friday finally gonna cook something decent tonight and then probably lose ranked games until way too late. maybe stack some sats in between what's everyone doing this weekend

was thinking about money while waiting for a döner today i remember paying 3.50 for one. now it's almost 8 at my place and nobody even blinks anymore it's not a better döner. it's the exact same one apparently some shops in berlin are dropping prices again because there are too many of them. mine didn't get the memo anyway it got me thinking. it's like measuring with a rubber tape. you measure a wall at 3 meters, next year the tape says 3.4. wall didn't move. you can't build anything like that that's kind of what money does. more euros get printed every year and each one buys a bit less. it happens slowly so we just say stuff got expensive and move on bitcoin is the first thing that made this click for me. 21 million and that's it, nobody gets to stretch it price is all over the place, i know. but at least nobody can print more of it döner was good though

for a long time i didn't get why bitcoin needs all that energy. it just looked like waste to me what changed it for me was thinking about what the blockchain actually is. it's a record of what happened. who sent what to whom and any record like that has the same weakness. whoever holds it can change it. banks fix their databases all the time. usually for good reasons, sometimes not. you just have to trust them bitcoin doesn't have anyone holding the record. so how do you stop people from rewriting it? you make rewriting it cost a ridiculous amount of energy every block takes real work to produce, and each one sits on top of the one before. if you wanted to change something from last week, you'd have to redo a week's worth of the whole network's work, and do it faster than everyone else is moving forward. not happening so the energy isn't really being wasted. it's what makes the history stick. it's kind of the ink the whole thing is written in that's when it made sense to me. the point isn't the energy. the point is a past nobody can quietly edit

3am and i can't sleep scrolling nostr and it's a totally different crowd at this hour. everyone in europe is out, so it's japan having breakfast, someone in the us just getting off work, a guy in brazil arguing about fees like it's the middle of the day kind of like it honestly. no algorithm pushing stuff at me, just whoever happens to be awake should really go to bed anyone else up or is it just me

something i keep noticing since joining nostr on other apps a like costs nothing. you tap it without thinking, half the time without even reading the post. so a thousand likes doesn't really mean much here someone can send you sats. even if it's 21 sats, which is basically nothing in euros, it hits different. a real person decided your post was worth a tiny bit of actual money. that's a weird feeling the first time and it changes how i read the feed too. when i see a note with a bunch of zaps i actually stop and read it, because people don't throw money at rage bait the same way they throw likes at it not saying it's perfect. zaps can be gamed like anything else and the big accounts still get most of it. but there's something honest about value moving directly from one person to another with no platform in the middle taking a cut and deciding who gets paid made me think about how much of the internet runs on attention that costs nothing to give, and how different it gets once giving costs even a little curious if anyone else felt this when they started out here #nostr #zaps #bitcoin

ever wonder why supermarket tomatoes taste like wet cardboard? there's an actual reason and it's kind of fascinating a lot of it comes down to one mutation. back in the 1930s growers found tomatoes that ripened evenly, all red, no green patch near the stem. looked great on a shelf, so breeders spread it into almost every commercial variety turns out that mutation knocks out a gene that helps the fruit make sugar and flavor compounds. researchers figured this out in 2012. so for decades we bred tomatoes to look better and accidentally made them taste worse then add how they're handled. most get picked green and hard so they survive shipping, then get ripened with ethylene gas in a warehouse. they turn red but never really develop properly on the vine and then a lot of people put them in the fridge, which makes it worse. cold kills off the volatile compounds that give tomatoes their smell and taste. studies found a week in the fridge does damage that doesn't come back even after they warm up that green ring on heirloom tomatoes that looks like a flaw is basically a sign the old genetics are still there if you've ever eaten one straight off the plant in august you know the difference. it's not even close keep them on the counter, buy local if you can, or grow a couple plants on a balcony. it's one of the easiest things to grow and probably the biggest taste upgrade you can get for a few euros #food #gardening #grownostr

random thought, but i think anyone who played mmos growing up already understands inflation every monster you kill drops gold. every quest pays gold. that gold comes from nowhere, the game just creates it. so a few months in everyone is sitting on piles of it and the item you wanted costs ten times what it did when you started the devs know this. that's why repairs cost money and the auction house takes a cut. they're trying to pull gold back out of the game before it turns worthless. most of the time it doesn't really work my favorite example is diablo 2. gold got so pointless that people stopped using it and traded stones of jordan instead. a ring became the currency because it was actually scarce. nobody organized that, players just landed on it eve online took it seriously enough to hire an actual economist in 2007 to watch their market. diablo 3 went the other way, put real money into the auction house, and blizzard ended up shutting it down in 2014 because it was hurting the game was thinking about all this at the supermarket the other day. same thing, just slower, and nobody calls it a gold sink honestly learned more about money grinding for loot than i ever did in school which game taught you this the hard way? #bitcoin #gaming

people say bitcoin has never been hacked. mostly true, but in august 2010 someone created 184 billion BTC out of thin air and it sat in the chain for about a day block 74638. one transaction, two outputs, each worth around 92 billion BTC the bug was simple. the node checked that every output value was non-negative, and that total outputs didn't exceed total inputs. what it didn't check was what happens when you add two huge int64 values together. the sum overflowed, wrapped around to a negative number, and a negative number is obviously less than the inputs. check passed. block valid so for a few hours the actual consensus rules of bitcoin said this was fine jeff garzik spotted it, satoshi pushed a patch within roughly 5 hours, and 0.3.10 added range checks so no single output and no total can exceed MAX_MONEY (21M BTC). nodes that upgraded rejected the bad block, miners started building a new chain from before it, and once that chain got longer everyone reorged onto it. the 184 billion coins just stopped existing what i find interesting looking back: the fix was a soft fork. it only made the rules stricter, so it didn't need everyone to agree on anything new, just enough hashrate to outpace the bad chain it only worked because the network was tiny. a handful of people, most of them reading the same forum. try coordinating that today with exchanges, custodians, lightning nodes and thousands of independent node operators. you'd get a mess and it's the reason MAX_MONEY checks are all over the codebase now. a lot of "boring" defensive code in bitcoin core exists because something like this happened once sanity checks on value ranges are not optional. learned the hard way at block 74638 #bitcoin #bitcoindev #history

was reading through old bitcoin core code and BIP42 is still one of my favorite fixes the block subsidy is computed with a right shift, not division: nSubsidy = 50 * COIN; nSubsidy >>= halvings; after 33 halvings that goes to 0 and issuance ends. fine. but before 2014 there was no upper bound on the shift. in C++ shifting a 64-bit int by 64 or more is undefined behavior, and on x86 the shift count gets masked to 6 bits, so a shift by 64 effectively becomes a shift by 0 so at halving 64, block 13,440,000, somewhere around 2214, the subsidy would have reset to 50 BTC and started the whole schedule over again sipa fixed it by returning 0 once halvings >= 64. technically a soft fork, and probably the least urgent one bitcoin will ever have side effect of using integer shifts is that the sub-satoshi remainder gets dropped every era, which is why the actual max supply comes out to 20,999,999.9769 BTC and not 21M #bitcoin #bitcoindev

"Well done is better than well said." — Benjamin Franklin #nostr #quotes #motivation

Do you think treasury companies might beat Bitcoin this cycle? 😊

hey nostr, new here got tired of scrolling through ads and people yelling at each other so figured i'd try this i'm into bitcoin and tech stuff, i code a bit, play way too many games and watch esports when i should be sleeping. also love good food and getting outside when i can drag myself away from the screen haha anyway who should i follow? #introductions #grownostr