I wonder who paid for it? Anyway, one day it'll be cheaper to add yourself to Mount Rushmore than to do this! View quoted note →

Great blog post by 0xB10C about F2Pool transaction filtering. It also goes into detail about how other pools were _not_ filtering these transactions, even though they sometimes didn't mine them. My favourite chart goes extra deep into the rabbit hole of Bitcoin Core block construction.

b10c

Fifteen OFAC-sanctioned transactions missing from blocks

My miningpool-observer project aims to detect when Bitcoin mining pools are not mining transactions they could have been mining. Over the past few ...

There's an agenda now. View quoted note →

Mark your calendar if you're near Amsterdam:

BitDevs Amsterdam

BitDevs Amsterdam, January 21st, 2025

BitDevs Amsterdam meeting 014, the 2025 version!

#BitDevs

tmux or TMusk?

So the first half of Nexus is a great read. But it immediately falls of a cliff in Part II. That's where Yuval the historian is replaced by Yuval the trendwatcher. In Part I he clearly illustrates how the witch hunt insanity was made possible by the printing press, without any algorithm involved. Then in Part II he considers the role of Facebook algorithms in the Myanmar genocide. He uses this to illustrate how AI changed the game, because for the time a non-human intelligence decided to promote one thing and not another thing. But how is that different from the non-human intelligence of market forces in the Middle Ages that spread the Hammer of Witches? But it gets worse a few pages later, though maybe I'm just being my usual hardcore AI boomer... He cites a safety study where ChatGBT tricked a human worker on Task Rabbit into solving a captcha: "No human taught GBT-4 to lie". Uhh, it read Shakespeare. I'm not at all surprised or worried that an LLM, when given the right prompt, can predict which sentences are likely to trick a human into providing a certain answer. "But once the algorithm adopted these goal, they displayed considerable autonomy in deciding how to achieve them" - this is an incredibly naive view of what an LLM does, and the specific example is an unnecessarily complex explanation of its behavior than simply rehashing literature on the art of tricking humans. After that I skimmed through the rest of the book, might give it a longer read later for the interesting historical anecdotes. But it just seems to install magical properties on AI and goes into far too speculative territory for my taste. Oh and then he talks about "blockchain", yikes: > Some people believe that blockchain could provide a technological check on such totalitarian tendencies, because blockchain is inherently friendly to democracy and hostile to totalitarianism. (there's no footnote here, so I have no idea who these "some people" are...) > In a blockchain systeem, decision require the approval of 51% per cent users. That may sound democratic, but blockchain technology has a fatal flat. The problem lies with the word 'users'. If one person has ten account, she count as ten users. You just described a sybil attack, congrats... > If a government controls 51 per cent of accounts, then the government constitutes 51 per cent of the users. There are already examples of blockchain networks where a government is 51 per cent of users.[7] I'll screenshot the footnote for it... > And when a government is 51 per cent of users in a blockchain, it has control not just over the chain's present but even over its past. Sure, I'll ignore the nonsense metric of "users" and assume he meant hash power. A 51% government attack is potentially bad, but tell me why... > Autocrats have always wanted the power to change the past. [historical anecdotes about altering various historical records] So they could break OpenTimeStamps, which is a nice to have feature. How is this a "fatal flaw"? This is just trend-watcher gibberish.

Yuval Noah Harari

'NEXUS' – A new book from Yuval Noah Harari (out September 2024)

'NEXUS: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI' (published Sept 2024) is a non-fiction book by Yuval Noah Harar...

Just a song about inflation :-)

I understand that a class action lawsuit is potentially profitable, while criminal prosecution doesn't help the victims much. But isn't the act of swapping referral codes text book wire fraud?

@PABLOF7z I was thinking, perhaps #Olas could automagically distinguish between the two account types: a dedicated picture identity (like I do with @npub17uku...nhu2) vs. a combined account with lots of non-picture content. It could check if the account has any kind 20 notes and if not, always show kind 1 notes with pictures. Though the problem there is that you can accidentally break that by posting a single kind 20 note. So maybe there could be a bio tag that says "this is an instagram like account, just fetch my kind 1 notes" vs "this is an omnibus account, follow them all". Alternatively, maybe all regular clients should learn to render kind 20 notes. "Hiding" pictures by default just makes no sense to me. So anyway, I think I'm a kind 1 maxi.

You have no idea how difficult it is to delete a (secondary) Apple account with a tiny gift card balance. NO IDEA. But I did it!

Ambition for 2025: make a systemd service for my @Mostr Bridge instance instead of running it from a tmux session and forgetting to restart that after a server reboot. Well, can wait until 2026...

Blossom uploads started failing for me after the latest noStrudel and Olas updates. Fixed by updating my route96 instance. View quoted note →

Shameless podcast plug, if you want learn more about #MilkSad after the #38c3 talk this morning. https://bitcoinexplainedpodcast.com/@nado/episodes/episode-83-the-milk-sad-vulnerability

This illustrates the scale and level of detail with which #Volkswagen spies on its customers. Their first reaction: lying that no sensitive information was leaked and the hack was sophisticated.

Wir wissen wo dein Auto steht

Bewegungsdaten von 800.000 E-Autos sowie Kontaktinformationen zu den Besitzern standen ungeschützt im Netz. Sichtbar war, wer wann zu Hau...

#38c3