I needed to understand merge mining for a particular research direction I am pursuing (relating to stale blocks), and created the following visualisation-rich piece on the topic. Hoping this makes it easier for some to grok how it all works, especially AuxPoW!

Merge mining and AuxPoW: how it works

deadmanoz's website

Great overview video of the priorities, methodologies and achievements of Bitcoin Core from @schmidty at OPNEXT’26 a few weeks ago

I mean, this is obvious in hindsight, but I only learnt about the following today.. Since SegWit, any block with witness-bearing transactions has required the coinbase to have an OP_RETURN carrying the witness commitment. This is what extends PoW to cover witness data (the spending authority), which SegWit moved out of the txid computation!!

I love my @npub1a00w...9q3h Daylight Computer 1, writing on it just feels soooo natural and satisfying But Daylight Desktop on macOS is buggy as hell, hasn’t been updated in over a year Similarly the Reader app on device also wigs out on a bunch of PDFs So, I do have to ask, is it abandonware?

“White House Considers Vetting A.I. Models Before They Are Released” We’re there already are we? This will just push people to non-American model ecosystems, they’re only a few month behind at the moment, IMO https://archive.is/V7HaO

I wanted to remain Nostr only, and will absolutely primarily post openly on Nostr, but damn, I wish there was more AI/ML and Bitcoin discussion and signal here (reluctantly frequenting X more frequently)

When an agent is deep in some obscure low-level code I don’t really have an interest in, and my eyes start to glaze over.. ..I finally have a glimpse of what it is like to be a non-technical product manager

Reading old BitcoinTalk threads, many just ooze critical thinking and deep thought Where has it all gone? I guess there is many orders of magnitude more noise these days, so it’s harder for signal to cut through

Kids used to “have ants in their pants” Now they’ve got ADHD

Experts offer theories on why WA is 'wild west' for ADHD prescriptions

With WA home to seven out of Australia's top-10 highest ADHD prescribing neighbourhoods, experts, psychiatrists and doctors weigh in with their the...

Torn between liberal democracies needing to win the AI race and the best and most competitive open source efforts not coming from liberal democracies

Hot damn… just had a router just flat out randomly die on me today Think I cooked it!!

To get to a “country of geniuses in a data centre” you have to go through “a large university research lab of graduate students in a data centre” I think we’re almost at that point

In a matter of a few hours I’ve got a completely private via Signal and self-hosted LLM (qwen2.5-tools) agent to interact with and use. It’s “self-configuring” and pretty capable for what it is (32B parameter model). It’s a tool I can comfortably use with my private documents, without worry of leaking to a provider. I understand the hype..