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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 14 Nov \ on: Stinger32LND Monthly Update — November 2025 lightning
You've been at this a long time, and on net have made no money. Money isn't all that matters, of course, and I'd be interested to hear what keeps you at it. What have you learned, at a high level? What's interesting? What do you understand after all this work that other people don't?
The key part (or at least, the part I'm interested in) has nothing to do w/ what the merchant does, and pertains only to the user's gains (or loss, possibly) of btc's fiat value, which is what the govt requires reporting on for tax purposes.
Until your comment, I hadn't even considered the additional headache that the merchant would get if they kept whatever btc they received in these sales -- imagine that accounting nightmare, where every candy bar's worth of sats needs to be tracked for gain / loss! But since all this is automated by Square, maybe it's less bad than it seems, e.g., it's all aggregated.
I have complex thoughts that I have yet to fully articulate.
One I can articulate is that it's interesting that anyone who does this just ignores the capital gains reporting issue. This is clever, I think - the old strategy of turning everyone into "criminals" means they can't possibly persecute them all, which could set precedent for the de minimus exemption we've all heard about.
Of course, this depends on anyone actually using this option, which they will not, at any kind of scale, for years. But zero to one is hardest. It's the beginning of a real grounding for btc, which is exciting even in theory.
Haven't, but that looks awesome -- didn't realize there was such a useful suite of tools! I moved slowly through the @Rizful guide which I love, (and where I learned a ton of useful stuff about Docker, too), but having more resources to get a better intuition is extremely welcome. Thanks for contributing to that!
This is not going to help w/ the demographic collapse, I can tell you that much. Although maybe wrt philosophical growth.
This is so cool! It would be interesting to integrate this with some other Lightning-related educational stuff, e.g., a narrative whereby you learn the fundamentals by setting up a node, and then get intuition by screwing around w/ ln-graph-viz.
I don't have a good sense of what that would mean, but maybe something will occur to me in the course of playing with it. I feel like I'm def your target audience here.
What this is missing from the vibe of this post, and many of the comments, is that Luke has been an absolute giant in the history of btc development; you say you don't want him to bring his values to btc -- bad news for you, bro, he's been bringing them since forever. You have him to thank for SegWit, more than almost anyone else.
Btc attracts nutjobs and weirdos. (Look in the mirror.) They are brilliant, insane, and also sometimes idiots -- even in the same person, all at once. (Look in the mirror.) Without them (us) there would be no btc.
This is fantastic and v timely. Wish I would have found it before burning a day getting electrs installed. Thanks :)
My sense is you just think that that there's no demand for the use cases of bitcoin, not that bitcoin isn't useful for them. [...] Basically, the things bitcoin is good for, few people care about.
That's what I'm afraid of, yeah. With a slight tweak:
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It's not so much "few people" as "small resultant m"
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What btc is good for, and that people do care about at large m, is a certain type of speculation. It is demonstrably the case that this is so.
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What is not demonstrably the case is that the m is very large for the common catechism that we can all recite, about how btc is sovereign uncensorable non-state money, blah blah.
Most of the response / advocacy is invariably aimed at category 2, and thus SN is replete w/ calls to educate the ignorant masses about the Good News of btc, get them to spend their sats on hamburgers, etc. I'm glad people are doing this. I bet it's doing work in the background. In fact, I'm confident that it is. But it's not moving the needle right now.
I'm coming to believe there's a nuanced and complicated relationship between type #1 value, and type #2 value, that I want to explore.
I don't think there's much point drawing a sharp differentiation between savings and speculation.
You're free to define the use case as you like, of course, but if there were a safe "preserve my current buying power" option that I had high faith in, I'd re-allocate a bunch of my btc stack to it. Hoping for "btc to $1m" loads on a different principal component than "don't let my money get inflated away" in my own mind, and I don't think I'm alone there.
Put another way: I think the overwhelming amount of ETF money that flowed into btc was not stemming from the "preserve my savings from the melting ice cube" mindspace. I don't have a lot of friends who have actually bought btc, but 0% of those that have are worried about monetary debasement. It's probably relevant that these are just normal people I know, not cryptotwitter doomscrollers.
I think a more relevant metric would be, what % of bitcoiners who have a need for crossborder payments, use bitcoinf or cross border payments.
Disagree again. The crucial point that I want to make is that you can't condition on bitcoiners. Well, you can, but that's a different question. The question I want to ask is:
A: m(use btc | need cross-border payments)
not
B: m(use btc for cross-border payments | bitcoiner ^ need cross-border payments)
Where m is the magnitude of value realized by that use case.
I believe the distinction to be crucial to get at the market-sizing question: if you need something that bitcoin ostensibly provides, and you're not using bitcoin for it, that's telling; and if there isn't much absolute need (e.g., small m) for the thing itself (e.g., cross-border payments, micropayments) then that's also telling; and (a subset of the previous) if you need the thing, and are using btc for it, but you are of little economic consequence because you're a poor refugee, than that's also suggestive of btc's future purchasing-power prospects.
This is one of the reasons I like SN so much. It's a thing that can't really be achieved with anything else
Agreed. The 'unique use' is a good criterion, I think; but it must be united with actual demand. Actual demand for SN, or Nostr, which can only be realized w/ btc, is low, and shows little sign of growing, as best I can tell.
This doesn't mean it never will. But I sense negligible actual demand for it right now, which is something to consider given the obvious benefits of SN vs any other thing. And yet most people are not hungry for those benefits, and I don't believe anyone will be harangued into it.
I think these are use cases, e.g., btc can be used to do them. But how much is really going on?
If we adopt a working definition of "use" to be something like where have people sacrificed their time and money to transform it into btc? then when you look at the person-money and person-hours so invested, I think #3 is effectively zero; #2 is negligible; and #1 also minimal, at least, if you divorce the "speculation" use case out of it.
I am just making all of this up, so reasonable people can disagree. I have no insight into shadow banking and how much fiat Russian oligarchs or CCP elites have secretly pumped into btc. I'd be very interested in analyses that pull fewer things out of their ass than I am doing here.
There's a monthly (?) thread on Hacker News for people who want to be hired. If that's your skillset, you may find it helpful. (There's a comparable thread where people / companies looking to hire post stuff, but I can't remember how those are named.)
Here's the one from November. Good luck.