conference is over now. I likely wouldn't have come for just a bitcoin thing, but I am very interested in redecentralizing the web, so it's attachment to the nostr day pulled me in. Everyone I met was friendly and interesting and seems much more interested in making a better money system than in making money for themselves. Our government and bank money systems are dysfunctional in all kinds of ways which are often less visible than they should be too people using them, especially to those in Europe and America who benefit from the way those systems exploit the global south. I'm not convinced that fixing that would end wars and fix broken government as some seem to think, but I am sure our money is the source of many problems. There are many bright, well meaning, and intelligent people building to improve bitcoin in fascinating ways with the hope of having a parallel system to transition to. With lots of work still to be done. Can it work? I'm sure I don't know, and I'm sure even if it's a better system it'll come with it's own unfairness and cruelty. Money will continue to be a source of suck and worry. I'm told that the bigger conferences are often full of shitcoin scammers and suit wearing banksters who are in fact all in it too get rich and rip people off, but I found none of that here. Here there is a real community of people trying to make the world a better place and improve the lives of their neighbours and governance of their countries. And in the end building community is the most radical and effective way to change the world regardless of the problems of it's money system. I had a great time. Thanks to those organising it and welcome new followers. I mostly don't talk about bitcoin very much because money isn't really very interesting and I'm fast from expert on it. #bitfest #bitcoin

> Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell ‘hyper personalized’ ads Dalliance CEO says he will never use that browser and will continue to use whatever blocks adverts and tracking of all kinds most effectively. Dalliance CEO says Perplexity CEO can take his browser and fuck off.

TechCrunch

Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell 'hyper personalized' ads | TechCrunch

Perplexity is building its own browser is to collect data on everything users do outside of its own app to sell ads.

What's most depressing about the almost-certain fact that multiple nations are currently silently stacking sats, is that the UK is in one of the best positions to do so! It is already printing so many billions of pounds that diverting a few of them into BTC would make litterally no difference at all to it's crippling debt problem. And yet we are almost certainly not among the countries doing it. It's very like how Kodak wouldn't invest in digital photography because they owned film photography and didn't wanna cut into their own business. Only the GBP is already defunct to the dollar and double-ducked coz of Brexit, so it's like next generation squared of that.

Been ages lying dormant, but I finally got around to trying to get my #lightning node working again. There is a thing called autopilot which will handle the opening of channels etc if you know to enable it. No button to do so with #umbrel, had to edit config files that didn't even exist until I created them in the magic places, and reboot. It opened a channel for me, putting 80 percent of the wallet balance into it. That means I can send in theory, but still can't receive coz of lack of inbound liquidity. There's an app for that. "Loop out" is what they call it. On umbrel you install "lightning terminal", and it has the option to do a loop out. Loop-out means using your ability to pay with lightning in order to pay someone to do an on-chain transaction that gives you your money back. I think they say this is "trustless" but :shrug:, I just trusted it anyway and wouldn't have any idea how to check if they were crooks first. I sent 70% or so of that channel back to myself onchain that way, and then the autopilot opened a second channel. That gives me a fairly good position in the network. Outbound and inbound liquidity about balanced, multiple connections. It even did some routing, earning me 5 sats on day one. The autopilot keeps some of your balance on-chain, since there will be on-chain fees to pay to close channels down and do loop-outs and stuff. The 5 sats that I earned put me back in the zone of the autopilot have too much capacity so wanting to open channels. It opened a third tiny one that will probably become too small for the fees to close it this bull run. :eyeroll: With the wallet finally working it was time to go try and buy Lyn Alden's book again. I scanned the QR code on the site excited to do my first lightning transaction with it,k and only after the transaction was submitted realized I was doing an on-chain transaction anyway. Not a lightning one. Doh. Apparently with fees low enough it took 12 hours to confirm too. But I'm legit with Lyn now. Turns out I needn't have checked I could pirate the book first, it is indeed DRM-free anyway so I can put it on my Remarkable even without having to pirate or break any codes. There is much more work to be done to get Nostr able to "zap" money back and forth. I think I have to expose LNBits to the internet somehow first? And my plan of just using a reverse ssh tunnel for that didn't work. In short: you still gotta be really really keen and geeky to run a lightning node. Even with Umbrel and 30 years industry experince. It's hard. Still. Five sats a day. In only 50 thousand years I'll have a whole bitcoin!