What makes Bitcoin so BIPping better?

BIP stands for Bitcoin Improvement Proposal. A BIP is a design document providing information to the Bitcoin community, or describing a new feature for Bitcoin or its processes or environment. The BIP should provide a concise technical specification of the feature and a rationale for the feature.

We intend BIPs to be the primary mechanisms for proposing new features, for collecting community input on an issue, and for documenting the design decisions that have gone into Bitcoin.

When the 51% vote it so then it is made it so.

Additionally, every I can do it better than Bitcoin! crypto needs to do better those BIPs, and every new one that comes after that.

That might take a while, if ever.

How to find the secret message in Bitcoin’s first transaction?

Satoshi left a secret message in Bitcoin’s first transaction:

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

It refers to this article in The Sunday Times. The point is to prove that the chain was created at least by that date. It’s also a tongue-in-cheek joke about the nature of currency and how governments manage it. You don’t have to take my word for it, though. Here is how to find it yourself albeit using the Bitcoin GUI instead of the command-line interface.

Continue reading “How to find the secret message in Bitcoin’s first transaction?”

Be sure to set up your Bitcoin node with the full transaction index!

Out of the box, you can only look up a transaction by its index when the transaction is associated with a wallet you own. This optimization makes sense from an efficiency perspective because should you waste disk space on transactions that aren’t your own? That is a good point, but you don’t save much space.

Continue reading “Be sure to set up your Bitcoin node with the full transaction index!”

Automatically open read-only files in View mode

When you open read-only files in Emacs, you probably won’t want to attempt to save them. Emacs will warn you if you try and help you deal with it. However, most of the time, it is interruptive to your flow to deal with it—most of the time, we never want to modify read-only files.

In that case, View mode will make it easier for you:

Toggle View mode, a minor mode for viewing text but not editing it.

When View mode is enabled, commands that do not change the buffer contents are available as usual. Kill commands save text but do not delete it from the buffer. Most other commands beep and tell the user that the buffer is read-only.

Enable it automatically with

(setq view-read-only t)

Via EmacsWiki!

How to get “Local Pickup Only” items delivered to you

Great listings on online auction sites are often “Local Pickup Only”. It would help to have a friend who lives there who can ship it to you. If you don’t, then, fortunately, you can hire one.

I haven’t tried it yet, but sites like TaskRabbit seem to be the way to get stuff picked up and delivered to you.

I wish I knew about this when that perfect Macintosh SE/30 got listed in Los Angeles!