por que, tudo no meio da correria, é a prova de que o time antigo era melhor. É a prova de que um time orientado para tocar a bola para o camisa 10 não funciona.

Soluções possíveis

Sei que não há mais tempo de salvar o ano, mas como mesmo que houvesse tempo de nada adiantaria eu escrever aqui qualquer sugestão, vou escrever mesmo assim e quem sabe fica aí pro próximo ano, ou quem sabe fica aí só pra eu e mais meia dúzia lermos e fim.

É certo que o Atlético não pode continuar jogando assim como está. A velocidade tem que voltar. Tem que voltar a correria e a loucura (não que Ricardinho deva ser mandado embora, apesar de eu achar essa uma boa idéia, mas ele precisa ser reposicionado no time). Então como fica o problema do furo da retranca adversária?

Perguntando a quem sabe mais de futebol do que eu, arranjei duas soluções possíveis:

(a) chutar de fora da área: ora, o Atlético tem vários pretensos chutadores de longa distância: o próprio Ricardinho, Evandro, Corrêa, Tardelli, Éder e até o Jonílson. Mas não chuta. Não entendo o porquê disso. Até vinha chutando em algumas partidas aí, mas parou, e a parada coincide mais ou menos com as partidas de nosso maior desgosto (essas últimas aí). O Flamengo só faz gol chutando de fora da área ou em jogada individual, não tem uma jogada coletiva (ou pelo menos não teve nos jogos que eu vi: contra Barueri, Atlético e Náutico).

(b) correr no fundo e cruzar pro meio da pequena área: essa é a melhor jogada do futebol, funciona quase sempre, é muito melhor do que os cruzamentos normais que se vê pedir pelas arquibancadas do Mineirão, é bela de se ver e, creio, fácil de se fazer. Mas é fácil só pra quem está acostumado a ela. Em várias oportunidades hoje mesmo contra o Internacional nossos jogadores poderiam tê-la feito, Corrêa, Márcio Araújo e Éder Luís poderiam tê-la feito, mas não sabem, sei lá, não querem fazer. O único jogador que faz esse tipo de jogada atualmente, mesmo assim só de vez em quando, é o Thiago Feltri (lembre-se dos dois pênaltis que ele sofreu recentemente), mas todo mundo vaia o sujeito.

Há, porém, um jogador que já passou pelo Atlético e que sabia fazer esse tipo de jogada com maestria. Não que ele seja a solução de tudo, mas acho que seria uma excelente peça no elenco: Danilinho. O problema de Danilinho é a estigma que pesa sobre ele, a de torcedores preconceituosos que o incluem entre um agrupamento místico e inerentemente ruim chamado "geração Série B", uma grande bobagem que inventaram aí.

Acabou-se o que eu tinha pra dizer.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

About CouchDB

In this talk from 2009, Michael Miller highlights some of the core features of CouchDB, those that would make it appeal to the developer public:

• Bi-directional incremental replication
• Custom views built with Javascript functions and saved to disk
• Filtered replication, so users can get part of the data
• Couchapps: lightweight web apps served directly from the database

What is the state of these awesome features today, 2016?

The replication protocol, which supports multi-master, has changed little, and has received criticism, but, as it is, it is the only open replication protocol out there, the only one that stands the fight, and the only one people were able to implement in the browser. PouchDB is probably the main reason people adopt CouchDB today. There are other things that talk that same replication protocol, so that's a thing.

Continuous replication, however, is too heavy, uses too much memory, and I don't think the idea of keeping two or more CouchDB databases in continuous replication today is good as it sounded back then.

Custom views always seemed to me as a gift from heavens, the solution to the dilemma between normalization and data duplication, they should be fast and flexible and support any use-case. That's how it sounds in that Miller presentation. However, today most CouchDB seem to be approaching views as just a confusing complicated hard way to do simple queries, like getting a list of items by the name of the category they're in, and other boring queries you can imagine.

This whole problem gave rise to the Cloudant Query Language and pouchdb-find. The second advertises itself as "inspired by MongoDB, it provides a simple API with operators like $gt (greater-than) and $eq (equals), so you can write less code to achieve the same performance as the map/reduce API". In other words: everybody seem to be looking at CouchDB as just a very poor and limited MongoDB.

To be fair, that is in fact the only sane way to approach CouchDB views, as other approaches, like the monolithic, cannot be used with a lot of data, and you must be sure your blocks of data will not get too big if you're willing to put them in massive documents.

Filtered replication was implemented, but it is slow to the point that no one recommends that you use them. I imagine the original idea was to mix filtered replication with Couchapps to make full-featured applications that the users would run on their own CouchDB instances, syncing back and forth from centralized CouchDB instances.

This idea would have been even more powerful if done with PouchDB on the user side -- since, I guess, no one has ever succeeded in distributing a CouchDB application to end users that ran their own CouchDB --, however the inefficiency of filtered replication made all these dreams come apart.

From the ruins of filtered replication emerged the db-per-user idea, which is the same filtered replication, but in such a way that a user owns the entire database and controls a PouchDB instance that replicates to and from that centralized database. The server may do things with the data stored in the CouchDB under its control, but the user at the same time has a copy of the entire data and it supposedly can work with it offline. This is a great idea, but if we look closely, it is much more limited than the original vision.

About Couchapps, the special database features that powered them in the first place were left aside as offline-first database-per-user PouchDB apps started to gain hearts and minds, and on the other side apps that would rely on a single server started to require features, like sophisticated authorization and per-document access control, that could only be provided by putting a normal server in front of CouchDB.

Like what happened to views, this is a sad thing. By trying to do things in the "regular" way, CouchDB users ignored CouchDB innovative ideas and made it look like a limited weird piece of software that lacks so many features that you must write a ton of middleware (that, of course, cannot be run inside CouchDB, what a limited server it is) to make it do simple stuff.

I must say, before it is too late, that I'm not in the big enterprise game, so I don't know how (if any) enormous software companies are using CouchDB and how it is working for them, this is just my impression from the low end of things.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Money Supply Measurement

What if we measured money supply measured by probability of being spent -- or how near it is to the point in which it is spent? bonds could be money if they're treated as that by their owners, but they are likely to be not near the spendpoint as cash, other assets can also be considered money but they might be even farther.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Scala is such a great language

Scala is amazing. The type system has the perfect balance between flexibility and powerfulness. match statements are great. You can write imperative code that looks very nice and expressive (and I haven't tried writing purely functional things yet). Everything is easy to write and cheap and neovim integration works great.

But Java is not great. And the fact that Scala is a JVM language doesn't help because over the years people have written stuff that depends on Java libraries -- and these Java libraries are not as safe as the Scala libraries, they contain reflection, slowness, runtime errors, all kinds of horrors.

Scala is also very tightly associated with Akka, the actor framework, and Akka is a giant collection of anti-patterns. Untyped stuff, reflection, dependency on JVM, basically a lot of javisms. I just arrived and I don't know anything about the Scala history or ecosystem or community, but I have the impression that Akka has prevent more adoption of Scala from decent people that aren't Java programmers.

But luckily there is a solution -- or two solutions: ScalaJS is a great thing that exists. It transpiles Scala code into JavaScript and it runs on NodeJS or in a browser!

Scala Native is a much better deal, though, it compiles to LLVM and then to binary code and you can have single binaries that run directly without a JVM -- not that the single JARs are that bad though, they are great and everybody has Java so I'll take that anytime over C libraries or NPM-distributed software, but direct executables even better. Scala Native just needs a little more love and some libraries and it will be the greatest thing in a couple of years.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Eltoo

Read the paper, it's actually nice and small. You can read only everything up to section 4.2 and it will be enough. Done.

Ok, you don't want to. Or you tried but still want to read here.

Eltoo is a way of keeping payment channel state that works better than the original scheme used in Lightning. Since Lightning is a bunch of different protocols glued together, it can It replace just the part the previously dealed with keeping the payment channel.

Eltoo works like this: A and B want a payment channel, so they create a multisig transaction with deposits from both -- or from just one, doesn't matter. That transaction is only spendable if both cooperate. So if one of them is unresponsive or non-cooperative the other must have a way to get his funds back, so they also create an update transaction but don't publish it to the blockchain. That update transaction spends to a settlement transaction that then distributes the money back to A and B as their balances say.

If they are cooperative they can change the balances of the channel by just creating new update transactions and settlement transactions and number them like 1, 2, 3, 4 etc.

Solid arrows means a transaction is presigned to spend only that previous other transaction; dotted arrows mean it's a floating transaction that can spend any of the previous.

Why do they need and update and a settlement transaction?

Because if B publishes update2 (in which his balances were greater) A needs some time to publish update4 (the latest, which holds correct state of balances).

Each update transaction can be spent by any newer update transaction immediately or by its own specific settlement transaction only after some time -- or some blocks.

Hopefully you got that.

How do they close the channel?

If they're cooperative they can just agree to spend the funding transaction, that first multisig transaction I mentioned, to whatever destinations they want. If one party isn't cooperating the other can just publish the latest update transaction, wait a while, then publish its settlement transaction.

How is this better than the previous way of keeping channel states?

Eltoo is better because nodes only have to keep the last set of update and settlement transactions. Before they had to keep all intermediate state updates.

If it is so better why didn't they do it first?

Because they didn't have the idea. And also because they needed an update to the Bitcoin protocol that allowed the presigned update transactions to spend any of the previous update transactions. This protocol update is called SIGHASH_NOINPUT[^anyprevout], you've seen this name out there. By marking a transaction with SIGHASH_NOINPUT it enters a mystical state and becomes a floating transaction that can be bound to any other transaction as long as its unlocking script matches the locking script.

Why can't update2 bind itself to update4 and spend that?

Good question. It can. But then it can't anymore, because Eltoo uses OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY to ensure that doesn't actually check not a locktime, but a sequence. It's all arcane stuff.

And then Eltoo update transactions are numbered and their lock/unlock scripts will only match if a transaction is being spent by another one that's greater than it.

Do Eltoo channels expire?

No.

What is that "on-chain protocol" they talk about in the paper?

That's just an example to guide you through how the off-chain protocol works. Read carefully or don't read it at all. The off-chain mechanics is different from the on-chain mechanics. Repeating: the on-chain protocol is useless in the real world, it's just a didactic tool.

[^anyprevout]: Later SIGHASH_NOINPUT was modified to fit better with Taproot and Schnorr signatures and renamed to SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Truthcoin as a spacechain

To be clear, the term "spacechain" here refers only to the general concept of blindly merge-mined (BMM) chains without a native money-token, not including the "spacecoins".

The basic idea is that for Truthcoin/Hivemind to work we need

1. Balances of Votecoin tokens, i.e. a way to keep track of who owns how much of the oracle corporation;
2. Bitcoin tokens to be used for buying and selling prediction market shares, i.e. money to gamble;
3. A blockchain, i.e. some timestamping service that emits blocks ordered with transactions and can keep track of internal state and change the state -- including the balances of the Votecoin tokens and of the Bitcoin tokens that are assigned to individual prediction markets according to predefined rules;

A spacechain, i.e. a blindly merge-mined chain, gives us 1 and 3. We can just write any logic for that and that should be very easy. It doesn't give us 2, and it also has the problem of how the spacechain users can pay the spacechain miners (which is why the spacecoins were envisioned in the first place, but we don't have spacecoins here).

But remember we have votecoins already. Votecoins (VTC) should represent a share in the oracle corporation, which means they entitle their holders to some revenue -- even though they also burden their holders with the duty to vote in event outcomes (at the risk of losing part of their own votecoin balance) --, and they can be exchanged, so we can assume they will have some value.

So we could in theory use these valuable tokens to pay the spacechain miners. That wouldn't be great because it pervert their original purpose and wouldn't solve the problem 2 from above -- unless we also used the votecoins to bet in which case they wouldn't be just another shitcoin in the planet with no network effect competing against Bitcoin and would just cause harm to humanity.

What we can do instead is to create a native mechanism for issuing virtual Bitcoin tokens (vBTC) in this chain, collaterized by votecoins, then we can use these vBTC to both gamble (solve problem 2) and pay miners (fix the hole in the spacechain BMM design).

For example, considering the VTC to be worth 0.001 BTC, any VTC holder could put 0.005 VTC and get 0.001 vBTC, then use to gamble or sell to others who want to gamble. The VTC holder still technically owns the VTC and can and must still participate in the oracle decisions. They just have to pay the BTC back before they can claim their VTC back if they want to send it elsewhere.

They stand to gain by selling vBTC if there is a premium for vBTC over BTC (i.e. people want to gamble) and then rebuying vBTC back once that premium goes away or reverts itself.

For this scheme to work the chain must know the exchange rate between VTC and BTC, which can be provided by the oracle corporation itself.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Como conversar com esquerdistas

(notas de uma conversa com P.S., 12/3/17)

Escutar o que ele está falando. E se o discurso dele é só uma coleção de lugares-comuns da esquerda (como deve ser, provavelmente), não tem problema. Fazer perguntas que tentam esclarecer o sentimento por trás do discurso (por exemplo, perguntar se o esquerdista tem medo de que Michel Temer vá empobrecer o Estado), e se a resposta for, de novo, um discurso pronto, repetir o processo (por exemplo, perguntar se o esquerdista tem medo de que o Estado pobre não poderá prover educação para a população), até chegar às raízes íntimas da inquietação que aquele esquerdista sente que tem alguma relação com aquele ponto.

Quando chega-se a esse ponto, o serviço já está feito. O serviço de neutralizar a neurose para deixar a pessoa lidar com suas causas que se escondiam por baixo de um mar de racionalizações e discursos políticos.

Um exemplo é o de que a pessoa foi assaltada. Nos momentos que se seguiram ao assalto, o sentimento de impotência e desorientação que ela experimentou era grande demais para ser tolerado ("por que eu? por que agora?") e então ela usou discursos que tinha ouvido para criar uma explicação para tudo aquilo, e a explicação acabou sendo a de que a falta de educação básica é que cria assaltantes, e essa educação precisa ser fornecida pelo Estado etc.

Também não precisa ser tão traumático assim. Pode ser um fato que não envolveu nenhuma violência física, como a dor que ela sentiu ao ouvir um tio, que era professor infantil, numa roda de conversa, narrar, com alguma tristeza que ele tentava esconder, o fato de que fora demitido.

Talvez este seja o processo que Olavo tentou fazer, sempre sem sucesso (já que, imagino, sem muito empenho), ao perguntar às pessoas "de onde elas tiraram essa idéia".

É bastante importante, talvez a parte mais importante, a cada momento deste processo (e de todos, mas estamos falando deste), notar em nós mesmos que o que o que estamos fazendo, essas perguntas todas, é de certa forma também um discurso (perceba que tem até um manual ensinando, que é este texto mesmo), e que ele também deve ter suas origens neuróticas.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Splitpages

The simplest possible service: it splitted PDF pages in half.

Created specially to solve the problem of those scanned books that come with two pages side-by-side as if they were a single page and are much harder to read on Kindle because of that.

It required me to learn about Heroku Buildpacks though, and fork or contribute to a Heroku Buildpack that embedded a mupdf binary.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/splitpages
• https://splitpages.herokuapp.com/

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

A chatura Kelsen

Já presenciei várias vezes este mesmo fenômeno: há um grupo de amigos ou proto-amigos conversando alegremente sobre o conservadorismo, o tradicionalismo, o anti-comunismo, o liberalismo econômico, o livre-mercado, a filosofia olavista. É um momento incrível porque para todos ali é sempre tão difícil encontrar alguém com quem conversar sobre esses assuntos.

Eis que um deles fez faculdade de direito. Tendo feito faculdade de direito por acreditar que essa lhe traria algum conhecimento (já que todos os filósofos de antigamente faziam faculdade de direito!) esse sujeito que fez faculdade de direito, ao contrário dos demais, não toma conhecimento de que a sua faculdade é uma nulidade, uma vergonha, uma época da sua vida jogada fora -- e crê que são valiosos os conteúdos que lhe foram transmitidos pelos professores que estão ali para ajudar os alunos a se preparem para o exame da OAB.

Começa a falar de Kelsen. A teoria pura do direito, hermenêutica, filosofia do direito. A conversa desanda. Ninguém sabe o que dizer. A filosofia pura do direito não está errada porque é apenas uma lógica pura, e como tal não pode ser refutada; e por não ter qualquer relação com o mundo não há como puxar um outro assunto a partir dela e sair daquele território. Os jovens filósofos perdem ali as próximas duas horas falando de Kelsen, Kelsen. Uma presença que os ofende, que parece errada, que tem tudo para estar errada, mas está certa. Certa e inútil, ela lhes devora as idéias, que são digeridas pela teoria pura do direito.

É imperativo estabelecer esta regra: só é permitido falar de Kelsen se suas idéias não forem abordadas ou levadas em conta. Apenas elogios ou ofensas serão tolerados: Kelsen era um bom homem; Kelsen era um bobão. Pronto.

---

Eis aqui um exemplo gravado do fenômeno descrito acima: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKb8Ij5ThvA: o Flavio Morgenstern todo simpático, elogiando o outro, falando coisas interessantes sobre o mundo; e o outro, que devia ser amigo dele antes de entrar para a faculdade de direito, começa a falar de Kelsen, com bastante confiança de que aquilo é relevante, e dá-lhe Kelsen, filosofia do direito, toda essa chatice tremenda.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Criteria for activating Drivechain on Bitcoin

Drivechain is, in essence, just a way to give Bitcoin users the option to deposit their coins in a hashrate escrow. If Bitcoin is about coin ownership, in theory there should be no objection from anyone on users having the option to do that: my keys, my coins etc. In other words: even if you think hashrate escrows are a terrible idea and miners will steal all coins from that, you shouldn't care about what other people do with their own money.

There are only two reasonable objections that could be raised by normal Bitcoin users against Drivechain:

1. Drivechain adds code complexity to bitcoind
2. Drivechain perverts miner incentives of the Bitcoin chain

If these two objections can be reasonably answered there remains no reason for not activating the Drivechain soft-fork.

1

To address 1 we can just take a look at the code once it's done (which I haven't) but from my understanding the extra validation steps needed for ensuring hashrate escrows work are very minimal and self-contained, they shouldn't affect anything else and the risks of introducing some catastrophic bug are roughly zero (or the same as the risks of any of the dozens of refactors that happen every week on Bitcoin Core).

For the BMM/BIP-301 part, again the surface is very small, but we arguably do not need that at all, since anyprevout (once that is merged) enables blind merge-mining in way that is probably better than BIP-301, and that soft-fork is also very simple, plus already loved and accepted by most of the Bitcoin community, implemented and reviewed on Bitcoin Inquisition and is live on the official Bitcoin Core signet.

2

To address 2 we must only point that BMM ensures that Bitcoin miners don't have to do any extra work to earn basically all the fees that would come from the sidechain, as competition for mining sidechain blocks would bid the fee paid to Bitcoin miners up to the maximum economical amount. It is irrelevant if there is MEV on the sidechain or not, everything that reaches the Bitcoin chain does that in form of fees paid in a single high-fee transaction paid to any Bitcoin miner, regardless of them knowing about the sidechain or not. Therefore, there are no centralization pressure or pervert mining incentives that can affect Bitcoin land.

Sometimes it's argued that Drivechain may facilitate the ocurrence of a transaction paying a fee so high it would create incentives for reorging the Bitcoin chain. There is no reason to believe Drivechain would make this more likely than an actual attack than anyone can already do today or, as has happened, some rich person typing numbers wrong on his wallet. In fact, if a drivechain is consistently paying high fees on its BMM transactions that is an incentive for Bitcoin miners to keep mining those transactions one after the other and not harm the users of sidechain by reorging Bitcoin.

Moreover, there are many factors that exist today that can be seen as centralization vectors for Bitcoin mining: arguably one of them is non-blind merge mining, of which we have a (very convoluted) example on the Stacks shitcoin, and introducing the possibility of blind merge-mining on Bitcoin would basically remove any reasonable argument for having such schemes, therefore reducing the centralizing factor of them.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Castas hindus em nova chave

Shudras buscam o máximo bem para os seus próprios corpos; vaishyas o máximo bem para a sua própria vida terrena e a da sua família; kshatriyas o máximo bem para a sociedade e este mundo terreno; brâmanes buscam o máximo bem.

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Qual é o economista? (piadas)

O economista americano rapper ficou triste quando sua banda brasileira favorita encerrou suas atividades por crer que a demanda por discos de rap seria cada vez pior. Resposta: Robert Lucas e as expectativas dos Racionais.

O economista inglês queria muito arrumar uma namorada. Resposta: John Maynard Keynes e a demanda afetiva.

Quando o filho do economista austríaco chegou em casa todo sujo ele sem nem pensar ordenou que o moleque fosse tomar banho. Resposta: Friedrich Hayek e a ordem espontânea.

O economista americano tinha muito orgulho de ter em sua casa um valiosíssimo quadro de um impressionista francês. Resposta: Milton Friedman e o Monet raríssimo.

O economista austríaco jurou aos seus filhos que todos eles se mudariam para Brasília. Resposta: Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk e o “eu juro” da capital.

O economista alemão organizou um evento meio sertanejo meio religioso e colocou como organizador uma executiva que tinha quebrado suas últimas 4 empresas por má administração. Resposta: Karl Marx e a expo-oração da que mais-falia.

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Bolo

It seems that from 1987 to around 2000 there was a big community of people who played this game called "Bolo". It was a game in which people controlled a tank and killed others while trying to capture bases in team matches. Always 2 teams, from 2 to 16 total players, games could last from 10 minutes to 12 hours. I'm still trying to understand all this.

The game looks silly from some videos you can find today, but apparently it was very deep in strategy because people developed strategy guides and wrote extensively about it and Netscape even supported bolo: URLs out of the box.

The two most important elements on the map are pillboxes and bases. Pillboxes are originally neutral, meaning that they shoot at every tank that happens to get in its range. They shoot fast and with deadly accuracy. You can shoot the pillbox with your tank, and you can see how damaged it is by looking at it. Once the pillbox is subdued, you may run over it, which will pick it up. You may place the pillbox where you want to put it (where it is clear), if you've enough trees to build it back up. Trees are harvested by sending your man outside your tank to forest the trees. Your man (also called a builder) can also lay mines, build roads, and build walls. Once you have placed a pillbox, it will not shoot at you, but only your enemies. Therefore, pillboxes are often used to protect your bases.

That quote was taken from this "augmented FAQ" written by some user. Apparently there were many FAQs for this game. A FAQ is after all just a simple, clear and direct to the point way of writing about anything, previously known as summa[^summa-k], it doesn't have to be related to any actually frequently asked question.

More unexpected Bolo writings include an etiquette guide, an anthropology study and some wonderings on the reverse pill war tactic.

[^summa-k]: It's not the same thing, but I couldn't help but notice the similarity.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Using Spacechains and Fedimint to solve scaling

What if instead of trying to create complicated "layer 2" setups involving noveau cryptographic techniques we just did the following:

• we take that Fedimint source code and remove the "mint" stuff, and just use their federation stuff secure coins with multisig;
• then we make a spacechain;
• and we make the federations issue multisig-btc tokens on it;
• and then we put some uniswap-like thing in there to allow these tokens to be exchanged freely.

Why?

The recent spike in fees caused by Ordinals and BRC-20 shitcoinery has shown that Lightning isn't a silver bullet. Channels are too fragile, it costs a lot to open a channel under a high fee environment, to run a routing node and so on.

People who want to keep using Lightning are instead flocking to the big Lightning custodial providers: WalletofSatoshi, ZEBEDEE, OpenNode and so on. We could leverage that trust people have in these companies (and individuals) operating shadow Lightning providers and turn each of these into a btc-token issuer. Each issue their own token, transactions flow freely. Each person can hold only assets from the issuers they trust more.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

idea: "numbeo" with satoshis

This site has a crowdsourced database of cost-of-living in many countries and cities: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/ and it sells the data people write there freely. It's wrong!

Could be an fruitful idea to pay satoshis for people to provide data.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Just malinvestiment

Traditionally the Austrian Theory of Business Cycles has been explained and reworked in many ways, but the most widely accepted version (or the closest to the Mises or Hayek views) view is that banks (or the central bank) cause the general interest rate to decline by creation of new money and that prompts entrepreneurs to invest in projects of longer duration. This can be confusing because sometimes entrepreneurs embark in very short-time projects during one of these bubbles and still contribute to the overall cycle.

The solution is to think about the "longer term" problem is to think of the entire economy going long-term, not individual entrepreneurs. So if one entrepreneur makes an investiment in a thing that looks simple he may actually, knowingly or not, be inserting himself in a bigger machine that is actually involved in producing longer-term things. Incidentally this thinking also solves the biggest criticism of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory: that of the rational expectations people who say: "oh but can't the entrepreneurs know that the interest rate is artificially low and decide to not make long-term investiments?" ("and if they don't know they should lose money and be replaced like in a normal economy flow blablabla?"). Well, the answer is that they are not really relying on the interest rate, they are only looking for profit opportunities, and this is the key to another confusion that has always followed my thinkings about this topic.

If a guy opens a bar in an area of a town where many new buildings are being built during a "housing bubble" he may not know, but he is inserting himself right into the eye of that business cycle. He expects all these building projects to continue, and all the people involved in that to be getting paid more and be able to spend more at his bar and so on. That is a bet that may or may not end up paying.

Now what does that bar investiment has to do with the interest rate? Nothing. It is just a guy who saw a business opportunity in a place where hungry people with money had no bar to buy things in, so he opened a bar. Additionally the guy has made some calculations about all the ending, starting and future building projects in the area, and then the people that would live or work in that area afterwards (after all the buildings were being built with the expectation of being used) and so on, there is no interest rate calculations involved. And yet that may be a malinvestiment because some building projects will end up being canceled and the expected usage of the finished ones will turn out to be smaller than predicted.

This bubble may have been caused by a decline in interest rates that prompted some people to start buying houses that they wouldn't otherwise, but this is just a small detail. The bubble can only be kept going by a constant influx of new money into the economy, but the focus on the interest rate is wrong. If new money is printed and used by the government to buy ships then there will be a boom and a bubble in the ship market, and that involves all the parts of production process of ships and also bars that will be opened near areas of the town where ships are built and new people are being hired with higher salaries to do things that will eventually contribute to the production of ships that will then be sold to the government.

It's not interest rates or the length of the production process that matters, it's just printed money and malinvestiment.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Lightning channels without HTLCs

` DISCLAIMER: the following design is flawed and kept only for the history.

What follows is a way to design Lightning channels that don't use standalone HTLCs at all: instead the hashlocks are the Settlement transactions themselves, so instead of a Settlement have as many outputs as pending HTLCs, instead they always have 2 outputs: the 2 peers in the channel, but there are as many pairs of Update/Settlement transactions as there are combinations of payments in-flight.

It assumes Eltoo exists and there are Update transactions that can attach to any previous Update transaction or to the funding transaction, and Settlement transactions, spendable after a CSV, one for each Update transaction.

Instead of explaining more, I'll give some examples.

Examples

In the following super-simplified notation I'll just treat the combination of Update+Settlement as one "state", otherwise this would be a mess.

Consider that Alice and Bob have a channel with a total of 100 BTC. When at rest, their channel state reads as follows:

s1[Alice 50 | Bob 50]

This is the initial state of the channel. `s1` here means the sequence of this Update/Settlement according to odd SIGHASH_NOINPUT CLTV rules which are abstracted away. In the following cases there will be `s2`, `s3` and so on.

Simple case of routed payment

Alice tries to route a payment of 7 BTC through this channel using the hash h1 = H(p1). The previous state is discarded and replaced with the following:

• current design:

  s2[Alice 43 | HTLC(if p1 then Bob else Alice after some time) 7 | Bob 50] -- where p1 is the preimage

  if the payment is fulfilled, Alice gets p1, a new state is created as s3[Alice 43 | Bob 57]; if it's canceled the state is replaced with s3[Alice 50 | Bob 50]; if Bob disappears and the timeout expires Alice closes the channel as s2[43|7 to Alice|50]; if Bob has p1, Alice disappears and the timeout expires Bob closes the channel as s2[43|7 to Bob|50].

• proposed design

  Instead of a single state that includes an HTLC as an output, we have two states that both peers will keep:

  s2[Alice 50 | Bob 50] s3[if p1 then [Alice 43| Bob 57]]

  if the payment is fulfilled, Alice gets p1, a new state is created as s4[Alice 43 | Bob 57]; if it's canceled the state is replaced with s4[Alice 50 | Bob 50]; if Bob disappears and the timeout expires Alice closes the channel as s2[50|50]; if Bob has p1, Alice disappears and the timeout expires Bob closes the channel as s3[43|57]; if Alice closes the channel without talking to Bob, but Bob has p1, he publishes s3 after her publishing s2; if Bob closes the channel without talking to Alice she sees p1 as broadcasted and is fine.

A case with 2 payments in-flight

What happens if besides the payment described above Alice then tries to route a new payment of 20 BTC using h2 = H(p2) while the previous is still pending.

• current design: I'll skip this as it's basically the same thing but with a new HTLC and everybody knows it.

• proposed design:

  Now the parties have to hold 4 transactions:

  s2[Alice 50 | Bob 50] s3[if p1 then [Alice 43 | Bob 57]] s3[if p2 then [Alice 30 | Bob 70]] s4[if p1 and p2 then [Alice 23 | Bob 77]]

  If one of the payments is fulfilled, or none, the scenarios are basically the same as in the previous case; If Alice gets p1 and publishes s3[43|57] without waiting for p2, then later p2 comes, Bob can publish s4[23|77] and don't be harmed; Other scenarios should be similar to the previous case.

A case with one pending payment in each direction

Now imagine that while Alice is routing the first payment of 7 BTC another payment comes in the opposite direction, for 11 BTC using h3 = H(p3).

• current design: I'll skip this as it's basically the same thing but with a new HTLC and everybody knows it.

• proposed design:

  s2[Alice 50 | Bob 50] s3[if p1 then [Alice 43 | Bob 57]] s3[if p3 then [Alice 61 | Bob 39]] s4[if p1 and p3 then [Alice 54 | Bob 46]]

  If one of the payments is fulfilled, or none, the scenarios are basically the same as in the previous cases; If Bob gets p1 and publishes s3[43|57] without waiting for p3, then later p3 comes to Alice, she can publish s4[54|66] and don't be harmed; Other scenarios should be similar to the previous case.

A case with 4 pending payments (you can stop reading now)

Consider now that there are two payments going to one direction and two in the other direction. And now we're going to specify the delay for each payment. The delay means the time for which we'll wait for each to be fulfilled or canceled.

h1: 7 BTC from Alice to Bob -- delay: 10 blocks h2: 20 BTC from Alice to Bob -- delay: 20 blocks h3: 11 BTC from Bob to Alice -- delay: 30 blocks h4: 5 BTC from Bob To Alice -- delay: 40 blocks

Now there are 16 transactions to be stored.
The CSV values are given on the Settlement transaction of each of these states, such that Settlements with higher sequence numbers have always time to be published.
Since the next payment expiring is the first, which will expire in 10 blocks, this entire "batch of states" have only that time to live. If it doesn't get updated with the fulfillment and/or cancellation of at least one of the pending payments and thus rewritten then the channel must be closed, probably with s2[50|50], to prevent loss of funds.

s2[Alice 50 | Bob 50] -- CSV 50
s3[if `p1` then [Alice 43 | Bob 57]] -- CSV: 40
s3[if `p2` then [Alice 30 | Bob 70]] -- CSV: 40
s3[if `p3` then [Alice 61 | Bob 39]] -- CSV: 40
s3[if `p4` then [Alice 65 | Bob 55]] -- CSV: 40
s4[if `p1` and `p2` then [Alice 23 | Bob 77]] -- CSV: 30
s4[if `p1` and `p3` then [Alice 54 | Bob 46]] -- CSV: 30
s4[if `p1` and `p4` then [Alice 48 | Bob 52]] -- CSV: 30
s4[if `p2` and `p3` then [Alice 41 | Bob 59]] -- CSV: 30
s4[if `p2` and `p4` then [Alice 35 | Bob 65]] -- CSV: 30
s4[if `p3` and `p4` then [Alice 66 | Bob 44]] -- CSV: 30
s5[if `p1` and `p2` and `p3` then [Alice 34 | Bob 66]] -- CSV: 20
s5[if `p1` and `p2` and `p4` then [Alice 28 | Bob 72]] -- CSV: 20
s5[if `p1` and `p3` and `p4` then [Alice 59 | Bob 41]] -- CSV: 20
s5[if `p2` and `p3` and `p4` then [Alice 46 | Bob 54]] -- CSV: 20
s6[if `p1` and `p2` and `p3` and `p4` then [Alice 39 | Bob 61]] -- CSV: 10

As in the previous cases, if at any time one peer tries to publish any of the Updates without waiting for remaining payments to be either canceled or fulfilled, the other peer can just wait for the missing preimage to arrive, gather the preimages they already know or which were broadcasted with the transaction and fulfill an Update that is higher in its sequence number.

Comments

Advantages:

• Any payment, no matter how small, is taken into account in the balance, no more trustfulness
• My understanding is quite poor, but I feel it's simpler than the current channels and even simpler than Eltoo channels.

Drawbacks:

• The number of needed stored transactions is 2^n for n payments in-flight.
• Big scripts in Settlement transactions that check many hashes are terrible if they ever have to be published. Is it possible to turn them into a single adaptor-signature-magic scriptless script? I hope it is, but have no idea.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Xampu

Depois de quatro anos e meio sem usar xampu, e com o cabelo razoavelmente grande, dá pra perceber a enorme diferença entre não passar nada e passar L'Oréal Elsève, ou entre passar este e Seda Ceramidas Cocriações.

A diferença mais notável no primeiro caso é a de que o cabelo deixa de ter uma oleosidade natural que mantém os cachos juntos e passa a ser só uma massa amorfa de fios secos desgrenhados, um jamais tocando o outro. No segundo caso os cabelos não mais não se tocam, mas mantém-se embaraçados. Passar o condicionador para "hidratar" faz com que o cabelo fique pesado e mole, caindo para os lados.

Além do fato de que os xampus vêm sempre com as mesmas recomendações no verso ("para melhores resultados, utilize nossa linha completa"), o mais estranho é que as pessoas fazem juízos sobre os cabelos serem "secos" ou "oleosos" sendo que elas jamais os viram em um estado "natural" ou pelo menos mais próximo do natural, pelo contrário, estão sempre aplicando sobre eles um fluido secador, o xampu, e depois um fluido molhador, o condicionador, e cada um deles podendo ter efeitos diferentes sobre cada cabelo, o que deveria invalidar total e cabalmente todo juízo sobre oleosidade.

Por outro lado, embora existam, aqui e ali, discussões sobre a qualidade dos xampus e sobre qual é mais adequado a cada cabelo (embora, como deve ter ficado claro no parágrafo acima, estas discussões são totalmente desprovidas de qualquer base na realidade), não se discute a qualidade da água. A água que cada pessoa usa em seu banho deve ter um influência no mínimo igual à do xampu (ou não-xampu).

No final das contas, as pessoas passam a vida inteira usando o xampu errado, sem saber o que estão fazendo, chegando a conclusões baseadas em nada sobre os próprios cabelos e o dos outros, sem considerar os dados corretos -- aliás, sem nem cogitar que pode existir algum dado além da percepção mais imediata e o feeling de cabelereiro de cada um --, ou então trocando de xampu a cada vez que o cabelo fica de um jeito diferente, fooled by randomness.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Drivechain comparison with Ethereum

Ethereum and other "smart contract platforms" capable of running turing-complete code and "developer-friendly" mindset and community have been running for years and they were able to produce a very low number of potentially useful "contracts".

What are these contracts, actually? (Considering Ethereum, but others are similar:) they are sidechains that run inside the Ethereum blockchain (and thus their verification and data storage are forced upon all Ethereum nodes). Users can peg-in to a contract by depositing money on it and peg-out by making a contract operation that sends money to a normal Ethereum address.

Now be generous and imagine these platforms are able to produce 3 really cool, useful ideas (out of many thousands of attempts): Bitcoin can copy these, turn them into 3 different sidechains, each running fixed, specific, optimized code. Bitcoin users can now opt to use these platforms by transferring coins to it – all that without damaging the nodes or the consensus protocol that has been running for years, and without forcing anyone to be aware of these chains.

The process of turning a useful idea into a sidechain doesn't come spontaneously, and can't be done by a single company (like often happens in Ethereum-land), it must be acknowledge by a rough consensus in the Bitcoin community that that specific sidechain with that specific design is a desirable thing, and ultimately approved by miners, as they're the ones that are going to be in charge of that.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

tempreites

My first library to get stars on GitHub, was a very stupid templating library that used just HTML and HTML attributes ("DSL-free"). I was inspired by http://microjs.com/ at the time and ended up not using the library. Probably no one ever did.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/tempreites

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Jethro Tull, uma breve história

Ian Anderson, John Evans, Barriemore Barlow e Jeffrey Hammond eram amigos da escola em Blackpool e tiveram uma banda entre 1964 e 1967 que teve vários nomes porque eles eram ruins e meio que precisavam mudar de nome para enganar o pessoal das casas de show para que pudessem tocar de novo.

Por volta de 1967 entraram mais duas pessoas na banda e isso fez com que ela acabasse (a banda não dava dinheiro suficiente e a mãe do John Evans já não ia agüentar sustentar esse povo todo). Ian Anderson resolvou continuar com os dois integrantes novos, chamaram mais um e aí surgiu a banda que se que se tornaria o Jethro Tull.

Depois que toda a formação se desfez, Ian Anderson contratou o Martin Barre e chamou de volta os seus 3 amigos e foi inaugurado o período "clássico" do Jethro Tull.

Quando foi chamado, Jeffrey Hammond disse que ia ficar só 5 anos e depois ia voltar para as suas pinturas, e foi o que ele fez. Passaram-se 5 anos, ele saiu da banda, abandonou o contrabaixo e dedicou-se às pinturas desde então.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Thoughts on Nostr key management

On Why I don't like NIP-26 as a solution for key management I talked about multiple techniques that could be used to tackle the problem of key management on Nostr.

Here are some ideas that work in tandem:

• NIP-41 (stateless key invalidation)
• NIP-46 (Nostr Connect)
• NIP-07 (signer browser extension)
• Connected hardware signing devices
• other things like musig or frostr keys used in conjunction with a semi-trusted server; or other kinds of trusted software, like a dedicated signer on a mobile device that can sign on behalf of other apps; or even a separate protocol that some people decide to use as the source of truth for their keys, and some clients might decide to use that automatically
• there are probably many other ideas

Some premises I have in my mind (that may be flawed) that base my thoughts on these matters (and cause me to not worry too much) are that

• For the vast majority of people, Nostr keys aren't a target as valuable as Bitcoin keys, so they will probably be ok even without any solution;
• Even when you lose everything, identity can be recovered -- slowly and painfully, but still --, unlike money;
• Nostr is not trying to replace all other forms of online communication (even though when I think about this I can't imagine one thing that wouldn't be nice to replace with Nostr) or of offline communication, so there will always be ways.
• For the vast majority of people, losing keys and starting fresh isn't a big deal. It is a big deal when you have followers and an online persona and your life depends on that, but how many people are like that? In the real world I see people deleting social media accounts all the time and creating new ones, people losing their phone numbers or other accounts associated with their phone numbers, and not caring very much -- they just find a way to notify friends and family and move on.

We can probably come up with some specs to ease the "manual" recovery process, like social attestation and explicit signaling -- i.e., Alice, Bob and Carol are friends; Alice loses her key; Bob sends a new Nostr event kind to the network saying what is Alice's new key; depending on how much Carol trusts Bob, she can automatically start following that and remove the old key -- or something like that.

---

One nice thing about some of these proposals, like NIP-41, or the social-recovery method, or the external-source-of-truth-method, is that they don't have to be implemented in any client, they can live in standalone single-purpose microapps that users open or visit only every now and then, and these can then automatically update their follow lists with the latest news from keys that have changed according to multiple methods.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Cultura Inglesa e aprendizado extra-escolar

Em 2005 a Cultura Inglesa me classificou como nível 2 em proficiência de inglês, numa escala de 1 a 14 ou coisa parecida. De modo que eu precisaria de 6 anos de aulas com eles pra ficar bom. 2 anos depois, sem fazer nenhuma aula ou ter qualquer tipo de treinamento intensivo eu era capaz de compreender textos técnicos em inglês sem nenhuma dificuldade. Mais 2 anos e eu era capaz de compreender qualquer coisa e me expressar com razoável qualidade.

Tudo isso pra documentar mais um exemplo, que poderia passar despercebido, de aprendizado de tipo escolar que se deu fora de uma escola.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

The problem with ION

ION is a DID method based on a thing called "Sidetree".

I can't say for sure what is the problem with ION, because I don't understand the design, even though I have read all I could and asked everybody I knew. All available information only touches on the high-level aspects of it (and of course its amazing wonders) and no one has ever bothered to explain the details. I've also asked the main designer of the protocol, Daniel Buchner, but he may have thought I was trolling him on Twitter and refused to answer, instead pointing me to an incomplete spec on the Decentralized Identity Foundation website that I had already read before. I even tried to join the DIF as a member so I could join their closed community calls and hear what they say, maybe eventually ask a question, so I could understand it, but my entrance was ignored, then after many months and a nudge from another member I was told I had to do a KYC process to be admitted, which I refused.

One thing I know is:

• ION is supposed to provide a way to rotate keys seamlessly and automatically without losing the main identity (and the ION proponents also claim there are no "master" keys because these can also be rotated).
• ION is also not a blockchain, i.e. it doesn't have a deterministic consensus mechanism and it is decentralized, i.e. anyone can publish data to it, doesn't have to be a single central server, there may be holes in the available data and the protocol doesn't treat that as a problem.
• From all we know about years of attempts to scale Bitcoins and develop offchain protocols it is clear that you can't solve the double-spend problem without a central authority or a kind of blockchain (i.e. a decentralized system with deterministic consensus).
• Rotating keys also suffer from the double-spend problem: whenever you rotate a key it is as if it was "spent", you aren't supposed to be able to use it again.

The logic conclusion of the 4 assumptions above is that ION is flawed: it can't provide the key rotation it says it can if it is not a blockchain.

See also

• Excerpt of discussion about DIDs and ION

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Memórias de quando eu aprendi a ler

A professora ensinou um método segundo o qual para ler uma sílaba, por exemplo, to, dizíamos rápido o nome das duas letras, cada vez mais rápido, tê ó tê ó t-ó tó, até acharmos o som correto da sílaba.

Até hoje não sei se esse é o "método fônico". Não me lembro jamais de ter que decorar uma tabela de pares de letras e sons resultantes ("b com a, bá; bê com é, bé" etc.).

Outra memória que eu tenho é de que essa técnica de falar as letras rápido foi fundamental para eu ter certeza de que sabia ler e estava lendo, mas de alguma eu já sabia ler antes de aprender a técnica, porque eu era capaz de, por exemplo, saber antes de qualquer coisa que ca era uma exceção à regra. Mesmo assim eu me lembro de passar muitas horas repetindo letras e confirmando que a técnica funcionava.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Excerpt of discussion about DIDs and ION

Melvin Carvalho:

"Not a single entity I know that's doing production deployments has actually vetted did:ion and found it to be production capable."

The guy leading the DID effort said this about ION.

Seems like they may be 6 months away from producing something.

https://github.com/decentralized-identity/ion/blob/master/docs/design.md#operations

In their design it says you can create, update, recover and activate. It is a bit magic

But update implies a versioning system. So you could think of it like updated nostr events. My key is A. Now my key is B. Tied to a content addressable static ID (like a genesis event ID).

Let's see. I hope they produce something useful. Daniel tends not to answer questions

When we first made DID, the idea was that your (d)id and your public key or hash were the same string.

As it evolved, that got broken. Which can be useful because then you can have multiple keys, but the trade off is more management needed.

So you have DID <—> controller two way link. Then it can have multiple keys. Those can be used to update the record. How that chain of records is stored, fetched and verified, is not covered by DID. So everyone will do it differently. Nostr for example could create updating keys with a NIP, it would do the same thing.

Hampus:

Basically impossible to have a convo with Daniel

Melvin Carvalho:

true. too often appeals to authority

https://identity.foundation/sidetree/spec/#update

the side tree spec has an update function

'Retrieve the Update Reveal Value that matches the previously anchored Update Commitment'

so it looks like they have a chain of anchors ... anchored to something, ion nodes i guess, which also run btc full nodes

'Embed the Anchor String in the transaction such that it can be located and parsed by any party that traverses the history of the target anchoring system'

'By leveraging the blockchain-agnostic Sidetree protocol, ION makes it possible to anchor tens of thousands of DID/DPKI operations on a target chain (in ION's case, Bitcoin) using a single on-chain transaction'

there you go

do a search in the ion repo for 'anchor' and it gives some details

https://github.com/decentralized-identity/ion/blob/66813123cf81ace05cea2039e93ef263952d6283/docs/Q-and-A.md

there's a Q & A

Ruben Somsen:

Their anchor protocol doesn't guarantee you have a full view of the data, so you can open the commitments to anything you like (provided you pre-committed to different views). In my opinion this makes the commitments pointless.

Melvin Carvalho:

'Assuming you are running your own node, you simply need to submit 1000 create operations to your node (ie. http://localhost:3000/operations) before your batch writer kicks in every 10 minutes by default, the batch writer will batch all 1000 operations into 1 bitcoin transaction thus you'll pay fee for just one transaction to the minor. The technical spec for constructing a create request can be found in Sidetree API spec, but if you know TypeScript, you are better off using the ion-sdk directly, it will save you a lot of time'

seems 3 places data is stored

anchored witness data: bitcoin tx batches of operations: ION nodes non witness data: maybe IPFS

'The logical order of operations, as determined by the underlying anchoring system (e.g. Bitcoin block and transaction order). Anchoring systems may widely vary in how they determine the logical order of operations, but the only requirement of an anchoring system is that it can provide a means to deterministically order each operation within a DID’s operational lineage.'

Ruben Somsen:

It's deterministic given a set of data, but there is no consensus on the set of data, so if A and B get presented with a different set, they come to a different conclusion

Melvin Carvalho:

yes. "DID owners can create forks within their own DID state history". so you dont actually know the full state. I think the design is of each identity has eventual consistency, with the anchor as the tie break. It can change as you know more data. But doesnt say what happens if two updates happen in the same block.

https://identity.foundation/sidetree/spec/#late-publishing

the aim is eventual consistency

so at any time you might have the wrong state, but if you had every update associated with a given id, you could determine the right order to apply the patches by using the bitcoin block chain (I dont know what happens if there's a tie in the same block) ... there's no peg in or peg out, it's just like version controlled files

Ruben Somsen:

But you can't know when you've reached the state of eventual consistency (i.e. when you finally have the full data set) and in practice it may never be reached, so there is no consensus

When there is conflicting data, the first one counts and the second one is ignored.

This problem is literally detrimental, yet it is being presented as a minor inconvenience.

Melvin Carvalho:

yes, and the first one can be published later, so systems will think the second is valid, until it isnt

Ruben Somsen:

Yup

Melvin Carvalho:

you could actually steal someone's identity, and revoke all their keys, and then reveal it years later

arguably this is worse than github

Ruben Somsen:

lol yeah you could

Melvin Carvalho:

or an attack vector, get someone's ID, but they dont know, then sell them lots of 'cheap' NFTs ... at some point you publish the new keys and reclaim all the tokens ... no one will know when they will be rug pulled

Ruben Somsen:

That was my original argument, but Daniel claimed the protocol wasn't meant for transfer of ownership rights.

Melvin Carvalho:

so then i wonder what the primary use cases are that cant be easily achieved already

'How Can ION be Used? ION can see a lot of use in many cases. The most obvious use case is for verifiable credentials. A business can credential employees, who can then be verified via blockchain on arrival at their destination. This functionality also raises its use as a means of supplying and verifying international travel documents.'

'Another use case could come from accreditation for organizations. Using an organization's public key, users can verify their accreditation status and trace their accreditation history over time.'

so i guess its an updatable profile page, but you dont know when your profile is compromised. OTOH it's free (their node is paying fees to start with), and improves BTC security budget. If you keep your key safe, and the nodes publish the updates for you, it might be a nice little profile you could use for stuff. But not sure id use it for anything high value. And nostr (for example) can do alot of this already — updatable profiles and publishing

i think it may be to a degree censorship resistant too

there's also no incentive to run a node, so im not sure why they would stick around

nodes can actually very easily censor by black listing certain tx (e.g. a hack, or sanctioned identity), removing the decentralized nature

so the nodes can never reach consensus

Ruben Somsen:

Like I said, the commitments are pointless. I think it's equivalent to just signing stuff with a key and making what you signed available for download in "the cloud".

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Websites For Trello

Names like "blablabla for trello" were the official recommendation from Trello for anyone doing services that integrated with it.

This one generated websites from cards and lists on a board.

The websites were generated from a fixed HTML template that were possible to be styled using the standard for CSS and JS plugins I've created, classless.

It was very complex, used RabbitMQ, a Python tasker that constantly rebuilt the sites on a Postgres database, Trello webhooks, a Go server that just sent the data to the client, I don't remember, but it was terrible design, although it was fun to think of the many branches and complexities of it, but also a huge amount of mostly wasted work.

It had some few paying users for a time.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/websites-for-trello
• https://websitesfortrello.com/

See also

• Boardthreads