A little, but not debilitating concern. Most of these people are still around, just not active. On the other side, there are also new contributors coming in, making great contributions, some of whom hopefully grow into long-term contributors. We do have to keep working at on-boarding people, though!

I’m a big fan of LN-Symmetry (aka Eltoo) and the derived variants. I’m looking forward to it getting much easier to have channels with more than two participants and the removal of the toxic outdated channel states. I guess that’s already on the way and just a matter of time, though. The biggest hurdle is presumably the consensus change to add SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT.

I don’t think it’s possible to force a channel to remain open, in the sense that it must be operational until a specific date. Ultimately, the channel co-owner can simply not cooperate to create new updates, so even if they cannot close the channel, they can force inactivity.

Haha, good times. Hope I’ll see you at a Bitcoin conference this year?

I guess the big question is when support for Offers is implemented in LND. As far as I can tell, all the other implementations have already started work on Offers, or even support it, but the majority of the network still consists of LND nodes, and from what I understand, the maintainers of LND have so far signaled that they prioritize other projects over BOLT12 support, even to the extent that external developers offering to work on it got dissuaded.

So, I guess it’ll be until either the users that are really excited to use BOLT12 migrate to other LN implementations to the point that the node population significantly changes, or LND gets support.

I find that the location is an important aspect for social meetups. It should be comfy and facilitate a conversation with multiple people. Additionally, you just need a seed of people that can’t stop talking about Bitcoin of which at least a couple actually follow recent development.

For the technical meetups, it helps to have a good mix of novice friendly topics, bike-shedding topics that everyone can weigh in on, and a few topics to pique the interest of experts. Also, have a guest or two to build some momentum! We have a few suggestions on running a Great Socratic Seminar on the BitDevs blog. You may find it interesting.

Unfortunately, I am not aware of any efforts to facilitate that so far!

A bunch of volunteers and Bitcoin Core contributors submit their own attestations to the Bitcoin Core repository. These attestations are tied to a specific commit and thus you can check that at least these attestations agree on the version they commit to. If you want to be thorough, you can set up your own Guix build and check that you arrive at the same binary yourself. This commit should correspond to the release tag signed by one of he maintainers. The PGP keys of the attesters are also held in the repository. You should import their keys and check that other keys you have encountered before certify the attester’s keys.

So, you can either trust the “social proof” of a ton of people staring at the Bitcoin Core repository, hoping that someone would raise alarm bells if attestations disagree or not match the release commit, or you could use a web-of-trust per the PGP keys to assign a higher trust to some attestations.

I’m afraid that I am not knowledgeable enough on these aspects of Lightning Node operation to have a recommendation.

I’ve been almost exclusively bouldering in the past five years. I guess it might have been three times that I went top rope climbing in the same time frame.

I’ve found myself disagreeing with a lot of bitcoiners in the last three years. I find that there are many different reasons why people might like honest money which seems to surprise many novice bitcoiners that expect all bitcoiners to share their own motivation.

I am vaguely familiar with how they work, and it seems like a reasonable construction, but I don’t have a strong opinion on Spacechains. Sidechains have not been much of a priority for me in the past few years. I’m waiting for a convincing motivation to bring one into existence.

“Gardening” Bitcoin Stack Exchange feels like a great way to nurture one of the greatest resources in Bitcoin. I still learn new things every week.

Given the history in the previous century with two different flavors of authoritarian goverments, Germans tend to be more interested in privacy than in other countries. Cash is still a lot more prevalent in Germany than in many other Western countries. I guess Bitcoin just fits well with the predisposition of many Germans.

In the past months Dominion has been my favorite, my all-time favorite might be Ricochet Robots.

The power of a single individual or small group of people to will something into existence, e.g. BTCPayServer, libsecp, Nostr…

I guess in the end that’s the only way anything ever happens, but I don’t think I was as aware of that before I discovered Bitcoin.

I would forward this question to the people that seem the most insightful to me in this regard: Daniel Batten, Margot Paez, and Nathaniel Harmon.

Sorry, I will leave this one to people that specialize in LN and have grazed more broadly than myself.

I made pancakes this morning

That seems very dependent on the individuals involved. I guess I might try to expose them to opportunities to learn about programming and how Bitcoin works under the hood.

I don’t know how El Salvador is managing their coins, so I have no idea

I wrote a bit about that here: #141322

It could definitely be better. My colleague Jonas has been doing a lot of work in this area. I think the Bitcoin Protocol Developer seminar is a big step, and there are a few other good initiatives trying to build paths to contributing to Bitcoin Core. It’s a work in progress.

Thanks