A while ago, I got all excited around the idea of Bitcoin as art . It was such a satisfying perspective that I decided to embrace it and implement a tipping service on the Bitcoin Testnet for this website. A fun experiment, a way to learn something and tinker around with the technology. The best part was: it somehow didn’t require any maintenance. It would work without further tinkering.
Because I can, I recently added support for testnet Bitcoin Lightning payments into this website. The beauty of Freedom and privacy respecting software is that you can do anything you want with it. There are many ways to do it. You can always use a service, provider for that, but the beauty of Bitcoin, the reason it is valuable, is that you can do it yourself.
Bitcoin is this strange thing I don’t fully understand. Going down the rabbit hole, as it is commonly known, I generally feel disappointed. Every bitcoiner I meet is a fanatic insisting that I buy bitcoin instead of a supportive mentor. The best buys of my life took place under guidance not pressure, thus I’m always reluctant to listen. Why are they constantly trying to sell it to you?
The previous posts covered mathematical curiosities. Now we can leave that realm, find an application and turn them into tools to work with elliptic curve cryptography. That means finding and choosing which particular values of the parameters bring us into a curve we can use for cryptography.
When merging the last two posts, I immediately run into serious difficulties. Haskell’s type system just made my work harder(well my ignorance did). Until I could come up with a solution, I could not appreciate how the strictness of the type system actually gives flexibility.