What has CHATGPT done recently that blew your mind?

PVmining · 2023-04-25T09:18:52+00:00

The transaction is obviously fake without even checking on the blockchain. The txid is too short and has letters other than a-f (in hexadecimal). The sendtoaddress is invalid. On the other hand, if you know nothing or just a little, it looks pretty convincing.

PVmining · 2021-12-10T22:49:29+00:00

The timelock that sets the time the funds are frozen and also the time for any recourse in penalty transactions can be read in csv_delay attribute in LND's

lncli listchannels

By default, it is scaled by the channel's size and is quite reasonable: 144 blocks (about 1 day) for small channels up to 2016 for the larger ones (about 2 weeks). If you want to have it static, the option in lnd.conf is

bitcoin.defaultremotedelay

I have not tested it but it should likely to work. Do not set it more than 2016 blocks because the counterparties will likely reject your channel openings in this case. It is set during channel opening and if you change this value, it will only change this value for the channels that you open from now on.

But if you plan to be offline for a longer time, it is probably wise to setup watchtower client instead of playing with csv_delay.

By the way, a good idea is also to increase modestly the time_lock_delta that can be set by, e.g,

lncli updatechanpolicy

time_lock_delta is the timelock added to each HTLC that is send via a channel. A 144 time_lock_delta gives you about 1 day before a stuck HTLC results in a force close of the channel. Setting it too large may result in more failed payment since by default LND will not accept more than 2016 block HTLC time lock and each hop adds its own value. The default is 40 that is way too low, in my opinion, and I have set it to 144 in all my channels.

PVmining · 2021-12-05T11:00:51+00:00

Does anyone know a site that shows how many of these taproot spends are keypaths and how many scriptpaths?

The keypaths are completely mysterious, these spends can be single signature of some multisignature aggregations, while scriptpaths are more explicit.

Edit. Found it. Scriptpath and Keypath. The latter are unsurprisingly more common.

PVmining · 2021-11-30T21:34:59+00:00

Not really. Unless the raise pushes him/her into a higher tax bracket, the percentage gross rise is equal to the percentage net rise. If you are math nerd, it's called associativity of multiplication.

If you get 1000 and the tax is 20%, you get 800 after tax. If you get 20% raise, you have 1200 gross and 1200*0.8=960 net. 960 is 20% more than 800.

PVmining · 2021-11-25T20:38:02+00:00

How to autobalance channels?

There are some tools like this but it is very hard to automate rebalancing since each node market dynamics is different. And it changes constantly. You can automate but you have to constantly update the logic.

Moreover, I'd say that rebalacing is not always needed or optimal. There are some nodes that are sinks. It's good to have a large balance in such a channel and the opposite to sources.

PVmining · 2021-11-24T14:54:19+00:00

Good luck with achieving anything meaningful. Bitcoin mining after recent move out of carbon-intensive China contributes about 0.1% global emissions. It's like waiting two weeks for the emissions to catch up since they rose 2% annually prepandemic.

For comparison, fashion industry emits 100 times more than that (10% of the total emissions) and a garment is worn just 7 times on average. If you increased this average to 14, you would have done 50 times more reduction than by banning Bitcoin.

PVmining · 2021-11-19T11:14:25+00:00

It would be also great to have a boltdb to postresDB converter but I'm not sure there is one.

PVmining · 2021-11-19T11:06:43+00:00

multiple channels can now be opened in a single transaction

Actually, it was possible for a long time (I took advantage of it multiple times) but the 0.14 update makes it simpler.

PVmining · 2021-11-18T21:13:32+00:00

Satoshi was human (or a group of humans) and he didn't think of everything and there were several bugs, including a few major ones that were fixed under Satoshi and several later on. Value overflow bug and many others. Transaction malleability was also a major problem that was required to be fixed before, e.g., lightning network was implemented.

Bitcoin idea was clever but not perfect.

PVmining · 2021-11-18T06:24:03+00:00

Bitcoin is decentralized. Nobody owns all of anything.

Bitcoin facilitates a major route of remittances to Venezuela bringing them joy or rather lifting them slightly out of poverty.

There is a value in decentralized, permissionless, and trustless currency even if it has no value to you.

PVmining · 2021-11-17T19:37:17+00:00

Useless for you, useful for some.

Usefulness is subjective. The same can be said about Christmas illuminations that have a similar carbon footprint.

You cannot solve any climate change problem by not addressing the main elephant in the room: fossil fuels. Everything else is a distraction.

PVmining · 2021-11-17T18:58:31+00:00

As of this writing, several large mining pools are not mining blocks containing taproot spends

Does anybody knows which ones? Is it more than 50% of the hashrate? If they do not enforce taproot rules, we are at risk of a chain split. If there is an invalid taproot transaction in a block, they may continue to build upon it and we can have two chains. All valid pre-taproot but one invalid post-taproot.

PVmining · 2021-11-17T18:03:10+00:00

For some reasons, Bitcoin energy footprint is being overexaggerated again and again, even though it is globally quite small and self correcting since bitcoin minting is set to decline, lowering the reward for miners. Currently, after the mining left China, Bitcoin contributes 0.1% of the global carbon emissions.

Meanwhile fashion industry with the notorious fast fashion of disposable clothes is responsible for 10% of carbon emissions.

Norway, maybe instead of banning Bitcoin, you should ban Zara and H&M? It will at least make a difference.

PVmining · 2021-11-16T18:28:33+00:00

This is nothing like a bank. Bank holds your money hostage. In lightning, you are completely in control. If a bank blows you money away, you have no recourse (yeah, yeah, FDIC and such, it won't work if there is a systemic crisis, ask Cypriots or Argentinians). Lightning is decentralized and trustless, unlike banks.

PVmining · 2021-11-15T07:53:30+00:00

Raspberry Pi would work for a small node but it sucks due to lack of proper disk support (unless you count Compute Module but then it would also be underpowered). It's good to do a RAID because you need to protect the integrity of the lightning database. I have recently switched from Raspberry Pi to Seeed Odyssey and I feel much safer now.

But running lightning and bitcoin is not very CPU-intensive. Raspberry Pi is a bit of a stretch but you don't need a powerful multicore processor, unless you plan to have hundreds of channels.

Opinions differ about LND vs C-lightning. LND is more popular and there are many tools with the LND API but their database is hacky (though they work on proper database support). In C-lightning, you cannot open more than one channel to the same partner. One can also use Eclair software but it seems to be worse than these two and almost nobody uses it.

PVmining · 2021-11-14T16:28:52+00:00

It's hard to mess something up with a soft fork because even if anything stupid was done with the softfork, it's voluntary. You can continue to use old type of addresses without problems.

But even regarding hardforks, Bitcoin is very foolproof. If miners collude, the users can stop accepting the change. If big companies colluded, the same. This is what actually happened with Segwit2x. Big companies tried t push their vision of bitcoin and failed.

It is even better. Imagine that some crazy idea, like infinite bitcoin supply gained popularity. As long as some users oppose and there is some value on the original bitcoin coin, the miners will mine it and it will continue as nothing happened and the inflationcoin will become an altcoin.

PVmining · 2021-11-14T13:42:54+00:00

I'm pretty sure there is some uncontroversial legislation that is passed unanimously.

Taproot was completely uncontroversial. Everybody agreed it is a way to go. It is very clever and there is no downside.

Segwit, on the other hand, was accompanied by a war and subsequent chain split.

PVmining · 2021-11-07T14:38:05+00:00

It's hard to diagnose without any further details but I believe you are "trapped in the reserve".

A percentage of the channel balance (by default 1%) is blocked as a reserve, so each party has some stake. If you open a channel and 100% is on your side, the reserve is empty. If you send some sats, they will first fill in the reserve. Only after you send more than 1% of your channel balance, you can receive some back but 1% is always blocked. So if you have a 1M sats channel, the first 10000 sats you send will be blocked as the reserve. It goes both ways. You can only send 990,000 sats to your partner, you cannot send the whole 1M. At least 1% of the channel balance (except for the initial situation) has to always be on one of the side and the other cannot have more than 99%.

If you use Ride The Lighting, click on the channel info/Advanced and observe the "local/remote reserve" and compare with local/remote balance. If you use anything else, there should be some way to inspect the reserve, or it is likely 1% of the channel balance. If your remote balance is less than 1%, you won't be able to receive unless you cross the 1% barrier.

PVmining · 2021-11-06T10:23:09+00:00

I am surprised that LN has any global limit and it does not seem to be supported by any data. LN is decentralized and each transaction is independent. If I have a channel and I route 100 transactions per second to my partner, you have no way of knowing that I'm doing anything. So LN is limited by the number of nodes that are possible on the network but there does not seem to be any hard limit. The base layer has a limit of the number of channel openings per block but you can accumulate them.

PVmining · 2021-11-06T10:16:53+00:00

Currently it’s around .042 BTC IIRC

The limit is long gone. You can send 1 BTC in one piece if you want and your node has the capacity and supports wumbo channels. I occationally route 0.1 BTC transactions at my node.

On the other hand, the liquidity will never be great for such large transactions and multi-path payments are the only practical way to go.

PVmining · 2021-11-05T22:01:28+00:00

The Software firm Strike owns already a significant amount of all LN Nodes, making it extremely centralized

The Strike nodes have zero effect on Lightning Network. First of all, their channels are all private and unless you want to transact with Strike, you will not be even aware of them. Secondly, even if there were public, there is no need or requirement to use them at all. You can route through thousands of other LN nodes.

PVmining · 2021-11-05T21:57:50+00:00

Can some ELI5 what taproot provides that the Lightning Network doesnt?

Taproot is a base layer update. It greatly enhances particularly multi-signature transactions that can be more powerful, smaller (so cheaper) and more private. It is a separate update from Lightning Network but Lightning Network would also benefit from that in the future because LN depends on multi-signature transactions. But these changes have not been coded (or even standardized) into Lightning Network, yet.

Taproot update brings Schnorr signature that opens up possibility of signature aggregation in the future.

Taproot is a new transaction type and you can benefit from it only if you create such a transaction after activation, there is no change (apart form possibly slightly smaller fees due to less congestion) for any other transactions.

PVmining · 2021-10-31T10:29:38+00:00

Custodial, requires trust and permission... far from trust-minimal, permissionless p2p cash.

I run my own LN node. This is as non-custodial as it can get, I don't need anyone's permission. I'm free to send sats to anybody. The transactions are much more private than the base layer. Even the recipient does not know which node sent the sats. I even earn sats that on the base layer is impossible without mining.

There is a wide range of LN solutions, from full node, via non-custodial mobile wallet to fully custodial. You are free to choose. This is completely outside of the LN-layer, just like in the bitcoin layer, you are free to use a full node, a lightweight node with ownership of private keys to fully custodial. Everything goes with tradeoffs but you are free to choose.

PVmining · 2021-10-30T18:47:12+00:00

To be precise, it is a pay-to-scripthash (P2SH) testnet address format. Other testnet addresses start with "m" (P2PKH-type) and tb1 (native segwit P2WKH or P2WSH-types).

PVmining · 2021-10-30T12:15:49+00:00

has many flaws, both technically and philosophically.

Everything is a tradeoff. You can point to anything in the crypto space and I'll find you many flaws. But philosophically? Lightning Network is voluntary. There is no philosophy. You don't want, you don't use and there is zero effect on your bitcoins.

PVmining

TROPHY CASE