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tldr

  • sory i deleted your profile images. you'll need to reupload them
  • if you have CCs, you will save more sats and spend CCs more often now
  • territory revenue is paid out when the action is paid for, ie immediately
  • satistics has autistic (ie excellent) levels of detail about how you're spending and earning money
  • every payment on the SN has a transaction page, and if you're involved in the transaction, you can see relevant details about your involvement in the transaction (click on a row in satistics to check it out)
  • payment retries are less buggy
  • zap retries fallback to CCs automatically if the receiver's wallet fails enough times
  • the analytics pages, for the site, territories, and your account, have more detail (and much more will come soon that isn't exposed in the gui yet)

what

My first professional mentor taught me that "no one cares how you did it, just what it does." My goal with this release was to upgrade SN's guts while maintaining parity otherwise. Some advantages of the new guts can be experienced immediately, but the main what of this change is easing system malleability by an order or two of magnitude.

what it does so far

  1. territory revenue is paid to the territory founder immediately, when the transaction happens
  2. you can now pay for things on SN with mixed assets, e.g. if your post costs 100 sats and you have 20 CCs and 50 reward sats you'll only need to pay a 30 sat invoice noncustodially
  3. depending on where the splits are sent, we can use a different, preferred asset for each destination, e.g. if you're zapping someone 100 sats and have 30 CCs, the CCs are used to pay the sybil fee, and you only pay a 70 sat invoice noncustodially
  4. satistics records not only how much of which asset you spent or earned on an action, but also the effect of the spending or earning on each "asset" balance. Basically, at a glance, you can audit that things are working as you expect them to.
  5. Every payment, aka transaction, has a transaction page with a visualization of the incoming asset splits and the outgoing destinations. Again, at a glance, you can audit that things are working as you expect them to.

what it will do over time

  1. this micropayment engine is agnostic to the payment method. previously we assumed all payments would use bolt11s, but we can now add bolt12 and possibly even onchain payments without hacks or other dysfunction.
  2. we'll be able to fine tune the incentives and side effects of existing behaviors to better fit with what we learn over time
  3. we can make better use of CCs to get you more sats
  4. we can make noncustodial splits while maintaining our existing retry UX
  5. we can add new payment and earning related experiments with relative ease

why

  1. When we zap someone noncustodially on SN, or merely withdrawal money, it's possible that the payment doesn't succeed for weeks afterward. If the payment fails, it could take up to two weeks for us to learn that too.
  2. When we pay for something noncustodially on SN, it's possible that the payment fails for reasons outside of our control. When that happens, we don't want to lose the related work.
  3. When we pay for anything on SN, we would like to know which source of money we spent, all the places it's sent to (potentially many), and what effect it had on our reward sat and cowboy credit balances on SN.
  4. When we pay for things on SN, we want to prioritize spending our cowboy credits over our sats. We also want to not use noncustodial payments if we have reward sats that can be used instead.
  5. The game theory of certain actions on SN are effected by the context and who is performing them. We want to be able to adjust, conditionally, the incentives of an action depending on the context and who is performing them.
  6. We want to add new paid features and incentives, or refine existing ones, with some regularity, so adding new paid features should be almost as easy as adding other features.
  7. Most of the things we pay for on SN have side effects conditional on SN receiving money (potentially two weeks in the future), e.g. a zap ranks an item higher relative to other items, the UI of every stacker needs to reflect the new amount, money needs to be sent to the territory founder, money needs to be sent to the OP (and forwards), excess estimated routing fees need to be refunded, push notifications need to be sent, the rewards pool needs to be populated, etc.
Put together, this means that we need to remember a lot of non-payment things in relationship to our payments, do detailed accounting, retry payment failures, make arbitrary and numerous fine adjustments to the effects of payments depending on the context, refund money when we don't get what we pay for, and anticipate and respond to payment events weeks in the future. Automatically.
That's what this thing I call a micropayment engine aims to do. I think of the requirements like an N-set venn diagram and the mircopayment engine is the middle where they all overlap.

sorry

  1. As a result of this change, I accidentally deleted all of your profile images. When we delete things, we try to delete them as deeply and permanently as possible for the sake of your privacy, and it appears I've shot us in our feet. You'll need to reupload them.
  2. The site speed has been sluggish for the last few weeks, a dimension I neglected while working on these changes. These changes in many ways worsen performance, but I'll be tuning things over the week and things should be back up to snuff soon.
  3. We've neglected most nonwallet and nonpayment dimensions of the site. Using bitcoin The Right Way is hard and a lot of what we're doing is on a weird little bleeding edge no one yet cares about. We've been having to invent stuff and learn the hard way as we go. This change is intended to encapsulate the wallet and payment stuff we've learned and get it out of the way so that we can move fast on the stuff that matters again.

what's next

  1. I'm going to be fine tuning the performance of the micropayments engine and fixing all the bugs I introduced
  2. Broadly, my next mission is to greatly simplify and reduce the complexity of the site
    1. all of our complexity budget is spent on doing bitcoin The Right Way, so everything else needs to be that much more intuitive
    2. e.g. our onboarding and introductory UX is a disaster
    3. in this vein, one of the first things I'm going to work on next, in addition to onboarding, is No Trust November - where we remove trust from ranking and downranking while also fixing/aligning the incentives of boost and downzaps.
    4. then we proceed with the grand plan of making territories great again
  3. ek is getting some R&R, so give him a break would ya
  4. sox is preparing a grandmother f'ing amazing upgrade to the editor which we have plans for that you probably wouldn't believe if I told ye and i want to keep secret for extra mindblow factor
No wonder I have so many cc’s today all the small zaps territory revenue is getting paid as cc’s because amount is too small.
Will we be able to pay for the territory partially in CC’s and partially in sats?
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Territory revenue should not be arriving as CCs. It should arrive as reward sats.
If you're getting more CCs for your zaps than usual, it may be a bug or there could be an issue with your wallet.
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Let me second this. I'm getting lots of cc's too.
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I've identified the problem (its isolated to wallets that don't support millisat invoices) and will get it fixed soon.
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How are you all determining that you're getting CCs?
If it's by looking at the balance in the upper right, that includes both reward sats and CCs.
When you get territory revenue for something, it goes to reward sats.
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Just to be clear, I just seem to be getting many more cc's than usual. My rewards were in sats, as always. Sorry if I added to the confusion
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Oh. My bad. I thought sats went to my attached wallet and that was cc’s like before.
So rewards will go to reward sats now and not withdraw automatically?
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52 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 10 Nov
They only withdraw automatically when they hit the threshold.
Because territory revenue doesn't come as a lump sum anymore, your reward sats will steadily climb until reaching the threshold then they'll withdraw.
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related 👀 #1278807
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  1. territory revenue is paid to the territory founder immediately, when the transaction happens
It’s probably because of this. Check if you’ve set a minimum amount to receive sats.
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Where can I check that. I think I have done it before but I don’t recall.
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It’s in the receiving wallet settings. But it could also be that the network fees are higher than what you set, so it’s failing.
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I think it is due to coinos. It can’t receive small amounts of sats. I could look into another wallet but I would rather not. It would be awesome if I could just pay whatever cc’s I have towards the territory and then pay whatever is leftover is owed in sats.
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You can do that with this change.
Our coinos channel may need to be rebalanced. I’ll look into it
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I think aim getting all CCs. Or was. Looks like territory rev came all CCs
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This is a bug on our end (some wallets don't support millisat invoices). I'll push a fix soon.
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go to https://stacker.news/satistics Find the transaction you want and click it, you’ll see more info!
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Yes I am having an issue too. I am sending sats ok but most of my received sats are coming as cc’s. All my rewards sats came as cc’s. I am going to detach and reattach my wallet today to see if that helps. If not I will look into another wallet option.
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We have plenty of outbound liquidity to coinos so we can rule that out as the cause.
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That’s good. Thanks
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FYI daily rewards came as CC’s too. I am still getting some zaps coming as sats to my coinos wallet but definitely got all of today’s rewards as cc’s.
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Hey @k00b I think that there's an accounting error (or that there was an accounting error before) in sats spent because I just went up on the top charts by 700k and I didn't spend 700k extra this weekend that I know of.
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112 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 10 Nov
Thanks!
top attempts to aggregate everything but I know I haven't spent enough time trying to rid it of bugs yet. It's possible it didn't account for something before that it does now. Regardless, I'll add it to my list.
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apologies for adding shit to the list!
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158 sats \ 1 reply \ @deSign_r 10 Nov
Seems like @delete and @remindme have been affected by this update too
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thank you
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This post just made me horny for some reason
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Love the "autistic" levels of detail. Attention to detail enables excellence.
Thank you for defending that dream that everyone seems to have forgotten about. One day "living the dream" will not be sarcastic anymore, and you've helped.
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162 sats \ 1 reply \ @AGORA 10 Nov
I missed a lot of metrics I was used too with this latest updated:
  • summary values in /satistics/graphs/ it was nice to have a uified value of sats-spent vs sats-earned for a set period of time. Now I'll need to do the maths manually.
  • lost another important metric in the /top/territories: now we have just total amount of items. No more post and comments. These were two other metrics we used to measure engagement.
Would these come back at some stage?
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Yes, they will come back. The internal changes for this update were huge so I had to simplify some stuff temporarily.
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Using bitcoin The Right Way is hard and a lot of what we're doing is on a weird little bleeding edge no one yet cares about. We've been having to invent stuff and learn the hard way as we go.
It's a testament to you and the SN devs and contributors that this thing works well enough that most of us have no clue how close to the bleeding edge of Bitcoin usage our daily adventures on SN are.
It's pretty darn cool!
Also: I did not realize/didn't think to connect the potential for delay in settlement on lightning with how it makes things hard to do on SN. This bit made my eyes water:
Most of the things we pay for on SN have side effects conditional on SN receiving money (potentially two weeks in the future), e.g. a zap ranks an item higher relative to other items, the UI of every stacker needs to reflect the new amount, money needs to be sent to the territory founder, money needs to be sent to the OP (and forwards), excess estimated routing fees need to be refunded, push notifications need to be sent, the rewards pool needs to be populated, etc.
And finally:
No Trust November
Yeeeee-haw!
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You do an amazing job building in public. Keep it up!
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If the mindbowing factor hasn't come in yet, then call me giddy. Love the new stats and analytics. Nice work.
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201 sats \ 0 replies \ @Wumbo 10 Nov
As a result of this change, I accidentally deleted all of your profile images. When we delete things, we try to delete them as deeply and permanently as possible for the sake of your privacy, and it appears I've shot us in our feet. You'll need to reupload them
All joking aside, Keep up the good Work
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Me last night: reeeeeeeee!
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This was the scariest moment since I've started to participate in SN life
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There you are...
we can make better use of CCs to get you more sats
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50 sats \ 0 replies \ @ken 10 Nov
Thanks for the hard work!
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you can now pay for things on SN with mixed assets, e.g. if your post costs 100 sats and you have 20 CCs and 50 reward sats you'll only need to pay a 30 sat invoice noncustodially
yeeeee! that's a feature I have been hoping for since I joined SN.
Also, I think this issue can be closed now?
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satistics has autistic (ie excellent) levels of detail about how you're spending and earning money
I’m offended. Jk, carry on
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Oh that's alright K00b, I'm sure I have a backup of my old avatar around here somewhere...
...
...
😬
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Woot!
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Let’s go
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It is android version or has web releasse?
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we only do web releases right now
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@d680ecaa8e I think you are referring to this1 unofficial SN for Android, right? If so, it's probably working but It's been a while since my last update (two or three months, maybe). But have in mind that the app is a very simplified version of the official SN site.

Footnotes

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oh. my profile photo was also gone. I was wondering what is with the profile picture everyone has and I wasn't remembering if my default was the same... :)) haha.
probably now is a period when we all get lots of CCs. yesterday I got zapped CCs more than anything.
great job with everything! keep it up!
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110 sats \ 0 replies \ @sox 10 Nov
Waited for this day with expectations, and wasn't disappointed in the slightest. woooooo!!!!!!
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I got sats from daily rewards, but the auto-withdraw didn’t work. Should I just reset the threshold?
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I'll look into it, but it was working yesterday. I may have broke it making other fixes.
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autowithdraw worked
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Okay. I'm not gonna do anything and see if it works tomorrow.
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Looks like I'm just getting CCs?
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I just got about 120 transactions like this! Did the sender just spam the send button 120 times?
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That's what that means, yes. We'll provide filters for this page eventually. It's a firehose right now.
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Only a total dummy would do that! ahahaha
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that lightning animation tho
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As a result of this change, I accidentally deleted all of your profile images. When we delete things, we try to delete them as deeply and permanently as possible for the sake of your privacy, and it appears I've shot us in our feet. You'll need to reupload them.
Thank you, I was wondering here: #1278519
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Instant payouts, smoother payments and Great analysis⚡
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sory i deleted your profile images. you'll need to reupload them
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accidentally deleted all of your profile images
This is good though because the new profile images can be animated now!
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What’s the difference between 35 927 and 70 790.293?
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great job! Any reason my photo wasn’t deleted?
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Welcome back from maintenance SN.
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When daily SN rewards will be removed? As I proposed from long time ago: #796213
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