@nixb
Bitcoin Maximalist
Relays (5)
- wss://eden.nostr.land – read & write
- wss://nostr.wine – read & write
- wss://relay.damus.io – read & write
- wss://nostr.orangepill.dev – read & write
- wss://relay.snort.social – read & write
Recent Notes
That’s a wrap. graduated yesterday. My favourite subject was Blockchain without a doubt. It was the only subject I received a formal commendation for by a professor. My professor was also very curio...
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
3❤️1
The British government wants to extend the TV license fee to YouTube, Netflix, Amazon and Disney+. The Independent calls it the “YouTube tax,” and it is expected in the BBC charter white paper bef...
It is worth pausing to consider how policy actually moves through government before taking this as settled fact.
Tabloid editors rely on provocative headlines because an emotional reaction drives immediate attention and shares. Stepping back to question the narrative with critical thinking is a genuine virtue, especially when a story seems designed to trigger panic rather than inform.
Are we looking at an enacted law, or early exploratory discussions from an upcoming White Paper where the department has already stated nothing is finalized?
Does Whitehall dictate what appears in our personal feeds, or does independent statutory oversight sit with Ofcom?
And is an anonymous briefing on supporting local journalism really proof of a state scheme to control how people vote?
Debating the future of the licence fee is entirely sensible, but asking whether a headline reflects an actual legislative decision or sensational speculation makes all the difference.
Tabloid editors rely on provocative headlines because an emotional reaction drives immediate attention and shares. Stepping back to question the narrative with critical thinking is a genuine virtue, especially when a story seems designed to trigger panic rather than inform.
Are we looking at an enacted law, or early exploratory discussions from an upcoming White Paper where the department has already stated nothing is finalized?
Does Whitehall dictate what appears in our personal feeds, or does independent statutory oversight sit with Ofcom?
And is an anonymous briefing on supporting local journalism really proof of a state scheme to control how people vote?
Debating the future of the licence fee is entirely sensible, but asking whether a headline reflects an actual legislative decision or sensational speculation makes all the difference.
I honestly wonder what an AI trained without guardrails would look, sound and act like. Perhaps way more based and way less conformist?
Have you ever worked for one of the few companies that have enough computing power to train a foundation language model?
I wondered why there are so many people joining Anagram who have not used nostr before.
The Anagram Youtube video has 7.3k views, that's organic Youtube growth, rather than people from bitcoin-x/nostr...
I definitely need a Remote Signer Connect with NIP-46. I intend to treat my Nostr keys pair like my OpenPGP keys. While these web-of-trust PKI self-certificates are cheap to create, building a reputation as a good key keeper is another matter, especially for someone like me who remembers these old days.👇 😁 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_signing_party
1
Gm
Since breaking my foot I’m now an old man
I start the day off with a murdoku puzzle and a cup of tea
Then I make my wife breakfast
Then I play a little guitar, cycle a bit if my foot feels o...
GM☕ Hope you be 100% to
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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/
---
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/
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: [email protected]
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
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: [email protected]
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
the NFT is in the JPG
https://nonfungible.cash updates
- improved builtin cashu wallet
- filter market offers
- profiles support banner images
https://blossom.primal.net/acb28277ccc6a13a933d030d1c...
Is this rubbish in the Bitcoin blockchain volunteer node runners who provide storage for free?
1
September blog is out!
234 net new merchants, a talk in Helsinki and a new Android release. 👀
nostr:naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzq04ty37x8we4m73cup72zqhkmg5t4xuag6r3ja6rhh369vwcpthdqy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv...
An app feature I could think 🤔 is what about add 'where39' (https://github.com/arcbtc/where39)
The Zap Wall lamp, Flashing and Beeping now for nostr:npub1r9zwdj8a3z5ue9yrzr094msgsm6fc0zmd8ukhkmegqwag8ths5aq7jq8lx ⚡️💡🔉👀 Made by nostr:npub1vxehyetdargg2vc4hjvxlm65y2w6fqgzyz0hukcskeh...
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 .. 
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GM☕
Over/under on Trezor?🤔
https://npub1w4j2y74wx24sckf7ymgnf3r4gp0yqd8huw8kzfyt2lj8lhmh7ujs75j067.blossom.band/982bcc98cfc3714bbabdfecda14832be43a2cb2a3d43a0ef452eb4983481dcd7.jpg
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👇
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👇
1❤️1
@Free Software Foundation Europe 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
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
Sunday Survey: Which Nostr Client are you using?
I use Primal on my phone and a custom AI agent written in Go to crawl public Nostr relays and find interesting content for me, much like old-school Google web crawlers.
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