Just a quick heads-up:
Mempool is literally emtpy, a good time to consolidate inputs or funding lightning channels.

Mehtub doesn't like tor so I can't watch but there has been a lively discussion here at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5539943 which I followed and still haven't made up my mind so far. I give a shit about what people want to store in the blockchain, I have stopped notarizing info in btc long ago as it seemed like kinda anti-social. On the other hand the argument of achow101 and others including Ptodd ("It removes more complex code than it adds.") does make sense to a certain degree too.

Right now I am not feeling like updating my node to support this. Not at all.

So when BTC last was over 100k wifey and me decided to owe ourselves a little spending spree and ordered/preordered:

- 1 Braiins Mini Miner (BMM)
- 1 Ofen
- 1 Ofen Pro

Now the Brains Mini Miner is an absolute gem with its display, wouldn't want to miss it. We're currently having it in the living room and you really don't hear it at all, but you can check prices now even more often (like every 15s :-)). Completely worth the money and great fun. Ofcourse we run it against solo.ckpool.org and who knows maybe we get lucky and hit a block in the next years. My verdict: Everybody needs one :-)

The Ofen contains a S9 miner which is bridged to wireless via an ultracheap inbuilt TPLink Wifi router. Actually very silent and mechanically a great design (you can sit even on it and have your backparts warmed), the thing is just that the S9 only yields a few satoshis per day (like 300-500 depending on how high you set the wattage). A good heater with some very small satoshi kickback and you have direct access to the Braiins firmware via browser. It's ok, but the return of the S9 is just too small for my taste.

The Ofen Pro however is a complete mess and I very strongly recommend against it (it truely sucks donkeyballs IMHO). While even better made in terms of airflow and noise the rest of the package is nothing a mentally healthy IT guy would like to have in his house. Again, the mechanical design is really great and I am still astonished as how silent you can run a single hashboard S19k, it even gives a few thousand sats a day when running at enough wattage.

BUT: The Ofen Pro can only be connected, configured and managed via smartphone app (ofcourse that 10yr old Ipad I had doesn't allow to install the app) that basically allows you to set a heating level from 1 to 5 and tells you how much the miner delivers to the pool. They don't allow you to connect to the miner itself, nor to the Raspberry Pi that does the BLE and wifi connection and runs the local parts of the app.
As ours stopped working after the first update of the app and the only thing we heard from support was to reinstall the app and press "repair miner" button and repeat that as often as it needs to get going again I decided to look inside. So at some point I opened up the thing to check how and what it does and got pretty pissed about what I found.

First of all the Pi has ssh logins enabled only via pubkey (easily solved once you manage to pull the SD card out) and of course they have their pubkey in there so they can connect to every Ofen Pro out there via ssh. While trying to get the sd card out I found that most things are hotglued inside the Ofen Pro - which had its advantage as I could just pull off the Pi from the case and access the sd card. Then I found that to access the device they call home via OpenVPN which actually means they have transparent access to your complete wireless network where the Ofen Pro is connected to.
They obviously decided that it is bright idea to directly drive the noctua fan hub via PWM from one the Pis PWM pins. Ofcourse there is the electronic equivalent of hotglueing as they soldered the wires directly to the Pi's pins and into the fan hub. They run two wires from the Pi to the fan hub which is powered with 12V from the Antminer power supply so I assumed one is PWM and the other is ground. Turns out the other one is rpm output (which they don't use yet in their javascript code mess <- software equivalent of hotglueing there too). That means the PWM signal is when you watch on an oscilloscope pretty free floating around against the GND of the noctua fan hub - but to my astonishment this works most of the time relatively good (but is still a crime against electronic sanity) - until it doesn't. Lucky enough the Braiins firmware shuts power off when the chips get too hot but it is far from how I would like to have fans controlled in a miner. Also they don't tell you that ofcourse you pay 2% devfee to braiins which could be ok if you a) openly communicate and b) let people access the firmware they obviously pay for.

My worst spending of BTC so far has been an KNC Titan for 4.5 BTC that went up in smoke and bright flashes by my own fault after about 4 months (thanks again to lightfoot and philip for their tips and help then!). Now it is the Ofen Pro, while much less corn was wasted on it the thing is an absolute insult to every miner and/or IT enthusiast with the slightest minimum of self-respect.

Habemus pumpum!

Mornings would be just fine with me, if they only wouldn't happen at a such inconvenient time of the day.

That's certainly not wrong but the numbers are going down over time, China has seriously ramped up domestic consumption and opened up a lot of new markets. It is not as dramatic for them as it was a few years ago. Also they have started to reduce their holdings of US treasury bonds which might have more of an effect than their tariffs which I agree are mostly a show of actionism for the Chinese punters.

But interestingly while browsing AliX et al it occured to me that the vast majority of Trump merchandise seems to come from China:

https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-maga.html

https://www.temu.com/search_result.html?search_key=maga&search_method=user

So that MAGA hat just got about twice as expensive in which I can spot some irony.

At least popcorn demand will soar in the short term I guess..

The empire strikes back..:


-> https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3305873/china-fires-back-stern-rebuke-trumps-tariff-escalation

Interesting times ahead. Starting to want one of those Greenlandish MAGA hats (those that say "Make America Go Away").

Thinking about all the munchies and goodies I could buy now if I sold it in time (like end of March when it was due) is a bit annoying admittedly, but then again given the price I paid ages ago for it still makes me smile (a sad smile, but still a smile).

Sold worth a few k for quarterly mortgage (that I forgot to pay and I probably can't file this under STML anymore) about an hour ago.
You're all welcome..

OTOH today is a good excuse to start drinking early..

Dust..

Me suspects Dollar Dump Donald Trump wants to force Powells hand on QE by creating havoc on markets.

But then again it is hard to get a complete picture on the full complexity of the stable genius' mind.

Them friggin ice vultures had it coming a long time..

Good job today buddy, but don't forget to have a break before you do more heavy lifting.

Me after realizing we're going down more:

If it goes above VWAP on the 1hr chart, I see a double-bottom.
But then again what do I know, I see white mice too and I smoke the hopium bong all day long.

Yeah, friggin walls. Do they also look like they're moving around to you or is the gin tonic / white widow combo kicking in with me?

But on a sidenote: You could really have had the dignity to fix my typo, now I am gonna be remembered as the guy who doesn't know how to spell that bytecan thingie that feeds him 

The two sentences in bold above especially resonate with me, couldn't say that any better, though I'd like to distance myself from implying that those who don't see it are cognitively limited. We grey folks actually learned in school and from our parents how and where to look for truths or better: critical thinking and that only seldom there is black and white - mostly it's shades of muddy grey. Nowadays they are just told to believe what the MSM influencers tell them ("They said he is an expert, so it must be true that it is a white one even I as layman see black there - science is amazing"). Looking for truth and critical thinking is not taught anymore, it's just follow the "experts".

It somehow started around 10-15 years back, until then you could still trust the national public stations here and sometimes they really pissed some people off with their scoops, in fact they did bite the hand that fed them occasionally which was the best justification for their public funding.
Funny thing is that the public today seems to have a very short attention span and if the MSM or politicians completely contradict themselves within like 2 or 3 years only, nobody even notices it anymore. And if you point that out, they just shrug with their shoulders.

Regarding interesting times: Pretty sure, in the almost 60 rounds around the sun I have done I've never felt we are as close to either a platinum-style economic crisis or a very inclusive (non-binary and gender-fluid people individuals very welcome to it) world war. I suspect a really big crisis (not like "O noes - I gonna run out of toilet paper in 12 days") will help make the masses good in critical thinking again, I am sure of that.


See that's the great gift of Bitcoin. I don't have to care anymore, I lost a job in 2022 because I made joke about the safety record of a vaccine (well, admittedly that was not the brightest move when you get paid indirectly from big pharma's money - including some of the MRNA "experts" )
Now thanks to Bitcoiun I don't need any more jobs - another job or customer lost is now quality lifetime won.

That's not to say I am looking for these kind of discussions and arguments, but if necessary I have them and I really don't care anymore what people think. I am good with all my beloved ones (even so our opinions often differ) and that's all that matters these days to me.
It also helps a lot when your partner has a similar mindset, that is not to say wifey and I agree on all opinions but its good food for long discussions that almost always benefits both of us in forming further our beliefs and opinions. I.e. that's how we defined democracy in ancient times. Also with discussions come drinks, so what's not to like on having different opinions?


Now you're trying to get me into really hot waters, do you 

I was about to propose the same thing to philipma1957.
I for one stopped the antminers and started breeding chicken in my home mine:



14 eggs due in 16d 2hrs at the time of this posting. Hopefully we get 14 new female egg workers. Every one of them that does not identify themselves as she/her will end as spicy chicken wings..

Eggs is the new toilet paper I tell y'all!

True that.

In our region (DACH) all commentators and reporters who were unwilling to go with the Zelensky = Angel, Putin = Evil narrative have been removed from their jobs. They still talk about the topic but they are heavily suppressed by the sorts of shadow bans. Same happened during Corona, it's not that there were no "experts" with a different opinion, they were just muted and removed from their jobs too and got labeled as conspiracy nut jobs.
Our western society is now more soviet style than we would like to acknowledge. If you knew the good ole DDR you will feel very at home in modern Europe. Quoting the honorable former under secretary Nuland here: Fuck the EU!

Also there is that pattern of telling everybody in dissent that they are just too dumb and too uneducated to understand the facts - which actually only reveals how poor the understanding of the terms democracy and fact is with these people.

/end of rant from retarded Putler fanboy and antivaxxer tinfoil hat UAP believer conspiracy theorist (I can't really warm for the flat earth thing yet, but I am working on it).