These days, there are many possible ways to communicate Bitcoin payment instructions. QR Codes, BIP 3/21 bitcoin: URIs, lightning: URIs, LN-Address, BIP 353 HRNs, loose addresses, lighting BOLT 11/12 invoices/offers and all kinds of ways to communicate those. Here's a simple parser to help you figure out your options:

bitcoin_payment_instructions - Rust

These days, there are many possible ways to communicate Bitcoin payment instructions. This crate attempts to unify them into a simple parser which ...

(early version, hope to add more later!)

Lighting absolutely does not take 5-10 seconds to settle a payment. Looking at payments from one of the largest custodial providers settlements are *way* faster than that most of the time. Sure, if you’re sending from a shitty node that doesn’t have good pathfinding[1] then it can take a bunch of retries and a while, but, like, don’t do that? Cashu could take 5 seconds if you hit bad Tor relays, but, again, like, don’t do that 🤷‍♂️. [1] https://lightningdevkit.org/blog/ldk-pathfinding/ View quoted note →

Don’t forget that Ripple was the largest donor to the largest non-party/candidate superpac in the last election cycle. If you thought they weren’t going to get a seat at the table (and ice out Bitcoiners), you weren’t paying attention.

Never, ever, ever put your hopes in a single politician. They will always let you down. (Assuming you even thought a strategic reserve was a good idea, though really it wasn’t) View quoted note →

Trust Models (refer back to this when someone claims their thing is “non-custodial”, note that privacy is a different spectrum) * Holding Funds On Chain * Trusting you can get a transaction confirmed in some time horizon where your balance is way higher than the on chain cost (LN) * Trusting you can get a tree of many transaction confirmed in some time horizon where your balance is way higher than the on chain cost of the whole tree (in-round Ark for high-ish balances, rollups for *very* high balances after some future soft-fork) ^ non-custodial v custodial * Trusting you can get a tree of transactions confirmed in some time horizon where your balance is similar to the on chain cost (in-round Ark for moderate balances, rollups for most folks after some future soft fork) * Trusting 1-of-N with keys (rollups with BitVM) * Trusting N-of-M to do something honestly once in a TEE (statechains maybe?) * Trusting N-of-M to do something honestly once (statechains/statechains-on-Ark) * Trusting N-of-M with keys (Liquid, Fedimint) * Trusting 1 entity with keys (Cashu, Coinbase, …)

This isn’t specific to BOLT 12 and is really stretching the line on accuracy. Yes, if you reuse a BOLT 12 across two companies they can compare notes and see that you used the same one (duh!), but it’s not “because you reuse the same public key”, it’s because it’s the same thing! But, of course, you don’t *have * to do this. Wallets, by default, should generate a fresh BOLT 12 every time they display the receive key (and LDK will every time the wallet asks for a BOLT 12), including fetching a different “offer_issuer_id”. Ultimately, don’t assume things just based on the name of a field in a spec - the “offer_issuer_id” is a misnomer, LDK actually has a different name for it because of this, and IIRC the spec even says don’t reuse it if you’re a regular end-user wallet! View quoted note →

What dimension am I in?

This neither increases privacy nor simplifies accounting. View quoted note →

I think people here underestimate just how many users Twitter/X has lost over the last year (not counting AI bots…). Looking back at people who were a major part of The Conversation a few years ago most of them simply don’t post anywhere anymore (or a few do on Bluesky). Turns out a bad algorithm is worse than none. Nostr isn’t losing the user race, people just stopped posting.

It’s a real shame the US outlawed this starting next year. Bigger shame the Bitcoin community isn’t constantly beating the drum, too….making it illegal to pay with bitcoin (via a payment processor) without KYC is nuts! View quoted note →

The feed is: “Trump and Musk are bypassing all the controls we had in place, they’re literally overthrowing the constitution by ignoring Congress” “Trump and Musk are saving democracy by throwing out all the unelected officials that actually control the government and installing the will of the people” Y’all need to chill the fuck out, dear god everyone has lost their damn minds.

If this is true bitcoin will fail. View quoted note →

We’ve got to years to pass the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act. We can’t let this pass us.

Okay, my mentions are now filled with spam. I guess that’s cause I “picked bad relays”? How do I (a normal user who doesn’t have the time to investigate the relay offerings out there) fix this?

Run a bitcoin payment processor so that normie merchants can accept bitcoin and we can spend bitcoin (which was half the damn point)? Congrats you have to ask for the socials of people paying 🤦‍♂️ View quoted note →

I once had a discussion with a GNU Taler dev, who argued with a straight face that the government should have a (limited) backdoor into financial systems despite voters sometimes electing bad people because, and I’m dead serious here, the German voters would never elect someone with as authoritarian tendencies as Trump. I guess he missed his history lessons…in literally every year of school there lol View quoted note →

And that’s 100k