2023 Jan 30

• Original Lightning Network paper had some pretty interesting estimates concerning scalability. In section 10 “Block Size Increases and Consensus” it estimates

  “If we presume that a decentralized payment network exists and one user will make 3 blockchain transactions per year on average, Bitcoin will be able to support over 35 million users with 1MB blocks in ideal circumstances (assuming 2000 transactions/MB, or 500 bytes/Tx)

  • Note: transaction sizes have decreased (especially multisig transactions important for lightning), and segwit increased block size. Although there still seems to be some unanswered questions here (at least from my current knowledge).

  • Interesting article on transaction sizes. Pretty quality article I thought, oddly has a bunch of kind of sus links at the end..

• Helix: space s opens symbol picker, which is basically any notable type/field/function/etc. that shows up in the current file, space h selects symbol references within current scope so you can easily edit at all of them or just see them, space r directly lets you rename

• Reviewed another PR!

• Everyday I understand more, I also cringe more about times I’d talked to someone and given a misinformed answer. Nevertheless, just gotta keep learning more and doing my best!

• Money plays such a big role in our lives because we are dependent on each other, i.e. society. This dependency is involuntary, but also greatly to our benefit. People end up feeling like a slave to this system, to earning money, because they view it in the context of having so many fundamental problems of survival having been solved before they were even born. You could be independent of the larger society, maybe live somewhere remote, but you would have to: build your own housing, source your own water, boil/clean it, grow gather or hunt your own food, cook and preserve that food, protect yourself from disease, create your own clothes, tools, and many more, not to mention all the uncertainty that accompanies them.

  • Today we have different problems, and all now as important to solve as our other problems were previously. But let’s understand in the developed world we take so much for granted! We are born freed from so many burdens!

  • That being said, there are many people that are at the mercy of their economic situation—that is not to be left unrecognized. However I don’t think it’s money that’s the source of many of these problems, but the restrictions/distortions/influences on people’s ability to make and save money themselves, as well as education among other things.

• I think it will be fun and insightful to build something using LDK. Can keep reviewing PRs and asking questions in the discord in the meantime. Right now I can be sort of helpful because I’m a new perspective, but my perspective is basically some random person who knows a little about lightning and bitcoin. I think I can probably be more helpful by trying to use the software. Then, I’ll be able to provide insight for one of their main audiences: people trying get started building in lightning.

• Also want to read more from the source on economics to come to my own conclusions. Wealth of nations, austrian material, keynesian material, others.

• I realize I think I’m more of a low-level person. I like product/user-facing stuff, but it’s more like candy, whereas protocol development, cryptography, and systems programming are the things that are the most intrinsically fun for me.