sedited

So we pull up out of the bush through the khowarib rivier, completely caked in fine, flour-textured dust of the mopane savanah. It's been seven days since we set out into the wild from the brandberg. Suddenly we see a fence rise on our left side, punctured by holes, goats and other farm animals freely crossing through it, the odd herder waving at us as we drive past. In the distance a green tin roofed plaza appears: Kamdesha veterinary gate. The fence on either side of the plaza is busted, sections either lying flat on the ground, or missing completely. It should be part of the red line, the cordon dividing Namibia into a "safe" veterinary sector, supposedly FMD free, and the "wilderness" beyond. Some of us get out, talk to the warden, there is a brief back and forth, some favours are exchanged. A few men with rifles line either side of the plaza as our convoy of three vehicles rolls through, a goat scurrying away in front of us. It is another 20 kilometres from here to a marked road, following the rough dirt track we're on. Twenty minutes later I see truly wild giraffes for the second time in my life.
#nevent1q…js4g

2026-03-14 17:22:26 UTC

Much more cohesive from the stormers today and a decent watch too.

2026-03-13 16:40:16 UTC

This is probably the weirdest internal border that I know of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Line_(Namibia)

2026-03-13 13:27:34 UTC

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Loved the video, looked pretty chill.
I think that was in 2008. Crazy scenes on the Zambia/Botswana border too. The backlog on trucks trying to cross the border was a multi week wait. Both sides had soldiers patrolling them to avoid looting. Back then there was only a barge doing the crossing, iirc two trucks every 20 minutes or so. There is a bridge there now :)

2026-03-09 07:43:30 UTC

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It's a really funny document too.

2026-03-09 07:20:51 UTC

Not everything I hoped for, but
* Support for querying slices of a block
* The new txospender index for querying the transaction of a spent output
* Better handling of pruned nodes using an index
* A host of bug fixes that should make using indexes more robust
#nevent1q…4fj4

2026-03-07 19:58:28 UTC

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Probably the most depressing border I've been to. Was there when the situation was really bad again and people attempted to barter my clothing out of desperation.

2026-03-02 16:43:46 UTC

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This was with most of your patches applied :)
It's really cool to see though that it takes about the same time now that it took me when I benched it back in 2019.

2026-03-02 12:16:24 UTC

Synced bitcoin core on a seven year old rock pro 64 in 34 hours.

2026-03-01 07:07:58 UTC

The coverage of this by european newspapers is atrocious.

2026-02-27 18:27:13 UTC

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Exactly.

2026-02-25 10:10:21 UTC

Wow, hetzner hiking their prices by over 30 percent for their boxes.

2026-02-24 07:20:31 UTC

Some people seem confused about section eleven of the whitepaper.

2026-02-21 15:00:15 UTC

Cash on the internet.
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2026-02-15 09:54:36 UTC

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Or now again.

2026-02-13 07:15:46 UTC

I still think so.
#nevent1q…5zsm

2026-02-12 10:22:06 UTC

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Indeed that would be bad.

2026-02-10 21:45:29 UTC

https://explained-from-first-principles.com/internet/

2026-02-07 10:29:11 UTC

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The issue is that with guidelines like
https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/post-quantum-cryptography
and
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/news/pqc-migration-roadmap-unveiled
these institutions might be spooked to enact the migration in order to retain their licenses.
Nuts.

2026-02-06 18:08:22 UTC

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> Its increasing
There's not been a significant increase in usage of large op returns over the past half year. The utxo set has been steadily shrinking in the same time frame.
The chart you showed seems to be measuring small op_returns too, which bip110 does not stop.

2026-02-06 13:00:48 UTC

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Not against stopping spam, strongly disagree with the method.

2026-02-02 06:31:40 UTC

I wonder how many people still self host their own lightning node without the help of a third party.

2026-01-31 08:24:37 UTC

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2026-01-30 14:18:01 UTC

Bitcoin Core while reading UTXOs from disk
https://blossom.primal.net/d54d96b6d0760d2fec43c278899743f284eb74b3a470b12cdcb1382ea8b961f0.mp4

2026-01-26 21:19:01 UTC

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Maybe file an issue? I've looked at it on amethyst and primal. Amethyst also renders it a bit weirdly, but primal gets it right.
To calm your nerves "driebuffelsmeteenskotmorsdoodgeskietfontein" is an afrikaans hyperbole sometimes used to refer to the middle of nowhere, or some outlandish place. It also a real place and the longest afrikaans word :)

2026-01-26 19:51:40 UTC

https://maps.app.goo.gl/g7LhrSYEjt6PQGEPA

2026-01-24 19:22:59 UTC

Sacha's fancy stuff not working today, but seems like stuff is not gelling in general.

2026-01-23 15:36:26 UTC

First proper work week in the new role.

2026-01-22 21:45:15 UTC

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It is south :)
It's in my home town's area.

2026-01-22 16:59:39 UTC

Can't wait to be going back here again soon. https://image.nostr.build/15fe805ee35dc870e04b094a62dbaad4263187990a7ec1f150644da5cc022a0e.jpg

2026-01-20 23:08:18 UTC

This was solved by Marko Falke here https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2026-January/704817.html after days of sleuthing and bisecting. Looks like the underlying problem for this is good old c++ not having a canonical order for argument evaluation. Evalaution may work differently on different platforms, assigning a different name.
#nevent1q…jefe

2026-01-19 12:22:00 UTC

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In short: The gpg version I had running back then still used sha1 has a default digest to generate the base signature attesting to the first subkey generated automatically during key generation. Like a good citizen, I changed the default digest algorithm to something strong, generated the remaining [a]uth and [e]ncrypt subkeys with this configuration, and changed the expiry on all of them. Turns out, gpg never refreshes the base signature even you tell it to update a subkey, or change its configuration. So when the Bitcoin Core commit signature verifier ran with a strict no weak algos policy it tripped over this weak base signature.

2026-01-15 10:37:19 UTC

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Cash on the internet.

2026-01-15 03:04:06 UTC

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Lol, I would not trust that :P

2026-01-14 12:36:15 UTC

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Why is that proposed at all?

2026-01-12 03:49:19 UTC

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Idk, maybe that tournament is just one too many for our teams.

2026-01-11 13:32:40 UTC

That score line is looking horrible 🥴

2026-01-11 03:51:19 UTC

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Like now, for example.

2026-01-10 21:12:08 UTC

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It served me well so far, but sometimes it does feel like gpg makes it hard on purpose.

2026-01-10 03:55:24 UTC

Messed up my first merge commit because my smart ass back in 2017 thought it would be wise to run key generation on an old, airgapped ubuntu distro for trust purposes.

2026-01-09 11:51:09 UTC

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It's literally what got me into Bitcoin

2026-01-09 11:43:46 UTC

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Heh, thanks :)

2026-01-08 16:32:00 UTC

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2026-01-08 13:36:20 UTC

Some of the brickwork on the Manhattan skyscrapers is really nice.

2025-12-31 14:21:50 UTC

Oxtail heading towards the pan.

2025-12-27 22:26:49 UTC

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Was thinking about the protomolecule today. Does an artificial, formless, agentic, substance trying to trick you into thinking it is alive remind you of anything?

2025-12-27 08:11:45 UTC

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2025-12-25 11:43:04 UTC

No CCC this year for me :(
Didn't really put much effort into it though, so maybe taking a year off is good.

2025-12-19 20:13:27 UTC

Three years doing full time Bitcoin Core work and I still find it very fun.

2025-12-11 08:39:09 UTC

utreexo 🤝 swiftsync

2025-12-10 18:42:58 UTC

Love throwing my trimmings in the pan, then fry the steak in the rendered fat.

2025-12-09 10:33:44 UTC

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#nevent1q…3zue

2025-12-08 17:03:45 UTC

Just spent half a day debugging a problem that wasn't a problem.

2025-12-04 21:28:11 UTC

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bitcoin-node -ipcbind=unix 😎

2025-12-03 07:06:48 UTC

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2025-11-28 07:07:58 UTC

I was a bit hopeful the last few months that the proposed soft fork will change this dynamic, but I no longer think so. One side needs people to run with their vision, while the other side is content with doing nothing. That's why I think its militancy will not die down. In all likelihood it will be a schism present for years to come.
#nevent1q…g6at

2025-11-25 12:56:12 UTC

Cluster mempool, the new underlying mempool data structure, was merged into Bitcoin Core's master branch. Read the description on its PR for how this will change mempool behaviour https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/33629

2025-11-24 09:42:29 UTC

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Exact same feeling. The cinematography was epic. I regularly think back to the scenes in the desert and next to the ocean.

2025-11-22 20:00:54 UTC

What a brutal game, but they held it.

2025-11-20 17:25:51 UTC

Look at my analooogy. I am analoooooogizing!

2025-11-19 16:34:46 UTC

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2025-11-15 22:56:37 UTC

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It's a pity that aezeed didn't catch on. It came out just a bit too late.

2025-11-15 14:37:25 UTC

Willemse, Williams, Moodie, Libbok, Arendse backline too good. Just so much faster than their opposition when they get going. Completely changed the pace of the springbok attack. That last cross kick was on the money.

2025-11-14 22:50:25 UTC

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Yes, that's it :)

2025-11-14 22:34:22 UTC

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Adjust the java version and add imports for the java crypto stuff.

2025-11-14 14:54:50 UTC

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Noone would do that job if they wouldn't believe in it. It's stressful, hard, boring, and the pay aint stellar in comparison to industry either.

2025-11-14 14:52:12 UTC

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Because she demonstrated competence and was for that reason appointed as a maintainer by her peer contributors.

2025-11-14 13:24:59 UTC

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That's some nice tooling, had to slightly tweak your example to include the correct imports, but ran all of them. Nix is magic in the sense that this would have been really annoying to setup by myself and now it just works .

2025-11-14 07:55:50 UTC

We've run into this problem where the same code built through our reproducible builds infrastructure has these weird registry switchups between running the build environment on an x86 machine and an aarch64 machine. At this point I would pay for someone to explain what is going on here. It doesn't make sense to me. https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/33775#issuecomment-3523047473

2025-11-13 21:45:02 UTC

Released v0.1 of rust-bitcoinkernel: https://docs.rs/bitcoinkernel/0.1.0/bitcoinkernel/#rust-bitcoinkernel
I consider this a beta release for this crate.

2025-11-11 15:11:10 UTC

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2025-11-08 22:31:16 UTC

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:D
French put in a decent fight in the first 40' though.

2025-11-08 22:30:34 UTC

French really ran out of steam after that second scrum penalty. What an effort in the last 20'! That Stormers backline was fire again too.

2025-11-06 07:29:29 UTC

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Yes :)

2025-11-06 07:11:23 UTC

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Not as a daily driver, but we've been testing it out in Bitcoin Core to make CI and dev environments more reproducible. A few tools were migrated to nix recently.

2025-11-06 07:05:18 UTC

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I haven't used java in a very long time, so can't say I have :P

2025-11-06 05:59:56 UTC

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Would be cool if you guys could work with it too! I think even if you have little interest in it as a replacement for your own consensus code, it might still be interesting as a tool to improve robustness.

2025-11-05 10:01:55 UTC

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Great episode!

2025-11-04 18:47:27 UTC

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Mmh, I'm planning on adding coin lookups, then you can program that yourself.

2025-11-04 16:27:04 UTC

Didn't expect this today: The bitcoin kernel API is now in Bitcoin Core's master branch! A decade of effort for various contributors and three years from myself: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/30595
Looking forward to an ecosystem of implementations, full nodes, and tools being developed around it!

2025-11-04 13:31:40 UTC

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Nice episode.

2025-11-03 17:41:13 UTC

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Yes, I am surprised to hear you say that 😅

2025-11-02 17:59:03 UTC

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2025-11-02 11:18:43 UTC

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Since v25:
Cutting initial blockchain download time in half, encrypting p2p communications, making lightning safer and cheaper to use, allow immediate bootstrap with assumeutxo, shipped better miniscript and descriptors support, easier compilation with cmake, fixed a bunch of CVEs that have been present since a long time, complete obfuscation of on-chain data, better coin selection, the mining interface for easy home mining with stratumv2, better and safer localnet hole punching with natpmp and pcp, and a whole bunch more.
You can read all about it at https://bitcoincore.org/en/releases/ .

2025-10-29 11:02:14 UTC

Kernel-node now has some simple connection management. I'm probably not going to be working on it myself, but it would be fun to expand its capabilities a bit more: https://github.com/TheCharlatan/kernel-node

2025-10-26 08:33:00 UTC

Well, if there is going to be a soft fork, which seems increasingly likely now, this conflict might be resolved after all.

2025-10-24 06:23:09 UTC

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Two projects I know well, liana and the bitbox02 firmware, are written in rust and have reproducible builds setups. But maybe you mean something else?

2025-10-24 05:49:24 UTC

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rustc does reproducible builds.

2025-10-23 21:15:12 UTC

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Some actual movement happening here too!

2025-10-22 07:21:48 UTC

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2025-10-19 21:58:32 UTC

msvc is really testing my patience again.

2025-10-18 18:01:16 UTC

Are DIs really going to beat their recruits again? Seems outlandish to even think that laying hands is going to improve combat readiness.