GrassFedBitcoin
Bitcoin Mechanic

Bitcoin

Public Key

npub1wnlu28xrq9gv77dkevck6ws4euej4v568rlvn66gf2c428tdrptqq3n3wr

NIP-57 Address

mechanic@getalby.com

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs8fl79rnpsz5x00xmvkvtd8g2u7ve2k2dr3lkfadyy4v24r4k3s4spzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgqgcwaehxw309aex2mrp0yhxummnwa5x2un99e3k7mg56sq60

Publishing to

relay.primal.net

relay.noswhere.com

relay.damus.io

Author Public Key

npub1wnlu28xrq9gv77dkevck6ws4euej4v568rlvn66gf2c428tdrptqq3n3wr

Show more details

Last Notes

2024-09-13 19:37:14

This one hurt @npub1h8n…rpev https://image.nostr.build/165f68ca98fc5ec343a7bfa70726cf89eb6f11c1fac1e39e096dbc5ae56ed0bb.png
(I tired making the zap splits all go to Guy instead of me. Guilt free meme theft - only on Nostr!)

2024-09-09 15:55:20

Permissionless protocols that don't take spam seriously become unusable.
Thabkfully, no one here is pretending it's all valid use of Nostr and thus inciting us to inaction.
However, Bitcoin is the most important protocol of our lives in many ways and the gas lightning around the spam it suffers has been sadly very effective.
Very few take it seriously or imagine fee markets for block space are somehow sufficient when they clearly aren't.
#nevent1q…rnav

2024-09-08 18:18:24

- reply

Next Halloween I should give out steak to the neighbourhood kids.
I can't participate in this anymore :/

2024-09-06 15:42:27

Bitaxes are actually great for ROI.
@nprofile…wpxv - you just post a picture of it on Nostr when it shows up and get zapped 200x more than it'll ever mine.

2024-09-06 04:07:26

A miner on @npub1qtv…7dze found a block yesterday and another today.
The machines were 6 feet apart.
Pretty blown away by this. https://image.nostr.build/1d220a50a2e09a38138953f96eb0f771d1c29f1ae0577908f8f2531f74caed94.png

2024-09-06 00:29:26

You cannot "nutrition science" your way out of an inactive lifestyle.
Gotta actually move.

2024-09-03 18:39:21

- reply

And what do you back that up to? Presumably not itself?

2024-09-03 17:53:28

- reply

Point is to be remote/off site.

2024-09-03 17:41:35

I want to upload a massive, already-encrypted backup of my files.
I've been searching forever for a cloud-storage provider that doesn't pointlessly encrypt it again and thus cause the upload to take days instead of hours.
Does anyone know of such a service?

2024-09-02 02:04:51

Taking a nap in the middle of the day - yay or nay?

2024-08-31 02:11:10

- reply

Needs to be the name of episode 2

2024-08-31 00:14:33

You could be outraged about Brasil banning Twitter.
Of you could use Nostr and pay no attention.
It's a lot more funny when they try to ban decentralized protocols than centralized platforms.
Genuinely I think we'd all just laugh if they announced a Nostr ban.

2024-08-30 00:24:05

- reply

FOSS larps drive me nuts.

2024-08-29 18:25:06

Sell above 58k, buy below 58k, hodl at 58k.
Seems like the most guaranteed trading strategy in existence.

2024-08-29 00:18:44

Moved Amethyst to the place on my phone home screen where Twitter used to be. https://image.nostr.build/db10f76070c2a019ebc4ff94e17c187dbd55d3beebb43652942da630e99c93ac.jpg

2024-08-27 06:16:22

Power cuts are gifts from God

2024-08-20 14:02:09

Voting for whoever undoes the law making websites ask about cookies.

2024-08-17 17:02:59

How I feel telling people not to take the fricken' vaccine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7FIiYsVy3U

2024-08-16 18:02:20

Use Knots
#Knotstr

2024-08-16 03:23:25

- reply

I had a shirt with him on once.
Glad I'm not that guy anymore.

2024-08-12 02:06:26

https://image.nostr.build/09fb98412c7b9f1a6a061f62ec0bc4e71d93e65bc22d01b5fb66a8cffd089d64.jpg

2024-08-09 05:23:09

- reply

I'd enjoy it

2024-08-08 05:27:45

https://image.nostr.build/86f354b01fd1408fcdd1743535cc362bf80e18ba26f053e8235eccf8f6a70d2c.jpg

2024-08-04 04:42:42

https://image.nostr.build/c4cb843a2a0e0299f43fd74f4010b569c5fa4a05f245d01b5f45143cd0563a75.png

2024-07-23 02:24:35

These guys could pocket (love how twitters algo makes posting YouTube pointless so I'm always reminded to come to Nostr for music poasting)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F_qZvbGEQI

2024-07-07 18:05:08

Need to buy a smoker.
Way too many options.
Happy to spend $1k-$2k
Advice appreciated :)

2024-07-01 01:49:52

Had surgery a year ago, and drank coffee basically every day since in order to minimize inflammation.
I stopped again about two months ago and coffee was definitely a net negative for energy overall.
Nothing beats the buzz it gives first thing in the morning, but without it I'm able to be productive in afternoons and evenings again and sleep far better.

2024-06-16 10:53:54

- reply

Do the instructions here not work? Is it a char length issue? https://twitter.com/SeedSigner/status/1781073766300143725

2024-06-15 07:02:19

For anyone at BTCPrague I'm gonna be on the main stage in a bit over an hour

2024-06-08 05:33:10

Nostr is a mess.
Feels so right.

2024-06-06 23:42:02

Exhausted
Go to gym anyway
Push extremely hard
Leave with tonnes of energy?
How does this happen?

2024-05-30 23:14:53

Wow just figured out Bitmain's latest fuckery in real time.
I'll give you the back story...
Once upon a time Bitmain was grinding merkle roots instead of nonces aka "covert ASICBOOST".
This gave them an advantage over other miners who didn't know this was possible. One company went out of business - KNC - citing "the Chinese having some secret advantage we don't know about" - which turned out to be true precisely for this reason.
It's one of the reasons ASIC manufacture is so centralized today and this is correctly identified by many as being one of the most vulnerable aspects of the entire bitcoin ecosystem.
The ASICBOOST issue came to a head when Bitmain used their influence to block the activation of SEGWIT (essential for Lightning) because it would break their ability to do it - at least covertly. Well, they would still be able to use asicboost, but just in an obvious way that would mean everyone else could do it too. They had patented it so as to try and prevent this because that's the kind of people we're dealing with here but I digress...
When asicboost was independently discovered by Greg Maxwell Bitmain lied and said they weren't in fact using it.
This was after years of bullshitting about segwit, with Bitmain pretending to be in favour of "alternative scaling solutions" or even doing segwit as a hard fork instead which would allow them to continue what they were doing.....
Absolutely nobody believed them thanks to GMax having reverse engineered one of their ASICs and demonstrating what they had built and tried to keep to themselves.
This was a watershed moment in the fork wars where everyone suddenly understood why Bitmain had been making nonsensical arguments against segwit forever. Wanting big/small blocks wasn't a related discussion. Segwit fixed TX malleability and was a no-brainer upgrade and in the end was combined with a block size increase anyway as a compromise.
So we proceeded with segwit anyway, at which point Bitmain switched to overt asicboost which is actually even more powerful, it just requires grinding version bits instead of merkle roots but it's obvious if a miner is doing this.
Now everybody does it so essentially the net effect of it being possible is zero, except your node asking you wtf miners are doing signalling for upgrades your node knows nothing about (upgrade coordination is what version bits are actually supposed to be used for).
Oh well, relatively little harm done. If you're happy to ignore the obvious dishonesty and effort to undermine what's arguably Bitcoin's most important ever upgrade.
Fun extra tidbit: Antbleed - an intentional backdoor with which Bitmain could remotely shutdown any Antminer in the world. They said it was for shutting down stolen ASICs but immediately patched it once it was discovered.
Anyway, this company now accounts for 25-30% of all blocks found, if you naively observe the blockchain.
That's not enough to spook anyone, but unfortunately many smaller pools are in fact just fronts for Bitmain which we know for three reasons:
1. The smaller pools are clearly using blocks constructed by, or for the benefit of, Antpool.
2. They share the same custodian of their newly mined coins (Cobo).
3. They have a lending program to bail out smaller pools who get in over their head due to FPPS.
And the trend is sadly in the wrong direction, given Braiins recently abandoning its old payout model and becoming just a simple proxy for Bitmain as result of switching to FPPS.
[Massive shoutout to @mononautical and @0xB10C for helping uncover how centralized pools have become. Those are their Tweeter handles, idk if they're on Nostr.]
Summary - Bitmain is not just Antpool, it probably accounts for >50% of block templates and manufactures >90% of the mining hardware in the world.
So where am I going with all this?
Amazingly, it's about empty blocks.
What does that have to do with anything?
Well, famously OCEAN has found 3 empty blocks in its short existence, causing many to wrongly make allegations of some sort of issue with the pool itself.
This spurred on endless debate about why pools make empty templates in the first place and the actual reason so many of them get solved.
In short, pools send empty templates then immediately follow up with full templates. So quickly, that the interim period accounts for a tiny minority of the empty blocks that get found on the network, and none of ours.
In all three cases with OCEAN, the miner solved the empty block long after already having a full template to work on -
- leaving the pool in a position to either throw away a perfectly good (but empty) block or to broadcast it to the network and get miners >90% of the reward of a full block. Obviously the latter makes sense and does zero harm to the network while still adding to the overall PoW necessary for any attacker.
So why would an empty block happen a few seconds after the pool had already sent an updated job for a full block?
Because Antminers suck.
*What we didn't realize was that they intentionally sucked.*
You can send an updated job to an Antminer and watch it continue to work on an old job for over 60 seconds in edge cases.
This was something we assumed was due to design of the ASIC itself, and thus just poor engineering on the part of Bitmain.
But it turns out we were wrong, it's due to Antminer firmware.
We know this because they just released a fix for it.
So Bitmain watched, while people kept mining empty blocks, everyone would wrongly attribute it to pools, while explainers on popular websites like mempool(.)space would offer wrong explanations about it happening due to pools being slow to send proper templates and seemingly no one would understand even the motivation for sending empty templates, let alone the reason they get worked on for so long.
But the fix being something that gets released right after OCEAN starts explaining what's really going on here is beyond reasonable doubt.
They had a fix for it, and have been using that fix for their own mining.
Now they can't get away with it because increasingly people are realizing that Whatsminers and ASICs from other manufacturers aren't finding anything like the amount of empty blocks because they switch jobs far more quickly.
An Antminer has a far greater likelihood of finding an empty block because it spends longer working on old jobs.
We've been out here yelling that the issue is with the ASIC *NOT* the pool.
The fact that Bitmain intentionally crippled the firmware on the Antminers they would sell to the world, while keeping more functional units for their own mining is typical of everything Bitmain.
Sure it can be incompetence and coincidental timing on the fix, but I sincerely doubt it.
The conversation around empty blocks reached the point where people were beginning to realize something was broken with Antminers and then they just happen to release a fix for it right after people finally start catching wind of what's really going on.
__________________
So imagine this -
You sell shovels to gold miners, and as we all know, the people who make money during a gold rush are the people who sell the shovels.
But in this case the shovel seller is digging for gold himself too.
And he has intentionally sold crappy shovels to all of his customers so as give himself an advantage.
Empty blocks kept happening, people kept blaming pools.
OCEAN got attacked over it. We explained the real reason they happen so much, and Bitmain releases a fix right after.
Insane.
This goes further than empty blocks.
It's not just empty templates that take forever to work their way out of an Antminer, it's *all templates* and pools are constantly updating work as new transactions show up.
A super lucrative transaction shows up in your mempool?
All other pools are sending an updated job to hundreds of thousands of Antminers who will ignore it for a while, while Antpool has their miners working on it more quickly.
It's not hard to see the motivation for all this, especially going forward as TX fees become more and more important.
Again, insane.
_________________
If you want to watch @wk057 and I figure this all out in real time, watch the video below which was just intended to be a discussion on why empty blocks happen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BkyhdxnDrM

2024-05-28 07:50:44

- reply

I haven't, we've never met.

2024-05-27 06:33:45

Made a video - first since September!
https://youtu.be/h-CA2wEFWPE?si=qOwXYNWcOLZI_x8a

2024-05-19 04:38:36

From '69 - '75 music making peaked.
You can't change my mind.

2024-05-10 05:48:28

2023 ruined IBD.
Sorry to post a Twitter link but I can't figure out a way to cross post it here and my client refuses to upload pictures.
https://x.com/GrassFedBitcoin/status/1788798634252759499

2024-05-06 17:39:39

- reply

man I wish Henreik Danielson's channel on youtube hadn't been deleted.
He was 1. f4 pilling the world.

2024-05-06 16:18:46

- reply

Noice

2024-04-22 14:25:55

- reply

APO is much less risky than what's presented here, certainly if you ignore Lightning itself and just think about the base layer.

2024-04-16 16:55:47

- reply

How are you testing it?

2024-04-02 06:21:56

- reply

If over 65536 you'll be paid out not matter what eventually.
If under then nothing unless you set up lightning (income) then there will probably be no minimum but tiny amount like 4 sats would probably just keep failing.
If you resume hashing before payout then you'll just resume working toward the higher threshold of 0.01xx (incoming ability to lower this if you want - stay tuned).

2024-04-01 23:52:21

Fuck the haters, Nostr's great.

2024-04-01 15:52:47

- reply

404...

2024-04-01 15:25:21

- reply

Are you into holepunch/Keet?

2024-04-01 14:49:30

- reply

USB but actually ended up taking several days after it hit 90%. I jumped the gun on this, thought it was almost finished.

2024-04-01 06:55:14

- reply

A fork is the wrong path. Spam mitigation always occurs higher up than the protocol itself. You don't change SMTP to deal with email scams.
All we do is carry on as before, placing sensible limits at the mempool level. They're still respected it's just there's a new avenue now exploiting the carelessness around taproot.
Bocks aren't slightly larger - they should be around 1.5MB and they're just under 4MB.
That's a failure.

2024-04-01 01:35:01

Someone paying $389 to move $1.94.
547,000 sats to move 2730 sats.
Why?
Because this has nothing to do with Bitcoin and doesn't make any sense from the network's perspective.
People who take comfort that behaviour will remain predictable thanks to economically rational decision making need to know it goes both ways when you start taking in external factors.
You have to do it with miners too.
If a miner can make more money in ways that have nothing to do with bitcoin then you can no longer rely on simple assumptions like "miners will do X because if they don't then they will make less than a miner who does"
The simple example I've used many times is compliance.
If you have a choice between expensive legal battles and exclusion informed by government blacklists (i.e censorship) then it's economically rational to do what's economically irrational.
"You left $500 in TX fees on the table! Why?"
"Because our lawyers advised us that this would save us several million dollars."
We have a case-study of this exact scenario with Wasabi Wallet.
So if this is true, what does it have to do with spam? From a miner's perspective, spam is simply a free lunch.
What's the downside?
The issue is we've been standing on shaky ground when it comes to the assumptions we've made about the choices of miners. Myself included.
It turns out there are instances when economic rationality works *against* the interests of the wider network. It's obvious, but apparently we're all surprised that this it the case, or straight up in denial about it.
Spam is that exact scenario. Blocks are far larger than was ever supposed to be possible with the introduction of witness-discounted data. We see block after block at what was meant to be a theoretical maximum of just under 4MB.
There is no room for interpretation. This is simply harmful and the result of a nasty attack.
The entire basis on which the blocksize wars were fought was that encumbering nodes with way more data would lead to centralization. (Along with a host of other issues, like centralization of mining & pools).
The simple solution is that it needs to stop. Blocks cannot be stuffed with arbitrary data placed there by ambivalent miners.
The way this stops is as a natural extension of a bitcoin community that recognizes attacks and responds accordingly.
It means using node software that isn't designed to hurt its users which is already happening with migration away from Core to Knots. The most popular plug-n-play nodes have all begun offering this.
They did not this time last year.
It means miners choosing pools that at least give them the option of not participating in the attack -> currently well under 1% of the hashrate, 6 months ago not even an option. Hard for me to talk about because obviously I'm employed by the pool in question.
It means people who never mined doing it for the first time.
And mostly it means maintaining an understanding of what makes bitcoin bitcoin. That in itself has always been enough to evict crypto scammers to something other than Bitcoin. Those who wanted to turn it into "paypal 2.0" with the same disregard and contempt for nodes that the spam apologists display now forked themselves off to bcash and craigcoin.
The one thing that will *not* solve this problem is high transaction fees. This is an argument made by those who at least understand an attack when they see it, but are in denial about what surviving it actually involves.
Throughout the last few months the conversation has rapidly progressed and the tide has been turning.
I am under no illusions that this is an easy fix, but that is because of the nature of politics and how much larger the ecosystem is now.
But it's also just history repeating itself.
Bitcoin keeps having to fight the same battles again and again. Always in service of importance of being able to run *and use* a node, affordably and trivially, by complete noobs.
To maintain decentralization.
To resist the corrupting of what we have.
Bitcoin is money. Other features cannot come at the expense of that.
OP RETURN wars, bcash, segwit2x, shitcoins, coloredcoins, hostile BIPs, malicious devs....
We've done it a million times before. Every single time the "laser-eyed toxic maxis" win.

2024-03-31 01:47:27

- reply

Only way to prove we've paid people. It would completely break our design if we didn't use BOLT12 and just said "trust us!"
We've allocated resources to help people get setup with BOLT12 but really LND just need to get on with it.

2024-03-26 02:46:00

My red pill was reddit banning the pizzagate subreddit.
Couldn't see the world the same after that.
Years later it surfaces who the 6th biggest account on reddit was...

2024-03-23 05:05:41

- reply

What is Blastr?

2024-03-21 01:38:23

Raspberry Pi 5 synced bitcoin in about 22 hours.
We're so back.

2024-03-20 04:41:49

- reply

I'm including Canada in this corruption of dairy.

2024-03-19 20:01:56

Dear America,
Half & half ≠ cream.
Stop ruining my coffee with it.

2024-03-04 22:34:14

Transatlantic flight tomorrow - any advice on some movies to stick on my laptop for it?

2024-03-03 00:43:28

Sometimes songs that go viral just hit outta nowhere https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxgeJLolGIo

2024-02-27 05:40:57

Decent BOLT12 wallet?

2024-02-15 13:35:46

ETF buyers are tourists.

2024-02-15 03:55:41

- reply

It's a fork of Core. Just makes a few things user configurable that aren't in Core. It's extremely low risk vs independent, ground-up implementations like BTCD which have fallen out of consensus before. There isn't really that risk but of course there are fewer eyeballs on Knots than Core.

2024-02-10 01:18:37

- reply

No experience. I know there's no tax for bitcoin/tech stuff.

2024-02-10 01:00:01

- reply

There are some comforts I'm used to that aren't found here but it's also perfectly safe (this isn't just hype. There is zero scetchy behaviour going on.)
Paying with bitcoin almost everywhere is unbeatable.

2024-02-10 00:56:48

Getting seriously El Salvador pilled.
Being around people who have hope for the future of their country is addictive.
This cannot be found in Canada or the US. These countries are on suicide missions and it's horrible to live in such an environment.

2024-02-05 18:12:51

- reply

idk, people want CTV + stuff. Everyone pushing for it is trying to thwart anti-spam initiatives though so my social heuristics are screaming at me that it's a bad idea and I haven't figured out why yet.
I guess that puts me in camp APO.

2024-02-05 18:02:16

- reply

That kind of backup is precarious on lightning. Most backups will result in force-closed channels. Recovering channel state is scary due to risk of having not the most recent state and thus triggering a justice TX.

2024-02-05 18:01:03

- reply

I was a CLN maxi but switched to LND because I need anchor outs...

2024-02-03 01:30:52

Oh Radiohead is a meme here?
Cool well I spent years obsessed.
In order of preference:
1. Jigsaw
2. Subterranean
3. Paranoid
4. Weird Fishes
5. Pyramid
6. Spinning plates

2024-02-03 01:14:12

- reply

They changed a lot over the years, with a generally incredibly depressing vibe throughout.
Jigsaw is basically my fav song of all time. There's probably a song in their catalogue you'd love if you gave it all a try.

2024-02-02 21:52:06

- reply

Poe's law until I noticed author.

2024-02-02 06:20:03

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7aHFwAPMww

2024-02-01 23:11:21

- reply

Badly. I need to raise my Nostr client game. Still using iris.to and I think there are better things out there currently.

2023-10-31 04:16:25

Daily note to self: Use Twitter less and Nostr more.

2023-10-09 18:08:59

Companies that force you to make an account with them in order to unsubscribe from their email spam....

2023-10-02 05:23:36

Is there a liquid that - with more than 100ml of it - you can do something evil on an airplane?
What is the rationale for this limitation?

2023-06-28 07:14:33

How come version-hell is so bad on python?

2023-06-20 01:25:33

ffmpeg is so good

2023-06-06 22:23:43

The fewer lightning channels I have the simpler and more enjoyable life becomes.

2023-05-29 21:31:19

My brit-who-has-been-living-in-north-america-for-a-while accent keeps making people think I'm Australian.
Gonna need active measures.

2023-05-06 19:41:05

Bitcoin's in the worst shape I've seen it in a long time.

2023-05-01 14:58:00

If you ever, for any reason whatsoever, use a CBDC you are laying bricks of an inescapable prison for yourself and everyone else.
You cannot afford to be this ignorant.

2023-04-12 18:31:08

Pfizer - biggest fine in US history for fraud, corruption. Caught bribing doctors, rigging studies resulting in deaths.
Me: I don't think they can be trusted.
99% of people: LOL dumbass conspiracy theorist.