deadmanoz

A Bitcoin block can carry full proof of work and still be invalid.

I've catalogued 143 established cases from 2010 to 2026, including two previously unreported F2Pool timestamp failures this year.

https://deadmanoz.xyz/posts/2026/invalid-blocks

89 blocks in 2012 contained the same P2SH-invalid transaction, mined by pools that hadn’t upgraded.

Archived explorer transaction lists and preserved headers establish its inclusion in all 89. Only four complete block bodies could be rebuilt.

Both recent F2Pool headers survived in merge-mined chains, with no known Bitcoin-side capture.

These chains also yielded ~1,400 stales new to the stale-blocks collection. Monitoring them is essential to a holistic Bitcoin monitoring effort.

127 of the 143 blocks have no complete body, yet their failures remain independently checkable.

10 further reports still need evidence. Old node files, pool logs or archives could help.

Contributions and corrections: https://github.com/bitcoin-data/invalid-blocks

Time to give my 10 year old servers another 10 years of life 😬

Opus 5 is a terrible model, it constantly makes mistakes and communicates in vacuous and confusing language

In late 2024/early 2025 when I was “getting back on the tools” after a few years of management, I realised that I didn’t really want to go back to dev mode again.

Fortunately I’d been experimenting with LLMs for work, early GitHub and Cursor with the tab and code- block completion, and it was clear that these tools would increasingly allow me to design and build things without having to dev mode again

I, like many others, have been aggressively pushing to leverage the tools for maximum utility. They are still lacking in areas, and you do need to invest heavily in experimentation, but it’s abundantly clear that human time and effort is better spent up the value chain and not writing any code whatsoever.

Maybe we haven’t yet passed the threshold for all codebases or projects, but it’s only a matter of when, not if.

This is both very interesting and very scary

Introducing Mempool Atlas

Mode 1: breakdowns and visualisations for ALL transactions in a single nodes mempool

Mode 2: similar to the above, but comparing between 2 nodes (default atm)

I have hooked up 3 nodes to this for the BIP-110 fork - core, knots & libre

(been iterating on the idea for a bit, but rushed to get this out today, probably a few bugs)

https://atlas.deadmanoz.xyz/

The boys are back in town !!

I am pretty diligent in record keeping, but it’s clear I need to ramp up what is recorded when doing impactful stuff.

For example, recording the versions of software, firmware and hardware.

Pre 4.0.X versions of the COLDCARD mk3 were ok, but nothing following (at least until the recent fix) 😬

Claude law “given enough tokens, all bugs are shallow”

on PBJ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law

Phew.. spent the last 6 hours or so frantically trying to get a handle on the coldcard issue and then assisting potentially impacted family and friends

Thankfully none impacted, but seen reports online of people that have been, my heart goes out to them 😢

“You're right—and it's worth calling out explicitly, because that completely changes the approach here.”

About time!!

As they say, “SA… heaps good”

Recently shipped some new features around timing analysis of merge-mined stale blocks to https://mmm.deadmanoz.xyz

The best studio I’ve ever been in

(also the only one 😂)

Palm Cove Bitcoin Bush Bash was a fucking blast

Met a bunch of people who I previously only knew online, and also a bunch of new people too

Everyone brings their own views and experiences, but all united by Bitcoin

Looking forward to next time ❤️

I travelled from Perth to Palm Cove (~5000km of travel via Melbourne) just for a re-up of

I've published my Bitcoin merge-mining research repo: data and tooling for about 26 chains that have merge mined with Bitcoin. Recovered stale blocks a focus.

Or, put another way, I ran nodes for about 20 non-Bitcoin 💩 chains, so others didn't have to!

https://github.com/deadmanoz/merge-mining-research

Welcome new Nostr users coming from

announcing Buzz on X 🎉🥳👏

https://x.com/jack/status/2079605800998146171?s=46

“Honest take”

Self hosting will increasingly become necessary, for privacy AND defensive purposes

Recount from huggingface regarding a recent security incident, model provider guardrails hampered investigation and response effort, fortunately they could self host

https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026

Get around your local BitDevs!!

AI Psychosis in software dev is having to read phrases like “load-bearing”, “seams”, “sidecar” constantly

Too bad it’s also really slow..

Chinese labs need to catch-up on inference infrastructure for scale!!

It might be true..

I’ve been using Kimi occasionally for a few months, mainly only when I had no usage remaining on Claude/Codex, because it was much, much weaker

But K3 does actually seem to be a very capable model from my brief experimentation

Now if only I had the hardware to self host it 🥲

It has been a while, good return - daughter “slayed it”

WORD5 #650 3/6

⬛⬛⬛🟧⬛ 🟪🟧🟧🟧⬛ 🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪

https://otherstuff.ai/word5/

OpenCode is a really good harness for local models

I’m using it with Qwen3.6 27B, which runs on a remote machine, connecting to an MCP, which runs on another, and it just works (as well as can be expected for a local model setup)

I’m going to be attending and speaking!!

Straya (sound on)

An interesting preliminary observation from the Merge Mining Monitor, 20 stale blocks in 20 hours produced by Foundry on 11/12 September 2025.

An event that cost them dearly, at least ~46.9 BTC lost in fees.

https://mmm.deadmanoz.xyz/?tree_time=2025-09-18T16%3A21%3A51Z&selected=00000000000000000000ba485fa4bbba0416890572ff6b5853cdc24e92d7434f

https://bnoc.xyz/t/introducing-the-merge-mining-monitor/146/3

Introducing the Merge Mining Monitor, another tool in service of the Bitcoin monitoring mission.

Merge mining lets child chains ride on Bitcoin's PoW, preserving the parent headers miners hashed.

Bitcoin keeps no durable record of valid blocks it later discards (stales/orphans). Merge-mined chains do.

The monitor turns that merge-mining evidence into a browsable record of who mined each Bitcoin block, which child chains rode along, and which discarded blocks survived in child-chain history.

The current dataset recovers 2,200+ stale blocks back to 2011, when Namecoin first brought merge mining to Bitcoin.

https://mmm.deadmanoz.xyz/

Introducing the Merge Mining Monitor, another tool in service of the Bitcoin monitoring mission.

Merge mining lets child chains ride on Bitcoin's PoW, preserving the parent headers miners hashed.

Bitcoin keeps no durable record of valid blocks it later discards (stales/orphans). Merge-mined chains do.

The monitor turns that merge-mining evidence into a browsable record of who mined each Bitcoin block, which child chains rode along, and which discarded blocks survived in child-chain history.

The current dataset recovers 2,200+ stale blocks back to 2011, when Namecoin first brought merge mining to Bitcoin.

https://mmm.deadmanoz.xyz/

This looks really fucking rad from Block, h/t

&

&

https://github.com/block/buzz

Fable 5.. probably at least 80% of my sessions are “safety measure” downgraded within the first few prompts

Guess I have no reason for “extra usage” come June 22nd

My blockclock has been offline for about a week (due to power outage and didn’t reconnect to the network), and it has been kinda liberating TBH

I needed to understand merge mining for a particular research direction I am pursuing (relating to stale blocks), and created the following visualisation-rich piece on the topic.

Hoping this makes it easier for some to grok how it all works, especially AuxPoW!

https://deadmanoz.xyz/posts/2026/merge-mining

Great overview video of the priorities, methodologies and achievements of Bitcoin Core from

at OPNEXT’26 a few weeks ago

I mean, this is obvious in hindsight, but I only learnt about the following today..

Since SegWit, any block with witness-bearing transactions has required the coinbase to have an OP_RETURN carrying the witness commitment.

This is what extends PoW to cover witness data (the spending authority), which SegWit moved out of the txid computation!!

I love my

Daylight Computer 1, writing on it just feels soooo natural and satisfying

But Daylight Desktop on macOS is buggy as hell, hasn’t been updated in over a year

Similarly the Reader app on device also wigs out on a bunch of PDFs

So, I do have to ask, is it abandonware?

“White House Considers Vetting A.I. Models Before They Are Released”

We’re there already are we?

This will just push people to non-American model ecosystems, they’re only a few month behind at the moment, IMO

https://archive.is/V7HaO

I wanted to remain Nostr only, and will absolutely primarily post openly on Nostr, but damn, I wish there was more AI/ML and Bitcoin discussion and signal here

(reluctantly frequenting X more frequently)

That’s cool!!

When an agent is deep in some obscure low-level code I don’t really have an interest in, and my eyes start to glaze over..

..I finally have a glimpse of what it is like to be a non-technical product manager

Reading old BitcoinTalk threads, many just ooze critical thinking and deep thought

Where has it all gone?

I guess there is many orders of magnitude more noise these days, so it’s harder for signal to cut through

Kids used to “have ants in their pants”

Now they’ve got ADHD

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-29/adhd-medication-prescriptions-high-in-western-australia-explain/106610292

The Big Stuff “Lotions & Potions for MEN”™️

https://fountain.fm/episode/TK0lnLralJ7vjKMRERXX

Torn between liberal democracies needing to win the AI race and the best and most competitive open source efforts not coming from liberal democracies

Hot damn… just had a router just flat out randomly die on me today

Think I cooked it!!

To get to a “country of geniuses in a data centre” you have to go through “a large university research lab of graduate students in a data centre”

I think we’re almost at that point

I set out to ground myself on what the most important properties of the Bitcoin network are, and in working to establish this I have landed on a random side-quest relating to… merged mining?

🤷

(it appears that there is some signal in this area for the purpose of Bitcoin network monitoring)

For Science™️…

https://fountain.fm/episode/1mieRW00BVL4hsQQHBYd

should post on Nostr more!!

https://x.com/spiralbtc/status/2041570185740452261?s=20

Realised I had a lot of knowledge gaps to fill so I filled some of them in writing this piece

http://deadmanoz.xyz/posts/2026/bitcoin-node-roles-p2p

📣📣📣

Perth BitDevs/Bitcoin Meetup for April 2026 When: TONIGHT - Thursday 2nd April, 6pm Where: Rocky Ridge Brewing Co, Burswood

Topics:

• BIP-54 Consensus Cleanup - timewarp fix, validation time limits, Merkle tree hardening, deployment debate
• BIP-110 update - Sybil nodes exposed, willcl_ark crawler shows only 254 genuine nodes out of 3,312
• PQ signature advances - lattice-based HD wallets (BIP-32-style key derivation for post-quantum)
• SHRIMPS - Jonas Nick's 2.5KB multi-device stateful hash-based PQ signatures, successor to SHRINCS
• IBD optimizations - l0rinc's ~16% speedup, Ruben Somsen's SwiftSync (5x faster), LevelDB tuning
• Bitcoin TUI - terminal user interface for Bitcoin Core
• Fuzzor Dashboard - Niklas Goegge's live fuzzing coverage dashboard for Bitcoin Core
• Channel splicing BOLT merged - 8 years from concept to spec, resize channels without closing
• Rare 2-block reorg at height 941,881
• ProductionReady - new "conservative" Bitcoin client, 501(c)(3) from Jimmy Song, Samson Mow, Parker Lewis
• ...and more!

Suggestions are open for additional topics to discuss!

https://github.com/PerthBitDevs/PerthBitDevs/issues/34

https://perth.bitdevs.com.au/

Pick almost any aspect of Bitcoin and prepare to be humbled and ready for a deep rabbit hole.

Currently digging into addr, addrv2, getaddr, et al and boy, there’s much more to these aspects than appears on the surface.

"Token bucket" rate limiters, 6 or 7 different peer types, 24-hour cache for getaddr response, etc etc 😅

Pretty impressed with qwen3.5 35B as a private local model.

Integrated vision, decent tool calling, reasoning/thinking that can be toggled.

It’s slow but has proven adequate in an OpenClaw harness for a few workflows I’ve got - private document interpretation/processing/organisation

I do wonder what the hardware requirements are for such local models to be capable of most general consumer use cases (this model at 35B is not there), probably100s of GB at this point in time?

Remember machine-to-machine payment discussions that were all the rage a few years ago??

Maybe we will finally see some traction in this area with agentic payments!!

Another solid report from

and

When I was younger I read widely but was very much into Tom Clancy, Matthew Reilly et al.. stories that were real or realistic(-ish).

Not much sci-fi or high fantasy (although I smashed Harry Potter like many of the generation)

In the last few years I’ve really enjoyed branching out into these genres.

Iain M. Banks’ Culture Series… the opening scene of Consider Phlebas had me hooked!

And the trilogy of first Mistborn books was 🔥🔥🔥

Open to recommendations

Very happy to renew

for a 3rd year 🎉

Kagi News (free for all) has been a great addition to the product suite in the last year

And looking forward to Search API coming out of beta one day soon too…

I think forging higher living standards in the developed world now means higher expenditure of “intelligence tokens”

(recognising that this just reduces to energy usage, like the original correlation)

Self-hosted (private) agents that can navigate the web (well) to do your bidding would be 🔥🔥🔥

Yep, just ask McKinsey

https://codewall.ai/blog/how-we-hacked-mckinseys-ai-platform

Great Aussie Tallow Soap!!

I don’t really understand all the hype about Karpathy’s autoresearch.. I mean it’s on the path to the self-improving AI flywheel, but it’s like a small step from hyperparameter tuning which we’ve been doing for many years..

.. unrelated, I do wish there were more ML/AI researchers/practitioners posting here on Nostr!