Is anyone tracking non-kyc custodial LN and other Bitcoin IOUs rug pull rates? I figured this is a very important metric to have; without the regulations, how often do dark providers steal/disappear/fail?

Businesses benefit a lot from centralisation and gate keeping, but if you are in the business of non-kyc Bitcoin services... You really owe it to yourself to organise your data in a ledger, make it public and make your server algorithmically replaceable... Because your service is going to be shutdown sooner or later, and you lose all your hard earned credibility... Give yourself a chance to salvage that later with a dark service.

My most common argument has always been that decentralised search is impossible, this is still true, but I think every vertical (streaming, micro blogging, video, etc ..) should have some standard most likely imposed by a client, and let few indexers compete .. but I have no idea how would the indexers get paid when the clients have all the power. Still, if Podcasts can interop, maybe more segments of the web can.

Soft fork idea; any UTXO being spent has to include it's entire Utreexo proof in the witness. Oh you have been hording a UTXO from Satoshi days? Your consolidation transaction costs extra 7kb per input... Sorry.

If you hate At protocol (I hate the identity layer), this thread from Rudy should make you annoyed, it proves they have the will, integrity and vision to move towards more decentralisation. My problem is, interop will break soon after... So I wish people just give up and focus on group chats instead... Maybe leave global discourse to special occasions and ossify it like Gmail, because there is no hope for doing both innovation and interop on the long term of increasing social fractions... Bitcoin is marvelous because it scales despite all this social shit View quoted note →

There is a new trend of "start centralized/trustful and decentralise/trustless when the need arise" that you can't unsee everywhere; - Bluesky - Hyperliquid - all Rollups - Ark - Cashu mints I am not sure how to feel about that, because... It is efficient you can't argue against that, and until regulations crack down it is hard to justify the complexity. Arguably, even Bitcoin didn't start with as much decentralisation as it has now, Satoshi could have reorged the chain anytime he wanted in the beginning, no? There is a formula between decentralisation and the value secured by that decentralisation... Too much decentralisation is wasteful for no value, and too little is dangerous for too much value.

Bluesky DAU is coming down back to match Mastodon soon... That's a GG. Message passing won, large indexers didn't earn their keep.

I don't care what people say, saying that SPV nodes are less secure than full nodes (in a network with significant minority of honest miners and honest relays) is absurd.

The original sin was calling them ledgers instead of message queues