Last Notes
Do relays advertise which NIPs they support? That one is what? NIP-70?
I couldn't code my way out of a paper bag, but maybe one of y'all can help out?
#nevent1q…4npg
We were way too excited about what we were talking about to even think about it. I think I only pulled my phone out once the whole time and it was just to show you @nprofile…nq7m's Freeflow client.
Was great to hang out this afternoon and talk Bitcoin, Nostr, faith, and whatever else came up over drinks and smokes.
Relieved some FOMO from not being able to go to Bit Block Boom this week. 😂
#nevent1q…htsy
Welcome to the StartOS family!
Loving the update to Jumble.social @npub1syj…f6wl!
One thing I am noticing, though. Now that "favorite relays" load in the right-side panel, you cannot select to send a note to only that relay. You first need to add it to a relay set, so it will show up in the left-side panel, and then Jumble will display the toggle to send your note only to that relay.
Always happy to see other Reformed Christians on Nostr!
How far the mighty have fallen... There's a few of us Reformed folks who are keeping the hardcore side of Protestantism alive. 😉
H/T to @npub1ak5…0gwg on Nostr in particular.
The tutorials @npub1utx…50e8 has in the readme for each of his Bitvora relays aren't too bad for someone who is a bit technically inclined.
We definitely need someone who can make some more approachable tutorials for some of these things, though... Like a Nostr version of @npub1rxy…hnp8, except that I prefer written format for tutorials, with screenshots and maybe some short clips for each step. Videos can be a pain to find there a section that you want to go back to started to watch it over again, while written format, you can just leave the section you need up on the screen.
I might be biased though. I write all the procedures for my department with my current employer using this format, and they are basically just tutorials by another name. They also take an incredible amount of time to do well, which is probably one of the major reasons why devs don't write them for their own projects. Their time is tied up building and squashing bugs.
We are doomed to forever have multople DM specs that some apps support and others don't. 😭
Easiest relays with a GUI are @nprofile…nggv's hosted relays at https://relay.tools and @nprofile…l3vp's Nostr Relay Tray.
Good thing I have them backed up as lists. 😉
Fair, and UTXOs of a few hundred thousand sats are probably fine. 😂
This man... So quick to fix things when reported to him!
#nevent1q…3y3l
Indeed. It's a relay that whitelists who can post to it based on your web-of-trust. In most cases, that is defined as the nostr:npubs you follow + the nostr:npubs they follow.
The one I am running is @npub1utx…50e8's WoT Relay that can be found here: https://github.com/bitvora/wot-relay
This implementation has the advantage that it can aggregate notes from those within your web-of-trust by pulling from the relays they write to. You can also limit the amount of time they will be stored on your relay and exclude certain users' follows from your web-of-trust if you notice that they have been duped into following bots.
UTXO calls this last feature the "Retard List." My retard list keeps growing...
Pointers for running your own WoT relay?
Things you learn from running a Web-of-Trust relay:
Trust no one.
With some notable exceptions, but yes, in general we have a great community here.
I know my personal repository of Nostr apps and tools is WAY out of date. 😂
I dunno. There's still plenty happening. A lot of projects have died, for sure, but they either weren't interesting enough to the community to keep going, the devs behind them lost interest or don't have time to work on side-projects, or they just couldn't find a way to become sustainable.
I don't know about others, but I haven't noticed a drop in folks engaging with me, and I am engaging more than ever on here. I have definitely seen others commenting on the feeling of less interaction happening, but that hasn't been my experience.
https://fountain.fm/show/vnmoRQQ50siLFRE8k061
LOL! @npub1syj…f6wl it looks like Jumble is automatically adding "nostr:" in front of "npub." It should probably only do this for a full and valid "npub" string.
Using npub.world to see their "reputable followers" can be very enlightening, too...
https://npub1kun5628raxpm7usdkj62z2337hr77f3ryrg9cf0vjpyf4jvk9r9smv3lhe.blossom.band/ceb5adc47457988d865b15a2926b1631cbbfbdfb7e0155f0a93c884c7d25f137.jpg
It should also be noted that WoT scores on #Coracle are completely individual. So, while this user may have a score of -14 for you, they have a -24 for me, because more of my follows have muted them.
Some have. I highly recommend #Coracle for that feature in particular.
You can also get this feature on all Nostr clients by only reading from your own Web-of-Trust relay that aggregates notes from nostr:npubs within your web-of-trust. That is a bit more involved to set up, though.
Because the mints talk to each other via Lightning, you can absolutely use an eCash wallet with Nostr and MiniBits gives you a Nostr Wallet Connect string you can use to connect it to Amethyst.
However, anyone you zap will receive sats via Lightning instead of eCash.
That's something different. A shitcoin to be precise.
Check out Cashu protocol. A great wallet for it on Android is @nprofile…vavr and one on iOS is Macadamia.
To be fair, begging can be a scam, if you are misrepresenting your reasons for begging. For instance, the folks who dress like bums, go out and panhandle until they receive enough from duped passers-by, and then hop in their car to head home.
Here's a reply I made regarding why follower counts are always wrong and they always will be:
#nevent1q…esml
Think of it like the relationship between gold and the dollar, back when banks would issue dollars as a "receipt" of the gold that was on deposit with the bank, and anyone carrying that receipt could turn it back into the bank to get the gold out.
eCash works in a similar way. A mint receives real sats as a deposit, typically via lightning, but it could be on-chain too, and they issue/mint eCash tokens to the one who deposited the sats. Just like USD, they can transact with anyone willing to accept the eCash as payment directly and privately, even offline, simply by transferring the tokens to that person's eCash wallet, which can hold tokens from any mint.
The big difference with eCash compared to the gold/USD reserve relationship of the past is, if someone DOESN'T want to receive your eCash as payment, you can easily have the mint that gave you your tokens send them sats via Lightning instead by turning your tokens back in with the mint to be burned.
Obviously, this means you are putting a lot of trust in the mint to honor your request to redeem their tokens back into sats when you want to transfer them out of the mint. It is a custodial relationship where you are holding IOUs that are only as good as the mint is honest. Great for small amounts, but I wouldn't trust it with anything more than I would keep as cash in my physical wallet.
Sounds like @npub1v0l…qj49's Freeflow, but built on BlueSky's ATProtocol instead of something that is actually decentralized.
You're not thinking too far ahead: https://www.solosatoshi.com/product/solarbit/
There are currently only three reasons not to generate block templates yourself:
1. You don't run your own node and don't want to start.
2. You don't like OCEAN for some reason, such as preferring FPPS payouts rather than only getting paid when the pool finds a block.
3. You don't want to run Knots as your Bitcoin node implementation.
I'd say D, which means I am probably actually at B.
Yeah, Phoenix and Breez both handle a lot in the background for you. However, because they do this, you can end up with an unexpectedly high fee when you are receiving a transaction and it exceeds the available inbound liquidity. That can be a bad experience for a non-technical person who doesn't understand why the fee is higher and how they could have avoided it.
For instance, because I knew that Phoenix was going to be creating an actual Lightning channel when I first deposited into it, I sent WAY more sats than I actually wanted to have in the wallet (5 million), so that Phoenix would open a really big channel. Then I swapped them back to on-chain via Boltz.exchange, so I wouldn't have such a large balance in a spending wallet. Leaving me with plenty of inbound liquidity in my Phoenix channel.
No non-technical person who doesn't understand how Lightning works is going to know that they should do this. They will send themselves 100k sats or so, and Phoenix will give them a channel of a few hundred thousand sats, and as they use the wallet more and more, they will be comfortable with keeping a higher balance on it, only to get randomly slapped with a higher fee because they ran out of inbound liquidity in their channel.
Breez's new Misty Breez wallet is looking really interesting for non-technical folks to have a better trust trade-off than going with a custodian, though. It still requires the responsibility of holding your private key, but that should be one of the first things a new Bitcoiner learns anyway. For my kids I will stick with hosting their Lightning wallets for them, but once they care enough to hold their own keys, I might be having them learn on Misty Breez.
As for how to find other nodes to connect to, I have seven channels. Five of them are with other Bitcoiners I know and can reach out to personally if there is ever any issue. They also reach out to me and ask what's up when my node is down. The other two channels that aren't with Bitcoiners I know are with nodes that are operated by services I use personally; namely ACINQ (Phoenix) and Boltz.exchange. As such, I have never had need to purchase a channel from a liquidity provider.
The best channel partners are Bitcoiners you know and can contact directly to troubleshoot issues with your channel.
This is what makes things confusing, right?
"Solo" really only refers to who is making the block templates, while "lottery" refers to only the miner who found the block receiving the payouts.
These are also the two main services a pool CAN provide to you. The pool can provide you with block templates to hash, and it can provide you with more regular payouts than if you were mining without the pool.
Standard pools provide both of those services: Block templates to hash and regular payouts whenever anyone in the pool finds a block.
Lottery pools only provide the first of those services: Block templates to hash. They don't provide regular payouts. You only get paid if your miner finds a block.
Until OCEAN, those were the only two structures. No one had yet figured out a way for a pool to provide regular payouts whenever anyone in the pool found a block without also providing block templates for those within the pool to hash. So, solo miners were all, by default, lottery miners, because they had no pool they could connect to and still be able to create their own block templates.
This led to confusion with people equating solo mining with lottery mining, when it really only refers to creating your own block templates.
But now, with OCEAN, you actually CAN create your own block templates while being connected to a pool only for the sake of regular payouts. So you ARE solo mining when you use DATUM, regardless of whether you are connecting to OCEAN for block reward splits or lottery mining without any pool at all.
I am going to flip that question on its head a bit. What is the incentive NOT to make your own blocks? If you already run a node that has its own mempool, why would you want to be beholden to someone else dictating what your miner is hashing? What do you get out of that that you would not get if you created your own block templates?
In my mind, the only reason not to create your own block templates is if you aren't running a node. And then question is, why the heck aren't you running a node?
And then, yes. OCEAN gives a discount on the pool fee for those who use DATUM to create their own templates, and you pay zero pool fee whatsoever if you are lottery mining using DATUM. So the incentive is you get paid more in either scenario. Assuming you are fortunate enough to get paid at all in the lottery mining option.
In the scheme of things, DATUM is quite new. Only been around since what, September of last year? Still a baby.
Usually it takes someone who is using a node implementation, who has some dev skill, and who wants to use the application himself to package an app for that platform. It's usually not the devs behind the node implementation itself who take it on.
The less popular the node implementation, the less likely the person with both the skill and the interest in doing the work exists.
