Here's a list of orphaned blocks: https://bitcoinchain.com/block_explorer/orphaned

If you think mining pools are too centralized, you should require more confirmations for your txns, when possible.

If you operate a LN node, you can set the min required blocks before a channel becomes active, for example.

If you operate an economic node (like a bank or business) you can require more confs before delivering the merchandise or crediting the customer's account.

Unfortunately, you cannot easily require more confirmations as a user requesting withdrawals from an exchange. Maybe your widthdrawl is included in a block that immediately gets reorged or orphaned. Your widthdrawl tx is no longer included in any block nor the mempools at this point. Your only recourse is to plea to the exchange and hope that they recognize the validity of the reorg and re-issue the widthdrawl tx in your favor.

Re-read page 6-8 of the white paper. Satoshi explains his reasoning and calculations.

In his examples, he estimated that IF the largest miner has 10% of hashrate, people should require 5-confs to reduce the probability that their transaction gets reorged to less than to 0.1%

A reorg happens when a miner is able to "undo" a block and replace it with multiple blocks which don't include your txn.

Foundry Pool regularly mines 6 blocks in a row. Foundry has approx 30% of hashrate today.

If Foundry wanted to be malicious, they clearly have enough hashrate to routinely reorg the chain.

So if we account for REALITY, satoshi would recommend requiring 24 block confirmations to reduce the probability of reorg to 0.1%.

If you start with high price then lower as you achieve scale, its a commodity product.

Or...

If you price low and raise as you achieve scale, its a luxury product.

If you compete on price, you're always competing with someone who has much lower costs than you. As a small biz, you gotta compete on something other than price to remain sustainable (be unique, be quality, be luxury)

The best luxury products can consistently raise their prices above CPI. This artificial scarcity can actually grow demand as fiat-minded consumers believe your garbage is a good investment.

Not necessarily. You're assuming that every watt of off-grid power is just a watt of grid power that would have otherwise been used.

Grid and off-grid are not perfect substitutes. Maybe they are close in Germany (I have no idea). But broadly speaking, not.

Industrial sites (bitcoin mines included) are often built near a power plant. They might even establish their own energy source that isn't grid connected.

Yeah, maybe if you live in Germany. But not if you live in near the equator.

Also, a lot of solar generation goes unmeasured because smaller installations are off-grid. Those figures shown for solar are likely only from larger-scale farms.

Energy consumption isn't the same as production. A lot of renewable (and nonrenewable) energy is produced that is never consumed, effectively stranded or wasted. One chart is confusing because its titled "consumption" but the chart axis measures "production".

Even the "obvious facts" don't include the whole story sometimes.

https://levels.io/projects/ Young solo serial tech entrepreneur

A true 10x dev. Just needs an allstar team and more focus to pull off something Great.

Zuck and Elon are no doubt geniuses, but its their ability to lead and delegate (not just their tech skills or IQ) that made their companies Great.

Don't hate the player, Hate the game. Your attention is priceless. Social media addiction is real.

Play dumb games, Win small prizes. Its not about the sats we won...

But the Coins we didn't even swing at because we were busy winning dumb games.

The SN team raised millions of american-flavored fiat dollars to pay devs and users (never forget, rewards is a marketing expense).

3 years later, SN still has less than 100 daily active users

So clearly, sweetening the rewards with investor money isn't working.

If you don't have a static IP but are still able to forward ports using a dynamic IP, then, when your IP changes, all connections will be dropped. Your node will reopen all outgoing connections using your new IP address. Unfortunately incoming connections will not be reopened and any remote nodes will have to wait for your node's new external IP address to be advertised again by your peers.

You can set a static IP on your LAN, but that does not necessarily mean that IP is publicly accessible.

To be maximally helpful for "the network", your node needs to broadcast an IP that anyone can connect.

Most residential Internet service does not include a public IP, rather your router is behind a carrier grade NAT, meaning you cannot forward ports.

Additionally, many Internet plans have data caps that make it "expensive" to sync a node from genesis quickly, let alone seed blocks to others.

That's how I understand it. Routing nodes would be incentivized to support all available transport layers as it increases the odds they'll help route a payment between peers which don't have the same transports enabled.

Most LN nodes are Tor-only. So the demand for anonymity layers seems strong. Additionally, clearnet is difficult/expensive to setup (especially if you don't have a dedicated-IP because you're behind the ISP's NAT).

The pleb noderunners deserve a "middleground" transport with some anonymity, easy to setup, and more performant.

Technically, you're right. But in practice most LN nodes that process the bulk of payments in the network are online near 24/7

An offline node (with no watchtower) is also vulnerable to being cheated by peers.

Similarly, it's not technically required for an i2p relay to always be online. Of course, it will only be usable (by yourself or others) if its online.

The biggest difference between i2p and Tor is that you don't have to run ANY server to access Tor. Just download a browser (run a local SOCKS5 proxy) and you'll be able to route traffic thru the network without helping to route other's traffic yourself. It's easy to get started with Tor, but you're sharing resources (relays) with hundreds/thousands of other users which can lead to poor performance or denial of service.

"require running always online server" -- probably not the best way to phrase it. Rather, using LN and i2p (directly) require running a server and most people will probably run that server 24/7

It is technically possible for hundreds of people to use someone else's i2p relay (instead of each running their own relay). But that's not "the norm" like it is in Tor.

Tor has Exit Nodes (i.e. Tor nodes that can "translate" traffic to/from a clearnet-IP address into Tor hidden traffic. However, Tor exit nodes are not used at all in LN routing.

Basically, LN has it's own "exit nodes" (i.e. LN nodes that run BOTH a hidden service address AND a clearnet address). These nodes can "translate" traffic to/from a clearnet-only node to a tor-only node for example.

So the fact that I2P has no exit nodes should not matter.

No need for individual miners to build their own templates if Antpool is in the middle with a stratum server!

I'm expecting the actual distribution of LN publicly-routable liquidity to resemble the distribution of hashrate in 10ish year (assuming LN continues to approach market saturation). Maybe a couple dozen uberbank nodes will manage 90% of public capacity and 1 or 2 nodes manage +50%

Those top nodes will certainly use tx batching everywhere possible, just like exchanges do. As economic nodes, they will excel in aggregation of blockspace demand.

Just as Mining Pools have been known to create block templates that censor, likewise Uber-Bank LN nodes will likely "whitelist", and "blacklist" recipients. Like Email, it might become EVEN MORE DIFFICULT to run a sovereign node and reliably receive payments/messages (especially if you are seeking privacy no-KYC, or are sanctioned individual).

This is what happens when you try to profit off a p2p system that kills middlemen.

Most sustainable "Bitcoin Business" are either a Fiat/state tentacle (exchanges/banks/compliance/information brokers/narrative shapers/media,etc.), and/or they are able to "exploit" a flaw/deficiency in the protocol by inserting themselves as middlemen (coinjoin coordinators/custodians/LSPs)

Every profit extracting vehicle that leeches on Bitcoin -- either by profiting off it's flaws, or bringing it closer to nationstate capture (the network as a whole will suffer).

Don't overcomplicate it... Stay humble. Stack sats. That urge you have to give back is natural. Give freely your time, energy, and value (not-for-profit), and we'll all get insanely wealthy together.

Less "Bitcoin Businesses", more "Business using Bitcoin".

Never forget, it was the Internet Businesses that slowly captured and degraded the soverignty of the Email protocol.

LND team has more interest in adding TapASS shitcoins on LN than supporting alternate anonymity transport layers.

I agree, i2P would be a great fit for LN nodes since both require running an always online server. A big reason Tor has poor performance is that you don't have to run a "Tor node" to use/abuse Tor. You can infinitely abuse other people's nodes on Tor with zero "skin in the game".

I have a similar mantra:

To me, it means that life does not just have to happen to you -- you can shape your life just by taking relentless action. Some call this ambition, and I believe its something you can train, its not just something you are blessed with. Don't wait to take action, take action then wait.

When results are slow or not showing at all, realise that you're just being impatient and funnel that impatience towards more action!

Adding a dust UTXO along with a larger UTXO as inputs to a tx does not magically remove the dust, or make the dust any more economical to spend.

A P2PKH tx is about 546 bytes, meaning you would have to pay at least 546 sats to spend it. Segwit and Taproot txns are a bit smaller ~450 bytes.

Suppose you have a 294 sat utxo and a 5000 sat utxo in the same wallet. You could just spend the 5000 sat UTXO for approx 500 bytes (500 sats fee at 1sat/byte or about 10% fee relative to the amount sent), or you could spend the 294 sat utxo for approx 500 bytes (about 170% fee), or you could spend both utxos for approx 1000 bytes (about 20% fee).

Every dust utxo is just a future "forced" donation to miners (if it gets spent) or a perpetual donation to all bitcoin holders (by burning or essentially removing those sats from the supply circulation).

You could try to convince someone that your sats are "rare" and trick them to pay you more then 1 sat per sat.

It was my first purchase using BTC. I wanted to prove to myself that BTC was actually worth something so I saved my sats from mining for several months and spent it all on the keyboard to "treat myself".

I had no appreciation for the economics or game theory, mining was just another way to passively earn dollars for me at that time.

I felt the same way 10 years ago. Paid 100M sats for a mechanical keyboard. It broke after 4 years. Now the same keyboard costs 300k sats (99.7% discount)

I could have changed my "life layout" with those sats if I just held for 10 years. But I chose to change my desk layout for a couple years instead. Spend wisely, stacker.