Official Bitcoin Twitter Self-Worth Chart $70k: your hairline recedes. $60k: gangrene develops. $50k: you lose the ability to make coherent sentences, and all you can say to your panicked loved ones is "Bitcoin is digital energy". $150k: erectile dysfunction vanishes. $250k: your wife returns with the kids, saying she made a terrible mistake. $500k: your long-dead father rises from the grave, tells you that he was wrong and you were right, and he's proud of you.

Starting the long walk to Vienna!

Several people have asked about the future of CLN without me at the helm. It's a worthy question, but not one I'm concerned about. One of my key responsibilities at Blockstream was to build up a team to support CLN development and usage. I've done that, and there's no critical dependency on me any more. I expect new developments to slow for a year while the team fills gaps, but users probably won't notice, because CLN is entering a phase of refinement, not radical change. Most of the exciting change happens one layer up now: plugins are really coming into their own, and daywalker90 has plans to rewrite reckless as a "one stop shop" plugin manager, which should really boost the ecosystem. Its telling that my last two big efforts in CLN have been in plugins: payer proofs and repeatpay are both in plugins (coming in 26.09!). I also have 2400 branches in my git tree; I'll have scripts and an LLM churn through them all looking for the unfinished/unmerged ones to decide how many are worth exposing to the world for others to finish. Software is never finished, but this is not my first time handing over major FOSS projects I've founded: I consider that doing that well is a key part of maintenance. My team is ready, and they will continue to make me proud!

So I'm leaving Blockstream at the end of the month, to try to start up Century Metadata. A non -profit to store and serve a small amount of encrypted data for 100 years, for a small one -time payment. Lots of fun problems in doing this, only half of then technical. I'll be talking about it at BTC++ in Vienna, and I'll also be attending the Oslo Freedom Forum just afterwards.

The main benefit of LLMs is that you don't need to apologize or justify when you clean up their mediocre code. It's a bit like having an insomniac coding intern who really likes to type.

BOLT 12 can be in different currencies for this reason. View quoted note →

I've been thinking about taking profits from a Sztorc Fork. I wouldn't sell someone a lemon face-to-face, even with full disclosure. Sure, they're adults, but the world is a better place when we care for each other: that is not who I want to be. Do not enable bad things. The anonymity of the marketplace does not absolve this. So, no. I will not encourage it, talk about it, or handle it. And I'll sleep great.

Guess in getting up for 5:30am then. View quoted note →

Don't support things you don't want to see more of.

Celebration time!

So, we're debating paying kids pocket money in sats. Since we're talking a few dollars a week, I'm thinking ecash, using

Century Metadata Cashu Mint

But what client? They have Android devices...

Indeed.

#CLN We're finally deprecating pay (in favor of xpay) in the next release: Greenlight has conclusively demonstrated that it's more effective across the board. That begins the 12 month window to removal. We've long had `xpay-as-pay` for xpay to take over pay commands. Flipping that to default true and running the tests has been eye-opening. Given our commitment to not breaking users, I'm re-learning things about pay. For example, if you try to pay the same invoice twice, pay "succeeds", whereas xpay says you've already paid. So when acting as pay, xpay needs to do that too. Mostly, the xpay error messages are much more informative and readable. But in a couple of cases they didn't use the correct error *code* (eg. There's a specific one for "route too expensive") so that's fixed. After this, I'll get back to my new "repeatpay" command and plug-in, which is a higher-level way to deal with recurring offers (an experimental option for now).

I expect Bitcoin to get a quantum scare every ten to twenty years, FWIW.

Weekly summary: I heard Iran is going to use Quantum Black is going to crash Bitcoin!

Claude is really happy to write more code. This can be a super-power! But it can also mean repetition, nasty workarounds, and unreviewable code :( For the BOLT12 payer proofs, I asked it to take my implementation, produce test vectors then compare against Vincenzo's LDK implementation. There was a bug in the spec around field ordering which this found, and it proceeded to fix my code, adding another complex pass to reorder the fields. Instead I asked it to change the Rust code, and indeed it was much simpler there too. If I hadn't caught this, we would and been stuck with a very weird spec and a lot of gratuitous code in every codebase. So now I need to start emphasizing the joy of simplicity, I guess.

Yes. View quoted note →

I've been through tech hype cycles before. They always have a grain of truth in them (otherwise they're trivially refuted) but they don't always work out. I have been through three VR waves, for example. I can't tell where Quantum Computing will land, though it has all the signs of needing a few more decades of occasional hype cycles. But I *can* tell that all the proposed mitigating signature schemes for Bitcoin suck hard: they're technically impressive because they're 10x better than I expected, but they're still 10x worse than what we have now. This means two things: I applaud and support the continuing research. And I won't support a soft fork any new cryptographic schemes until the someone demonstrates an extant QC that can factor faster than a classical one.

Americans trying to get back to the moon and missed.

This one doesn't keep getting disconnected from LND and Eclair, because we disabled the padding feature which made all messages the same length on the wire which was to be a release feature 😔 It was an obscure part of the spec, but LND have already fixed theirs for v21: kudos! I submitted PRs to Eclair and Phoenix (the latter mainly Claude, but it's a trivial change). I still have hope for a workaround, but we'll see if I can get it before Sangbida as Release Captain says No! View quoted note →