whaack

My contributions to the republic, while having spent years twiddling my thumbs reading the logs, are as follow:

1. 5 Qntra posts, found here: ¹

My first post was an inside perspective of MIT's "blockchain" curriculum. It confirmed what the republic already knew, namely that there was no interesting work going on at MIT re bitcoin, and any "work" being done there was hostile towards republican interests. Two other posts were tabloidal, making fun of pantsuitism. And the last two posts were reports on Coinbase shenanagins during the bitcoin cash hard fork.

2. Setting up my own trb bitcoin node. (failed)

There was naivety in my attempts to setup a running bitcoin node. When I first attempted to setup a node, I tried to get it goig on an old unused laptop. One mistake was believing that 2gb of ram is enough to get a timely block sync. I had thought at the time that the only bottleneck to getting a node up to speed was downloading the blocks, and I did not intuit the time it takes to locally verify all the blocks along the way² I later attempted to sync a node on a dedicated machine hosted by dreamhost.com,³ paying a little over $100 usd per month. I can't quite recall what happened, but I think around block 350,000 it got stuck. Later, without trying to reboot bitcoind, I decided to cut my expense with dreamhost and gave up on running a full node.

3. Researching how many bitcoins are tied up in P2SH⁴ (failed)

The goal was getting an upper bound of how many coins are in anyone-can-spend scripts in order to answer the question: how many coins are in addresses related to segwit?

To do this, I first used ben_vulpes's block explorer⁵ to grab sexprs containing the data for every block. This was obtained by looping from 0...max_block_height and running
wget -0 http://mimisbrunnr.cascadianhacker.com/blocks/blk{n}
where {n} was the block number. While I was running a loop performing this task I noticed that occasionally ben's block explorer would give me some malformed file - and I had to simply re-wget the same url until i got back a properly formatted sexpr. It took a while to download all the blocks from Ben (even though I was not verifying them) and so I paid for a digitalocean droplet to run my scraper script on.⁶

Once I had blocks 0..n, I ran a script⁷ that would go through a chunk of blocks and keep an ongoing hashmap mapping "(txn hash, output number) -> num_satoshis_sent_to_output" for all the outputs in the block that were sent to non-trb conforming addresses. For each new block, the script would first iterate through the txns in the block to see if any of them spent the coins in the ongoing hashmap obtained from all the previous blocks. If a txn in the new block consumed one of the P2SH UTXOs that was being stored, that UTXO would be deleted from the ongoing hashmap. Once the purge of transaction outputs that had just been spent was completed, the script reiterated through the new block's txns to add any txn outputs that were directed to non-trb P2SH's to the ongoing hashmap. After iterating through all the blocks, one could calculate how many satoshis were in non-trb addresses by summig up all the values in the obtained hashmap.

I don't recall at what point/why I just faded away and stopped working on this tool. It may have been because I hit a problem with running out of memory for storing all the segwit UTXOs. It was an interesting investigation and perhaps the republic would still find a counter of coins that are contained in non-trb addresses useful. Which brings us to part two of this post:

Potential Future TMSR Work

diana_coman: whaack_pura_vida: that⁸ is obsolete so not a lot of help in itself; nobody is going to make the list ready for you to pick and choose, wtf.
diana_coman: whaack_pura_vida: publish what you figure out by Sunday together with *how you went about* the figuring out

My initial internal response to diana_coman was " (1) why is that a ridiculous expectation since there previously was a list of entry points? and (2) how is that list obsolete if a young hand such as shrysr is digesting V, which is more or less a task on that list?"

The best answer I can come up with to my own questions are "Yes, a list was once generously made, but doesn't mean that lords have time to keep an up to date task list for noobs. That post was THREE YEARS AGO and now there are new tasks to do - which you must find yourself. The current task list may or may not coincide with the three year old post, you have to have read the logs to find out."

With that being said, and keeping with the "how you went about figuring out", here is a list of potential tasks, with an annotation denoting how/why I came to choose that task.

1. Creating my own V⁹
2. Related to 1, taking up the task of maintaining a vpatch viewer¹⁰
3. Creating a new trb block explorer¹¹
4. Continuing fighting the war on Segwit, first by completing the task of sizing up the coins held in P2SH. ¹²
5. Learning ADA and completing Stan's FFA series.¹³

Tasks (3) and (4) seems the most interesting to me, but I believe the v-related tasks (1) and (2) should be my starting point.

1. These were edited by BingoBoingo, and one was improperly formatted wthen sent to him. So these contributions may have even been net negative depending on how much time BingoBoingo had to spend to correcret my mistakes. [↩]
2. My intuition was likely skewed because my first experience with running a bitcoin node was using power ranger software which used SPV, effectively making my computer search for the longest chain instead of the longest valid chain. [↩]
3. Originally I had thought, what help is it to run a node on someone else's iron? I still believe it is not that useful, you are only temporarily increasing the redundancy of the bitcoin network, but at any moment the enemy can flip a switch and you go offline. Adding a node to pizarro also has dubious utility, because from my understanding the republic already has a few nodes there at 161.0.121.248 and 161.0.121.250. [↩]
4. pay to script hash [↩]
5. dead at time of writing [↩]
6. This was also discontinued when I did some cleaning out of expenses. And I wiped everything off the droplet without first taking a local copy. [↩]
7. A lot of CL weird and sloppy code. Some of it is copy and pasted from code Ben was using to analyze his own block explorer. [↩]
8. http://trilema.com/2016/how-to-participate-in-the-affairs-of-the-most-serene-republic/ [↩]
9. The initial idea was planted by the trilema post of entry to affairs. That being said, V seems a natural starting point for working with republican code. It demonstrates understanding of the tool required to publish and use any code in the republic [↩]
10. per the suggestion of trinque. [↩]
11. Found this may be useful by going through old tasks and noting that Ben's old block explorer mimisbrunnr had died. [↩]
12. I figure that the lords best spend their time fortifying their castle walls rather than going out to fight against nonsense like Segwit. But perhaps a noob could prove his worth by taking on this neglected task. [↩]
13. This task seems a useful start for the same reason the V tasks seem useful: to prepare a young hand by learning the tools used to contribute to the republic. In addition, from my understanding only a few have gone through any of Stan's series. But apart from the additional proofread, this is a personal development goal rather than a contribution. [↩]

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 22nd, 2019 at 11:24 p.m. and is filed under Bitcoin, tmsr. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.