tobiTCOIN

bitcoin

Dr. Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim, wie nützlich ist Bitcoin? Mit Rene Pickhardt

Deutschland: Inflationsrate steigt auf zehn Prozent (Germany: Inflation 10%)

New to Stacker News

solabtc

LN Things Part 5: HTLC Deep Dive

This is probably the best diagram explaining HTLCs I found https://ellemouton.com/posts/htlc-deep-dive/#all-together-now

What’s your ratio of time looking at SN vs. twitter?

afizzycola

80 twitter / 20 SN ... but that's because I use twitter for other topics, too

What are the best Medium style developer guides for BTC?

higuyslol

anyone interested in building a learning project together? We could start to create those guides. I'm not so experienced in the javascript stuff ... most of the time I struggle more with configuring and integrating things, not with the lighting related stuff.  

liked this one a lot ... made a little video about how to get it running https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE3OK3oqDc4 and another one how to extend it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSZcjoyI_9c

EU lawmakers set to tighten up on crypto transfers

Shock The Web | Lightning Hackathon

secondl1ght

Just registered. I think I'm looking for a team

Ok so I go first. 

For me this is not at all about Bitcoin's price in fiat... Comments like "it will go to the moon" are still welcome

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These properties seem to me (and in general for humanity) positive things Bitcoin offers:

1.1) Bitcoin is scarce money: Printed money is (even with good intentions) never distributed fair
1.2) Bitcoin is handing over the power to a ruleset + the market, instead of a committee of humans: Humans can be corrupt, fouled by feelings and unable to understand satistics
1.3) Bitcoin digital and global money
1.4) Bitcoin has a disruptive potential for a lot of financial legacy stuff

Next I tried to understand why Bitcoin and not something else. Because all the other moneys (and its holders) also want to be the worlds currency protection is super important. 

Bitcoins seems to me to have the strongest protection agains any kind of attacks because off:

2.1) Bitcoin is most decentralized: Of course that's what all cryptos claim to be, but if you check a little bit more in detail small e.g. block sizes are a plus to run a mini computers instead of banking servers. 
2.2) No lead. No CEO. No institutions: This seems to be unique and makes it super art to even find the perfect attack target to kill Bitcoin
2.3) Encryption: Always favors the defender. I'm learning a lot here currently - this stuff is amazing 
2.4) Proof of work: You need to invest energy to get Bitcoin. Energy is a real world cost. So attacks are super costy in the real world, which makes it less likely that someone attacks. 
2.5) Adoption: Now with financial institutions, cooperations and a state holding it, it seems to be good to protect itself

3.) #1 wrong story told about Bitcoin:
Bitcoin is slow, limited in transactions and high transactions fees ... Lighting Network solves this 

4.) Energy consumption
The energy consumption of miners are the #1 doubt I have, but this idea of attacks being too expensive (in energy) to be worth it in PoW seems to the amazing solution. I know these reports of the sustainable power mix and carbon emissions of other industries... but I don't feel qualified to validate this. 
How much "energy waste" is fine to generate a secure, not corrupt, independent, fair … world currency. Considering that money has massive impacts on almost everything and runs or destroys societies. The longer I thought about the ideas above the more I think it's still worth to give Bitcoin a chance. 

5.) Shitcoins 
All altcoins promote themselves to be faster (see Lightning), cheaper (see Lightning), better for the environment and technically advanced. With technically advanced this feels to me more like betting on in the best case tech stocks. 

All altcoins are: 
- more centralized (in money distribution, control over the project, technical requirements for nodes, ...)
- less mature / more in beta / less adopted
- often technically more complex and thus less stable
- more prone to fraud 

Proof of Stake is from my understanding a the rich become richer sceme. Cheating and being caught in PoS means you loose the same immaterial asset that you tried to steal. In PoW you loose real world engery. 

I see the point of advanced smart contracts but these are possible on Bitcoin too in the future ... and I prefer to play it save first in terms of protection and technical basics. It's not possible to run a world currency with major network outage once a month. 

6.) Central Bank Digital Currency 
that's even worse than shitcoins. Decentralization isn’t important, until it suddenly is. Privacy isn’t important, until it suddenly is.

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Happy to get some feedback and critic. If you thing I'm brainwashed too much with Bitcoin propaganda please let me know, which aspect you see different. 


Your reasoning why you ended up being a Bitcoin maximalist

SEO for Stacker News

haha ok keep your tilde... if it's just a few selected special chars that's easy - but I have seen terrible stuff in the past in some projects... so that's the standard recommendation. 

1.3) It's not really a high prio task. 

In general all the ideas are just written down while randomly checking stacker.news... 

1.1) + 1.4) and in general things to reduce "not really relevant URLs from search engine user's perspective are good ones to start with. 1.7) too 

And maybe as a first step to become more news like offer not just "link" and "discussion" but also "article" with maybe min. 200 words. title. description. image, ... (need to look up in detail what's needed)  

Doing SEO for a news publisher as my main job some first hints about what could be improved at Stacker News to make it more visible on Google and other search engines 

1) The URL structure + internal links

1.1) Currently every post like https://stacker.news/items/13799 and all replies https://stacker.news/items/13804 have URLs. I would recommend let Search engines just index the original post (but with all the replies) as one URLs. Replies should not be indexable. Replies alone are hard to understand coming from Google. In general search engines like bigger posts with more content - could be done by grouping the whole thread into one indexable URL. There is different ways how to solve this. In general I would recommend to rid of URLs which are not used by users + which are thin content (that's many of the comments) and solve it differently 

1.2) Speking URLs are still a thing for search engines. https://stacker.news/The-Insiders-Are-Yelling-Warning-Signs/13814 is nicer than https://stacker.news/items/13814

1.3) I would avoid special chars in URLs https://stacker.news/~job

1.4) 3 URLs for every user with posts or comments could be reduced to one by just adding everything below on e.g. https://stacker.news/cointastical I don't expect that users on Google search for profiles of stacker.news

1.5) I would recommend to reduce links to user profiles e.g. on the homepage. The content is usually more important than user profiles for search engines. This could be solved by replacing the a href link with a button or something javascript like. Google will just follow a href links

1.6) On home there are always 3 a href links to every post. The title, the comments and the date. Just make the title an a href link. The link text is important to guide search engines, what the link goal is about. 4 comments or 4 Mar is telling search engines bots nothing. 

1.7) Google will not click the "more" button at the bottom of the page. So they cannot reach older articles. I would recommend to have a pagination an maybe an archive which lists all posts of each month and links to prev and next months. 

1.8) An XML sitemap would be useful too 

1.9) This should not be indexable https://stacker.news/search?q=bitcoin. Search should never be indexed


There is probably more to find here 

2) Content polish to be news worthy for Google 

The are some realy good long reads on stacker.news but the current structure make it hard to rank them in e.g. Google Top Stories (that's the with image news posts in Google), Google Disover or Google News. The content does not fullfil the requirements to be ranked in those services yet. I'm not sure if the standard stacker.news could make it into those but if the contend would curated and extended it should be worth a try. 

2.1) Images are needed 

2.2) Article markups are needed https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/article?hl=en

2.3) A news xml sitemap is need. Rss feeds are recommended too 

2.3) <h1> is needed also more descriptive <title> and meta description would help 


Ok I will stop here. I think there are a lot of technical issues which should be solved as a starting point. As a follow up that's part 2) already there is a lot of stategic potentical with SEO for stacker.news. Happy to help @k00b. 

SEO for news publisher during the day
Learning about Bitcoin + Lightning at night 