8 entries tagged lightning. All writing.
OCTOBER 6, 2026 The Rule That Never Mentioned Lightning FinCEN withdrew its 2023 proposal to label crypto mixing a "primary money laundering concern." I read the withdrawal notice and the original proposal. Neither says the word Lightning, but the proposal's definition of mixing was written so broadly that a literal reading brushes against how Lightning works. Here is what the rule said, what it would have meant for Lightning service providers, what the withdrawal changes today, and what it leaves alone. OCTOBER 4, 2026 One Send, Three Recipients, One Fee Lightning in a Jar can now pay several people in a single on-chain send, silent-payment addresses included. The builder posted a test spend; I found it in the blockchain, checked the arithmetic, and looked for the matching change in the public repository. Here is what that one transaction shows, what batching does and doesn't buy you, and what I haven't tested. SEPTEMBER 30, 2026 The Jar Ships What It Promised Two things I flagged as "he says so, but I can't see it yet" in my last two Lightning in a Jar posts — a recovery scheme for silent payments, and Nostr Wallet Connect — showed up in the public repository overnight. I went and checked. Both are there, and the code backs up what he told me. SEPTEMBER 30, 2026 Two-Tenths of a Percent, If Illinois Can See You Illinois just became the first state to tax Bitcoin transactions directly — a 0.2% Digital Asset Tax Act taking effect January 1, 2027. I went looking for what it actually reaches, using two Kankakee residents as the test case: one who owns a Bitcoin ETF inside an ordinary brokerage account, and one who wants to buy coffee with sats over the Lightning Network. The tax lands hard on one of them, barely touches the other, and can't see the actual coffee purchase at all — and the reason why says a lot about how a state can tax a ledger it doesn't control. SEPTEMBER 29, 2026 The Jar Learns to Hide Which Jar A quick follow-up to my Lightning in a Jar review — the wallet's author tells me he's shipped Silent Payments, send and receive, with the first inter-wallet transactions running tonight. Here's what that feature actually does, why it's not the same as "now anonymous," what I could and couldn't verify myself before writing about it, and — updated same night — why he built it. SEPTEMBER 25, 2026 A Private Room With a Public Door Someone sent me a write-up I didn't understand at first, claiming Zcash-style privacy now works on Bitcoin itself — no soft fork, no new coin — and a real private transfer confirmed on mainnet this morning to prove it. Both halves are true. Here is how it works in plain English, what the demo actually proved, the flaws its own builders list first, whether swapping the one-key vault for a decentralized escrow would fix it, and why, if I had to make Bitcoin private for a normal person tomorrow, I would still start with Lightning. SEPTEMBER 10, 2026 A Jar Is Not a Vault: Reading My Friend's Lightning Wallet Before I Recommend It A friend of mine spent six months building a self-custodial Lightning wallet that runs in a browser, and he'd be the first to tell you it has no audit. I trust him — which is exactly why I shouldn't ask you to trust it on my say-so. So I read the code, checked the served binary against the published hashes, and worked out what the trust model really is. Along the way, the thing every Lightning wallet review should say and mostly doesn't: what a Lightning wallet is for, and what it is not. SEPTEMBER 9, 2026 "Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins" Just Grew a Second Half Alby disclosed a critical flaw in Alby Hub, its self-hosted Lightning node software, that could let an attacker who reaches an exposed control panel send your bitcoin out from under you. The twist worth sitting with is the timeline — the fix shipped over a year before the warning did — and what that gap actually tells self-custody Bitcoiners about the setting they should have checked already.