#95 Neon waves

And bike shedding.

Another two-week update. TBH, this week was a bit rough in terms of being focused and getting things done. I suppose that’s the counter effect of those weeks where you get tons of things done, and it all balances out.

Maybe I should not worry about discussing address poisoning attacks on Sunday mornings at 8am but instead enjoy the weekend 😂. This is a design I quickly made up in response to the discussion. I don’t understand why wallets don’t detect this simple patterns that clearly hint at attempted mischief and notify users.

The Summer of Bitcoin students submitted their proposals and the mentors reviewed them, identified the ones that are the best fit for their projects and are now in the final selection process. Lots of great submissions for the Border Wallets project I am mentoring on together with Aditya. Big thanks to all the students, they clearly put a ton of work into the applications. I hope the ones that don’t get selected continue on this journey anyways. No need to ask for permission to contribute.

And Daniel and I were on the Citadel Dispatch podcast interactive live show. Really enjoyed the format of loose conversation over two hours. We touched on a lot of things, but it still feels like there were many threads that could be full-on conversations on their own. Matt does a ton for bitcoin, big shout-out to him.

Didn’t do much again for Saving Satoshi due to more urgent priorities (sorry crew). Below is an illustration for the block tree structure users code around in chapter 8.

Chapter 9 lesson content is coming together, which will deal with bitcoin script. This never made much sense to me, so it’s a good opportunity to learn how it works. We’ll probably have a custom script editor and visualizer.

BTC Prague planning is at an important phase. Four more weeks to go until the conference, so things need to be wrapped up. The program is pretty much defined (big thanks to Michael and Mo), and we need to do some production work - posters, card game, throws… Those need to be done by end of next week to arrive in time. I’ll slightly revise the cards and design a booklet and box for it, so it’s going to look like more like a complete product this time.

Some random poster ideas from Friday’s design huddle. They are really just atmospheric, to help turn a very conservative-looking hotel conference room into the design lounge we are striving for.

Foundation work also took a bunch of time. We now accept bitcoin donations, got another big donation, and have four grant finalized. Those will all get announced the next 1-2 weeks.

Also went to a Bitaxe workshop (shout-out to WantClue). Was super interesting to build our own little single-chip home miner. I really appreciate the Open-source Miners group and their ambition to decentralize mining via DIY. Empowering individuals is essential to bitcoin. Would be amazing if this could happen at all levels, so it’s dead simple for anyone to run an onchain node and home miner, lightning node and LSP, any maybe even Ecash mints. Ideally on affordable smartphones. Does a one-chip miner by itself make a big difference? No. Neither does a single node. But thousands and tens/hundreds of thousands can.

Also enjoyed the Mutiny review.

And shout-out to Jakub for taking on the Bitcoin Layers design, and everyone else for all their contributions.

And that’s that, time to enjoy the weekend. Have a good one.

✌️