Where Did those Seagulls Come From?

I was just meditating and noticed that my brain was tremendously chatty today! I already had breakfast and that might be why. I decided to attend to my five senses, and then memory, emotions (mine were VERY GOOD!), general awareness of what's going on, memory again, and something new, the chatterbox. I called it "this." It's the thing that makes the thoughts. I attended to it like a cat watching a mouse hole, waiting to see what would come next. I waited patiently and it was calm and silent.  At last, I was meditating as I wanted to!  And then there were seagulls. I think they were on sand, or drawn on sand. Then my 15 minutes were up; the alarm on my phone was going off. I'm pretty sure I had started dreaming.  I'm excited to get back to watching that mouse hole tomorrow morning.

Meditate.  Just do it.  If you get seagulls and you can figure out why, please let me know!

What do You Know?

Skip this paragraph and the next one if Bitcoin and scammers don't interest you.  I offer to sell bitcoin to people who are willing to mail me cash.  This is attractive to scammers who can find victims to mail cash for any reason.  They instruct their victim to mail me the cash, open a trade with me, and then once I get the cash, I send the bitcoin (technically, I instruct the escrow service to release the bitcoin), they withdraw it and then disappear.  If their victim does not expect anything from them that they can't provide (human contact, someone to talk to, etc.), they don't have to disappear.  Sometimes, it's not even a scam, it's just someone doing something for someone and arranging to be paid for it in bitcoin.  When it is a scam, it's called a "Man In The Middle" scam, or MITM.  When the service is loving conversations, it's often called a "romance scam."

Scammers have hurt the image of Bitcoin, so I enjoy frustrating them.  It's always my hope that I'm wrong when it seems to me that I've run into a scammer, and Reliable4748 on paxful is no different. All of the ideas I came up with that would make him being a scammer unlikely are things he doesn't want to do.  My newsletter has more to say on this so if it interests you, visit the archives.

To know that two twos make four isn't really knowledge in my view.  It is a necessary result from how we define two and four and applying a bit of logic.  To know that a seed will grow into a tree is real knowledge, but I don't think we get to experience that kind of knowledge.  The seed may not germinate, after all.  Perhaps we know "if it germinates and grows into a mature plant that produces its own seeds, then it will be a tree."  That goes back to definitions and logic, and perhaps a bit of knowledge. However, if it happens to grow into a vine, we must recognize that it wasn't knowledge, but rather an incorrect assumption.  If it does grow into a tree, you can pretend it was knowledge, but I won't agree.

It is safe to assume many things, and that is how I view most of what others call "knowledge."  I view most "knowledge" as working assumptions.  In one of the Alice in Wonderland movies, Alice (or her uncle, or dad?) claims to practice believing in six impossible things every morning. This "practice" pays clever homage to the idea that we don't get knowledge, but rather working assumptions, definitions, and logic.  "Impossible" is a word that smacks of knowledge and, in my view, is too presumptuous to be useful.  In his book, Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill tells us that he bought a dictionary and clipped out the word "impossible," and advises his readers to follow suit.

Some people feel that science is about proving things, and in a sense, it is, but it's about proving theories are wrong, not that they are right.  Good experiments push at the boundaries of a theory, and when they fail to produce a theoretical prediction, they open the door to improvements in the theory.  When the theoretical predictions are all produced, other experimenters attempt to do the same thing, perhaps changing some elements of the experiment that theoretically won't change the result.  When the same experiment consistently produces the predicted results, the theory is strengthened, but it's never "knowledge."  The knowledge is that the theory has always worked, and it becomes pretty safe to assume it will keep working.  Nevertheless, the greatest scientific experiments are those that show an accepted theory to be wrong.

It is not safe to assume that someone who contacts you through the Internet is an honest person.  It is generally true that they are honest, but the dishonest ones are hunting for people in whom they can turn the assumption into what the victim will claim as knowledge.  They often find me and my working assumptions: that they are honest, that honest people don't mind sharing a selfie with you, that they read the instructions in an ad if they want to engage the advertiser, that they'd follow those instructions, etc.  I provide lots of opportunities for them to disprove my working assumptions and they often disprove a lot of them (didn't read the instructions, aren't willing to send me a selfie, used the word "I" when they were talking about their victim, etc.).  I can't use such evidence to know they are scammers, but they often get me close enough to prevent their scam (if it is one) from succeeding.

I invite you to join me in viewing everything we know as a set of working assumptions, and consistent definitions and logic as how we view (and discuss) reality.  This view introduces a bit of doubt, and if you've ever known something that turned out to be wrong, you'll appreciate the change in view.

Does This Exist Yet?

Of course not. I'm only just writing it right now.  But I'm equivocating on the word "this." By "this" I could mean the doorknob I was imagining on my walk this morning, or some unspecified invention that you might think of today or at some time in the future.  When the answer is NO, well, there's an opportunity.  Its existence might end up doing more good than harm, and you (or I) can add that goodness to the universe.  It might do more harm than good though, so we should be a bit careful.

The doorknob has a small electric generator inside, connected with gears to the handle, and connected to a capacitor and possibly a battery.  If you push the doorknob into the door, it will be harder to turn because the gear ratio to the generator will be higher.  It also has a control board and a keypad and a little multi-colored LED.  To make the doorknob engage with the latch, you have to turn the doorknob to charge it.  You can turn it back and forth and it will charge in both directions.  When it's charged enough to power the control board and engage the latch (when you enter the correct code on the keypad), the LED turns on.  You can keep turning the knob if you think you might be too slow to get the code entered before it runs out of power.  Once the LED is lit, you can enter a code and if it's the right code, the LED changes color to indicate that you can turn the doorknob to open the door.

This is intended to be an electro-mechanical automatically-locking doorknob that doesn't require batteries.  If there is a battery, it could absorb extra energy and use it to disengage and, after a time-out, re-engage a deadbolt, but that makes the product significantly more complicated. I will most likely never develop this product, but if you or someone you know likes it, I'll sell whatever rights I might have for pretty cheap!  Caveat: I have not done any patent searches at all.

A friend bought me a copy of Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich.  I read parts of the cover and the first few pages and learned that Mr. Hill identified thirteen principles that are common to successful people.  I imagine that recognizing the value of your intent and refusing to abandon it is one of those principles and my theory feels stronger after reading a few pages of chapter one.

I've met a few people who had some decent ideas but didn't want to share details because they were afraid the idea might be stolen from them.  I usually explain my position in such cases, which is that my idea becoming a reality is more important to me than making money off of it, and I encourage everyone to take the same approach.

I don't know what you're curious about and I'd like to know.  I enjoy writing and will do my best to answer questions that I like.  I thought of a lot of things to write about this morning on my walk and now it's dinner time and I've forgotten most of them.  I did want to use this second entry in my thirty-day challenge to make a list of things I'd like to write about.  Also, here's a brief description of my morning routine:

1. 7am is the time I chose, before which I'd stay in bed and after which I'd feel like I should already be up.
2. I make my half of the bed and dress in sweats to go for a walk.
3. I drink a glass of water with some electrolyte powder in it and eat a protein bar.
4. I walk twice around the block which takes about 30 minutes.
5. I do squats, pushups, and sit-ups for about 10 minutes.
6. I read and reply to messages on my phone, mostly in Telegram groups (like http://t.me/voluntaryism_group ).
7. I meditate for 15 minutes.
8. I make a fruit smoothie and toast a split-in-half delicious, made-with-love-by-my-wife keto bagel and have them for breakfast.

The same friend who bought me the book also suggested, about two years ago, eating only fruit for a while, which I did about a year and a half ago.  Now I'm addicted to healthy food.  It was in a seminar from Landmark where I started doing the extra ten-minutes of exercise.  It's a form of "resistance training" which I'll explain in another blog post.  I also have an abnormal platelet count, which is more material for a future post (hmm... or a past one).

This 30-day blog challenge so far has showed me the truth of the claim that we are fresher and more capable earlier in the day. I'm pretty sure I heard that idea in podcasts from both Tim Ferriss and Brett Veinotte but it's nice to learn from personal experience too.  It showed me some other things and I will consider closing each entry with a list of such things.  I don't remember the other things right now (it's 7pm!), but you can look forward to them in posts that don't yet exist.

Creating Habitual Blogging

I recently heard Brett Veinotte interview Isaac Morehouse, the guy who created Praxis.  They discussed an idea I considered, which was to commit to publishing a blog post every day for 30 days.  That's what I'm doing, but I wanted to share some thoughts on it.

As soon as I heard it, I thought about how it might benefit me and also that I may already have those benefits, so perhaps it isn't worth committing.  Later in their conversation, Isaac pointed out that he is currently publishing a daily blog post.  They discussed the effects of the commitment.  It will take some discipline.  It will take some tolerance for... well, crap.  Who can produce quality writing every day for thirty days in a row?  Perhaps I can, but if not, do I break a commitment or tolerate my crappy writing?  Let's see!

There is a safety net, which is that I can go back and edit whenever I want to.  I could even delete a post, but I doubt I'd do that.  Enough about me!  What, of my thinking, might benefit you?  I will do my best to respect my audience by trying to stick with answers to that question.

Before I started writing this one, I had planned to write a newsletter for my Bitcoin Dealer list in which I would publish my commitment.  I now see that as another reason not to just start.  Think of "reasons not to just start" as a VERY popular source of procrastination. I searched for "reasons not to just start" and Google returned four hits which were about: drinking, watching "The West Wing," meditating, and a strategy in playing "Magic: the Gathering."  I guess no one else that Google indexes has identified this engine of procrastination, or else there's a better way to say it.  Procrastinating?  Just start.  Tolerate crap.  Have some discipline.  You'll get better at it.

It's Sunday, so I met up with some friends at a coffee shop. It's the "Temecula Valley Voluntaryists" Coffee Shop meetup that happens almost every Sunday. Another guy named Dave was there and he suggested I'm a perfectionist because I referred to the tolerance of crap that I mentioned earlier.  I agree.  My audience is small.  If you aren't enjoying this entry, you'll move on, especially if you're as intelligent as I'd like my audience to be.  So I can assume you're enjoying my writing since you're still reading.

This might be entertaining: I wrote the paragraph below this one about ten minutes ago and then added more.  I think I was being honest, but before publishing, I felt it was too short.  So I sought and found some more to say that would alleviate my perfectionism.  Thanks Dave!

That's about all I'm interested in writing of my own thoughts, but if you want views from others who also see value in it, here's a website dedicated to the idea.

Chaining the Blockchain to human memory

Human beings currently have no way to detect a counterfeit blockchain without a trusted source.  We connect our bitcoin software to peers and we get "blocks" of transactions that are cryptographically protected and require multiple gigawatts of power to create and protect.  We trust the source because the amount of work required for a 51% attack, we hope, is too much for any one organization to do.

I don't think we have much protection from "Sybil attacks" which is where our bitcoin software connects to a "bunch of random peers" that aren't random at all, but rather run by a single nefarious organization that will feed us a counterfeit blockchain in which they have control of some bitcoin to trick us into giving them some value in return for what will look like real bitcoin, but when we connect to the real world, those transactions will be invalid. I aim to provide relief from that problem.

If you think your bitcoin software is experiencing a "Sybil attack," you could check Ken Shirriff's blog post about stuff that should be in the blockchain that you downloaded.  The problem is that the attacker might have added all those "hidden surprises" just in case you, their victim, might check.  What they probably did not do (because it's the equivalent of doing all the work to make the blockchain about 4600 times) is ensure that their fake chain has exactly three block hashes for 12/13/13 that contain two occurrences of a double-e, and that one of the three has the smallest blockhash for that day (

000000000000000003da16c9e2b1b09dd1e366183017688ee53d01ef6aee9722

). One of the other two happens to be in a chain of transactions (chained together by the ONE output (out of several) in each transaction that was spent) which put an image of Nelson Mandela into the blockchain (read Ken's post to learn more).

My interest, however, is in relieving you of the necessity to find any blog post.  I'm going to help you memorize aspects of the real blockchain so you can verify them without trusting anyone but your own memory.

My plan is that each day, I will look through the previous day's blocks as reported by blockchain.com, and run the Golly program I wrote using the merkle root on the block with the smallest block hash, and report the block height and post the image on which the program stabilizes.  For example, the smallest block hash for 4/12/19 was for block 571383,  which hash started with 0000000000000000000071, and if you use the merkle root from that block in my program, you get this image:

... in which the object in the lower left corner is called a "glider" because it will just keep moving (in this case, down and to the right).

If you do the work of visiting the block to get the merkle root, installing Golly and adding my script to it, and running that script against the merkle root, you'll see that it creates the image above.  Now you can choose a memorable image from the following list and try that one.  Once you've done it a few times, you'll know how, and if you remember what the end result looks like and the block height or the date, you'll have a very high bar for any Sybil attacker to pass using Bitcoin Core:

1. Click Help | Debug Window
2. Click the "Console" tab.
3. Into the command entry box at the bottom, type "getblockhash " and then the blockheight I report below and hit enter.
   
4. Copy the answer (a long hex string).
5. Enter the command "getblock " and then paste that "hash" and hit enter.
   
6. Scroll up to the top of the output and copy the "merkle root."
7. Run Golly, run my script, and paste the merkle root in the input box.
8. Verify that it produces the result you remember.

Troubleshooting:

Let's say you can't find this post, but you remember the date and the image.  You need to get the block height.  So do this:

1. Visit https://www.blockchain.com/explorer (Click "Data" from the front page).
2. Scroll down to where blocks are reported and select "View More".
3. Click the "Previous" link at the top.  This changes your browser URL to the format you need to look at blocks mined on other dates.
   
4. Find the Unix Timestamp for the date you chose, and tack three digits on the end (blockchain.com uses milliseconds since epoch) and replace the number at the end of the URL from the previous step with this new number and hit enter.
5. Search on the page for a long string of zeroes.  I use Firefox's search feature (CTRL-F), so as I type zeroes, it jumps to each successive hit.  At some point, I add one more zero and there are no hits.  Now I can use the next-hit and previous-hit buttons (after removing that extra zero) to figure out which one is the smallest.
   
6. You'll see (perhaps even recognize) the block height you forgot there on the left, so you can just copy it and use that in the process above.

What if none of these images speak to me?  Then use a significant date.  You can run the procedure above right now using your birthday and, assuming you have an accurate blockchain, make the image and set it as your screen saver. Make a new one each year.  The series would be your birthdays, rendered in Life using the most-work (smallest hash) merkle roots from Bitcoin's blockchain.

4/13/19, block 571452, 0000000000000000000030

4/14/19, block 571579, 0000000000000000000027

The left-most thing is a glider.

4/15/19 has not yet ended, so you'll have to wait.

Healing Myself

Well, I went off Hydroxyurea (Hu) about two weeks ago.  A friend who is a doctor gave me a book on the connection between the mind and the body, called "The Power of Suggestion with Hypnosis" by Dr. E. Arthur Winkler.  This book solidified and verified my understanding of human consciousness and its power.  It seems likely that my own Essential Thrombocythemia (ET) is a result of my perception of the world as not working properly.  Platelets can be conceptualized as shields, so when threat levels (even metaphorical) are high, it makes sense (to a human body, which has limited ability to interpret the thoughts that its consciousness holds) to make more platelets.

In my case, it is the production of platelet factory cells ("megakaryocytes") that my body increased.  The medical establishment cannot distinguish between "abnormal" and "unhealthy," and in my case, I believe my abnormally high platelet count is not unhealthy.  Dr. Tefferi of the Mayo clinic recommended (I don't have time to look up the reference) NOT treating ET with Hu unless there are symptoms.  My health insurance company (Kaiser) has not yet assimilated this kind of thinking, so I and my friend Dr. Blanscet agreed to go ahead with my personal plan to stop taking Hu.  I am now working on teaching my body that the threat for which it is preparing by making extra platelet factories is not the kind of threat that extra platelets will help mitigate.  At the same time, I've stopped calling it "too many platelets," and started calling is "abnormally high platelets."  The rephrasing warms my spirit because my body has furnished me with extra protection, and my consciousness is now on the same page with it.

I remember reading something in high school (late 80s) about cancer patients envisioning cancer therapies working as designed and other patients not bothering to do that mental work.  The experiment suggested that the mental work improved the efficacy of the therapy.  This memory has been sitting in my mind for about 30 years.  It explains why I tend to be radically optimistic about things, if you really think about it for a while.  I read that article in Time or Newsweek for the Orange County Academic Decathlon all those years ago.

⚡Lightning Network⚡

Simplifying as much as I can:

The lightning network ("LN") lets us use software to keep track of who owes whom, and how much, and in a way that allows the one owed to claim their money whenever they want.  Since it's safe, and it's fast, we can let the software update who owes whom in a way that implements a payment from any one of us to any one else.  This tracking of who owes whom how much is done without the blockchain and nearly immediately, which is what makes it so great.  The next few paragraphs will get into more complicated details, so consider skipping ahead if the mechanics of the LN don't interest you.

 

Details for nerds like me

These debts are represented by "channels." For example, I can open a "channel" to you and put as much money into it as I want.  I admit that opening a channel does use the blockchain.  The software will show that the channel owes ME all the money, but (without using the blockchain), the software can (very quickly) update the channel to show that some of the money in it belongs to you instead.  And if I had a channel open with someone else (E) into which they deposited some money, the software could updated that channel to show that the same amount of that money belongs to me, which makes it okay that some of the money in our channel now belongs to you.  Effectively, E would have paid you, by paying me.

That might seem trivial, but you could be Starbucks, and if my channel to you has enough money in it, E would be able to buy several coffees without filling up the blockchain, or having to wait ten minutes.  Furthermore, if you (Starbucks) pay your webmaster through lightning, and the webmaster has a channel open with me that I funded, you could pay him through me, and that would bring a lot of the money in our channel back to me.  It could cycle thousands of times without ever adding to the blockchain.

In the situations I've described, where I'm being a middleman, I will make (very tiny amounts of) bitcoin, a little for each payment that goes through me.  In fact I've earned about seven satoshi (a satoshi is 0.00000001 BTC) at this point, which covers a tiny fraction of the fees I paid to open my lightning channels.  The first five or ten channels I opened were set to charge fees that were kind of large.  The settings are in the eclair.conf file.  I adjusted the settings as shown at the bottom of this email in my eclair.conf file to lower my fees and attract what's called "relays," which is what it's called when you're the middleman.  "fee-base-msat" is the thousandths of a satoshi that you charge to relay a payment, and "fee-proportional-millionths" is the portion of the payment you're relaying that you charge to relay it.  Since they're millionths, 10000 (don't use commas in numbers in the conf file) would be 1%, which is VERY large.  Most people charge 0.0001% (1 millionth).  It may pay in these early days to charge high fees, but that's not a game I'm interested in exploring.
 

What if the other guy disappears?

If you have a channel open with someone and you want to take all your money out and he's not around, you can "force close" the channel.  This takes some time.  The time it takes is useful to prevent people from cheating.  If our channel NOW owes me less than it did before, I might try to force close it using an earlier balance.  If so, I'd have to wait, and while I'm waiting, your software would see that I'm trying to cheat and be able to take the full balance, thus punishing me for trying to cheat.

This is because there are two ways to empty the channel, and one of them has a waiting period for whoever is trying to close it unilaterally.  The other way is if we agree on the balance, and we both sign the closing transaction.  If I do try to close the channel unilaterally using an earlier balance, the resulting output allows your software to take all the money in the channel with no waiting period using an "anti-cheat" transaction.  With every balance update, one of these "anti-cheat" transactions is created for each of us, and our lightning software will watch for the unilateral close operation that allows it to take all the money.

How I set up my Lightning node:

I followed these instructions from Johnny Pham.  If you do that too, I invite you to open a channel to me (and let me know; I'll open one to you as well, for the same amount, up to $100).  You will need to know my "node URI" which is:
03525a26e79adf5793bb9e2747ea7d0d925bf8157362148f3b5da6e1c855be07bf@76.174.129.203:9735

My custom setting from eclair.conf:
eclair.node-alias="Scotese Lightning node"
eclair.node-color=d818f0
eclair.fee-base-msat=3
eclair.fee-proportional-millionths=1
eclair.server.public-ips.0=76.174.129.203

The last three settings here are in bold to indicate that I added them.  I added them so that my node is publicly available and I'm using non-default fees to attract business.

In my next newsletter, I'll be explaining what I know about BitcoinHEX, which looks like a really great idea to me.