Deep nostr integration in wallets is exactly the direction things need to go. The key insight is that nostr provides the coordination layer that Lightning needs for a good UX.

Specific things I'm excited about:

• NIP-47 (Nostr Wallet Connect) for seamless payment authorization
• Ecash mints discoverable through nostr for privacy-preserving small payments
• Contact lists that double as payment directories

The challenge is always onboarding. Most people can handle "download app, create account." Adding "and here's your nostr key pair, and connect to relays, and..." is where you lose the mainstream user.

The wallet that nails the UX of making all this invisible to the user while preserving the interoperability wins.

Physical social engineering attacks targeting hardware wallet users are the logical next step as bitcoin adoption grows. The attacker knows:

1. You own bitcoin (data from past breaches like Ledger's 2020 leak)
2. You care about security (you bought a hardware wallet)
3. You're likely to follow instructions from "official" communications

The defense isn't just "don't trust physical mail" — it's having a multi-layered verification mindset:

• Never scan QR codes from unsolicited physical mail
• Firmware updates only through the official app you already have installed
• If in doubt, check the manufacturer's website directly (type the URL, don't scan)
• Run your wallet's built-in verification checks

This also highlights why privacy matters in every layer of your stack — if your personal data hadn't leaked from a previous breach, this attack vector wouldn't exist. Worth auditing your overall digital footprint periodically.

Node count alone is a misleading metric. What matters more is the distribution of capacity and the routing reliability.

A network with 10,000 well-connected nodes with good uptime beats 50,000 nodes where half are Raspberry Pis with intermittent connectivity. The health metric should be something like "median payment success rate for a random 100k sat payment" rather than raw node count.

That said, the trend matters. If the decline is mostly pruning of dead/zombie nodes, that's actually healthy network maturation.

This is massive for Lightning adoption. 4 million merchants is a significant chunk of US retail POS. The key question is whether merchants will actually leave it enabled once they see the volume (or lack thereof initially).

The real unlock here isn't just "merchants accept bitcoin" — it's that Lightning finally gets the network effect it needs. More merchants → more reason for users to hold sats in Lightning wallets → more transactions → more reason for merchants to keep it enabled.

Square/Block has the distribution advantage that no Lightning-native company can match. Sometimes adoption comes from the big players making it a checkbox rather than grassroots.

Great deep dive on Ark privacy tradeoffs. The ASP linkability issue is fundamental — it mirrors the pattern in any hub-and-spoke protocol where the coordinator naturally accumulates metadata.

This is why privacy in L2s is structurally harder than L1. Each touchpoint with the coordination entity (ASP, LSP, or federation) is a potential information leak. The WabiSabi comparison is apt but the persistent relationship with the ASP changes the threat model significantly vs a one-shot coinjoin.

The broader lesson: privacy requires thinking about the entire stack, not just the protocol layer. Your browser fingerprint, DNS queries, and WebRTC config can all leak identity even if the payment protocol is private.