Mrow.

I hesitate to muddy up what seems to be more of an underground news feed with my own silly content, but if there's an appetite for my nonsense then maybe I'll keep it up.I've been on a whirlwind tour through bitcoin culture for the past few days. I haven't really been able to shut up on Nostr about how much running a node changed the game for me.

It's probably no surprise to this audience, but the Blocksize War didn't really register to me as something of importance until I got to syncing my node. It took well over a week for me to get through the whole blockchain. That time frame feels either painfully long or, considering bitcoin's growing popularity, astonishingly quick. Something like 700GB of data. That's it. It's so crazy to me I still want to just grab strangers IRL and be like, "CAN YOU BELIEVE IT'S ONLY 700GB".

Kind of fun checking up throughout the process and seeing where in "Blocktime" my node was, then checking mempools.space to see exactly when that was.

Yeah look I'm still too green to open public channels on my node, too small of a fish to toss around the kind of liquidity I'm guessing big noderunners are playing with, and I'm keeping most of the sats that enter my gravitational field. Still, everything about accumulating bitcoin was somewhat desperate and even daunting up until I reached 100% sync with the blockchain. As soon as I hopped on Nostr and got to zapping it really shifted. Suddenly, there's a small stash of sats that I'm using to engage with this community, to support others or give them a little digital nod. I really couldn't connect with the platform or even considered layer 2 much at all until I had skin in the game. Only a full node+lightning node and Nostr, along with the interconnected platforms/utilities that many of you have been building, really could bring me out of my trance of layer 1 sat stacking. So thank you to those that have done such excellent work, it's incredible stuff.

Was considering one of those crazy detailed space sims to give my brain some exercise but... then I found Amboss and realized I can made my head hurt just with layer 2's. I'm definitely not ready for the big leagues. But for now, a few private channels feels great while I read up over the next few weeks on DarthCoin's outstanding documentation. Speaking of, are there LSP guilds like the Fuel Rats? That'd be fun. "We have Liquidity. You don't."

That is all for now.

Chau chau, meow meow.