Today I opened 4 lightning channels, all .onion addresses.
I then sent someone 1K using a lightning address, from my phone. Which means that it was able to lookup the address, get an invoice created, route properly, and actually transfer the loot.
And I'm not directly connected to any large lightning nodes (AFAIK).
This feels way cooler than I expected, and I'm probably enjoying it far more than is reasonable. 😆
Thank you to the plebs who joined forces with me to grow the network! You are the real heros of this story. You have earned zero fees from me for life.
Next up, we'll see if I can route to people I am not directly connected to. Should be fun. I'll have a good time or a food story.
Any home LND noderunners out there who would let me open a 100K sats channel to them? Give me a pubkey & address (DM or publuc if you like).
I'd rather open a channel with a random person on nostr than a random person on the internet at large.
Plus I'm seeing minimum channel sizes of 5M and that's too rich for me right now. Someday, maybe.
No catch, just free incoming liquidity for you (well, once I get some inbound liquidity myself). I get to learn. That's the benefit to me.
I have not been impressed by the security papers posted on arxiv in a while.
Cryptography and Security
It's always been a bit buzzwordy and chasing whatever is already being discussed, but it feels like it's getting worse...
"Quantum-Resilient Blockchain for Secure Transactions in UAV-Assisted Smart Agriculture Networks"
"LLM-Driven APT Detection for 6G Wireless Networks: A Systematic Review and Taxonomy"
"A Novel Zero-Trust Identity Framework for Agentic AI: Decentralized Authentication and Fine-Grained Access Control"
I mean, did the authors train an LLM on all the clickbait sites in the world and ask it to generate the spiciest possible title? If I was deciding who gets funding, these would be at the bottom of the pile at best. It's more likely they'd just get pitched in the bin.
I've been tinkering with an LND node for a few months now and the #1 issue is getting out of sync with the chain data. Even when it has the blocks, it sometimes hasn't processed them.
This same problems happened to me with the lightning node in Zeus.
And it's a troublesome problem to detect too because uptime monitors are going to report the service is up. Systemd is going to say the service is running. The blockheight might even be up to date!
It'd take some custom code to dig deep and detect this as soon as it happens. Sure, something could be written, but I haven't come across it yet.
As I understand it, a watchtower is looking for channel closures with old channel state. This is not at all the same as detecting that your node is falling behind and payments are going to fail (sometimes silently) if someone tries to move any money.
The only explanation I can muster for this being the state of lightning after 5+ years is that laws must have had a severe chilling effect and kept developers away. It's hard to understand why the quality would be so low unless there just aren't enough devs to go around. I know the people who are working on these projects are incredibly passionate, so I don't believe for a moment that it's a lack of caring on their part.
An ex-Army buddy of mine is considering putting together gunshot wound (GSW) kits that aren't made of a bunch of cheap garbage like the commercial ones and selling them for for bitcoin.
He's worried nobody will be interested. Give this note a boost and a react if you think he's wrong. Or reply with what you want (backpack full of supplies, something small and lightweight, etc.).
I want to show him that it'd be worth the significant upfront investment and he should go for it.
I'm still in shock that the Statue of Liberty is not on Ellis Island.
I learned that almost a week. ago and I just can't get over it. All this time...
FYSA: There are still #Matrix servers you can register with without even providing an email address (and #Nostr, and #Git, and #Mastodon...)
Calitabby Network
Calitabby Network is a collection of online services operated by crispycat built on Free Software. Calitabby prioritizes user privacy, free speech ...
The age of the #cypherpunk is still here, if you know where to look.
Hint: following the people using these services is a good place to find out where to look. 👀
This is what #decentralization looks like.
Three #solar powered #meshtastic nodes and four more in the works. As long as one of them is up, it'll relay encrypted messages for people.
A little soldering, a little 3D printing and about $250 in parts to build one. Now that the CAD work has been done, each one only takes about 2 hours to put together. (not counting print time)
Parts list and instructions are coming soon.
#decentralize everything
A guide for those new to nostr:
GM = Good morning
GN = Good Night
LFG = Life's Fairly Good
PV = Pura Vida ("pure life")
TIL = Truth In Lending
BTC = Bitcoin
That should clear up any confusion about terminology. 😉
Part of me wants to track how many hours I am spending on building each of these #solar #meshtastic nodes, as that is very much part of the cost of producing them.
A bigger part of me doesn't want to know because it'll be depressingly expensive, even at minimum wage.
Wow, it seems like I just had a #RAKWireless current sensor go bad after about a month of use.
It was impeding current flow (thus stopping the battery from being charged) and when I swapped it out for a replacement, the replacement worked just fine.
#meshtastic #MeshRadio #mesh #radio #electronics #repair
An #open #hardware #meshtastic node with hot swappable MCU. 👀
Hot take: having firefighters is a worthwhile thing.
#taxes
The "Urban Assault Vehicle" is the best mix of "Rollin" by Limp Bizkit.
RIP DMX 🪦
There's no sense crying
over every mistake
You just keep on trying
'til you run out of cake..
...and these points of data
Make a beautiful line
We're out of beta
We're releasing on time...
Look at me still talking
While there's science to do
When I look up there
It makes me glad I'm not you
I have experiments to run
And there's research to be done...
"Still Alive" by GLaDOS
An eletric heater powered by an old #bitcoin miner, with a meshtastic node embedded in it. It uses #meshtastic to bounce data to a gateway to submit PoW. By default, that could go to the person who built the heater.
The user just plugs in the heater without ever having to deal with any of this, nor connecting their electric heater to their wifi. Then they get a small check in the mail each year for running their heater.
If the customer is technically savvy and interested in obtaining bitcoin, they could reconfigure the heater to mine for them.
