Mastering Bitcoin and other technical books are ones I prefer to have in physical form to quickly flip through or take notes. Everything else I prefer as an ebook.

Putting BBQ on the menu this week after reading this. I've been to The Joint in New Orleans and would agree that it's definitely worth the visit alongside Blue Oak.

Stale states are just old commitment transactions that have been revoked. If you ever broadcast one, your channel partner would see it as a cheating attempt and they’d publish the punishment transaction. We keep those old commitments around so that if the other side ever tries to cheat, we have what we need to punish them.

When you splice, the channel gets a completely new funding output. All the old commitment transactions are tied to the old funding outpoint, so after the splice they can’t actually be broadcast successfully anymore. They basically become useless. That lets the node safely prune them because they’re no longer connected to the active funding transaction.

So splicing doesn’t restart the channel or reset the balance, but it does give the channel a new funding anchor and makes all those old revoked states unbroadcastable, which is why they can finally be cleaned up.

They both adjust liquidity, but serve different functions. A splice directly modifies the channel and its size. So I can splice more sats into my channel and it will in turn increase that channel's total capacity. Splicing out will also decrease the channels overall capacity. Swaps leave the channel state alone. With swaps you're simply moving liquidity through swap providers to swap in and out while paying them a modest fee. With splices it's a cooperative agreement with your channel partner to increase or decrease the capacity of the channel by effectively resetting/updating the funding transaction. Downside is you need both channel participants to run a lightning implementation that supports splicing. This can also help clear a looong list of old commitment transactions for a given channel.

Splicing!

What is even happening?

According to Texas, there's nothing better than looking at your paper Bitcoin through a hall of mirrors.

It would be lovely if they started selling. Genuinely hope they start offloading.

Personally, I don't think It matters what their stance is. People/bots pushing slop are just going to get better about hiding it and probably never disclose AI was used. While authors using AI to constructively review their work will responsibly disclose that AI was used to assist with the BIP, probably get lambasted and shamed for it the first time around and then fearfully choose not to disclose that AI was used ever again. This is a new skill that we need to learn to wield responsibly while simultaneously becoming better at identifying BS, slop proposals when we see them.

100%. The scapegoats chosen here will be completely deliberate. If I had to put my tinfoil hat on I would say there is a very high likelihood that there were backdoor deals made to include or exclude certain names from this list.

At this point, we'll only get what they haven't cared to incinerate or use for blackmail in the future.

There's no spectrum here. It's quite binary.

Really wish they would cut ties with GameFreak though. They are chronically mishandling the Pokemon games and slowly eroding the brand and confidence in the franchise.

We need a proper map of places and stores that accept Bitcoin. btcmap exists, but is terribly outdated, imo. It's mostly just filled with ATM's and places that don't actually accept Bitcoin.

Genuinely can't understand why anyone is even entertaining Luke and his proposals. I suppose the fudsters, news outlets, influencers and anti-Bitcoin crowd need to play off something? I don't know.

Soft fork? No thanks. I'll hard pass on this.

100% this. Don't overcomplicate things, OP.

And a vast majority of the population still choose to wear blinders, refusing to acknowledge it.

Their interests will develop into careers. Some more profitable than others. Forcing profit seeking behaviors and interests onto a child can rob them a bit of that valuable exploration phase potentially hindering the development of their own interests.

Agreed. Instead of teaching them to become a little capitalist that time may be better had teaching them how to build something, how to solve puzzles, how to use a tool to solve that puzzle, etc. Or more generally, just give them that time to pursue their interests while outside the classroom. Nature, art, whatever it may be.

And whose fault is that? Let the banks rot. If they provide an inferior service they deserve to go. They're preying on fear to stay alive at this point.

How do you classify Borg?