jamesob
@jamesob
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American bitcoin dev PGP: 25F27A38A47AD566
Joined March 2008
"Knowledge and experience of combined opposites is sort of what it’s all about.". Happy Birthday, David Lynch
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BITCOIN CORE'S LOSS OF FOCUS. The legacy technical leadership in bitcoin is becoming increasingly less effective. --. Almost universally, Core and "graybeard" devs are not focusing on _the_ fundamental problem in bitcoin: preserving trustless UTXO ownership. Instead they are.
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I've been watching markets compulsively for the last few years, and it's obvious that we're headed for some very strange times. I've been meaning to write about this - and how Bitcoin ties in - for a while, but finally got around to it this weekend.
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THE CONSENSUS CONUNDRUM. Bitcoin faces a one-of-a-kind leadership problem . —. A lot of consensus-change proposals for bitcoin are on the table at the moment. All of them have good motivations, whether it's scaling UTXO ownership or making self-custody more tractable. I won’t.
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So what do you call the position where. - you realize that the monetary system is broken and fixing the money is basically most important thing in civilization.- you realize blockchains are extremely experimental and bitcoin is the most conservative and safe design.(1/n).
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In 1971, a house cost 2.5x your yearly salary. What's that number now? 10x, 15x?. Why has this changed? Haven't materials gotten cheaper, technology better?. Could it be that gov't manipulation of price of money has caused huge asset inflation => wealth gap?.
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Getting increasingly worried about the dev funding situation in Bitcoin right now. A few (really talented) Core devs are losing funding pretty soon; there apparently isn't money enough to go around. It'd be really nice to see more Bitcoin businesses step up. This could get bad.
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I made ~$37,000 trading in traditional markets in 2020. Some fancy derivatives trades. Real smart guy stuff. Given what I put at risk, that's about a 37% return for the year. Know what I would've made if I had just kept my Bitcoin? About 10x that. Who's smart now?.
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I've just published a paper with a new proposal for how to construct vaults in Bitcoin, OP_VAULT. I think vaults are maybe the single most impactful change we could make to Bitcoin to help derisk custody at any scale.
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I have bizarrely elaborate home infrastructure; I self-host music streaming, DNS servers, monitoring applications, bitcoind nodes, a network isolated security system, routers, highly redundant ZFS NAS servers, file syncing, LLM models, YouTube archiving. All of this is accessible.
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Here's a copy of the note about Bitcoin I'm sending out to friends and family this season. This leans pretty heavily on "number go up," but that's what gets most people thinking.
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Jan 3. Pull all your coins off custodians. Just to see if you can.
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I started working on Bitcoin because I want the state to be much smaller than it is today, and I don't think it should have the ability to print or control money. It might surprise you how little enthusiasm there is for that among the Core org. Motivations matter.
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This book by @steveinpursuit is the most interesting thing I've read about bitcoin since Mastering Bitcoin. The Blocksize War? Good work but not new info, either because (like me) you were there or because you've absorbed the history secondhand, since it has become unquestioned
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I would never tell someone who is actually poor to have fun staying poor. I will absolutely tell pontificating Dunning-Krugerized macro celebrities to have fun staying poor.
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I really like "have fun staying poor" as a meme because it has a spiritual and intellectual interpretation that is perhaps more profound than the obvious financial one.
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Transported anywhere on earth instantaneously.Carried anywhere physically undetected.Can't be censored.Can't be diluted.Can't be confiscated. It sounds like a device out of Arthurian myth, but it's here. You can use it. You can understand it. You can work on it.
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I'm really excited for the release of NYDIG's Bitcoin Task Bounties program. This is a new and unique part of the funding ecosystem for Bitcoin, in part because it suggests entrypoints for devs that want to get involved.
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There two things I'd like to do before biting the dust:. 1. Raise a family.2. Help implement a monetary system that can't be debased or confiscated by bureaucrats.
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Man I'll never forget the feeling of dumping BCH for BTC on some shady exchange at the first possible opportunity. Probably the only form of genuine alchemy I'll ever experience.
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Some news: I'm leaving NYC to move to Tokyo. Still working on Bitcoin (that goes without saying), just doing so at @dglab_official instead of @ChaincodeLabs.
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- actively put yourself out there.- don't assume you're unqualified.- be honest and work hard. cool things will happen!.
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I'm back working on opensource Bitcoin software full-time and I'm starting to shake the tree for funding. These are my priorities. (hint: the theme is stability)
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Bitcoin is a lot easier to sell than gold. Which is why you shouldn't.
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Hi. I'm asking for money from you to keep working on Bitcoin Core. Here's a thread about it.
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Huge red flag - Rust's serialization library serde, which is basically its stdlib for JSON, ships with a precompiled binary for which there is no alternative. The maintainer mysteriously refuses to offer an alternative despite the fact that there is no technical reason shipping
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Most people think that the innovation of America was representative democracy, or having a vote. That's a red herring. America's unique feature is the explicit limitations put on government, especially as outlined in the Bill of Rights, which we're steadily reverting.
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I've outsmarted myself out of a lot of Bitcoin. Don't try to be clever!. Use Bitcoin like a savings account, and treat USD as working capital. Sell if you need to buy something worthwhile (mortgage, school, etc.), but otherwise just let it be.
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To all those who think "maybe in a few years we'll have a softfork:" . What do you think happens if/when a signature gets put on this, and Bitcoin becomes a strategically important reserve asset of the US government? You think a few people on the internet still get to do.
All it needs is a signature and America’s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve is real. Drafted by @btcpolicyorg
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OFT FORGOTTEN BITCOIN SCALING LIMITS. Many aren't aware of how limited current on-chain capacity is. Forget P2P commerce or checking acct volume; even savings acct. vol. (2 tx/mo.) or L2 use is out of reach for all but 2.7% of the US, or 0.1% of the world. Some numbers:.
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Market sending a clear signal on just how worried it is about Lagarde's ability to regulate Bitcoin
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I've proposed draft changes for a softfork that encompasses BIP-118, BIP-119, and BIP-345. This might not be the route that we ultimately go, but having a tangible possibility on the table is important for progressing the technical discussion.
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Bitcoin pulled libertarianism out of the realm of LARP, and I'm happy for it every day.
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Hi - @NYDIG_BTC is hiring people who have chops with Bitcoin, Lightning, or applied cryptography. Get in touch if you're interested or know someone who is.
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Did you ever think we'd be governed by USSR apologists?
All I’m saying is if we can’t stop a literal Soviet apparatchik becoming our top bank regulator we don’t deserve those freedoms anyway.
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You're going to be a terminal user once I get through with you
I'm in the process of auditing electrum and specter-desktop for personal use, but I'm tempted to write a wallet that (i) has completely self-contained (and minimal) dependencies aside from libsecp256k1 and core, and (ii) can use GPG (ie yubikeys) to encrypt on-disk wallets.
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After watching Bitcoin awhile, it's clear that some of the most serious threats will be businesses trying to shape the protocol to serve their own ends at the expense of long-term security, e.g. Segwit2x and Coinbase's UTXO snafu. Wouldn't have been my first guess.
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Broke: paying $44 for halibut in an airport terminal. Woke: walking around at all times with multiple tins of $3 sardines in olive oil like a total psycho
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Last Friday I started the process of selling most of my gold. Had to call someone on the phone, haggle over price, then go buy packing materials. Had to print out shipping labels, double box the stuff (label on each box), and then drive it to the UPS store.
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I've said it before and I'll probably say it many more times: the 2020s will be a continued (and unfortunate) wealth transfer from those who do not hold financial assets to those who do.
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What makes Bitcoin special - i.e. trustless, unconfiscatable, borderless - is that it's 100% digital. As soon as you try to make it a token for a physical asset (gold, cars, houses, . ), you now need a legal system to enforce the redeemability of the token. Trustless no more.
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In hindsight it's going to look so obvious: how the $*@# did we take on so much debt as a society and expect to get away unscathed?.
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An excerpt from the original Lightning Network paper that succinctly describes why scaling needs to happen off-chain. Volume at Visa's scale would create 400 terabytes of txn data per year.
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.@LynAldenContact's latest article is maybe the most lucid, complete description of our (very unusual) monetary system that I've read. Lords of Finance was good, but this is way more concise.
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Everything I'm reading about this policy response is just making me want to hate-buy Bitcoin. Even despite a strong conviction that BTC's going to be sold off along with every other liquid asset in the coming weeks.
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It wasn't obvious that the combination of a new virus and the dissolution of an oil cartel would bring markets to their knees. It *was* obvious that overleveraged corporates with historically high P/Es pumped up by unnaturally low rates can't tolerate the unexpected.
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*checks Twitter, sees people complaining about Bitcoin maximalism*.*goes back to reviewing PRs*.
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Call your grandparents! . Way better use of 15 minutes than browsing this website.
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Have you been thinking about taking the plunge into full time opensource Bitcoin development? There is (industry-competitive) funding available!. If you're a good engineer with interest, send me a DM and I'll be happy to talk.
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Your blockchain isn't real unless you can sync it on this.
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So I was thinking. Obvious we need to split up the country, right? Big problem is: who takes the national debt?. Well, leftists like MMT which says that debt "isn't actually a problem." So they should have no issue taking it while other side reboots w/hard money. Problem solved!.
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A big congrats to Sjors Provoost (@provoost) for receiving well-deserved long term support from @OpenSats. Between sponsoring @MarcoFalke, @josibake, and now Sjors, I'm really proud of what OpenSats is doing to stabilize work on Core.
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Man is there anyone left who makes a decent browser and isn't actively trying to censor the internet?.
This week we saw the culmination of a four-year disinformation campaign orchestrated by the President. We have to acknowledge how the internet was misused to get here. And we have to change it.
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Really interesting point made at the conference by @TheBlueMatt about lightning that hadn't occurred to me: HTLCs for amounts below the prevailing L1 feerate are not trustless, since you're paying as much in fees to deter theft as the value of the transfer itself. Does this mean.
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Of course bitcoin twitter is talking about an SBR - everyone wants to be rich. It's the street-smart, principled bitcoiners who are talking about the other side of this - guys like @markgoodw_in. We're trading a bag pump for a freeze of any scaling/privacy innovations in the.
lmao my entire timeline is taken over by Lummis intrigue. do you think people want the SBR or what?.
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I've created and written up a demo of a simple vault implementation using OP_CTV. I think this design has the potential to make custody at any scale much less nerve-wracking.
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Buying Uber credits over the #LightningNetwork on @bitrefill using the Joule browser extension (, no personal data required. WebLN + Joule is a great UX; nice work, @juscamarena @wbobeirne!
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If twitter winds up being the de facto message bus for debating technical bitcoin stuff, we're not gonna have a good time. Twitter .- doesn't support content archiving/export,.- encourages optimizing for dunks, likes, soundbites,.- unpredictably bans people, and.- is full of low.
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anyway when you find out what that position is called, let me know and I'll put it in my bio.(5/5).
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I wrote another brief update on Bitcoin to send out to friends and family in the same style as the one I sent on Nov 30 of last year. Feel free to read and reuse.
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Not buying any Bitcoin until either stocks get hammered (at which point I expect BTC to fall) OR we pass $9k (i.e. I'm totally wrong and it's ripping in my face). Will update thread if this changes.
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Best thing I've bought all year is a printer. So good to be able to get away from a screen and read something work-related on paper.
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US Bitcoiners, start thinking ahead: consider firearms training and starting the (usually months long) process to get a conceal-carry permit. You need to be able to defend yourself. It's the only real counter to $5 wrenches.
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Putting assets on a blockchain that aren't endogenous to the chain itself doesn't work, because if possession isn't 10/10ths of the law you're just backing up to a traditional judicial system. Bitcoin is the only thing that a blockchain fundamentally makes sense for.
Seth Green developed a whole show around his bored ape, because by owning the NFT he owned the right to that character. Then someone stole it. Now Seth doesn’t own the IP to the character in his show anymore
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Alright so where is El Salvadore but with cold weather and firearm ownership?.
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Using a router supplied by your ISP is probably facilitating state access to your home network. Using a router you bought in a store is probably facilitating state access to your home network. At least make it harder on them.
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I'm not even beefing on the US government wanting to buy Bitcoin, that's perfectly understandable. I'm beefing on our lack of acknowledgement that that likely means immediate protocol ossification, and how bad that would be for Bitcoin.
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Great first-time contributions to Bitcoin Core:. - reviewing PRs by building/testing locally,.- adding test coverage, and.- best thing: finding bugs, whether conceptual or in code. Common, well-intended, but often not well-received:. - refactoring,.- reviewing PRs with only nits.
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Very simple scenario for you:. Tomorrow gov announces that by EOW, all exchanges must move held bitcoins over to a one-way hardfork that adds "monetary policy tools" and OFAC compliance. Can bitcoin support an exit for everyone who wants out?. This is why scaling matters.
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