What do you use for your personal laptop and personal phone? I'm contemplating switching.

Helpful tip: use a virtual card for every subscription. If any service makes it difficult to cancel, simply delete the virtual card.

“Don’t sin by letting anger control you. Think about it overnight and remain silent. Interlude” ‭‭Psalms‬ ‭4‬:‭4‬

Yesterday was brutal. From this point, I see two paths forward. Sit in self pity and stay down. See this as an opportunity from God. It could have been worse. This is an opportunity to look inward and see my flaws. Not leave it there, but be honest. I was careless with security. I thought: "this probably won't happen to me". I didn't have: alerts in place, proper logging, kill switches, separation of responsibility, on and on. I pray this won't be a lesson I ever have to learn again. Learn this lesson from me: it CAN happen to you.

I still have no idea how the attacker was able to get access to my lnd node. I messed up a in few ways with protecting my admin macaroon, but the unknown is what bothers me the most. View quoted note →

This morning, my grandma died and I lost ~0.2 bitcoin. I feel devastated and embarrassed. My grandma was old and lived a good life. She was a follower of Jesus. She was in a lot of pain and I'm glad she found relief. The hard part is watching my family grieve. With the bitcoin loss, I only have myself to blame. Someone got a hold of my my lightning admin macaroon. They closed the existing channels and swept the funds to their bitcoin address. I'll list the attacker's addresses below if anyone is interested. Although my systems were meticulously locked down, I wasn't as careful with passing around my admin macaroon between systems / different computers. It shouldn't have been an admin macaroon I was using in the first place -- another reckless mistake. I also didn't have enough monitoring in place. One silver lining is I happened to sweep quite a bit of funds out of my lightning node about a month ago. It would have been closer to 0.4 bitcoin had I not. I had quite a few services that used the admin macaroon: BTCPay, a cashu mint, my website, etc. I'm so sorry to anyone who had any amount of bitcoin with my mint. I will try to make amends, just reach out to me. This is my fault and I only have myself to blame. Not just for my own losses, but for any losses by those who held bitcoin in my mint. I'm not sure when I'll be ready to spin up my lightning node / cashu mint again.

@the axiom I got your message but can’t send one back to you. I tried it with others users and it’s working fine. Not sure what’s up.

The WesternBTC is now a trial relay (https://westernbtc.com). How it works: When a pubkey is first seen, it's given a trial whitelisting of n days (30 in my case). After the trial period has elapsed, any notes created by the pubkey are deleted. If the pubkey is officially whitelisted at any point before the expiration of the trial period, the pubkey is promoted to full whitelisting and removed from the trial whitelisting. What this enables: - sign ups without users having to pay first (terrible UX previously) - gift wraps now work (NIP-17) - clean up relay space automatically View quoted note →

PSA: the WesternBTC relay will be down for about an hour while I do some work on it View quoted note →

Trial period relay: notes have a time-to-live unless the npub is whitelisted. If an npub gets whitelisted by the relay, we remove the ttl on any existing notes.

It's humbling to admit, but almost everything I used to code myself is done better and faster when I use AI. What used to take me around 4 hours of planning and coding I can do in less than 5 minutes with Opus 4.5 + Claude extension in VSC. Instead of being bitter, I'm grateful for the opportunity to get ahead of it. Ironically, I have job security because existing processes aren't intuitive and there are too many exceptions.

As soon as I hard Luke Gromen capitulated, I flipped bullish.

What kind of animal gets this at 10am