Sjors Provoost @sjors@m.sprovoost.nl

If you enjoy the Bitcoin, Explained podcast, you may want to check out my new book! It covers softfork activation mechanisms, what's cool about SegWit and Taproot, how nodes bootstrap to the network and find their peers, what an address really is, how AssumeUTXO can make initial block download suck less, how UtreeXO could compress the entire UTXO set into a kilobyte of merkle forest, how Guix makes reproduceable builds great again, and more.

More details and preview at: https://btcwip.com

Oops, I managed to maroon myself by incorrectly building OpenSSL here. I could still see everyones toots, post things and reply. But afaik nobody go to see any of it.

Until I actually paid attention to the Sidekiq errors: "OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError: SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=error: certificate verify failed (unable to get local issuer certificate) "

Fun fact: when the mobile Mastodon client fails to post something, it loses the entire message.

Pro tip: don't upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04 if you're running a Mastodon instance.

But if you do, you may need this incantation to get OpenSSL 1.1.1 and Ruby 3.0.4 to work: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/17798#issuecomment-1107648097

Here's my post (it's also linked in the article): https://sprovoost.nl/2017/07/22/historical-bitcoin-core-client-performance-c5f16e1f8ccb/

Great writeup by @lopp who picked up where I left off in 2017: https://blog.lopp.net/running-bitcoin-core-v0-7-and-earlier/

As much as I hate RT, it's important to take notice here: removing apps from app stores is now standard procedure in war.

I haven't seen removal from phones yet.

Censorship is a normal part of war, even in democracies, but it's useful to be aware of how that translates to modern times.
https://m.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/google-blocks-russias-rt-app-downloads-on-ukrainian-territory-says-rt-2773225?ampMode=1

TIL Putin ended the Russian - Netherlands tax treaty per 1-1-2022. In retrospect that was a more obvious red flag for a sanctions-worthy move coming soon. It removed much of the incentive of oligarchs to park their stolen money in our little tax paradise.

Or maybe it was unrelated, who knows...
https://www.pwc.nl/en/insights-and-publications/tax-news/enterprises/russia-to-terminate-double-tax-treaty-with-the-netherlands.html

It's always a good idea to stay on top of security updates for all your devices and servers. These days it's probably an extra good idea.

On the bright side: if Russia uses up their entire stockpile of zero days, we'll all be safer in the long run.

Russian Orthodox Church in Harbin and it's ice sculpture cousin. And Psy, to give a sense of when this was 🙂

In light of:
1. Putin's recently stated desire to restore the former Russian Empire; and
2. China's endorsement of his actions: "The position of the Chinese government is that we believe that sanctions have never been a fundamental and effective way to solve problems" (rather hilarious in context of Chinese sanctions against e.g. Lithuania and Australia for not sufficiently sucking up to Xi)

This video should be relevant again, when Putin tries to take back Manchuria:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBGsRmRjuHE

And then he retweets this asinine thread, in which an AWS engineer claims that "Computationally cheap cryptographic currencies with privacy are actually a solved problem."

He then points to Chaumian E-cash (which did not solve the double-spend problem for fucks sake) and digs even deeper by referring to zero knowledge systems, without pointing out that every current efficient design is either a trusted setup or too experimental cryptography for money.
https://twitter.com/colmmacc/status/1486025976819552263

Exhibit 3:

First Taleb writes a paper demonstrating that Bitcoin is extremely volatile and that this volatility has not gone down over the years.

Then he calls a little bear market "Imploding" (without demonstrating that this somehow exceeds the volatility we've seen before).

Perhaps he's referring more to the fact that Bitcoin is not very uncorrelated to other assets, as some hoped for. But past results don't guarantee future performance. And again: Bitcoin hasn't been killed yet.