Anon / Anon is on Nostr

Last Notes

2024-08-21 02:16:42

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I’m a 51 year old retiree and I approve of this message.

2024-08-19 17:55:37

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Articles only. With articles, I can block all ads and nonsense without much hassle.
With podcasts, I inevitably have to fast forward through a barrage of pitches for garbage products they’re shilling, intros and outtros, ad-reads from sponsors, awkward chitchat, and the ever-annoying “please like, subscribe, sign up for my email spam list, review me on these ten platforms, and support me on Patreon” panhandling.

2024-08-18 17:05:55

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Agreed. I must say though, the user interface for JoinMarket is atrocious. For joins, I feel like the winning combo is Wasabi with a custom, zero-cost coordinator.

2024-08-15 02:44:14

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Bro, who’s the shortest man in the Bible?
Knee-high-miah.
Nehemiah, bro. Get it? Nehemiah!😂

2024-08-13 15:11:15

TLDR: AlbyHub appears to be monitoring private inbound Lightning transactions, even those that don't pass through Alby, logging them, and then sending the details over email.
I installed AlbyHub a couple of weeks back. It's connected to my private LND node which runs on the same VM.
I was really disappointed to see that Alby is collecting a record of my own private transactions, not just those that pass through Alby's LNUrl implementation. How do I know this? Because they sent me a friggin' email showing the details of a private transaction. (I'm just testing their product so I don't mind sharing the details here on NOSTR. See screenshot.)
Just to trace the information flow a bit: When someone sends me BTC through my lightning address (e.g. myname@mydomain.com) , it passes through Alby's LNUrl implementation. So of course Alby knows about it. The fact that they're recording it and publicly emailing me about it is very troubling, but not unexpected; Companies can't help themselves when it comes to archiving and leveraging their users' data. The real deal killer though is that Alby is monitoring my *private* inbound transactions, those that don't even make use of AlbyHub, sending that information to Alby servers, where they then broadcast those private transaction details over an SMTP channel.
Dude, that's not cool at all.
@npub1get…0nfm #alby #getalby #albyhub
https://m.primal.net/JyUS.png

2024-08-13 13:41:41

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Oh wow, that’s really amazing!

2024-08-13 00:56:12

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Wow. After decades of use, all major browser makers were simultaneously informed by some obscure third party, the “Oligo Research Team,” that sites can communicate with 0.0.0.0? I remember people discussing this topic like fifteen *years* ago.

2024-08-09 20:36:56

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I can confirm that many US-based Porsche dealerships discretely install a tracking device on cars as they arrive from Germany prior to customer delivery. It’s done within hours of the vehicle arriving at the dealer.
Customer requests to remove it are deflected or outright refused, forcing him to threaten to kill the deal if the tracking device stays. Only then will they grudgingly remove it.
The tracking is performed by a company named Stargard. If you obtain account credentials and login, you’ll see they keep a log of every location the vehicles visits.

2024-08-07 15:19:33

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I’d love to hear more about your lifestyle. What country are you in?
Living off my Lightning node just isn’t feasible here in the US. I run a ton of my expenses through BitRefill (cell phone, groceries, restaurants). I also pay Bitcoin for tech expenses (servers, email, domains, VPN) but stuff like paying rent etc. is darned near impossible except in cases where landlord is young and Bitcoin-friendly.
I’m getting better at demanding *payment* in Bitcoin, but that’s only because I’m mostly retired and work only when it suits me. Most clients just aren’t open to it. 😕
How’re you able to live off Bitcoin?

2024-08-06 18:26:16

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I’m with him philosophically, although I’ll likely never get used to Europeans pluralizing the word math.

2024-08-06 18:19:41

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Truth. Even Bitcoin maxis like me typically make an exception for Monero and find it useful. The risk with holding XMR in large quantities is that every time a CEX delists it to satisfy some government thug, the price drops suddenly and violently. The practical use of XMR on DEXs like Bisque though is undeniable.

2024-08-06 17:50:01

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Just to follow up on this... I've had others try to send to my LN address (anon@anon.dev) and it works just fine, which indicates the Alby Hub LNUrl endpoint is working successfully. Good news. Love the product!

2024-08-06 13:51:27

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Thanks for trying, Roland. I've been looking for someone to test with. I just sent you 1,000 sats, which seemed to work just fine. When you try to send some back to me, what error message do you receive?
I'm 100% certain the error is on my side but not sure where. There's plenty of inbound liquidity and I can receive from other sources. Apparently it's just the inbound zaps that don't work. I'd be open to any suggestions.

2024-08-06 13:34:57

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No joke. I almost completely gave up on Alby because of the ridiculous CAPTCHA puzzles. It’s costing them users.

2024-08-05 19:55:33

ELI5:
“They” say one of the primary contributing factors to this Bitcoin and equity selloff is the unwinding of the yen carry trade, that is to say, the differential between USD and JPY rates just narrowed due to an increase of the JPY rate, and people are selling risk assets to pay back their yen loans. Fair enough.
If that’s true though, wouldn’t the lowering of USD rates also cause a narrower spread? Yet lowering the USD rates is widely seen as positive for risk assets. The topic of the “carry trade” never seems to come up in the context of lowering US rates. Why is that?
#asknostr #bitcoin @npub1a2c…w83a #macroeconomics

2024-08-05 17:47:49

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My thoughts after using Alby Hub for Windows to connect to an LND node running on the same machine....
(1) There seems to be an issue when LND uses self-signed certificates, which is the default behavior. AlbyHub complains that the certificate isn't trusted, and this happens even if the self-signed certificate is added to the Trusted Root Authorities folder in the Windows Certs console. What I ended up doing was creating a dedicated DNS entry for LND (lnd.mydomain.com), and then getting a free SSL cert from one of the countless free providers, including that DNS name on the certificate. I forced LND to use that certificate instead of the self-signed one and then referenced it in the AlbyHub setup. That seemed to clear up the error.
(2) If you make any errors during the initial setup of AlbyHub, even something simple like a misspelling or forgetting into include the Grpc port suffix (:10009), you can't correct it. You'll end up getting an error along the lines of "the product has already been setup." I believe I sent you a screenshot. To fix this, you have to close the app, delete the alby data folder from both %appdata% and %localappdata%, restart the app, and try the configuration again.
(3) Since this is a UI app, not a service, you'll probably want the default behavior to minimize the app to the system tray when the user clicks the close button, rather than terminating the app. That's the way long-running apps usually behave if they have a UI (see bitcoin-core UI, Telegram, Signal, etc. for example). It's what we Windows users expect. :)
(4) It would be nice to see BTC quantities expressed in BTC instead of sats, or at least provide the option to toggle. Not a deal-killer, just a personal preference issue. Dealing with unwieldy sat quantities (e.g. 78,300,000 sats) instead of more reasonable BTC quantities (e.g. .783 BTC) presents an extra mental conversion hurdle, albeit a small one, that users have to jump through when figuring out how much they want to send or receive. I'm guessing the decision to use sats has something to do with GetAlby's history as a preferred method of "zapping" NOSTR users, which is typically done in micro quantities, like 50 sats at a time?

2024-08-03 22:52:48

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I’m using Alby Hub as the LNUrl endpoint for my self-hosted LND node, but it’s not clear how Alby generates any revenue from such activity.
What is Alby’s revenue model?
#alby #bitcoin #albyhub

2024-08-03 03:47:57

I’m here to lurk, listen, and learn.
#introductions