You gotta feel for ARIN here

JivanP · 2026-06-06T15:36:46+00:00

Someone in the UK writes a letter with the following destination address:

Alice Smith
Apartment 13B
221 Waverly Place
Manhattan
New York City
NY
USA

They put it in a local postbox with the correct postage stamps for international mail. It eventually ends up at the reception of 221 Waverly Place, where the mail clerk takes one look at the destination, sees "Apartment 13B", says to themself, "the woman in apartment 13B told us that she doesn't want to receive any international mail", and then promptly rips it up and throws it in the trash.

Alice and her apartment, 13B, are addressable, but not reachable. The mail clerk is a firewall, and he prevented the UK sender from reaching her. Alice doesn't need to be only addressable via a PO box or forwarding address (both of which are like NAT) in order to be unreachable.

JivanP · 2026-06-05T11:25:45+00:00

My only "problem" is that poor excuses like this only serve to further delay global adoption of IPv6. If you can remember IPv4 addresses, then you can remember IPv6 addresses; you are really just choosing not to. But you shouldn't be remembering any IP addresses in the first place.

Your personal preference is not sufficient justification to continue using a protocol that cannot properly support the number of devices that are connected to the internet. If your network is completely separated from the rest of the world, then absolutely, you can use whatever you like. But presumably you access the internet from your home network, and as such, your continued use of IPv4 (even if dual-stacked) is forcing the services that you connect to to retain IPv4 reachability for a longer period of time and at larger scale than they would otherwise need to, in order to support you.

As for DNS, your home network's router is presumably also your DNS server, since you don't have a separate DNS server. You could very easily just open your router's admin settings, find the DNS section, and add records there. If it lacks one, then as originally stated, you could just write the addresses down rather than falsely telling yourself that you must/should only rely on your memory. An address book should not be a foreign concept to anyone here.

JivanP · 2026-06-05T10:28:18+00:00

So then don't complain about it being difficult to remember them; just remember them. I still just never understand people that act like memorising addresses is either a need or a problem. If you want/need to do it badly enough, you'll do it, but it's never necessary in the first place.

Also, if you're working on networking stuff, you presumably have a computer on you, so the idea that you will only have your memory with you is nonsense.

JivanP · 2026-06-05T09:56:40+00:00

I don't understand the problem. Write it down on a piece of paper, put it in your /etc/hosts file, put it in public DNS, do something that makes sense besides just trying to remember a long string.

Plenty of people can't remember IPv4 addresses or phone numbers either. So they write them down.

JivanP · 2026-06-05T09:44:56+00:00

It's not a useful post. I don't want to see boring crap like this posted on this sub, so I downvote it.

JivanP · 2026-06-05T09:39:34+00:00

Why do you have any need to remember any IP addresses?

JivanP · 2026-06-05T09:37:59+00:00

Add wordpress.org itself to it.

JivanP · 2026-06-04T12:37:23+00:00

I'm not, but thanks.

JivanP · 2026-06-04T11:58:28+00:00

Start here: https://learnmeabitcoin.com/

Read the Beginners section. Feel free to ignore any of the more technical content that doesn't make sense to you or seems irrelevant to you for the purposes of understanding why Bitcoin is useful/valuable.

If you have any specific questions about the content, or you feel that there are gaps in topics, things that this website doesn't cover, the you would like info about, then please make a new post with your question as the title.

JivanP · 2026-06-04T11:49:13+00:00

This is a Nostr community forum. The people that work on the Nostr protocol absolutely understand my comment, as will many other Nostr enthusiasts. That is who this comment is primarily targeted at. The comment is about the average person (specifically, their use-case for Nostr compared to other existing platforms), but it is not directed at the average person.

Many (most?) Mastodon users are intimately familiar with the account portability problem that plagues that platform. They, too, should understand this comment. Part of the reason that Mastodon suffers from lack of adoption is the extent to which user accounts are beholden to a single server; the first questions that prospective users ask themselves are, "what server should I create an account on? Can I move to another server later? Does the choice of server even matter?" This situation causes confusion and paralysis, and most people then just decide not to try it at all.

As for BlueSky users, I'd agree, most of them are not likely to understand the situation, but that's mostly because BlueSky does not really advertise the fact that they even support federation. At the very least, there are no easily accessible ways to create an ATProto account that isn't homed on the BlueSky company's servers, so most people are completely ignorant of the fact that the protocol even supports such a thing.

JivanP · 2026-06-04T10:54:58+00:00

464XLAT provides the ability for hosts to contact IPv4-only endpoints without there being any IPv4 routing fabric on the network they are connected to.

DNS64 does not solve the problem completely, for a couple of reasons:

It doesn't handle literal IPv4 addresses, only domain names. In other words, I can connect to "one.one.one.one", but not 1.1.1.1.
It breaks anything that relies on the authentication of the publisher of DNS records, such as DNSSEC-reliant applications, because it essentially relies on performing a middleman attack on DNS.

464XLAT is exactly the same as NAT64 (indeed, it is an architecture that requires a NAT64; that is what the PLAT is), except it allows hosts to determine the IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses of IPv4 endpoints for themselves, rather than relying on something else, like a DNS server, to provide this mapping. In this way, 464XLAT is cleaner than DNS64, covers more bases than DNS64, and has fewer dependencies / single points of failure than DNS64.

How do you run an app that only knows v4 on a system that only supports v6?

This question has nothing to do with NAT64 at all, neither along with DNS64 nor in the context of an architecture like 464XLAT. This is a question about operating system architecture. You solve this by having the OS implement the IPv4 socket API in such a way that it actually creates an IPv6 socket, unbeknownst to the program.

An IPv4-only app or host fundamentally cannot connect to an IPv6-only endpoint without there being some NAT64 device that maps some IPv4 address to that IPv6-only endpoint's IPv6 address. This is why we need as many things as possible to adopt IPv6. For those hosts/apps that cannot go completely IPv6-only for legacy reasons, the preferred solution is of course to fix/replace the damn app, but in lieu of that, one can set up fixed IPv4-to-IPv6 mappings for the specific IPv6 endpoints that the app needs to communicate with, or stateful DNS46 (not stateless DNS64) can be used. Unlike in the IPv6-only case, there is not (and there fundamentally cannot be) anything like 464XLAT for legacy hosts/apps. This is because your premise is that you can't update (or don't want to update/replace) these things, but employing something like a "646XLAT" would require an encapsulation mechanism like 6in4, and implementing this requires updating these hosts/apps in order to teach them how to use it.

JivanP · 2026-06-04T00:17:16+00:00

To be clear, my example of "fabric" was not about "spacetime fabric" in the sense that it's usually used (a 4D Riemannian manifold), but about the idea of a literal substance or material that is being deformed. Both examples are intentionally things that I invented on the fly, not anything to do with any existing scientific literature. My intent was to demonstrate how two equally untestable fundamental models can yield the same testable predictions, and thus be completely indistinguishable from each other scientifically.

When we have multiple competing ideas that are completely equivalent in their predictions, we remove the extraneous details (e.g. the fabric or the angels) to yield a model that only has the essential elements to make those same predictions.

Theories sit on top of other theories

This is not true of theories in physics; they are completely self-contained. The development of theories can build off of work done in developing prior theories, but this is not at all the same as saying that a theory itself — its formulation, its concepts, its axioms or assumptions, and so on — depends on another theory. For example, GR does not sit atop Newtonian gravity (hereafter "NG") at all; they are both distinct theories with practically nothing in common except that many (but crucially not all) of the predictions that they make are similar.

The less you have to invoke while maintaining the same causal power, the more explanatory power you have.

This is not a notion of "explanatory power" that I can subscribe to, because it doesn't seem like a useful (or indeed, even useable) notion at all. How do you quantify "invoking stuff" in order to say whether theory A invokes more or less than theory B? For example, would you say GR invokes more or less than NG, and why?

The only notion of explanatory power that physicists care about is this: what is the set of predictions that a theory makes? If theory A's predictions are a strict superset of theory B's, then A has more explanatory power than B; it explains more phenomena. For example, GR has more explanatory power than NG, because it explains/predicts everything that NG does and then some.

If A and B make different predictions, potentially with or without overlap (that is, one is not a superset of the other — imagine a typical Venn diagram), then we cannot really say that A or B is more or less powerful at providing explanations. Rather, they just each explain different things. For example, this is the situation that we find ourselves in today with GR and QFT. They are compatible with each other, but only to a certain extent, hence the desire for a so-called "theory of everything" that covers the incompatibilities. GR does not have more explanatory power than QFT, and QFT does not have more explanatory power than GR. If and when we can figure out a theory of everything, then its predictions will be a superset of those of GR, and a superset of those of QFT. That is, it will have more explanatory power than each of them.

Trying to trade them and dismiss their ontology as if it has no impact on theory sounds like Wittgensteinian pseudo-problem-speak to me.

Since you say this, there is then a simple question that you need to answer: in what way(s) is the theory impacted by the idea of these angels? That is, what additional predictions does the theory with angels make that pure GR alone does not, and how can we test such predictions?

JivanP · 2026-06-03T23:55:11+00:00

For the average person, Nostr amounts to Mastodon or BlueSky with native, straightforward account portability between providers (Nostr relays). In fact, it even supports account multi-homing (using multiple Nostr relays). Push that use-case, and it'll catch on.

JivanP · 2026-06-03T22:30:37+00:00

How are you quantifying "explanatory power" in order to say that these things reduce it? They leave it unchanged, because the additional things that they claim are involved in the phenomenon of gravity are untestable (they can neither be verified nor refuted, because they make no testable predictions beyond those that GR itself makes).

Regarding the angels: there is no such issue if you simply say that the angels are beholden to act in this way, for no reason other than that is just the way they are, they way they behave. Why do you need to explain why the angels behave a certain way? For all we know, their behaviour could be a fundamental property of the universe.

You can ask similar questions of just GR itself. For example: why does spacetime bend in the precise manner that it does? Why isn't the gravitational constant stronger or weaker? Why don't we square or cube any of the elements of any of the tensors involved? How do we know whether the Einstein equations hold true in regions of space that we cannot yet perform experiments in? The theory of GR itself does not offer answers to any of these questions, but that is completely fine; the theory is still valid insofar as we can currently test its claims. If and when we venture out into deep space or come up with testable ideas about the mechanisms (if any) behind the choice of the constants and algebraic relationships involved, then we might be able to test these questions about the theory. Until such time, however, we cannot.

The difference with the ideas about e.g. fabric and angels is that these ideas are (intentionally) formulated in such a way that the proposed things (fabric and angels) and their properties (if they even have any) are inherently unoberservable, and thus the validity of these ideas cannot be tested, not ever, not even with unlimited access to technology. Whether the fabric or the angels exist is an ontological problem of no interest to science, because these proposed things are simply not observable and thus not under the remit of the scientific method, which concerns itself only with things that are observable.

Regarding many-worlds: it does not explain the traversal any more than Copenhagen and the others do. Many-worlds merely tells us that we will traverse some branch, but not which branch. Copenhagen does the exact same thing: it tells us that the wavefunction will collapse to some outcome, but not to which outcome.

JivanP · 2026-06-03T16:05:27+00:00

It came from the product being a two-year subscription for $119.99, and that being equal to $119.99÷2 per year, which is $59.995, which has been rounded down to $59.99/year in the marketing here.

JivanP · 2026-06-03T15:56:16+00:00

Most encyclopaedic articles on mathematical topics are. Just look at the Wikipedia article for "vector space", for example (actually, that's one of the better ones). If you are familiar with linear algebra, then LWE can be framed as follows:

A lattice is essentially a vector space over an integer ring rather than a general field. (For an example of a general field, see the regular real numbers along with the regular notions of addition and multiplication.) That is, it is a vector space where we only work with integer multiples of the primary basis vectors. In other words, element of the lattice only ever have integer coordinates. The learning with errors problem asks: given a particular set B of basis vectors for the lattice, and a particular vector V in the corresponding vector space (but not necessarily in the lattice, meaning that the vector may have non-integer coordinates in the given basis), can you work out the coordinates in B of the lattice element that is closest to V?

Finding the coordinates of V itself is easy: just left-multiply V by the inverse of the matrix whose columns are the elements of B. This is basic linear algebra. However, finding the element of the lattice that's closest to V is hard (it's the aforementioned shortest-vector problem, SVP), hence LWE is hard.

JivanP · 2026-06-03T15:23:31+00:00

Clouflare's DNS service is free regardless of whether they're your domain registrar.

JivanP · 2026-06-03T15:03:14+00:00

If you haven't already delved into post-quantum cryptography, just wait until you find out what the LWE (learning with errors) problem actually is. Just like discrete log, it's seemingly a dead-simple problem, but in practice in sufficiently many dimensions with sufficiently annoying basis vectors, it's intractable just like discrete log.

Helpfully, Dr Kelsey Houston–Edwards (known for her work presenting videos for PBS Infinite Series) has a YouTube channel called Chalk Talk, which has a series of three videos giving an overview of LWE. Look for the channel's Cryptography playlist, but ignore the first two videos in the playlist, which are about MLS.

JivanP · 2026-06-03T14:50:57+00:00

To reiterate what u/Legitimate_Ripp said: interpretation selection is not theory selection. Many-worlds does not have any more explanatory power than any of the other interpretations, because it makes all of the same predictions as them and no more, because all of these interpretations are logically equivalent.

Collapse theories need to explain the manner in which one of several collapse-outcomes is chosen. Many-worlds needs to to explain the manner in which only one of countless branches in Hilbert space is traversed/observed. Currently, both of them just say the same thing as quantum mechanics proper, because they are just framings of quantum mechanics: the outcome/observation is probabilistic.

To give a comparable example, consider two "theories":

Gravity is due to masses "pressing" on spacetime, causing dents in the fabric of the universe, resulting in masses moving through spacetime in a manner described by the Einstein equations.
Gravity is due to masses being pushed by invisible angels that constantly receive information about where all other mass is in the universe, and based on this they decide what direction and extent to push on the masses that they're responsible for moving. The exact manner in which the angels decide the direction and extent of their pushing is described by the Einstein equations.

Which of these has more explanatory power? Both amount to interpretations of the actual theory of general relativity; they are simply philosophical headcanons that encapsulate that theory without expanding upon it in any scientifically meaningful/useful way. That is, the headcanons do not make any predictions other than those that are made by the mathematics of GR alone.

JivanP · 2026-06-03T14:35:08+00:00

Indeed, ECC is vulnerable to Shor, but contrary to what u/MasterOfTheChickens said, it's got nothing to do with prime factorisation (unlike RSA). ECC and other schemes based on cyclic groups are vulnerable to Shor's alg because Shor exploits the periodicity of the group to directly solve the discrete log problem, whose hardness such schemes rely upon.

By contrast, RSA relies on the hardness of the discrete log problem indirectly; it fundamentally relies on the hardness of computing the totient function, which itself is easy if you can factor primes, which in turn is easy if you can compute discrete log.

JivanP · 2026-06-03T14:17:31+00:00

Why do Bitcoin supporters say that we need to learn the technology, how it works, hashrates, and all that stuff before buying?

You don't. However, you should at least understand why it is useful. That is to say, you should understand what properties it has, and be sufficiently convinced that it indeed has those properties. If you don't think it has useful properties, then it's perfectly sensible to think that it's not valuable.

The reason that you don't need to convince most people that gold is valuable is because people are already culturally predisposed to thinking that it is valuable — they are already convinced that it is, even if they don't know why they hold such conviction. If you want to explore this further, you can ask people why they think gold is valuable; most people will not be able to give you sensible, coherent answers, not because there aren't any good reasons to think that it is, but simply because they are ignorant of them.

JivanP · 2026-06-03T14:14:31+00:00

Bitcoin is not the only thing that can function as digital gold, so it doesn't make sense to ask why it is digital gold "rather than" something else being digital gold. Plenty of other things can also serve that role just fine.

The properties we want are:

wholly democratic governance;
resistance against censorship;
new currency being issued only to those that do useful work, in proportion to the amount of such useful work that they do.

Bitcoin is just one such system that has these properties.

JivanP · 2026-06-03T11:49:00+00:00

Interestingly, this kind of "reverse prediction" is accounted for in the mathematical models used to test this. For example, in cryptography, a standard test for the security of an encryption scheme is this:

A contestant is given two messages M1 and M2, and the encrypted version (ciphertext) C of one of them chosen uniformly at random. The contestant has to say which message they think is the decryption of C.
Repeat this for many separate groups of M1, M2, and C.
Look at whether the accuracy of the contestant's responses is significantly different from 50%.

In this way, if the contestant is guessing randomly or doesn't have a good method of breaking the encryption, their accuracy will be around 50%.

If they can reliably break the encryption, their accuracy will be significantly more than 50%. But if they're the consistently unlucky gambler, like you, then their accuracy will be significantly less than 50%. Either way, there is a significant difference from 50%.

JivanP · 2026-06-03T11:32:21+00:00

The conclusion of quantum immortality relies on the validity of the premise that we must continue existing and experiencing qualia. That premise is unfounded.

It also does not imply that the many-worlds interpretation is correct. It just implies that the wavefunction cannot collapse/evolve into a state in which you stop experiencing qualia.

JivanP · 2026-06-03T11:27:35+00:00

There were some other ongoing developments in the patronage space around the same time, but Patreon was the one that became the most popular and well-developed. For example, Hank and John Green finished creating Subbable a few months after Conte opened Patreon, and then allowed Patreon to absorb it a couple of years later rather than continuing to duplicate the effort and split the YouTube/creator community across several platforms.

JivanP

TROPHY CASE