Slated for launch on wednesday May 27, 22:32 CET, the US will again be capable to bring humans into orbital Space. The US had grounded itself for nearly a decade, when on July 8 2011, the Space Shuttle Atlantis made a full stop on the massive Kennedy Space Center landing strip. Now, the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule is ready to go with 2 astronauts to bring a visit to the International Space Station. An historic step in the heritage line that started with the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programmes in the 60s, and continued from there onwards with the Space Shuttle programme. Now the US has embarked on a new, more commercially oriented, model for bringing astronauts into orbital Space. Where previous Human Spaceflight endeavours were fully executed by NASA staff and contractors, now the Human access to orbital space is bought by NASA as a service from SpaceX. I just wished they did the same thing for Deep Space Exploration and had motballed SLS by now.

Human access to Space is a highly prolific achievement in the geopolitical context. I believe, if everything goes well with the Crew Dragon, Soyuz is doomed and tensions between US and Russia will rise further. Europe traditionally has declined to play a role in Human access to Space. From a practical point of view, the economic investment is too big and the economic and scientific returns are too marginal. Yet, from an inspirational and geopolitical dimension, it might just need to step into the game. Let's get Hermes to fly again!

Hello everyone,

I noticed strange activity on the ZapRead LN node.  I have stopped it for the time being.  Apologies for the inconvenience.  I will investigate but hopefully there is no issue.  

It looks like some kind of bot activity making withdraws.  

I'll follow up with an update once I sort it out.

"Laszlo Hanyecz made what is believed to be the first real-world transaction involving cryptocurrency. He told 60 Minutes why he did it..."

Today, 10,000 Bitcoins are worth around 90,000,000 USD.

"Justin Sun disclosed that he is working with law enforcement to chase after the people who forked the blockchain that his newly-bought social network site, Steem, ran on;

• Justin Sun is working with law enforcement over the Steem debacle, he claims.
• He said that those responsible for the fork of the network, Hive, acted illegally.
• Steem has voted in favor of a hard fork to seize $5 million worth of assets.

Justin Sun, the wealthy CEO of the TRON Foundation, has called the cops on those responsible for splitting from his newly-bought blockchain-based social network, Steem.

He’s also called up the law:

“We are working w/ law enforcement & will take actions to get our funds back! We have lots of sympathy for all Steem witnesses who has suffered the same at the hands of the Hive witnesses,” he wrote today.  (..)"

https://decrypt.co/29564/justin-sun-stolen-steem-funds

Yesterday I came up with a quite interesting idea - we have satellites with a Bitcoin node (to be more precise, they transmit data for Bitcoin nodes + users' messages), we have a goTenna, i.e. a project to create a mesh network or a concept of transmitting transactions via radio.

Many of these projects require the preparation of an architecture, which is expensive, at least for me.

Yesterday I accidentally found an interesting project - smspushtx (https://github.com/prusnak/smspushtx) used to send Bitcoin transactions via SMS. You send an SMS to a specific number with the content of the transaction that is being executed.

I thought - a very nice concept, but it has one disadvantage. Centralisation. SMSPushTX uses Nexmo architecture to receive transactions and execute them. What if there is a project where every person can become a "transmitter" for bitcoin transactions?

Concept

How can someone become a "receiver" for SMS? Of course the answer is simple - smartphones with Android. Android is a very powerful system, which can try to compete with full-fledged systems for computers.

With root (administrator privileges) we can download the whole database of SMS from our phone, which is stored in SQLite file.

Thus, on the basis of the SQLite file, we can analyze incoming SMS, extract transactions and, using e.g. Electrum-CLI, send to the Bitcoin network.

Todo ...?

I'll say the subject is interesting. You can use old phones for an alternative form of communication with the network (you don't need the latest flagship, it's important that the phone has a root.

I'm curious how to send transactions in the Lightning network - is it possible in this way? Dunno ...

Since last year, I started a fundraiser on Tallycoin, the Bitcoin Patreon challenger, to support my activities for Space Education & Outreach. It was a bit to try out new Lightning Network services, like ZapRead, and was actually dormant, untill I shared my Blockstream Satellite 2.0 set-up on twitter, and bitcoin twitter got crazy! In addition to new donations, I have gained tens of new followers within a day or so!

After sharing a video, Bitcoin twitter got even more crazy, and I even had the pleasure to interact with a BSV follower, who thought this was all just hobby for fun (I mean, in no way will we get gigameg blocks down every 10 minutes from Space). Well, partly he is right, it is a lot of fun to bring Blockstream Satellite 2.0 up- and running, and doing all kind of experiments.

It is this kind of fun that I also want to bring about in my Space Education & Outreach activities. Whenever this Corona lockdown is over and schools and events are up and running again, I want to go out and tell the public about the wonders of space and the universe. At the same time, I want them to interact with my mobile Blockstream Satellite 2.0 set-up, and my Lacuna Space IOT terminal. I even want to donate such set-ups so they can experiment themselves.

For these things, I look for donations as schools often don't have the means to finance my Space Education & Outreach workshops. So chip in for the crowdfunding at Tallycoin, also with LN microdonations, and make it happen for kids at schools and events!

"Argent is making crypto wallets as simple to use as a regular banking app—but there’s a long road to mass adoption, says founder Itamar Lesuisse.

Argent’s big innovation is to use smart contracts to replicate the features of a conventional banking app like Revolut. “We’ve abstracted all the complexity that comes with a noncustodial wallet,” Lesuisse explains. “So you don't have to backup a seed phrase, you don't have to worry about gas, you can use a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol like Compound in one tap...”

https://decrypt.co/27800/argent-is-bringing-defi-to-a-billion-people

I have been using this wallet myself for several weeks and I can say that it significantly facilitates the use of the ETH network, and no transaction fees of ERC20 tokens provide even more satisfaction. Especially now, when transaction fees are rising. You can also use  Uniswap exchange in a very simple way via argent.

I've had episodes with encryption of the entire hard drive. Now I don't have it encrypted on my computer (but I will be changing my computer) and there is an experience that has changed my life.

On Wednesday I ordered a hard drive to resuscitate my old laptop (to present it). The choice fell on 128GB SSD, which I ordered in the shop - as a new one.

I connected the drive to my laptop and tried to upload Windows (not for me :D). Unfortunately the laptop had a problem with booting the flash drive, but finally I saw a driver charging window. It was weird for me, because there is usually an installer window.

However, the computer restarted all the time and I noticed that it's not from the Flash Drive that the system is booting, but from the disk - WTF I thought.

I plugged the disk into a USB pocket and started to check what is happening. I was surprised to see the data ... and this is someone else's.

The drive was corrupted and did not allow to write the data (in SSD it's a protection). Someone brought the drive to be repaired probably, but the service technician probably decided that the drive was to be thrown away and the store tried to sell it a second time ... with someone's data.

I think encryption is good practice. Ofc. in EU if you buy something by internet, you can return it in 14 days and received money back (any reason ... no reason is also reason :D)

Transaction fees in BTC - ETH - LTC and NANO