Taking Flight

Sept 7 - 13

This was a difficult week. I flew to Asia for the first time since I was 2 years old. I’m writing this in a hotel room in the Da’an district of Taipei, the capital city of Taiwan. It’s my first trip to ‘Asia’ in over three decades. I didn’t know what to expect, but the trip has been surprisingly smooth and action packed in the best way. I’m keeping a video log of my travels, check out the last bullet point in “What Happened this Week” for a link to the first one.

I’m going to be gone from Texas for a whole month, so there was a lot of errand running and last minute preparing to do before I left. I’m happy with the work that I got done before I left, but I am noticing that there’s a severe lack of progress being made on my ‘deep work’ projects. It’s hard to coordinate and ship at the same time, and frankly I’m a little delusional for thinking it’s possible to do everything.

I’m also coming to terms with the fact that one reason that frequent travel works so well for me is that I’m very deadline motivated. Having a trip planned is a built-in deadline to get clothes mended, clean the apartment, and finish up whatever not fun administrative tasks I’ve been avoiding. I like coming back to an apartment that has fresh sheets, washed laundry, and a sparkling kitchen. This does mean leaving for a trip is particularly laborious but the net benefit of having that work done when I arrive is really hard to overstate.

Having gotten through the 22-hours of international travel and work that it took to pack for a month, I’m happy. It’s been an amazing trip so far and I’m only three days into it. Here’s to another action packed week!

What Happened This Week

• I attended the bi-monthly Lightning Spec meeting. I’ve been really quiet at these the last few months, as I’m really more doing background maintenance stuff. One of the highlights is that splicing is getting worked on across pretty much all implementations, which is exciting. That means the protocols I worked on for dual-funding will be in every lightning implementation at some point.

• I did some reviews for Core Lightning; one of the PR’s was about what’s changed in the Lightning specs since the last release so I wrote up a blog version of it for giggles here.

• Ordered more stuff for the Pleb Print Shop so we can finish the stuff for bitcoin++ in Berlin; started making some speaker gifts for the next event!

• Got some more yes’s from sponsors for upcoming bitcoin++ events! I just need to follow up on them now, which is definitely a weak point for me. I also found a local friend who’s going to run the volunteers for Bitcoin++ this year. One challenge I’ve given myself is to get better at delegating, and I think I’m doing ok so far with this conference.

• Had a great call with a local Austin bitcoiner about some cool ideas for how we can make the bitcoin++ in Austin next May really good. Part of organizing events is figuring out how to involve institutions in the local community. I’m excited to have one of our long time supporters involved in planning even earlier this year; and even more excited about the idea they had of how to get another institution involved. Hopefully it works out!

• Started putting the pieces together for a potential side event for bitcoin++/Base58 in Buenos Aires around Labitconf in collaboration with La Crypta. I talked to a couple ‘stakeholders’ about the project (the conference, La Crypta, the incredible waxwing who’s helping me craft some content for it). It’s going to happen, we just need to figure out the when and where.

• Had some great calls with Dustin Dettmer about splicing projects and life stuff. One thing he suggested is trying to call “Base58” as “base-five-eight” instead of “base-fifty-eight”. So if you hear me saying this differently, you’ll know why!

• Flew to Taipei in Taiwan! I’m here for five days ahead of the Japan Bitcoin Conference in Tokyo this week. I’ve been making a video blog of my adventures, you can follow along on Twitter or Nostr. Here’s the first video blog I made! You can check it out on X or Nostr. Oh my god does it take a lot of time to edit videos. The trip has been really amazing so far. I do wish I had more time!

Things I Could Use Some Help With

• Bitcoin++ in Berlin just opened up our call for volunteers for the event next month. You can sign up to volunteer here.

• I’m still looking for an assistant in and around Austin to help with Base58 things occasionally. Hit me up at hello at base58.school!

From Around the Web

• t-bast, the lead developer and CTO at ACINQ’s, made the first zero-fee lightning commitment transaction using the new package relay primitives that are now in Bitcoin Core. Very exciting for lightning usability and a huge potential improvement to force close vectors (as well as other problems).

• I love Peter Todd’s Libre Relay project, which is a fork of bitcoin-core with different mempool relay rules (more relaxed/permissive). He just kicked off a fundraiser project for it on Geyser fund, check it out here.

• If you need a new backpack, I can’t recommend the Hajo series from ucon acrobatics enough. I’ve had one for over a decade and it’s just incredible for traveling. Holds lots of stuff, is compact, very difficult to pick-pocket. Check out their current offerings here. And no this isn’t a paid placement, I’m just traveling and realized how much I love it.

~nifty