606: Nix's Magic Cookbook

I love the idea of audits like this. Great idea

Clip 5. Meant self custody, not self sovereignty

Clip 5. Eh, not really important to me. I don't coinbase or care much about clarity act. Self sovereignty over here

Clip 4. Cut, not helpful to the topic or discussion

Clip 3. Helpful to see where he is coming from and the lense he sees through. I would have liked it to be included since I don't know his background at all

Clip 2 misses out on the whole point of why bitcoin is a good investment, being scarcity. Mathematics proves only 21million. CUT

Clip 1,agreed on cutting

Love the bonus content! It was great seeing you guys at Linuxfest! Have a good LUP today!!

Boost just because it’s Wednesday!

Screw it! I’m blowing the whole boost budget on TWIB this week. Another newbie corner idea: what’s the difference between the different address/wallet types? I still use some “legacy” wallet addresses but some things I’ve read seem to suggest changing that. I find it confusing. From what I can tell there’s wrapped segwit, native segwit (which may or may not be the same as bech32, idk), and taproot. I found an article about switching to taproot on stacker news. It mentions that the others are more expensive and will continue getting more expensive over time, but I’d love to know why that is and if there’s ever a reason to choose one of the other options or if taproot really is the best, etc.

Finished the episode and feeling the need to send in extra value after that boost segment. I wanted to boost about newbie corner anyway. I would love a holiday special episode that goes over some of the logic behind your setup. What I wanted to ask you about, that I think could go with a holiday special, has to do with cold storage. I have a new cold card mk4 that I want to move my cold storage to, but I can’t decide how I want to balance backups and security. I’d be interested to hear how your thoughts change when thinking about individuals protecting their wealth as well as small business. Preferably, I’d like something that my wife could handle if me and the hardware wallet were to suddenly vanish. If something terrible like a house fire happened, and I didn’t make it, she could not access our money, the way it’s set up right now.

Hi Chris, I just started the episode but I forgot to boost last week so I wanted to fire some value back your way.

Just noticed I received errors on earlier boosts. I’ll boost extra later. No biggie.

On a different note, my nix-Bitcoin node is working out great! I love how intense the security defaults are. I even have it routing through a tiny linode! That was a challenge all by itself but we got there. Is the JB server Jupiter01? I enabled tor and stuff but kept getting connection errors when I tried to open a channel. I’m trying to do my part and provide some of that sweet sweet liquidity.

For some reason River’s KYC rejected me and wouldn’t let me try again for 30 days. I ended up just going with Swan and never tried again. I’ve never had a KYC issue with any other company, before or since, but I’d really rather be a River customer than a Swan customer right now.

Chris, your timing is hilarious. Despite nearly constant reminders from my wife, I put off dealing with old retirement accounts for TWO YEARS, and finally got around to it last week. I decided open 401k and Roth IRA accounts with Swan Bitcoin. I use Swan to DCA, so it was convenient, and it allowed me to put this money in Bitcoin without taking a big tax hit. I’d heard some of the drama, but didn’t think much of it until hearing this episode. I agree with your analysis though, all these little turd nuggets are adding up, and it’s starting to smell like a full-blown shitstorm. As I type this boost, I’m looking at two checks made out to a Ripple-owned crypto bank, per Swan’s instructions. I have to admit, I’m starting to have second thoughts.

Another question: as a member who also boosts, do you prefer having income from memberful or as boosts? Say for example I wanted to increase my financial contribution to JB. Is the membership or boosts more effective/easier for you guys to take in?

Show production question for ya: What part of Jb's operations takes the most of your time? What takes the most energy? What is the highest cost? As a member, I want to help offset that some, especially if it is something that I could either help support with time or by helping automate or maintaining some of the infrastructure, etc

Fidgets are a big part of my life, mostly because when you have a 3d printer, you can make your own. I've made probably around 20 infinity cubes for people and then 2 for myself, 1 for work and 1 for home. Look up fidget on printables.com or thingiverse

Episode 100 idea: Bitcoin Dad's guest appearance (if he is up for it of course)

+1 to expanding the updates section discussing the implications of changes Also +1 to what bitcoin.conf settings you run and why

Thank you for this episode

Chris, can you do an section on your core config options and rationale behind them?

In regards to entropy and offline generation, I think people are missing the point. You want more entropy data points and to get such things, most operating systems get that from network, disk, memory, all kinds of different things that are changing. If you have a tails system that's completely air-gapped, you're not going to have all the network data points that you can pull from to add to the entropy pool. To get the most randomness, you want a very high entropy pool and the Linux entropy pool is taking all sorts of different inputs, so the more inputs you can add, the higher your entropy, the better your random number generator is. So when I generated more dice rolls, I was using my main online system with browser open as much entropy as you can possibly get based off of network activity, and all that. Yes, sure, if somebody pwned that computer already, they could see the numbers that were generated, but that still is much higher entropy than if you have an offline system that you just booted up and you're already generating numbers off of.

Community Mining pool update. The upstream project P2PoolV2 is still working on mining share payouts. The software is not yet a minimum product. At the same time, I have been working in a NixOS flake to run the project as a service module.

Huge update on JB mining pool coming soon. Chris, please contact me to discuss some details

Thanks for the boost question in the show notes, great addition to the notes

I am an IT sysadmin that also enjoys coding. LLMs have changed by job a little bit in that I don't have to spend as much time sorting through search results to find solutions to my problems. I'm able to find things sooner and have answers that are more catered to the problem that I am having. For coding, I enjoy doing it and I don't have a pressure to release anything faster than normal so agentic coding hasn't really been a huge part of it yet. If there was a pressure to ship mostly functional programs sooner, I might be using it more but at the moment it is just a fabulous search tool

Chris, I think you probably would end up spending more BTC if there weren't taxes on it either since all these boosts are essentially a locked up cash flow for you. You'd be able to dip into the boost income and pay the monthly bills with less cost

Edit last boost I WOULD NOT have to do all these calculations

I would spend more sats if there wasn't a capital gains tax on every single transaction. My self hosted lightning would then just become my checking account and I would have to do all these calculations on how much fiat I need to save to pay the bills and put the rest into BTC cold storage. Could take my whole pay in BTC

This was a great episode. I know you were going to try changing the format. I'm excited to see what way that goes. Just wanted to give you some signal on the current format as I get lots of value in each episode. When you choose what to cut, please don't cut the state of the network section. I like hearing that each week

Hi Chris, I really appreciate everything you do and the work you put into the show. I hope this value makes it a little more worth it for you. TWiB is one of the best bitcoin shows on the internet! Let’s get these numbers up, boys!

HAPPY LAUNCH SUNDAY ON A TUESDAY

Couldn't make it yesterday since the storms in my area knocked out the regions electricity. Thankfully I have a portable generator to keep water and fridge running. Maybe it's time to invest in a battery system with an inverter and a bigger generator to keep more of the home running

I'm also rethinking my cold storage situation. I wrote a little rust program to roll a virtual dice using the rand crate, then used that running on my desktop which at that time had been online and doing a bunch of things in the background for a while to get some random dice rolls. Going to check out Bitkey and also maybe an ESP32 based seedsigner

Regarding fed reserve... All our govt does is jibber jabber unless it affects their own wealth or life or agenda. They don't care about the middle class and as long as there isn't a revolution, which they're confident there won't be, they can continue just jibber jabbering

I've taken the plunge into nixos. I set up a full lightning stack on nix-bitcoin and a side effect of that was to install nixos on my main server at home. Chris, I blame you

Thank you for this episode!!!

Chris, I will buy you a bitaxe. Tell me which one and where to ship it. I'm almost done setting up a pool server so we can have a JB Pool

Catching up, regarding the poverty line, I spend over 23k on housing and I'm in the Midwest in a rural area. What gets me is that all these "experts" never update their formulas even though everything is constantly changing around them. Why do you think that is?

Great show as usual! Thanks for the value! Even if Bitcoin is flat for another quarter or two, TONS of great work has been happening. It just gives us plebs more time to DCA at these super low prices!

I used to run both knots and core. Only run core now. Not a fan of property seizure in general

Split to angerz is failing on fountain

Upper-ed expectations!

Great episode, I'm a little behind. Keep them coming!!

Hey Chris! Great show! Regarding the age vs gold standard stuff, I more or less agree with you, I just see it a little differently. Instead of time since 1971, I think of it as “time spent on a fiat system”: They blow up 100% of the time, so the longer one goes, the more messed up and prone to failure it is. Going off the gold standard allowed for more creative ways to keep the charade going. Also, consider the incentives of fiat. It basically incentivizes everyone to buy up all the resources as quickly as possible. The longer you hodl dollars, the less you get when you spend. Of course people are going to buy up and hoard all the scarce assets they can, it makes for better money than the money! We live in a clown world, I swear. 🤡 Keep the excellent Bitcoin content coming! I loved the bonus ep! I’d happily pay for bonus conent again. ❤️

If family computer counts, the first computer I remember using and learning was a dell dimension 5000. Keep in mind I'm only only 10ish years older than your oldest... Sorry to make you feel old lol The first computer that was actually mine was a custom built machine centered around an A10-7890K because I was too poor for a dedicated video card at the time. This was during high school so what money I did get from the job I had was saved up and I later bought a 1050ti.

For the dumb time machine thought experiment I would back to the era of early steam locomotives so 1880s to early 1920s. I would love to be on a train crew and armed with my current knowledge of how to run one already, I probably wouldn't need to learn too much in terms of being an engineer or even a fireman. Plus it was the old west which is one of my favorite historical eras. Yeehaw pardners

Regarding that CTO that got hired in the first story. Sounds like someone had a bunch of Microsoft stock and wanted to pump the value up

The intro song for bootleg sums up my work life pretty good

The split to drew failed in my last boost

Congratulations Alex for figuring out why in the business datacenter we have a few separate SANs, compute hosts and NAS boxes instead of one. All because the department of redundancy department exists. In my homelab, I have found that added complexity can make more headaches down the road when one box gets updated and that breaks a thing or you have to shut everything down because your NAS with all the data needs an update or whatever the case may be

I think the four year cycle still exists because our political system in the United States is also a four year cycle to an extent. We get at least lately a different president every four years and it just goes back and forth between the two major parties and the four-year cycle is indicative of market during those policy changes that the different parties make and their ethos of how to run the country

Would the bip110 situation be somewhat solved by having additional node implementations?

+1 to NixOS node. I don't feel like I ever have to worry about doing updates on my server anymore

I'll take some Saylor sats... Yes Strategy selling is good, along with all the other whales because that means more and cheaper sats for me!!!

When I heard about the fold card from you, I immediately went to set it up. Been paying bills and my mortgage with it. So far, so good!

I love microcenter. Closest one to me is 2 hours though

So Chris, you're in a farm with a barn and a wide open area right? So when are you going to get a ham license? That kind of terrain is perfect to set up a dipole antenna... Well, maybe I'll just have to come out and make it happen. At this point you are 2 years overdue. I even waited a whole year after it was originally mentioned and STILL got both a technician and general license before you guys. Anyway, as we say in ham radio, 73

Extra bonus sats for the baby Chris clip. Loved it

I don't like to acknowledge my birthday in general. I'd rather it not exist sometimes, but I will celebrate everyone else's birthday with great enthusiasm

re: fusion power I'm not an expert, just someone who has been interested in nuclear physics and done some research, so if there's anyone out there in the audience who knows more, please correct me We're actually getting there. ITER is planned to be operational as the first power grid scale fusion power plant in France by 2037, japan has had a working fusion generating station since 2023 called JT-60. So for Helion to be making a much smaller scale fusion generator compared those those projects, I believe it. Smaller and more efficient stations might be the way to go for the future. Would make the power grid more resilient since if there are many smaller systems adding power to the grid, the chance of a chain blackout is less. Also fusion has minimal waste compared to fission. The fuel is deuterium which is Hydrogen with 1 proton and 1 neutron smashed into Tritium which is Hydrogen with 1 proton and 2 neutrons. The most waste producing part is creating the tritium since that involves lithium mining

I might be biased, considering I’ve “nix-ified” nearly every device in the house, but I’ll add a big +1 to nix-bitcoin. It’s been rock solid for me. I deployed it in a NixOS container a couple years ago, and I just did another major version update on it a couple nights ago. The update went super smooth, no issues. After a quick reboot, everything was back up, including the lightning channel with your node. Nix-Bitcoin is awesome!

Thank you for this episode!!!

Excellent episode, as usual! I think you’ve hit the nail on the head about BTC loans. I believe it’s going to be a massive market. I need one myself, actually. Last year, I had some cash set aside to buy a car and went to some dealerships, but right before I pulled the trigger, Uncle Sam hit my wife and I with a massive tax bill. It was our first full year living and working in WA, and I guess my wife wasn’t paying enough in taxes out of her paycheck. Wiped out my whole car fund. Luckily, I was listening to TWIB, and stacking sats. So, it didn’t hurt as bad as it could have, but now I need one of those BTC loans. I am highly interested in the subject either way, so thanks for covering these important topics!