nixb

Bitcoin Maximalist

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npub122z4r6mdw8nuhk4wn88c0c2yhpu7wrelt72c8p9e87xkjs7qc27qtnwvet

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nprofile1qqs99p23adkhre7tm2hfnnu8u9zts708pul4l9vrsjunlrtfg0qv90qprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuumwdae8gtnnda3kjctvqy2hwumn8ghj7etyv4hzumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgw5sejr

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npub122z4r6mdw8nuhk4wn88c0c2yhpu7wrelt72c8p9e87xkjs7qc27qtnwvet

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Last Notes

2026-10-27 14:49:39 UTC

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Quantum mechanics is only useful for key exchange. Your smartphone, a classical computer, is already more capable of breaking asymmetric cryptography than the most powerful quantum computer on Earth. Writing a theoretical paper is one thing; engineering and building actual hardware is something entirely different. It’s a bit like string theory.

2026-10-18 18:55:27 UTC

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As a Gen Xer who started coding in BASIC, I naturally gravitate toward Python and Go. I appreciate languages that read like plain English.. clean, readable, and easy to understand.

2026-10-18 18:51:01 UTC

FCUK to JPEGS and NFTS
2026-10-17T06:39:04Z Imported mempool transactions from file: 436 succeeded, 23105 failed, 44554 expired, 0 already there...
Because of mempoolexpiry=72 and minrelaytxfee=0.00003000, over 67,000 stale and low-fee transactions were instantly dropped!
• Only 436 legitimate, high-priority transactions were kept in RAM.
• Your UTXO cache now has over 2.0 GB of RAM space.
which will keep random I/O off my external drive and keep my SSD from stalling.

2026-10-18 18:25:52 UTC

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Congratulations, Sophie. The tension between centralization and decentralization spans everything from human politics to system architecture. A prime example is Werner Koch, creator and maintainer of GnuPG. You hit the nail on the head: Werner Koch and Yutaka Niibe have been pivotal figures in the protracted debate over modernizing the OpenPGP standard (RFC 4880). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkwd7Vcq7d4

2026-10-16 10:12:11 UTC

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GM☕ Hope you be 100% to
---
1. Bitfest UK Event Venue Details
• Event: Bitfest 2026 (19–22 November 2026)
• Venue: Pendulum Hotel
• Street Address: Sackville Street, Manchester, Greater Manchester, UK
• Postcode: M1 3BB
• WGS84 Coordinates: 53.474312, -2.235080
---
Where39 Encoding Result
Running ₿>./where39 encode --lat 53.474312 --lng -2.235080:
4 Words (≈ 5 m² resolution):
Space-time secret 🗺️ place words…
📍
slogan left sheriff roof
📍
Thanks Ben for where39 project 🙏
https://arcbtc.github.io/where39/

2026-10-16 07:55:52 UTC

Why My 1TB Bitcoin Node Keeps Stalling: JPEGs, the Tragedy of the Commons, and Why Bitcoin Needs 'Roofshots', Not Hard Forks
by Andre Amorim
🛡️ Editorial Transparency & AI Attribution
🤝 Co-Authored — Collaborative research & writing by AA and google/gemini-argon & google/gemini-3.8-flash.
Summary: How diagnosing a hardware freeze on my external SSD exposed the real cost of blockchain bloat—and why the recent Bitcoin Knots hard fork was the wrong answer to a very real problem.
Bringing the late Luiz André Barroso and his Roofshot Manifesto into this hits the exact philosophical mark. What happened in August and September 2026—when the forced BIP-110 activation stalled after just two blocks and the Bitcoin Knots camp responded by hard-forking away from Bitcoin’s SHA-256d proof-of-work to BLAKE2b—is the textbook definition of a reckless “moonshot” that fractures a system instead of evolving it.
Barroso argued that the greatest triumphs in computing don’t come from blowing up the foundation for a dramatic “moonshot,” but from roofshots: disciplined, backward-compatible, incremental engineering steps that compound over time without breaking the live system. In Bitcoin, soft forks and local node policies are roofshots; contentious hard forks are failed moonshots.
For months, my Bitcoin full node has been suffering from a frustrating symptom. Every few days—or sometimes after a few good weeks—the external 1TB SSD holding the timechain completely stalls. To bring my node back to life, I have to physically unplug the USB cable from my MacBook Air and plug it back in.
At first, I wondered if a single massive image or video file being pulled from peers was hitting a bad sector on my drive and crashing the process. Today, I ran a deep system diagnostic on my node’s hardware and logs.
What I found wasn’t a corrupted drive. Instead, I found concrete, real-world proof of the exact problem that triggered Bitcoin’s latest “civil war”: the clash over whether Bitcoin should remain sound money or become a subsidized hard drive for JPEGs, NFTs, and speculative tokens.
At the same time, watching how that conflict ended—with the Bitcoin Knots camp ultimately breaking away in a contentious hard fork—reminded me why we must fix Bitcoin through disciplined evolution, not network-splitting revolutions.
The Smoking Gun in My Node Logs
When I inspected the system logs right before the latest stall, three numbers jumped off the screen:
My 1TB SSD is now 90.3% full (over 841 GiB used, leaving barely 90 GiB of breathing room). 68,095 unconfirmed transactions were sitting in my mempool waiting to be flushed to disk.
Writing just 55.9 MB of that data to my external SSD took 22.95 seconds.
On a modern 10 Gbps USB-C NVMe drive, writing 56 MB should take less than a tenth of a second. Taking nearly 23 seconds means my SSD was choking at roughly 2.4 MB/s 🤬 slower than a 1990s thumb drive.
Why? Because consumer external SSDs rely on free space as a high-speed buffer (an SLC write cache). Once the Bitcoin blockchain pushed my 1TB drive past the 85–90% capacity cliff, that buffer vanished. When the node tried to flush a heavy burst of mempool and database updates, the SSD controller got overwhelmed, stalled for nearly 30 seconds, and triggered the operating system’s USB hardware timeout—disconnecting the drive until I physically unplugged it.
Privatized Profits, Socialized Costs
Why is a 1TB drive no longer enough to comfortably run an unpruned archival node? And why are volunteer nodes constantly drowning in tens of thousands of unconfirmed transactions?
In economics and systems architecture, what I am experiencing on my desk is a textbook 🎓 negative externality commonly known as a Tragedy of the Commons.
Consider how skewed the incentives are when people use Bitcoin as a data dump for Ordinals, JPEGs, videos, or BRC-20/Runes tokens:
Miners get paid: When someone mints a batch of NFTs or meme tokens, they pay a one-time transaction fee to the miner who builds that single block. The miner pockets the reward and moves on.
Ecosystem vendors get paid: Marketplaces, token launchpads, and hardware vendors take their cut of the speculative hype.
Volunteer node runners pay the bill forever: People like me—running full archival nodes (prune=0) out of pocket for the sake of network decentralization—get zero financial reward, yet we are expected to download, relay, validate, and store those arbitrary files forever.
Worse still, because of the SegWit and Taproot witness discount, arbitrary non-financial data stuffed into witness scripts gets a 75% fee discount compared to standard financial data. An ordinary person making a genuine peer-to-peer payment pays full weight per byte, while someone uploading a rubbish JPEG—in an NFT market that history and facts have largely proven to be full of scams—gets subsidized block space at the expense of every volunteer node’s hardware.
The 2026 Civil War: Right Diagnosis, Wrong Cure
The frustration of volunteer node runners is completely justified. When non-financial bloat pushes the blockchain past the physical limits of everyday consumer hardware, volunteers are forced to either buy bigger drives out of pocket, turn on pruning (prune=1), or shut their nodes down—pushing validation toward corporate data centers.
However, the outcome of the latest Bitcoin civil war showed us the danger of letting frustration lead to a hard fork.
When the Bitcoin Knots camp tried to force the issue in August 2026 with a mandatory BIP-110 activation—despite having less than 3% of the hash rate—the breakaway chain produced just two blocks and stalled. By September 2026, to keep that separate chain alive without existing miners, they resorted to a permanent hard fork, swapping out Bitcoin’s SHA-256d proof-of-work algorithm for BLAKE2b.
Just like the Blocksize Wars of 2015–2017 (which gave birth to Bitcoin Cash and BSV), history proved once again that hard forks do not fix Bitcoin; they only fracture the network and create altcoins. You cannot save the decentralization of sound money by splitting the ledger and abandoning consensus.
The “Roofshot Manifesto” and the Case for Soft Forks
When I think about how a critical global system like Bitcoin must survive, adapt, and evolve, I am reminded of a lesson from one of the greatest computer architects of our generation, the late Google Fellow Luiz André Barroso (que partiu deixando muitas saudades).
In his famous essay, The Roofshot Manifesto, Barroso pushed back against Silicon Valley’s obsession with “moonshots”—all-or-nothing, radical leaps that ignore existing constraints and usually fail. Instead, he championed roofshots: steady, disciplined, incremental engineering improvements that aim for a 2x gain right above your head, build directly on what already works, and compound reliably over time.
Barroso’s philosophy applies directly to Bitcoin governance:
Hard forks are reckless moonshots. They break backward compatibility, fracture network effects, leave users and infrastructure behind, and split the community in two.
Soft forks and local node policies are roofshots. They respect the existing consensus rules, preserve the unbroken history of the ledger since 2009, and allow the protocol to adapt and evolve safely without breaking the network.
Where I Stand as a Node Runner
Diagnosing my external SSD taught me a practical lesson: I can tune my dbcache in RAM to protect my USB controller, and as a sovereign node operator, I have every right to configure my local mempool rules so my hardware isn’t acting as a free relay postman for unconfirmed JPEGs and scam tokens.
More importantly, it reinforced my conviction about how Bitcoin must move forward. My criticism of using volunteer nodes as subsidized cloud storage for non-financial junk remains 100% valid. Yet the solution will never be another 2017-style or 2026-style hard fork.
Bitcoin was built to endure for centuries. To protect both the ledger and the volunteers who keep it decentralized, we must reject hard forks and fix our problems the way great systems engineers always have: one disciplined soft fork—one roofshot—at a time.
Author Coordinates & Verification
Author: AA (André Amorim)
Website: nixb.org
Nostr NIP-05: andre@nixb.org
Nostr NIP-23: Kind 30023 Long-form Content
Tags for Primal: #bitcoin #nostr #runninganode #decentralization #soundmoney #softfork #systemsengineering
#bitcoin #nostr #runninganode #decentralization #soundmoney #softfork #systemsengineering #hardware #barroso #tragedy-of-the-commons

2026-10-14 15:00:38 UTC

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Nice.. Ever considered pitching 'zaps for wildlife' to animal lovers? another day I was thinking about a product like that.. I asked to gen AI to gen the image .. https://blossom.primal.net/0f9c686b8731bfa33483dfef68852e5593b81aec85661822b4e9f44f6aee7207.png

2026-10-14 06:35:53 UTC

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I am sort of interested in their Secure Element Chip
TROPIC01
https://trezor.io/guides/trezor-devices/trezor-safe-7/what-is-the-tropic-01-chip
sounds solid ..building this sort of machinery and firmware require a lot of expertise and capex so 👏 to the trezor team,
ps.: I am not an expert but I remember reading an interesting book about it👇
https://blossom.primal.net/8e20764c6ee042e6ddf16d02079e599ccae22f81b41a2e98caf313f97d19d991.jpg

2026-10-14 05:53:14 UTC

@nprofile…w3mz me thinking about Intellectual Property - IP, Open Source and Licence in the AI era, some opinions..
1 - Former Microsoft Engineer and Youtuber
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KC31K-CUC5Y
This topic also reminds me of the "Open Source History" documentary .. RevolutionOS 🎬👇
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0RYQVkQmWU

2026-10-10 23:45:15 UTC

I’m heading to BitFest @nprofile…vyv7 in Manchester for the first time. Before GPS, I studied physical A–Z maps, which likely exercised my hippocampus—much like how London black cab drivers develop larger hippocampuses. Today, smartphones with GPS, digital compasses, and accelerometers deliver real-time navigation. Without my smartphone, I easily get lost.
Thanks to the organizers, I received a student discount. When traveling in Europe and needing a Wi-Fi internet hotspot, I use my university credentials for Eduroam. In the UK, JISC manages both Eduroam and Govroam. The installed JISC app relies on Bing Maps. Comparing it side by side with Google Maps, Google Maps appears to offer a more up-to-date version. However, as a FOSS enthusiast, I volunteer for OpenStreetMap (OSM) whenever I have spare time. If I am not mistaken, BTCmaps @nprofile…9yc5 also utilizes OSM (https://btcmap.org/map#12.00/53.48153/-2.23829).
https://blossom.primal.net/87ee09ab1ea916df6376d609fd52c2111d8e89e5bb590a1380cf6f617525e93e.png
https://blossom.primal.net/92486bfb3a2ef1c3e960faea561c4046ffbca87e3243ddcfd579f84aec4d1d61.jpg

2026-10-09 08:56:05 UTC

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It looks like this might be tied to the browser engine... it works for me on Blink (Chrome), but breaks on Safari’s WebKit.
If you're seeing this on iOS, a quick fix is clearing the cache:
Head to Settings > Safari > Advanced > Website Data.
Search for youtube and swipe to delete.
Once you reload the page, the thumbnails should pull cleanly from YouTube's CDN.
PS
Talking about YT thumbnails I confess this one here makes me LOL ..
https://blossom.primal.net/dbf5cffcdf84e04e3b12cbfaddd36755ebe795a6a0f2528cf8259739f1287b94.png
The coincidence was that I used the "Jenga Tower" analogy to describe when a software breaks .. the inspiration actually came from one of my favorites comic strips XKCD "dependency"
😁
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/dependency.png
and the whole point to use Eelco Dolstra's nix.

2026-10-08 12:12:17 UTC

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Discounts for Bitcoin payments.. 😀People naturally spend money that loses value (like fiat currency) and hoard money they think will go up (like gold or Bitcoin). That’s Gresham’s Law: cheap money drives good money out of everyday use. If a shop offers a discount for Bitcoin, it’s giving people a real reason to actually part with the asset they’d otherwise hoard under the mattress.

2026-10-07 14:27:03 UTC

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Love the panic, but a math paper is not a physical data center. Half the machines people hype, like D-Wave, are just quantum annealers that are physically incapable of running Shor's algorithm in the first place. For universal gate systems, real-world error rates mean you need thousands of noisy physical qubits just to forge one stable logical qubit. That turns a four-thousand-qubit paper equation into a forty-million-qubit engineering mountain. In actual lab tests, IBM's quantum rigs famously struggled to factor twenty-one into three times seven without using classical pre-calculated hints. Your phone calculator does more work while sitting locked in your pocket. The whole quantum panic feels less like an urgent engineering crisis and more like a manufactured scare to sell new quantum-proof wallets or push BIP drafts that confiscate early coins. Relax, your keys are fine. Think in terms of real engineering, not paper theory. Trying to steal Satoshi's coins under the guise of an upgrade sounds shady as hell.

2026-10-06 07:36:05 UTC

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Which game engine are you developing in… Unity, Unreal, or Godot? In my spare time, I’m learning Godot. The main reasons I picked it are its licensing and because GDScript looks a lot like Python; also, the community is very friendly.

2026-10-02 15:57:26 UTC

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reminds me .. Mick .. Rolling Stones .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcMQWfMTfJ8

2026-10-02 14:08:17 UTC

There's No Place Like 127.0.0.1 Except ::1

2026-10-02 13:58:42 UTC

Going to @nprofile…vyv7 in the envelope of two .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWXCCBsOMSg&list=RDGWXCCBsOMSg&start_radio=1

2026-10-02 13:06:51 UTC

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yes I remeber that like Jean M. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCLEZM_N0K8&list=RDvCLEZM_N0K8&start_radio=1

2026-10-02 11:17:29 UTC

@nprofile…37z9 project "where39" reminds a bit (vibe) of Google Geo Platform .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiK3i37HPyM 'Why we map the world?'

2026-10-02 10:52:08 UTC

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@nprofile…c6at Sure, my first question in the tourist walk around would start with the hotel name itself… Pendulum Hotel. Distributed networking reminds me of “Spontaneous Synchronisation“ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T58lGKREubo

2026-10-02 09:35:36 UTC

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I will try to come, my first time in Manchester .. @nprofile…vyv7 @nprofile…37z9 I was thinking 🤔 (..not exactly as locals.. but tourist guy) so .. my idea is.... do we have something like we get here in Leeds Digital Festival https://leedsdigitalfestival.org/events/leeds-digital-festival-innovation-and-invention-guided-walk-2/ we could use https://github.com/arcbtc/where39 .. just an crazy idea ..

2026-10-02 07:15:58 UTC

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here is my personal bias ..👇 (thanks to the gemini v4 fact check and proofreading)
Trust isn't an assumption; it's a conversion.
For decades, Public Key Infrastructure has wrestled with where digital trust actually originates. Centralized models like X.509 place their faith in a hierarchy of Certificate Authorities, while decentralized models like PGP's Web-of-Trust spread that faith across human peer networks. Yet both approaches hit the exact same wall: they rely on human honesty and subjective reputation.
Satoshi Nakamoto broke away from this entirely by tying digital trust to the immutable laws of physics.
In classical chemistry, Antoine Lavoisier famously proved that matter cannot be created or destroyed, declaring that nothing is lost, nothing is created, and everything is transformed. Later, Albert Einstein unified this by proving that mass and energy are merely two forms of the same thing. In modern physics, the total mass-energy of a closed system is strictly conserved. You cannot forge energy, you cannot summon it from nothing, and you cannot erase it without a trace. Work must be accounted for.
Satoshi took this thermodynamic truth and applied it to digital consensus. In a Proof-of-Work system, an unforgeable ledger cannot be conjured through institutional authority or social promises. It demands an irreversible, measurable expenditure of real-world electricity. By grounding asymmetric cryptography in the conservation of mass and energy, trust stops being an act of human faith and becomes a physical certainty.

2026-09-29 15:13:43 UTC

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In blockchain mining, electricity is transformed into cryptographic hashes to manufacture trust; in a cloud data center, electricity is transformed into general-purpose computation to manufacture business value.
Reminds me of Barroso and Hölzle (2009, p. 39), 'Datacenters are essentially very large devices that consume electrical power and produce heat'.
Sounds like mining 101 if we can extract the value of that energy input..
reference:
Barroso, L.A. and Hölzle, U. (2009) The datacenter as a computer: an introduction to the design of warehouse-scale machines. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool Publishers. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01722-3.

2026-09-27 14:59:19 UTC

@nprofile…vyv7 @nprofile…37z9 I am working on this 'game’ related to "project management" (or as they say at Google internally) program manager… the broad idea is based on LNbits Scrum (Scrum as envisioned by one of the authors of Scrum… borrowing the idea from rugby game…) https://youtu.be/ZDPtJyNpcRM

2026-09-27 12:42:29 UTC

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I use Primal on my phone, and I’ve got an AI agent set up, baptized him 'Struthio' (the scientific name for ostrich). Every morning at 9 AM, he’s scheduled to scrape Nostr relays and dig up cool stuff for me. I guess Struthio already has some built-in alignment, because so far he hasn't served up any weird dark-web style content.

2026-09-25 19:45:04 UTC

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not in my machine .. https://blossom.primal.net/1fa54852e9321aab99a58cc4012cb66544263e4c57d4620e996a03f5b36ba1b1.png

2026-09-22 11:21:14 UTC

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Got some server error..🤔 https://blossom.primal.net/d4f55b24ca5eb84d1b9ef0d063461703e5d3348cebbe34d969ffcde3d4d232bc.png

2026-09-22 09:46:36 UTC

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Planning to head to Nostrshire to learn more about the LNbits transition from Python-based extensions to sandboxed WebAssembly (WASM) modules and iframes. Huge step forward for the platform!
I’m particularly interested in project management extensions right now. I’ve been deep in study mode for certifications like Google PM, Scrum.org, and PRINCE2 (classic UK gov heritage). While digging into FOSS sustainability for my academic studies, the same old questions keep popping up: why do so many great projects get abandoned, or why does every npm install remind us that "x packages are looking for funding"?
Then, playing around with the LNbits "scrum" extension, the potential hit me immediately... micropayments tied directly to Kanban tasks. Clever concept, but the UI definitely needs love. That got me thinking: who builds the most engaging UI/UX? Game developers 🎮.
Right now, I’m learning Godot Game Engine (nice licence type) to prototype a tycoon-style game tailored for project managers, taking cues from "Game Dev Tycoon" and "Prison Architect".
P.S. Fun fact: the UK’s creative industries as a whole actually generate more economic value than pharmaceuticals, car manufacturing, and aerospace combined🤯
This current AI builder vibe genuinely gives me early 8-bit era nostalgia like BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, Commodore days all over again.

2026-09-22 06:51:22 UTC

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Congratulations on your achievement. Alcohol can cause both physical (chemical) dependence and psychological dependence. In some individuals, genetics plays a massive role, not just the social environment. If you are one of those individuals who is more susceptible to it, or if you know someone who is, ask your GP about an alcohol antagonist medication such as nalmefene.

2026-09-20 14:42:02 UTC

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think and walk to church of jesus crist

2026-09-20 14:18:47 UTC

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I mean https://totum.com/

2026-09-20 12:34:44 UTC

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@nprofile…fys2 .. how all those computers clocks get in sync? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T58lGKREubo

2026-09-20 12:18:22 UTC

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BTW, for debugging purposes, the transaction was already confirmed on the blockchain more than an hour ago.

2026-09-03 16:09:26 UTC

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Oh, sorry! In fact, it was just off the top of my head related to thought-provoking films... I was thinking of an 'all-time films' list. I generally pick topics like automation and clocks, so yes, I would definitely choose Time is Money from your list. Clocks connect to the arrow of time and entropy (the Second Law of Thermodynamics), but they also remind me of rhythm, pulse, and frequency.

2026-08-28 15:56:04 UTC

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reminds me https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017136/