Damn, there was a proposal for BOLT spec changes to enable fixed-size messages, and now I have to implement it to show it's unnecessary...

Rusty Russell’s Quiet Corner of The Internet

“If you didn’t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn’t boot”

This was passed on to me by Ben Elliston, ex-gcc hacker and good guy.  Amusing in context, but the corollary is that working on free software mean...

I wrote this over 15 years ago, and it still rings true: separate the art from the artist. It's a key stabilizing principle for me when navigating Bitcoin developers.

Now I have a shell script `rcargo` which remote compiles rust crates: I work on my laptop but have beefy machines on my home and work LANs. You'd have to reimplement cargo to do it much finer-grained, apparently: sccache used to and gave up? The real trick is ssh's ControlPath config var, which allows shared connection for much-improved speed: ChatGPT taught me this one! The other option is Nix, but I'm not *that* bored!

crates.io: Rust Package Registry

crates.io serves as a central registry for sharing crates, which are packages or libraries written in Rust that you can use to enhance your projects

Second Rust crate, re-implementing a utility I had written several times and see. This one takes a more thorough approach and handles corner cases a bit better. I also added percentile support which is actually quite cute. Basically, if you have a pile of text lines, which contains some numbers, something like you've run a benchmark 20 times, produced a pile of output, line stats will gather similar lines and show you the stats on the numbers.

Sometimes people speak of Bitcoin and I get a moment of disorientation before I realize they're speaking of it as an *investment*. Like gold, oil, Nvidia stock, etc. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's a single dimension: up good, down bad. Corollaries: 1. This is fungible: there are other investments, some of which may be better at going up. 2. They may be "really into" Bitcoin, but it's a phase: some other financial winner will come along. 3. There are no deep insights here, just a lot of effort to predict numbers. 4. They're not wrong: finance is important. But for me it's like doing my taxes: I do it, but I kinda resent the time I spend on it.

Paused my reading of The Mandibles for Xmas day: It's not exactly holiday reading. It's one thing to know nothing stops this train. It's another thing to read through a detailed description of what the slow inevitable crash looks like: It's like the right brain equivalent of When Money Dies.

My second week of Rust (only a few hours a day though: I am on vacation after all) has me reproducing and enhancing a tool I wrote in C. It takes multiple lines and runs stats on the numbers in it. This is useful for quick benchmarks: `for i in $(seq 10); do /usr/bin/time myprog; done | linestats`. Each line with the same literal parts is combined, with numbers replaced by "min-max(mean+/-stddev)". The C one wasn't very clever about decimals, so it needed a good rewrite. The new code works, but needs polish, more options, optimization, tests and documentation before I release it. The good thing about these small projects is they don't get hamstrung by Rust's glacial build times!

I have published my first Rust crate. A the library that I've always wanted to exist and would normally have written in C, so it was a good chance to experiment with rust.

syncless - Rust

syncless: ordered, atomic storage without durability guarantees.

1. No, I'm not reading your article on quantum. 2. Yes, all choices are bad. That's what "breaking" means. 3. I'm glad smart people are thinking about technical mitigations.

Since I'm taking a few weeks vacation, I've decided to seriously try to learn rust. My method in this case is to ask ChatGPT to guide me (but not write for me!) a library ("crate") that I've always wanted to write and never got around to. Of course, I get a lot of feedback on appropriate rust styling, but some of it veers into things I feel are deeper constraints. In this case, I had an open function, which took a struct containing some flags, such as "writeable", "create if didn't exist". It didn't like the fact that I asserted if you set create and didn't set writeable. Here is my response: --- Re: assert!(). I dislike APIs which allow misuse. Callers of a library should not rely on such checks in the library, in fact the concept of adding an InvalidOptions error type is offensive. A recoverable error is strictly a worse api than an unignorable error. But a compile time error is better. We should use an enum READONLY, WRITE_MUST_EXIST, WRITE_MAY_CREATE. --- Of course, it's a waste of time for me to lecture it on style, but I can't help myself!!

"Bitcoin is taking over the world"? Tether is many things, but it's not Bitcoin.

Happy VPN-day Australia, to those kids who celebrate!

In preparation for onboarding new core lighting developers are preparing a series of videos. So I've been asking ChatGPT about CLN developer features, particularly with comparison with other projects people might be familiar with. Of course, I compare myself with Linux, but it's interesting to see comparisons against other projects: **Type-safety**: OpenBSD High Bitcoin Core High Core Lightning Very high for C Nginx Low curl Moderate MySQL Moderate SQLite Moderate CLN sits near the top among major C codebases for safety discipline. **PR Submission** Core Lightning’s PR flow is unusually strict, slow-moving, and review-heavy compared to most open-source C projects — closer to Bitcoin Core or OpenBSD than to typical GitHub projects. --- Compared to “average OSS” Most projects: Feature-oriented PRs Informal review Few required reviewers Patch squashing common Tests sometimes optional Architectural discussion often post-merge CLN: Patch-first culture Pre-merge architectural scrutiny Extremely high reviewer expectations Tests are mandatory Clean, narrative commit history matters

Seriously considering putting two RTX 6000 in my upcoming build machine. Puts the price up an order of magnitude, but truly private AI might be a worthwhile investment. Never played with GPUs before, so informed thoughts welcome?

The latest (final?) #CLN release candidate fixes a long-standing bug where we could forget UTXO spends when we restart. This explains a variety of bug reports we have seen and been unable to reproduce over the years: the most recurrent being gossipd telling peers about channels which are long closed. We no longer make this mistake, but we also have to walk back and revisit old UTXOs. We do this while running, but for older nodes (like mine!) that can be a lot of blocks. In fact, and I only vaguely recall this, my node tracks back to block 500 (!) so it's going to take a while. Of course we remember progress, so you can restart slike normal during this process. Other than higher CPU consumption you shouldn't notice anything.

With my bike being repaired, I've been doing more walking. Australian cities are really optimised for driving, but I must say it gives me a lot of time to reflect on broader issues, probably a decent way to increase my nostr posting!

@Jameson Lopp recently posted on X about the danger of "store and forget" for Bitcoin over decades. Unfortunately he's right. Originally I stored my raw private keys and UTXOs (on paper, care taken) figuring that was standard. Then bitcoin core stopped supporting them! Other wallets tend only to support them for sweeping, and I wonder how long. If I were storing funds today I would use BIP39. BIP93 is cool and more general, but not widely supported, and I don't know what support will look like in a decade.