What's happening with Gossip?:
Implementing NIP-46 support in gossip has been far more difficult than I expected, at every step of the way, to the point that I've become dejected. I'm primarily motivated by progress and currently I am demotivated by my lack of completing anything useful for the end users, and have become too easily distracted to the point that I think it would be fair to send some bitcoin back to OpenSats as a refund.
For a long time there was a rust compiler bug around lifetime erasure ('_ vs '0) of data sent across async points. But I noticed that wasn't happening about a month ago.
Then all the signing/encrypting/decrypting functions needed to be made async, which bubbled up to more and more code needing to be async.
Then I went ahead and defined a Signer trait implemented by anything that could sign things... but that had too many functions (NIP-46 only does some) so it had to be broken up into 3 or 4 traits over time.
Then I built an Identity which could be any of (None, PublicKey, PrivateKey, RemoteSigner), and also a gossip client identity that wrapped this. And it had to be Serialize/Deserialize to save it.
Then I needed a network-level Client that a nip46 signing client could utilize to communicate with it's remote signer, without being tangled up in the "minions" I currently have.
Then I needed the nip46 signer itself that uses this Client and implements Signer, plugged into Identity and Serialize/Deserialize.
Then I needed to migrate how your identity loads and saves to this new serialized Identity (instead of just keys as it used to be).
Then there were lots of bugs around where detection of whether you could sign things or whether things were unlocked was being done wrong.
It starts to work... you can connect to the signer and you can learn your public key, and you can then get a feed. But it quickly gets jammed up and gossip freezes.
So now I think I should use tokio_console to debug it, which requires me to instrument lots of code.
And I'm just so tired of this.
Mike Dilger ☑️ /
npub1ac…9p35c
2025-05-09 01:34:03
Author Public Key
npub1acg6thl5psv62405rljzkj8spesceyfz2c32udakc2ak0dmvfeyse9p35cPublished at
2025-05-09 01:34:03Event JSON
{
"id": "79d49d996872322a8ed60fdcbc1d88d2bef08f547f31511bec63fd32af1eab40",
"pubkey": "ee11a5dff40c19a555f41fe42b48f00e618c91225622ae37b6c2bb67b76c4e49",
"created_at": 1746754443,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [],
"content": "What's happening with Gossip?:\n\nImplementing NIP-46 support in gossip has been far more difficult than I expected, at every step of the way, to the point that I've become dejected. I'm primarily motivated by progress and currently I am demotivated by my lack of completing anything useful for the end users, and have become too easily distracted to the point that I think it would be fair to send some bitcoin back to OpenSats as a refund.\n\nFor a long time there was a rust compiler bug around lifetime erasure ('_ vs '0) of data sent across async points. But I noticed that wasn't happening about a month ago.\nThen all the signing/encrypting/decrypting functions needed to be made async, which bubbled up to more and more code needing to be async.\nThen I went ahead and defined a Signer trait implemented by anything that could sign things... but that had too many functions (NIP-46 only does some) so it had to be broken up into 3 or 4 traits over time.\nThen I built an Identity which could be any of (None, PublicKey, PrivateKey, RemoteSigner), and also a gossip client identity that wrapped this. And it had to be Serialize/Deserialize to save it.\nThen I needed a network-level Client that a nip46 signing client could utilize to communicate with it's remote signer, without being tangled up in the \"minions\" I currently have.\nThen I needed the nip46 signer itself that uses this Client and implements Signer, plugged into Identity and Serialize/Deserialize.\nThen I needed to migrate how your identity loads and saves to this new serialized Identity (instead of just keys as it used to be).\nThen there were lots of bugs around where detection of whether you could sign things or whether things were unlocked was being done wrong.\nIt starts to work... you can connect to the signer and you can learn your public key, and you can then get a feed. But it quickly gets jammed up and gossip freezes.\nSo now I think I should use tokio_console to debug it, which requires me to instrument lots of code.\nAnd I'm just so tired of this.\n",
"sig": "0402ade6d77814bdca60774bc088ffa4df6af316cae4daca12e738ad99ff4eb7127a5cccfb266c7877db8523261bab11f9cd15d40f831dc2f35fb64b59f71d32"
}