TheCharlatan

Just a charlatan.
thecharlatan.ch

Public Key

npub196cr58e3ds70njgqul6ndm3gu4yxxjgx00sp32t95lru5k600u7q2ftlhg

NIP-57 Address

opensats@vlt.ge

Profile Code

nprofile1qqszavp6ruckc08eeyqw0afkac5w2jrrfyr8hcqc49j60372td8h70qpz4mhxue69uhkg6t5w3hjuur4vghhyetvv9usz9mhwden5te0wfjkccte9ehx7um5wghxyctwvshs8cwlvu

Publishing to

ditto.pub/relay

relay.nostr.band

relay.damus.io

Author Public Key

npub196cr58e3ds70njgqul6ndm3gu4yxxjgx00sp32t95lru5k600u7q2ftlhg

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Last Notes

2025-05-21 06:07:43

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No, a pruned node verifies everything, no matter how far back it is.

2025-05-20 22:22:20

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Fine left curve, but in monero you need to be an active adversary to guess the transaction broadcaster, in cashu the mint absent any proxy always knows. There is an asymmetry there.
I'd say Monero's current cryptography is weaker, though that might change soon.

2025-05-18 05:44:04

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https://github.com/fort-nix/nix-bitcoin ?

2025-05-11 17:33:51

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It is the -softwareexpiry startup option, which is default on. I think most people do not know about it.
https://github.com/bitcoinknots/bitcoin/blob/28.x-knots/src/validation.cpp#L4458

2025-05-10 06:25:45

Cash on the internet.

2025-05-06 16:41:33

Thank you @nprofile…sjlm for trying the kernel library out and leaving such a nice report - A 15x performance increase is wild! https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/30595#issuecomment-2855208506

2025-05-06 15:22:56

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I think the bot just posts directly to mara's slipstream and ignores the limit.

2025-05-06 07:36:09

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It's like three clicks on a website. https://opreturnbot.com/

2025-05-05 16:31:40

It's that hue of green time of the year again.
https://image.nostr.build/cb24792b9788d4554823bb2d0b37bd6659a7c5ba8439306f5a3547daf6ae23ef.jpg

2025-05-05 13:29:20

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There doesn't need to be, it's not a consensus issue.

2025-05-03 19:22:15

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I don't think people want to be there, but what is the alternative? Needs to support email signup, get through email client spam filters, and have some small amount of moderation.

2025-05-03 17:11:20

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Yeah, hope summer's better this year. Last year's just rotted everything away at the stalk.

2025-05-03 16:43:50

Beans, tomatoes, and maize started sprouting. Salad and herbs are already well on the way. Still waiting for the carrots and the pumpkins.

2025-05-03 08:08:23

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The problem with the patch from the perspective of disallowing data embedding is that for it to be effective an overwhelming majority of nodes would have to upgrade to this patch. In the time where most nodes are not upgraded yet, the network will perform in a degraded manner, but data carrying transactions will still be relayed. If most nodes eventually upgrade, it is easy for the spammer to come up with a new script variation that is not covered by the current filter, which starts the entire game again. At the moment nodes upgrade very slowly. It usually takes years before a big majority of nodes upgrade to the newest version. You could argue that this is fine, and people will just be encouraged to update faster, but then you enter dangerous "auto-updating" teritory, which is against the core tenets of our project.

2025-05-02 15:15:56

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There is no malice involved.

2025-05-02 08:18:18

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I would like to say that OP_RETURN is the best shot we have at harm reduction. For what it's worth I have been supportive of e.g. making p2ms transactions non-standard. That's not going to happen, but at least we can reduce harm by making OP_RETURN an option for fake p2ms data encumbering users.

2025-05-02 08:14:08

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I think the much better question is why would somebody use OP_RETURN for stamps, BRC-20 and Counterparty. It does make a difference for some of these protocols if the data is in an output, or the scriptsig, or witness part of a transaction.

2025-05-02 08:11:47

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There's no point arguing over what you consider a moral argument then.

2025-05-02 07:42:16

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Oh, I think I see your argument. If you run with stricter data carrying policy, you have a higher chance of relaying lower fee transactions to Ocean's mining pool. Is that really it?

2025-05-02 07:37:19

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Why rub with a mempool at all then?

2025-05-02 07:36:10

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Paying to a fake key or hash cannot be controlled by policy, no matter how aggressive you get. You might say this is expensive, but not by much more than embedding data in fake p2ms (which is controllable by policy). Is there a point to forcing people into the worst class of data embedding in terms of node resource consumption?

2025-05-02 01:27:34

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I think Ocean's market share is too small to have an effect here, though obviously that might change. They also use a different client already, so why should Bitcoin Core maintain something that they don't even directly use?

2025-05-01 15:53:39

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What will increase?

2025-05-01 13:29:09

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We should always calculate future resource burdens on nodes with full blocks, if the premise is that we want Bitcoin to be used. Changing policy does not change this calculation.

2025-05-01 01:16:58

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I think you are confusing things here. Block validation does not have much to do with policy. Every node has to run the same block validation checks or risk inadvertently forking itself off, or getting forked off by an attacker feeding it a specially crafted block, and falling out of consensus. My choice as a user would be running Bitcoin Core, but I could also be running btcd, or libbitcoin, as long as they implement the exact same checks in their validation logic. Bitcoin Knots just re-uses the exact same block validation logic that Bitcoin Core does, so there is no difference there. We all have to apply the same logic, or risk falling out of consensus.
The difference that policy makes in the case where a Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots client enforces different policy rules is that if a transactions enters a Bitcoin Core client's mempool, and is then included in a newly mined in a block, Bitcoin Core does not have to re-request the transaction from a peer and can validate the block with the transaction it already has. If Bitcoin Knots on the other hand does not have the transaction yet, it requests it from a peer first, and then validates the block with it. In the end, the result is the same. Both nodes validate the block in the same manner, persist the same block of transactions to disk, and have the same view of the set of unspent transaction outputs. Applying the same block validation rules is the consensus all nodes have to maintain with each other and policy does not really play into that.

2025-04-30 21:31:24

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The result of checking a block's validity in Bitcoin Core. This includes validating its header, merkle roots, and transactions, spending its coins, checking its coinbase, and protecting against duplicates.

2025-04-30 12:05:41

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Yes they can, pruned nodes fully download and validate all historical blocks. They just throw the data away once they validated it.

2025-04-30 06:30:34

Cash on the internet.

2025-03-17 17:48:30

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Are you building a v28 tag, latest master or one of the v29 release tags?

2025-01-15 16:38:54

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I just spent a few days trying to make size_t handling safe in c++, so doing that seems much easier indeed 😄

2025-01-15 13:20:53

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Bitcoinkernel 😉

2024-12-27 19:31:51

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Vscode has problems with some of the templates used in the code. I recommend clangd as a language server in either vim or emacs.

2024-12-23 13:11:14

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I love the way down from the station towards piazza riforma. Something about it just always makes me feel very homely.

2024-12-17 21:18:32

Pretty cool how these kernel refactoring PRs all keep on finding minor bugs and inconsistencies.

2024-12-03 22:46:19

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Wonderful work!

2024-11-22 17:30:22

It's just experimental, but come try it out.
https://github.com/TheCharlatan/kernel-node

2024-11-13 16:44:32

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We are also in hard place at the moment because macos now also requires a stapled notarization. There are open source tools for it that seem to work well, but they introduce a big rat tail of dependencies.

2024-10-31 21:04:42

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I guess so, but if you want to do something a bit more lively than their examples, I find it gets hairy easily. This might actually be something llms could be really good at.

2024-10-31 20:57:24

Why is it still so hard to go from hand drawn diagram to something that can be shown on github and maintained online?
Should look nice hand drawn, have a language, be easy to edit.

2024-10-29 19:06:50

The last week was a bit rough, hope I find my step again.

2024-10-22 09:40:19

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Thank you for reading it :)

2024-10-21 14:25:30

Wrote my thoughts down on the Bitcoin kernel library.
https://thecharlatan.ch/Kernel/

2024-10-09 06:12:51

I was in a tiny dry stone walling museum a couple of days ago. It was interesting that they showed a bunch of techniques that were still highly specific to the region. Most of the walling was done with small slate-style rocks - very different from the Jura chalk I am used to, where we sometimes work with boulders a quarter the size of a car. They also showed a free-standing raised bed supported by dry stone, which I would love to have in my garden some day. We also came across these free-standing dry stone structures on our hikes in the region, something I've never seen around here.
https://image.nostr.build/f9c4677735e0683e9cc6b9e89397b195fa877c18d2b4e1e03d7a1e54ae085565.jpg
https://image.nostr.build/bdc4c511f95a9aaec1c24cde18ebbaa8662f8d83d714b072766e68510717e760.jpg
https://image.nostr.build/07fe323b68bdd5e15a58f6e57fbf5a664cc4e4d494e271e9cf7e50bb1764c4c5.jpg

2024-10-02 13:49:21

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You scan through everything client-side, many monero wallets do this. There is no SPV and headers are not checked either.

2024-09-26 17:13:12

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Do you want #30955 next?

2024-09-21 14:45:09

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How is it getting and submitting work?

2024-09-17 06:14:33

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I don't think this makes much sense.

2024-09-12 12:19:17

A lot of time being spent on refactoring PRs at the moment. Not sure how I feel about that. There are so many feature PRs starving for reviews and the benefits of some of these refactors are questionable.

2024-09-05 07:23:32

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Noise and glitch have their time and place :)

2024-09-03 13:34:42

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Yeah, there are hacks, e.g. un-ar and re-ar together over a manually maintained list of libraries, but... yuck.

2024-09-03 13:15:22

So cmake really can't handle linking multiple static libraries together into another static library. That sucks, because the kernel library depends on a bunch of other static libraries. If we want to ship the static kernel lib, we'd now have to include all the other libs too. This is only when shipping the static lib, the dynamic lib works just fine. 😐

2024-08-31 15:25:57

Writing RAII style C++ is fine and good, but having no common pattern to effectively handle errors in constructors sucks. You can see it all over Bitcoin Core's codebase. There are like five different ways to handle these errors and none of them are really ergonomic.

2024-08-23 15:24:48

Cash on the internet

2024-08-23 11:26:05

Interesting epispde
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5rODDqew5kacXGc4uCdEjg?si=f2YSG9r7RDCMpwHCM6K-Dg

2024-08-21 15:25:12

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It feels a bit zmq-y with libmultiprocess having a lock-based event loop at its heart and events just sending notifications. I'm at the point now where I'm trying to figure out request chaining and feel like that goes decidedly beyond what zmq is capable of out of the box.

2024-08-21 09:02:43

Spent the past two days reviewing libmultiprocess. I've just about scraped the surface of its capabilities. I'm still far from actually understanding it though, there's just a lot going on. From my current mental model though this one of the coolest projects I've seen in a while. I want to spend the rest of the week on it too. Lets see if I can figure out more things.

2024-08-20 08:06:36

Been reading a bunch of really well written questions on stackoverflow lately, where none of them got a decent answer.

2024-08-17 21:24:51

John P. O'Neill

2024-08-17 16:25:52

Very nice article from hrt on compiler performance. I've been wondering lately if many of the shared behaviours we use in Bitcoin Core should be defined as concepts instead of pure virtual classes.
https://www.hudsonrivertrading.com/hrtbeat/optimising-compiler-performance-a-case-for-devirtualisation/

2024-08-17 13:49:17

My boulder hall progress is glacial, but I can finally do most of the 'six' rated routes, while a year ago I was struggling with the 'five' rated ones.

2024-08-17 11:07:18

Libtool is a fool.

2024-08-16 21:06:30

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You say, by pointing out how to be a model citizen here 😅

2024-08-16 13:40:21

My normie friends are buying shib again.

2024-08-16 13:03:55

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I'm going to harvest some firebeans soon. How are you going to prepare yours?

2024-08-16 05:54:11

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Yes, I'm always on the look for new stuff. Last summer I finally discovered early hardcore punk, this summer I'm all about doom metal and German provoc-techno-rap.

2024-08-15 20:49:51

Cmake in Bitcoin Core is actually going to happen. It took so much effort, but it is actually happening now 💪
I'm glad that it will free up much of my review time. Hopefully I can sink that into the kernel and multiprocess.

2024-08-14 13:41:16

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#28217

2024-08-14 06:27:05

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What happened in February 2023?

2024-08-12 16:47:21

Was up in Davos https://image.nostr.build/08264f5745c847604d32c51ddcfef3f72f3c4d9bad378d7cfc4a90e5c45e8d7a.jpg https://image.nostr.build/7bda0e3e2dee4e6ce5e9df1ecd9409b889a7ec53b5c3c47e4c1e1cd7931f42e8.jpg https://image.nostr.build/c5c414bcdfd8840eb5359dfe2cc5a8cd50a7c0fa3f6959aa3e1e3ae5c7354fce.jpg

2024-08-11 22:26:06

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Yes!

2024-08-10 10:34:39

Not gonna lie, boks looking kind of good.

2024-08-09 18:12:33

🥈for the relay, finally Simbine has his medal!

2024-08-09 18:07:08

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I know all the good spots around my town. Feels like cheating sometimes 😅

2024-08-08 18:56:46

Tebogo!

2024-08-08 15:29:47

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It sure is 😁

2024-08-08 09:55:20

I so hope we get multiprocess on its way for the next release. Ryanofsky has been creating something great over the past 8 years. Together with kernel this is how Bitcoin Core can be reformed. Kernel for low-level operations without any infrastructure requirements, multiprocess for the rest.

2024-08-06 21:53:12

Sky was quite clear tonight and moon wasn't up yet. I think you can make out the rings of saturn just a bit here. https://image.nostr.build/dfb231866a43393c17b29782056a26e11c284d2ce9c013920178d8fc4f98c880.jpg

2024-08-06 16:24:24

Read this about ten years too late, but read it I did. I didn't like these active retrospectives where he explains what beat is and why (in his view at the time of writing) something was beat. That took me out of the immersion a couple of times. It did remind me of some of my past travels and friendships though, but without all the affairs going on. Glad to have had my own Deans and Sals in my life. https://image.nostr.build/d685c6ed03bcaa4f86c4315509fcbe81c544d98a99dc3deefb1ab9134c476b22.jpg

2024-08-06 14:02:00

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I'll never be entirely happy with it, but we gotta start somewhere.

2024-08-06 09:22:48

The kernel API PR is up, come and review it: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/30595

2024-08-06 07:23:37

Nice morning innawoods.
https://image.nostr.build/2079e01536306749a8bb82fb8ccbca55d33a0927fb1afd4ef216468bb10ced77.jpg

2024-08-06 06:36:01

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Today.

2024-08-06 06:32:13

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(and schnorrsigs)

2024-08-05 21:52:52

Cash on the internet

2024-08-05 11:49:41

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Getting there, starting to have the confidence for those marks. But I also like an even crisp caramel outside.

2024-08-05 10:43:05

Been having some good success on the braai recently. https://image.nostr.build/19da3b9061cef3c813f35dc1a6ff8db5357acc8951c323e76f0c1c3b5db10654.jpg

2024-08-04 20:00:39

Heartbroken for Simbine, even a national record did not help him.

2024-08-04 16:33:52

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Constness besides, I think things are ready now. Going to update the rust crate, then it's on to writing the commit and pull request messages.

2024-08-02 18:00:31

Stuffing whole chickens with ras el hanout was one of my better discoveries this year.

2024-08-02 06:43:34

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Stuff is looking much better already, thinking about constness in the API again now.

2024-07-30 21:31:48

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Ok, the tests are in better shape now, but still lots to do. Decided not to mess with the blockstore yet. Going to have to do multiple passes over everything again.

2024-07-27 18:22:39

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👀

2024-07-27 18:08:18

Antoine Dupont just became the GOAT.

2024-07-27 15:44:54

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Checks out

2024-07-27 15:44:26

I think I am getting close to the first kernel API pull request. Most small patches were merged and reviewed quickly, there are maybe 1 or two left. Then it is time for the big one.

2024-07-25 20:21:45

ISS shot from my phone. https://image.nostr.build/a7b753614920ba30fd2ab202aa2a7339159191127d3409b4bc4f049ee0a91ec3.jpg

2024-07-24 20:48:59

Grass is looking so much better this year than last. Wonder if it is down to us getting more rain, or something else.

2024-07-24 19:48:38

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It's about the same speed now as writing to the file. Kind of sad that it is not faster, but at the same this means Bitcoin Core is already doing a decent job at it.

2024-07-24 12:19:49

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> A socialist country
This made me lol.

2024-07-23 19:26:28

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Should I invest in some serious RAM?