feat: add blu-site static site generator and fix language issues

Build a complete static site generator in Lux that faithfully clones
blu.cx (elmstatic). Generates 14 post pages, section indexes, tag pages,
and a home page with snippets grid from markdown content.

Language fixes discovered during development:
- Add \{ and \} escape sequences in string literals (lexer)
- Register String.indexOf and String.lastIndexOf in type checker
- Fix formatter to preserve brace escapes in string literals
- Improve LSP hover to show documentation for let bindings and functions

ISSUES.md documents 15 Lux language limitations found during the project.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>

projects/blu-site/content/articles/2023-03-10-micropayments.md

@@ -0,0 +1,261 @@
+---
+title: Micropayments and the Lightning Network
+description: Content monetization on the internet is broken. Credit card fees prohibit the ability to make small payments for individual pieces of content. Creators have to choose between invading user privacy by selling their data, annoying them with a barrage of ads, or putting up paywalls and forcing them to sign up for subscriptions to continue. The Lightning Network offers a new, alternative monetization strategy in the form of micropayments.
+date: 2023-03-10
+tags: bitcoin
+---
+
+_Content monetization on the internet is broken. Credit card fees prohibit the ability to make small payments for individual pieces of content. Creators have to choose between invading user privacy by selling their data, annoying them with a barrage of ads, or putting up paywalls and forcing them to sign up for subscriptions to continue. The Lightning Network offers a new, alternative monetization strategy in the form of micropayments._
+
+Check out the [Voltage](https://voltage.cloud/) presentation on this topic [here](https://youtu.be/6Vq6foKst54).
+
+_If you're interested in learning more about the history of micropayments, check out [Amber Case's article](https://caseorganic.medium.com/who-killed-the-micropayment-a-history-ec9e6eb39d05) and the [Open Index Protocol's episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_6cLtpf3AE)_
+
+## Before Bitcoin
+
+Before the World Wide Web, the internet, or even the personal computer revolution, the concept of making tiny payments in exchange for digital content had already been conceptualized. The term “micropayment” can be traced back to Ted Nelson as early as 1960, when he began brainstorming his ideas for what a globally accessible, computer-based repository of human knowledge could look like, and coined many other terms and ideas that are used on the web today, like “hypertext” and “hypermedia”. While often failing to implement his own vision for the web (and being vocally regretful of how the web took shape), others took many of his ideas and built them into what we know it as today.
+
+In 1992, Tim Berners-Lee, creator of HTTP and HTML, released his [second version of HTTP](https://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/HTRESP.html) and the first reference to the status codes now in common use. Among them was a code that Berners-Lee and others thought would one day be used to pay for digital content: <code>402 payment required</code>. Sadly, this status code is officially [“reserved for future use”](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7231#section-6.5.2), as the various attempts to make micropayments on the web, from its inception, failed to come to fruition. Over 30 years after the invention of the internet, we’re still waiting for one of its major original visions to be fulfilled.
+
+Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994 to guide the development of the web, and micropayments were a major consideration from the start. In 1995, Phillip Hallam-Baker, who wrote a number of RFCs on internet security, drafted the [Micro Payment Transfer Protocol (MPTP)](https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-mptp), which never seems to have been implemented. It offers a number of insights on the nature of micropayments that are as relevant today as they were at the founding of the internet:
+
+> There is a large interest in payment systems which support charging relatively small amounts for a unit of information. Here the speed and cost of processing payments are critical factors in assessing a schemes usability. Fast user response is essential if the user is to be encouraged to make a large number of purchases.
+
+A critical limitation of MPTP, however, was that a third party, referred to as a _broker_, was explicitly required by the protocol.
+
+At the time, there was no way to make a digital payment without a trusted mediator, so any attempt at a protocol for micropayments had to be developed with some sort of custodianship of the money in mind.
+
+The W3C continued to push for micropayments for a while, in 1998 publishing an [overview](https://www.w3.org/ECommerce/Micropayments/) of micropayments and suggesting MPTP as a practical approach and noting:
+
+> Micropayments have to be suitable for the sale of non-tangible goods over the Internet […] With the rising importance of intangible (e.g. information) goods in global economies and their instantaneous delivery at negligible cost, "conventional" payment methods tend to be more expensive than the actual product.
+
+This echoes Hallam-Baker’s second major concern of transaction costs imposed by technological or overhead costs of available payment mechanisms. His first concern, the need for a “fast user response”, is often overlooked in discussions about the viability of micropayments. But one astute observer, who would later go on to have a strong influence on the development of Bitcoin, was already thinking in depth about this problem. Nick Szabo, creator of the concept of smart contracts and Bitgold, wrote [“Micropayments and Mental Transaction Costs”](https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/micropayments-and-mental-transaction-costs.pdf) in 1999. Szabo states that the _primary_ reason for the failure of micropayments to take hold was not due to technological or overhead costs. It was due to the _mental transaction cost_ experienced by the user of having to decide whether a purchase was worth the price for every interaction on the internet.
+
+> […] customer mental transaction costs are significant and ubiquitous, so much so that in real world circumstance cognitive costs usually well outweigh technological costs, and indeed technological resources are best applied towards the objective of reducing cognitive costs. […] Micropayment technology efforts which stress technological savings over cognitive savings will become irrelevant.
+
+A web based on micropayments implies frequent purchases, which implies decision fatigue. It is likely the case that for most micropayments, the mental transaction cost incurred by having to make constant choices about purchases likely outweighs the value of what they’re paying for.
+
+Large companies like Compaq and IBM, and startups like Pay2See, Millicent, iPin, and others, tried their hand at reducing these technological and mental transaction costs for micropayments in the early days, and it was still an assumption that the concept would be a lasting feature from the start.
+
+Perhaps the most notable of these companies, which would go on to have a lasting impact on the Bitcoin community, was DigiCash, spearheaded by David Chaum. Chaum had already formalized many ideas for a [blockchain-like data structure](https://nakamotoinstitute.org/literature/computer-systems-by-mutually-suspicious-groups/) and [secure digital cash](https://nakamotoinstitute.org/literature/blind-signatures/) in 1982 before going on to found DigiCash in 1989. DigiCash implemented Chaum’s proposals, allowing users to withdraw money (called “eCash”) from a bank and make untraceable digital micropayments with it. Unfortunately, only one bank ever implemented eCash, and in 1998 the company went bankrupt.
+
+Other micropayment efforts were also dissolving around the same time, and the W3C itself [closed their contributions to micropayment activity](https://www.w3.org/ECommerce/Micropayments/) in 1998.
+
+The dot-com crash was in full swing, and micropayments were one of the ideas that crashed the hardest. It was a good time to be a critic. In 2000, writer Clay Shirky wrote [“The Case Against Micropayments”](http://mx.thirdvisit.co.uk/2002/10/04/theacaseaagainstamicropayments/) in which he boldly declared:
+
+> Micropayment systems have not failed because of poor implementation; they have failed because they are a bad idea. Furthermore, since their weakness is systemic, they will continue to fail in the future.
+
+His primary argument for their fundamental flaw was not technological or infrastructural — but instead echoed Nick Szabo one year prior: decision fatigue. He goes on:
+
+> In particular, users want predictable and simple pricing. Micropayments, meanwhile, waste the users’ mental effort in order to conserve cheap resources, by creating many tiny, unpredictable transactions. Micropayments thus create in the mind of the user both anxiety and confusion, characteristics that users have not heretofore been known to actively seek out.
+
+Shirky went on to predict three methods of payment that would become dominant on the web which did not suffer from the decision fatigue problem: aggregation (bundling low-value things into a single higher-value transaction), subscription, and subsidy (getting someone other than the user to pay for the content — today this has manifested itself as the ad model).
+
+By the end of the dot-com crash, Shirky’s predictions were looking more salient. Credit cards, with their infrastructure costs prohibiting payments of less than $1, had become the de-facto method of payment, and passion for the micropayments project was losing steam. What was a self-evident and exciting prospect for the web’s future faded against the backdrop of its increasingly centralized, surveilled, and ad-driven successor — Web 2.0.
+
+## Bitcoin and the Centralized Web
+
+> We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.
+
+— Satoshi Nakamoto
+
+> The idea driving 402 was that it’s obvious that support for payments should be a first-class concept on the web and it’s obvious that there should be a lot of direct commerce taking place on the web […] In fact, what emerged is a single dominant business model which is advertising. That leads to a lot of centralisation, because you get the highest cost per clicks and with the largest platforms.
+
+— John Collison, President of Stripe
+
+Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin whitepaper near the end of 2008, aptly timed in the midst of the U.S. Housing Crisis. He released the original code for it shortly after. Bitcoin was a massive breakthrough, both in the history of computer science and the history of money, and spurred a new wave of interest in the possibilities of the internet. For the first time, there was a permissionless way to transfer value with an _internet native_ currency, without all the inelegant, bloated infrastructure needed to use credit cards.
+
+For awhile, the price of bitcoin was so small that some people did advocate its use for micropayment systems, despite Satoshi admitting that it wasn’t (yet) a great solution to that problem:
+
+> Bitcoin isn't currently practical for very small micropayments. Not for things like pay per search or per page view without an aggregating mechanism, not things needing to pay less than 0.01.
+
+But the limits imposed by fees didn’t stop people from dreaming about new possibilities enabled by it. Marc Andreessen, creator of the first popular web browser, [gave the examples](https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/why-bitcoin-matters/) of content monetization and fighting spam:
+
+> One reason media businesses such as newspapers struggle to charge for content is because they need to charge either all (pay the entire subscription fee for all the content) or nothing (which then results in all those terrible banner ads everywhere on the web). All of a sudden, with Bitcoin, there is an economically viable way to charge arbitrarily small amounts of money per article, or per section, or per hour, or per video play, or per archive access, or per news alert.
+
+This statement is not true today of course (at least, as far as Layer 1 is concerned), but the fees in 2014 were low enough that it was actually possible to build around the concept of micropayments. One interesting project built around this time was [Bitmonet](https://www.pcworld.com/article/447463/news-junkies-opensource-project-links-bitcoin-with-publishers.html), which allowed users to choose their subscription level by paying 10 cents for just one article, 15 cents for an hour of unlimited access to the website, or 20 cents for a day pass. Unfortunately transaction fees are [no longer low enough](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html#alltime) to be able to allow for arbitrarily small micropayments, and although the issue was clearly on Satoshi’s mind from the earliest days of Bitcoin, it wasn’t designed to specifically address the micropayment problem.
+
+### Subscriptions and Ads
+
+Shirky’s predictions for content monetization were pretty accurate, particularly when it came to subscription and ad models.
+
+In the ad model, content was subsidized by an advertiser, typically through a third-party. From 2014 to 2022, Google and Facebook essentially [held a duopoly](https://www.ft.com/content/4ff64604-a421-422c-9239-0ca8e5133042) over the online ad market as the third-party mediator between advertisers and content creators. The two companies (and in reality, most of big tech) [collected enormous amounts of personal information](https://www.security.org/resources/data-tech-companies-have/) and simply asked their users to entrust them with the safety of their data, despite numerous breaches. This [information is used](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/02/16/what-does-big-tech-actually-do-with-your-data/?sh=6a79a424515f) to show targeted ads for products people are more likely to buy. Companies often refer to this model as “free — with ads”. But in reality, users do pay a price. The ad model forces users to trade two things in exchange for the content:
+
+1. Their data, forcing them to give it to third parties, which, as Nick Szabo famously stated, are [security holes](https://nakamotoinstitute.org/literature/trusted-third-parties/).
+2. Their attention. There is a reason for the phrase “pay attention”, and it’s well illustrated here. More time users spend on a site with ads, the more money advertisers, ad platforms, and the content creator makes. Thus a creator is economically incentivized to show as many ads as they possibly can without annoying the user so much that they leave the platform. The currency of the “free with ads” web is your attention. You are the product.
+
+What’s clear in the ad model is that the _consumer_ becomes a second-class citizen. Since a layer of abstraction exists between a creator’s revenue and the end user, making a great user experience is not the highest priority. And as more and more [consumers use ad-blockers](https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users), content creators are forced to get more aggressive with ads, making using the web a more degraded experience for everyone.
+
+Subscriptions also rose in popularity. Customers showed they were much more willing to pay for bulk access to licensed content like movies and music on a regular basis instead of paying to own individual songs. Although a more honest business model, they can also be very problematic when they are the sole option for payment. And in recent years, as these services become increasingly competitive, more and more people find themselves suffering from subscription fatigue. The inability to access just one (or a few) specific news articles, movies, or songs at any given time forces a suboptimal choice of trying to pay in bulk and optimize the most content for a given subscription.
+
+Take streaming services, for example. Today there are so many streaming services, all battling for content licensing, that users end up paying multiple subscriptions to try to capture a greater subset of the movies and TV shows they want. But all they _really_ want is to watch an incredibly small subset of what’s offered by any given service. When they pick a service for a movie or show they want, it often doesn’t stay long, and will be bounced around unpredictably from company to company as licensing expires and gets updated.
+
+News articles are another example. Companies like The New York Times or The Economist entice readers by allowing them to read just a few seconds of an article before blocking the content with a subscription paywall. Even more so with newspapers than with movies, customers are far more likely to want to pay a small amount for a single article of their choice than for a package deal to articles they don’t want.
+
+While subscriptions offer a more straightforward approach than ads, using them in practice often makes for what is an increasingly costly and stressful management game.
+
+When Clay Shirky was writing about the issues of mental transaction costs, he was writing before the mental costs of subscriptions and ads began to weigh down on people as they do today. Bitcoin gave a solution to the problem of an internet-native currency, but slow processing and high fees quickly became a prohibitive problem for a system supporting micropayments. One more major innovation was needed before true implementations of micropayments technology could take off.
+
+## The Lightning Network
+
+> A decentralized system is proposed whereby transactions are sent over a network of micropayment channels (a.k.a. payment channels or transaction channels) whose transfer of value occurs off-blockchain. — Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja, The Bitcoin Lightning Network
+
+In February 2015, [“The Bitcoin Lightning Network”](https://lightning.network/docs/) was published, representing perhaps the biggest advancement in Bitcoin since its inception. Through the clever use of Bitcoin properties, a series of payment “channels” could be constructed such that transactions did not have to be announced to the blockchain but could still retain the lack of trust in a third party, using the Bitcoin blockchain itself for dispute resolution. Payments can either be made directly between two channel partners, or they can be routed across a series of partners, so long as there exists a path of connected partners between sender and recipient. Because of this, it was no longer necessary to pay fees to miners for every transaction, and payments could be settled near-instantly. Since the primary reason micropayments weren’t viable on Bitcoin in the first place was due to high fees and slow transaction processing, the Lightning Network (abbreviated LN or called “lightning” for short) opened up a whole new world of possibilities that are just beginning to be explored.
+
+### Methods
+
+The smallest unit of bitcoin is a satoshi (often abbreviated to sat). One bitcoin is equal to 100,000,000 sat. At [current conversion rates](https://www.coinbase.com/converter/sats/usd), 1 satoshi is equal to $0.00023, meaning that the smallest payments that can be made (assuming no routing fees) are currently at a granularity of about _two ten-thousandths_ of a penny, a finer granularity than was ever seriously considered by the web’s early founders. Technically, even finer granularity payments of a thousandth of a satoshi (called millisatoshi, abbreviated msat) can be made within the confines of the Lightning Network, but any sub-satoshi amounts will be rounded down if the money is ever moved back to the blockchain. Therefore, all of the methods of payment discussed below can be used to make micropayments, but different mechanisms allow for a variety of [novel payment schemes](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/can-bitcoin-fix-micropayments) to be set up. I won’t go into the technical details of how the Lightning Network works here. My intention is to provide a high level overview of some ways micropayments can be made with it, and hopefully to spark people’s imaginations to the possibilities.
+
+### Invoice
+
+The most basic way to make a payment on the Lightning Network is through the [Bolt-11](https://www.bolt11.org/) invoice. This is an encoded string of information containing everything necessary for the payment to be made. The invoice is generated by the recipient and then sent to the payee. Typically, from a user’s perspective, the payment string is encoded as a QR code which the payee can scan.
+
+_Benefits:_
+
+- Least abstractions from a technological level
+- Available by default in LN implementations
+- Payments occur directly node to node
+
+_Drawbacks:_
+
+- A recipient having to first send an invoice can make for awkward UX
+- Both nodes must be online for a payment to be made
+- Invoices are non-reusable and must be freshly generated every time
+
+Most of the ways to pay on LN today either simply use Bolt-11 invoices or some abstraction of them under the hood.
+
+### Keysend
+
+An alternative to invoices are [keysend](https://voltage.cloud/blog/bitcoin-lightning-network/keysend-payments-explained-voltage-technical-series/) payments, which allow for payments directly between two nodes without an invoice. Senders only need a node’s public key. One crucial downside to keysend is the lack of a proof of payment, making it unsuitable for merchants or other systems that rely on proof of purchase. For content monetization, however, keysend pairs nicely with the concept of [value4value](https://value4value.info/): a model which gives content away freely and asks the user to give back the value they felt they received in turn (and requires no proof of payment).
+
+_Benefits:_
+
+- No invoices required, payment can be sent instantly
+- Available by default in LND, Eclair, and Core-Lightning (but must be manually turned on)
+- Direct node to node payments
+
+_Drawbacks:_
+
+- No proof of payment limits scope of use
+
+_Possible micropayment use cases:_
+
+- Streaming sats (Boosting) while listening/watching/reading content
+- Micro tipping
+- [Boostagrams](https://podnews.net/article/how-to-earn-bitcoin-from-your-podcast)
+
+_Examples:_
+
+- [Podcast Index](https://podcastindex.org/)/Podcasting 2.0
+
+### LNURL
+
+[LNURL](https://github.com/lnurl/luds) is a set of standards designed to expand the capabilities of LN by providing a specification for “out-of-band” or third party communication between nodes. LNURL standardizes a whole set of LN-based interactions for developers. For example, the [LNURL-Pay](https://github.com/lnurl/luds/blob/luds/06.md) spec defines how services can create static QR codes that can be paid multiple times. Under the hood, the service is generating a new invoice every time a payment attempt is made.
+
+_Benefits:_
+
+- Static pay/withdrawal links
+- LN based authentication schemes
+- [Many more](https://github.com/lnurl/luds)
+
+_Drawbacks:_
+
+- LNURL operates “out-of-band” meaning that there is a service between LN nodes creating invoices on a node’s behalf. This can mean that the service must be trusted to stay online in addition to the nodes involved in the payment.
+
+_Possible micropayment use cases:_
+
+- Private, printable, reusable QR code for donations on content
+- Reusability allows for payments to be made even when embedded in images and videos
+- Withdrawals for content creators who’ve accumulated sats on a given platform
+- Donations to protestors: Anyone can hold up a sign a protest movement captured on video, and sympathizers can easily donate. To quote Marc Andreessen from [“Why Bitcoin Matters”](https://a16z.com/2014/01/21/why-bitcoin-matters-nyt/) in 2014:
+  > Think about the implications for protest movements. Today protesters want to get on TV so people learn about their cause. Tomorrow they’ll want to get on TV because that’s how they’ll raise money, by literally holding up signs that let people anywhere in the world who sympathize with them send them money on the spot. Bitcoin is a financial technology dream come true for even the most hardened anticapitalist political organizer.
+
+_Examples:_
+
+- [Cointrain](https://satoshkey.com/site/cointrain)
+- [Lightning addresses](https://lightningaddress.com/)
+- [List of Awesome LNURL things](https://github.com/lnurl/awesome-lnurl)
+
+### LSAT
+
+> Many speculate that [the 402 status code] was intended to be
+> used by some sort of digital cash or micropayment scheme, which didn't yet
+> exist at the time of the initial HTTP specification drafting.
+>
+> However, several decades later, we _do_ have a widely used digital cash system:
+> Bitcoin! On top of that, a new network oriented around micropayments has also
+> arisen: the Lightning Network.
+>
+> — Olaoluwa Osuntokun, [LSAT: Authentication and Payments for the Lightning-Native Web](https://lightning.engineering/posts/2020-03-30-lsat/)
+
+[Lightning Service Authentication Tokens (LSATs)](https://lsat.tech/) are a protocol created for authentication and paid APIs that leverage the forgotten HTTP error code 402 discussed earlier in conjunction with the lightning network. LSATs can be thought of like reusable tickets that need to be paid for to gain access to a particular resource. But the powerful thing here is that _rules_ can be applied to modify access to resources on a given site, and the tickets can be reused on subsequent visits to the site.
+
+_Benefits:_
+
+- Extremely flexible
+- Reusable
+- Allows for highly granular and fine-grained access to digital resources
+- Finally makes use of 402 error code!
+
+_Drawbacks:_
+
+- Difficult version control
+- No current methods for efficient management (Could be solved by browser extension such as [Alby](https://github.com/getAlby/lightning-browser-extension/issues/9))
+- Underutilized/underdeveloped despite being around for awhile
+
+_Possible micropayment use cases:_
+
+- Pay for single video/podcast/song/article and remember it on subsequent visits
+- Metered subscriptions of your choice
+- Custom expiration dates on content
+
+_Examples:_
+
+- [Aperture](https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/lsat/aperture)
+- [Boltwall](https://medium.com/tierion/boltwall-middleware-for-lightning-payments-authorization-e3a1dbb54a4c)
+- [lsat-js](https://github.com/Tierion/lsat-js)
+- [Alby Mixtape](https://mixtape.albylabs.com/)
+- [Nakaphoto](https://nakaphoto.vercel.app/)
+
+### WebLN
+
+[WebLN](https://www.webln.guide/introduction/readme) is a standard for abstracting away LN interactions by relying on a client (such as a browser extension) to communicate with a WebLN enabled site. The client must have the ability to interact with the user’s lightning node. For example, a site might use WebLN to request a payment from the user when a button is clicked. When clicked, the user’s client extension will popup, providing whatever payment details the WebLN enabled site sent to the client in a simple to use interface. WebLN greatly simplifies the payment flow for browser based interactions, where user’s no longer have to pull out their phones to make QR code based payments.
+
+_Benefits:_
+
+- Better UX
+- Simple implementation
+- No third party required
+- Compatible with LNURL
+
+_Drawbacks:_
+
+- Browser client required
+- Few clients in use
+- If user doesn’t have a client installed, fallback options (such as LNURL or invoices) must be provided
+
+_Possible micropayment use cases:_
+
+- Anything an invoice, LNURL, or Keysend can do!
+
+### Projects Using Micropayments
+
+Finally, here is a short list of projects using micropayments that I found interesting:
+
+- [micropay.ai](https://micropay.ai/): Micropayments to generate images using DALLE-2
+- [WebLN Experiments](https://webln.twentyuno.net/): A collection of various WebLN demos
+- [LN VPN](https://lnvpn.net/): Pay as you go VPN service, pay as little as $0.1 for 1 hour
+- [LNCal](https://lncal.com/): Allow people to pay you in bitcoin to schedule meetings
+- [BTCMap](https://btcmap.org/): Map of locations accepting bitcoin. Uses Boosting for favored payments
+- [Lightning Video](https://lightning.video/?type=top&nsfw=false&all=true): Like Youtube, but uses bitcoin micropayments instead of ads
+- [Sats4Likes](https://www.sats4likes.com/): Get micropaid for micro tasks
+- [PeerTube Lightning Plugin](https://p2ptube.us/): Pay PeerTube creators with LN
+- [Stacker News](https://stacker.news/): Reddit-style discussions with micropayment tipping
+- [Bookmark.org](https://bookmark.org/): Pay to archive links
+- [THNDR Games](https://www.thndr.games/): Earn bitcoin while playing games
+
+See [bolt.fun](http://bolt.fun), the [Lightning App Directory](https://dev.lightning.community/lapps/index.html), or [Lightning Landscape](https://www.lightning-landscape.net/projects) for a larger list of projects being built on Lightning.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+Micropayments have arrived on the web, and this article just scratches the surface of what’s possible. While there are significant technological and mental barriers remaining, I hope the above examples show how far we’ve already come -- and how much further we can go -- for a cleaner, freer, and more expressive internet.

projects/blu-site/content/articles/2023-10-31-payjoin-better-future.md

@@ -0,0 +1,382 @@
+---
+title: Payjoin for a Better Bitcoin Future
+description: Payjoin is a protocol that uses a simple, clever trick in the way Bitcoin creates transactions to solve many of its problems at once.
+date: 2023-10-31
+tags: payjoin bitcoin
+---
+
+Payjoin is a protocol that uses a simple, clever trick in the way Bitcoin creates transactions to solve many of its problems at once. It was created to solve Bitcoin's biggest [privacy problem](https://decrypt.co/107376/bitcoin-privacy-problem-what-cypherpunks-are-doing), but can also assist with its [scaling problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem), and help people [save on fees](https://github.com/orgs/payjoin/discussions/91#discussion-5439172). It's particularly compatible with Lightning Network Nodes, as it currently has a liveness requirement for the receiver, meaning they must be online at the moment they are being sent money (just like a Lightning Node). In the future, even this requirement will be eliminated and it can be used offline. It can be [easily integrated into wallets](https://geyser.fund/project/payjoin#:~:text=Payjoin%20is%20easy%20to%20integrate%2C%20but%20can%20only%20take%20off%20when%20software%20supports%20sending%20and%20receiving%20via%20the%20BIP%2078%20spec), it can be used to [open many lightning channels at once](https://github.com/payjoin/nolooking), and it's usage can be made passive, so that you can receive the benefits of Payjoin without even knowing you're using it. The privacy benefits of payjoin cascade, so that everyone would see privacy gains even if only a [minority of people used it](https://reyify.com/blog/payjoin#conclusion). And, perhaps best of all, payjoin doesn't require a hard or soft fork. It can be and is used on Bitcoin today, and it could be used on Bitcoin from the very first version of the software.
+
+Payjoin is a derivative of [Coinjoin](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/CoinJoin), which is an older, more interactive protocol, meaning the user must be heavily engaged with it to use it, which necessarily drives down usability and inhibits adoption. Somehow, despite this, Coinjoin has seen much higher adoption than payjoin so far, despite the more obvious benefits and ease of use with payjoin. A complex, unclear path forward for developers inhibits adoption by wallet software.
+
+Payjoin has been around for a few years, and given:
+
+1. The _many_ benefits listed above
+2. The ability for a passive, nonintrusive user interface
+3. The simplicity for wallet providers to integrate it
+
+Why is [adoption so low](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/PayJoin_adoption)?
+
+Especially compared to the far more interactive, difficult to use, and expensive Coinjoin protocol?
+
+In this article, we'll look at current attacks on Bitcoin privacy, the history of payjoin from the perspective of privacy, how it works and how it can provide so many benefits with no changes to Bitcoin, and the current state of adoption. If payjoin can radically improve privacy, scaling, and fee issues with Bitcoin, the low effort required for wallets to integrate it would be well worth it.
+
+## Why Privacy Matters for Bitcoin
+
+Before discussing the importance of payjoin, we must understand the importance of privacy. If you don't need convincing on this front, feel free to skip down to the history and explanation of payjoin.
+
+In Western democracies, the prime importance of privacy is difficult to communicate, as its benefits still seem invisible to people. It is harder to convincingly explain to someone why privacy matters (especially in the face of higher cost or greater inconvenience) if they've never felt the often terrible consequences of bad actors having too much information about them, perhaps because it requires people to think long-term about the consequences of these invasions.
+
+Still, privacy seems to be something more and more people want in theory, but they typically do little to achieve it unless the barriers are extremely low and convenient. Therefore, technologies that wish to protect people's privacy should be designed to do so with minimal requirements for interaction and inconvenience for the user.
+
+### Fungibility
+
+Privacy is not the only problem payjoin can help solve, but it is the problem it was created to solve. The lack of privacy by default on Bitcoin has long been lamented, and one taken very seriously in the Bitcoin community. Bitcoin was designed to be directly peer-to-peer and censorship resistant. But the ability to track owners of future payments once coins have been linked to an identity allows for discrimination. This destroys fungibility -- or the degree to which one of a currency's individual units are indistinguishable from another of the same unit -- which is one of the primary properties of a good money.
+
+If buyers can be tracked, not only can coins that are currently owned by illicit actors be rejected, but coins that _have ever_ been used for illicit purposes can be marked as such and be rejected by merchants, nevermind whether the current owners obtained them through perfectly legitimate means. Imagine not being able to buy milk at the grocery store because the dollars you have were once-upon-a-time used to buy drugs, would it be fair to you to be discriminated against by having them say "your money is no good here"? Should you be punished for someone else's crime? And what would that do to how you treat those dollars? It would make them worthless as your spending power is diminished by owning them, and make some dollars (the "non-tainted" dollars) more valuable than other dollars, which of course shouldn't make sense. One dollar should always equal one dollar, no matter what individual one dollar bill is used to represent it, or the ability of the dollar to do its job of transferring value is impeded.
+
+### The Criminal Myth
+
+It is often said by Bitcoin and privacy detractors that privacy is for criminals. This is the familiar "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" logic, which is easily refuted:
+
+- Few people would be okay with an internet live stream of them taking a shower or using the bathroom being broadcast. Is that because it's wrong? This is to point out that _everyone_ has something to hide, and hiding things isn't inherently wrong.
+- More broadly, the government is charged with providing the legal basis for what's wrong, but that definition is always subject to change. If people aren't free to have privacy, then they really aren't free at all, as their actions will be severely restricted by perceived social, if not governmental, restrictions. People are judged and attacked for doing perfectly legal things by others all the time. [Privacy is the power to choose who you reveal yourself to](https://nakamotoinstitute.org/cypherpunk-manifesto/).
+
+Aside from this naive and self-evidently illogical argument, criminals, unlike most law-abiding citizens, are willing to accept high costs to obtain privacy, so measures to hurt privacy-by-default hurt regular people far more than they hurt criminals. This would be the case even if governments weren't doing a poor job of actually using their new privacy-restricting measures to actually catch criminals en masse, but instead to "pick and choose" and selectively spy on the citizenry at their will. If a citizen says something those in power don't like, and what those in power don't like is always in flux, it can selectively decide to target and hurt them.
+
+Finally, the desire for privacy isn't merely the fear of government overreach. It is a practical safety or reputational concern. If someone can find out how much money you have and where you live, how hard is it to steal from you? Now consider the number of places you entered your address, payment details, pictures, on the internet. Do you trust every one of those sites to keep your information secure? You shouldn't, because even the best fail, and criminals are paying large sums of money to hackers who exploit weaknesses for this valuable information.
+
+### Privacy and Democracy
+
+A prerequisite to control in any totalitarian state is _knowledge_ of the speech, access to information, and financial activity of its citizens. Without it, it can't know what to attack, shut down, or manipulate to advance its narrative or further its control. If it doesn't reliably have access to this information, it becomes difficult to target citizens on a whim. In totalitarian societies of the past, such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, privacy was eroded by ensuring the indoctrination of family members who would report on unfavorable opinions in private conversations, destroying webs of trust in families. When this same erosion of privacy occurs with money, its effects can be even more powerful than with speech. Cutting off the source of funding can be a very effective means of disbanding political dissent.
+
+### Bitcoin Privacy is Under Attack
+
+> Never waste an opportunity afforded by a good crisis
+
+-- Attributed to Nicollo Machiavelli
+
+It is in the name of combating criminals, in this case Hamas terrorists, that new regulation is opportunistically being proposed to make privacy-preserving methods in Bitcoin illegal.
+
+On October 10, 2023, an article was published by the [Wall Street Journal](https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/militants-behind-israel-attack-raised-millions-in-crypto-b9134b7a) reporting that Hamas acquired $130 million dollars of funding by means of cryptocurrency. One week later, senator Elizabeth Warren [wrote a letter](https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2023.10.17%20Letter%20to%20Treasury%20and%20White%20House%20re%20Hamas%20crypto%20security.pdf) to President Biden urging him to address questions regarding his administration's response to the "use of cryptocurrency by terrorist organizations" by October 31, citing the WSJ article as evidence of the urgent need for such regulation. The letter obtained the signatures of 29 of the 100 senators, and 76 members of the House. Curiously, on October 19th, just two days after the letter was sent, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network [published a proposal](https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/federal_register_notices/2023-10-19/FinCEN_311MixingNPRM_FINAL.pdf) for regulating cryptocurrency mixing due to the risk of money laundering. It lists, among the methods used to obscure transactions:
+
+> _Using programmatic or algorithmic code to coordinate, manage, or manipulate the structure of a transaction:_ This method involves the use of software that coordinates two or more persons’ transactions together in order to obfuscate the individual unique
+> transactions by providing multiple potential outputs from a coordinated input, decreasing the probability of determining both intended persons for each unique transaction.
+
+This definition includes Coinjoin and Payjoin, although _using algorithmic code_ is broad enough to include any transaction, and therefore justify at-will censorship.
+
+But the WSJ article, which provided the sentiment for the letter and attempted to justify the regulation, horribly misinterpreted the data -- the actual dollar amount that was connected with Hamas was [$450,000](https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/cryptocurrency-terrorism-financing-accuracy-check/). Cryptocurrency is nowhere near a major source of Hamas' funding. Hamas itself explicitly stated that they did not want funding via Bitcoin due to its traceability.
+
+The irony of the proposed regulation, then, is that its effects will be minimally impactful to the terrorist organization that is the justification for its existence, but maximally impactful to everyone else who wants to use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
+
+There can be little doubt that the battle for the right to privacy in Bitcoin has arrived in the U.S., and it has predictably masked itself in the guise of national security against foreign adversaries. It's more important now than ever to understand the need for and use of privacy-preserving techniques on Bitcoin to combat the ongoing attempts to chip away at it.
+
+> [We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any.](https://nakamotoinstitute.org/cypherpunk-manifesto/)
+
+## 1. How Transactions Work
+
+To understand the need for payjoin and how it works, it's crucial to understand how transactions work. Each transaction in Bitcoin is a combination of _inputs_ and _outputs_. Outputs define which public key or "address" the bitcoin is being sent to. Inputs define which "sources" or _previous_ outputs are used in creating the new outputs for a transaction. It is helpful to think of this as an analogy to how we use different denominations of cash to pay for things. Imagine you need to pay $25 to a restaurant for dinner, plus a $5 tip for the waiter, for a total of $30 (these are your outputs, two different "chunks" of money going to two different people -- the restaurant and the waiter).
+
+How would you pay it? Let's say you have the following bills available (these are your inputs):
+
+- One $20
+- Two $10's
+- Six $5's
+
+To construct this transaction, you could use one $20 bill and two $5 bills, one being for the waiter:
+
+![Restaurant payment](/images/articles/payjoin-better-future/25-5-tx.webp)
+
+Note one important way in which our cash analogy breaks down: the $20 and the $5 _merge_ into one "bill". This would be more analagous to melting individual pieces of gold into one bigger piece in order to be able to pay the exact amount required, instead of handing over multiple pieces. Bitcoin allows us to split and merge inputs however we'd like to create the appropriate output.
+
+You might also use two $10 bills and two $5 bills like so:
+
+![Restaurant payment](/images/articles/payjoin-better-future/10-5-tx.webp)
+
+You could even use your six $5 bills:
+
+![Restaurant payment](/images/articles/payjoin-better-future/5-5-tx.webp)
+
+Before they're spent on something, the individual bitcoin "bills" you have are called _unspent transaction outputs_, or UTXOs. This name is confusing at first, but makes perfect sense if you think about it. They are the "results" (_outputs_) of transactions that haven't yet been used up by _other_ transactions. A transaction output that is _unspent_ is a transaction output that you _can spend_. Therefore, in effect, UTXOs become like the bills of cash in your wallet. After they're spent, they become inputs to another transaction's outputs (the cash in someone else's wallet), and are no longer spendable by you, but the _record_ of the fact that you spent that bill to them remains on the blockchain.
+
+Unlike cash, for a Bitcoin transaction to be valid, we need the approval of the sender. This is done with the sender's _digital signature_, which serves as proof of their intent to spend the coin. A valid signature (that is, a signature corresponding to the address of the UTXO) needs to be present on each UTXO that the sender is trying to spend as an input to a new transaction. The presence of a signature "unlocks" the UTXO and signals that it was its owner's intent to spend it in the proposed transaction.
+
+Here is an example of a real transaction that had 1 confirmation while writing this:
+
+![Example of a real transaction with 1 input and three outputs, one being a fee](/images/articles/payjoin-better-future/real-transaction-1.webp)
+
+[(Link)](https://mempool.space/tx/6a1f3e9b12a3e4f947b471a290c8c90681e1fe6e9869245dbc253b4015dc3bf6)
+
+As we can see, the above transaction consumes one input and creates two outputs, one being the actual payment, and the other almost certainly being change sent back to the spender. A fee equal to the sum of the inputs minus outputs is also paid to the miner.
+
+This "UTXO model" is very powerful. Since every transaction has inputs and outputs, and since the outputs of one transaction become the inputs of another transaction later, we end up with a long chain of transactions, and are able to track bitcoins' transfer of ownership from transaction to transaction all the way back to a miner. Since Bitcoin has a limited supply, and derives its crucially non-inflationary properties from this fact, it's important to be able to audit how much is in circulation or "unspent" at any given time, which the UTXO model allows for.
+
+This is the crux of the privacy problem with Bitcoin. _Every transaction has a history_. All the bitcoin that came to you and anywhere you send it to can be _easily_ tracked. The system was explicitly designed to support this, albeit not with the intention of tracking individuals. In this system, your only true bet is to never link your identity with your public key, which, in our age of mass surveillance, can be very hard.
+
+## The Historical Origins of Payjoin
+
+### Satoshi's Modest Mistake
+
+When Satoshi published the [whitepaper](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf) in 2008, he recognized the privacy problems that came from the requirement of announcing every transaction to the public, and keeping it private.
+
+He had two recommendations to avoid linking an identity with transactions:
+
+1. Keep public keys anonymous
+2. Don't reuse public keys
+
+This is good advice, but for 1) it is very difficult to keep our identities completely isolated from our payments without extreme caution when making payments online. And for 2) even without public key reuse, if transactions spending from multiple keys are spent together in subsequent payments, it is not too difficult for a tracker to put together which keys belong to which person. These suggestions, even when combined, make for a very difficult to enact and imperfect privacy solution.
+
+After these suggestions, Satoshi then makes a modest mistake, exaggerating the weakness of his own system:
+
+> As an additional firewall, a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner. Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input transactions, which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner. The risk is that if the owner of a key is revealed, linking could reveal other transactions that belonged to the same owner.
+
+Satoshi's assumption, and indeed, all the examples shown so far, presume that all the inputs in a transaction belong to the same owner. In other words, it assumes all the "bills" come from your wallet, which is a fair assumption, but one that isn't _necessarily_ true. This assumption is called the [common input ownership heuristic](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common-input-ownership_heuristic). It is almost always true for any given transaction, and it is the basis of chain surveillance.
+
+### Coinjoin
+
+In early 2013, Gregory Maxwell played a fun game in the [bitcointalk.org forum](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=139581.0). He provided one of his UTXOs (worth 1 BTC) and an address of his, and asked people to create new transactions using that UTXO as an input. If they proposed a transaction where they sent less than 1 BTC back to him, that meant they were trying to take from him, if more, they were giving to him. If they used the transaction to send exactly 1 BTC back to him, however, they were simply using his address in the transaction to increase privacy by making it _look_ as though it was one of the spender's UTXOs, even though it wasn't. When one of Maxwell's inputs was consumed and sent back to one of his addresses, he posted another one so someone could continue the game. From the perspective of a chain analysis company, this would have the effect of making Maxwell seem rich! Since his address was public, and many UTXOs were being used to construct transactions involving him, anyone analyzing the transactions and making the assumption that all inputs in a transaction were owned by the same person would think Maxwell was transacting with far more bitcoin than he actually was, hence the post's title: "I taint rich!".
+
+Of course, this game wasn't really private, since Maxwell posted his address in a public forum, but it proved a very important and consequential concept. As Maxwell states:
+
+> A lot of people mistakenly assume that when a transaction spends from multiple addresses all those addresses are owned by the same party. This is commonly the case, but it doesn't have to be so: people can cooperate to author a transaction in a secure and trustless manner.
+
+In a [later post](https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=279249) that same year, Maxwell formalizes this idea into a concept he called Coinjoin:
+
+> When considering the history of Bitcoin ownership one could look at transactions which spend from multiple distinct scriptpubkeys as co-joining their ownership and make an assumption: How else could the transaction spend from multiple addresses unless a common party controlled those addresses?
+>
+> [...]
+>
+> This assumption is incorrect. Usage in a single transaction does not prove common control (though it's currently pretty suggestive), and this is what makes CoinJoin possible:
+>
+> The signatures, one per input, inside a transaction are completely independent of each other. This means that it's possible for Bitcoin users to agree on a set of inputs to spend, and a set of outputs to pay to, and then to individually and separately sign a transaction and later merge their signatures. The transaction is not valid and won't be accepted by the network until all signatures are provided, and no one will sign a transaction which is not to their liking.
+
+This means that, in effect, an arbitrary number of people can coordinate to create transactions each contributing and signing their own inputs, without risk of theft by others _at any point_.
+
+He then highlights another benefit of Coinjoin transactions, which is that transactions can be _batched_ to save on fees by finding someone else who wants also wants to make a payment at the same time as you:
+
+> The idea can also be used more casually. When you want to make a payment, find someone else who also wants to make a payment and make a joint payment together. Doing so doesn't increase privacy much, but it actually makes your transaction smaller and thus easier on the network (and lower in fees); the extra privacy is a perk.
+
+And finally, Coinjoin is a protocol such that, if enough people use it, everyone wins, resulting in privacy gains for everyone:
+
+> Such a transaction is externally indistinguishable from a transaction created through conventional use. Because of this, if these transactions become widespread they improve the privacy even of people who do not use them, because no longer will input co-joining be strong evidence of common control.
+
+To provide a concrete example, say we find three people who want to do a coinjoin. Beforehand, they agree to mix 0.1 bitcoin, gaining privacy by having three equal-sized outputs to make it unclear which address owns which coins. The change addresses will be clear to an analyst, but the 0.1 values will not.
+
+![Coinjoin Example](/images/articles/payjoin-better-future/coinjoin-tx.webp)
+
+The privacy gains aren't necessarily very strong with only three participants, especially if the other participants de-anonymize in later transactions by tying them to their identity, but this can be mitigated with multiple rounds of coinjoin on those coins or by using larger anonymity sets.
+
+To summarize, **_Coinjoin is a transaction created with inputs and outputs from multiple parties, such that it is difficult to tell who owns which coins after the transaction._**
+
+For a deeper dive into how to actually create a Coinjoin and what tools are available, see [this guide](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/a-comprehensive-bitcoin-coinjoin-guide).
+
+Coinjoin is one of the most effective and widely adopted privacy solutions for Bitcoin today, but it has some major drawbacks:
+
+1. <b>Interactivity</b>: Coinjoin requires a high degree of interaction from the participants; they need to agree to a uniform output size and must all supply their signatures within a reasonable time. High interactivity requirements create friction for users, and therefore hinder adoption by wider audiences.
+2. <b>Centralized coordinators</b>: Wasabi and Whirlpool are currently the most popular methods of Coinjoining. They take fees for conducting the coordination, in addition to the miner fees paid just to participate in the transaction (since Coinjoin transactions have a lot of signature data, they are more expensive). JoinMarket is an example of a non-coordinated service, but this has the tradeoff of increased interactivity.
+3. <b>Multiple rounds required for enhanced privacy</b>: To get better privacy, it is often recommended to Coinjoin multiple rounds due to the limitations of small anonymity set sizes, which costs time, increases interactivity, and costs more in fees.
+4. <b>Coinjoins look different from normal transactions</b>: Coinjoin transactions have a distinctive, recognizable pattern: multiple inputs from multiple parties resulting in multiple _uniformely sized_ outputs. This means that if your coins have been identified prior to you doing the Coinjoin, the snooper will know you've Coinjoined. They may not know where the money went or what you do with it after you Coinjoin, but they know how much you had and that you did a Coinjoin in the first place.
+
+Clearly, this is not an end-all be-all solution for Bitcoin privacy due to these limitations, especially for more passive Bitcoiners who want a privacy-by-default approach.
+
+After a few years, a better solution was on the horizon, one that could be done without _any_ extra steps having to be taken by the transactees, was directly peer-to-peer with no centralized coordinators or marketplaces (therefore saving time and money), and looked no different from normal transactions: Payjoin.
+
+Payjoin has been developed from a series of earlier innovations, let's take a look at those.
+
+## BIP-21
+
+An important user experience (UX) improvement in early Bitcoin was BIP-21. [BIP](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/tree/master) stands for Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, and defines a set of standards that either require consensus changes to the Bitcoin protocol (e.g. hard forks or soft forks) or provide information and methods otherwise useful to interacting with Bitcoin.
+
+BIP-21 is a standard that defines a scheme using URIs to simplify user interaction with Bitcoin, allowing them to pay by clicking links or scanning QR codes. A few query parameters, such as `amount`, `label`, and `message` are also defined so that client software can easily access and parse them for better UX. [Here is an example](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0021.mediawiki) BIP-21 URI with those parameters:
+
+![BIP-21 Simple](/images/articles/payjoin-better-future/bip21-message.webp)
+
+Importantly, the standard is extensible, as custom query parameters can be created and new standards can be built on top of it. For example, in the Lightning Network, the custom parameter `lightning` can be added [in addition](https://bitcoinqr.dev/) to the Bitcoin address so that the user can pay with either method:
+
+![BIP-21 with Lightning](/images/articles/payjoin-better-future/bip21-lightning.webp)
+
+This powerful and flexible BIP would prove useful in combination with concepts from Coinjoin.
+
+### Pay-to-Endpoint (P2EP)
+
+The [earliest mention](https://blog.blockstream.com/en-improving-privacy-using-pay-to-endpoint/) of the Payjoin concept I could find was by Blockstream, published in August 2018, where the article [references a workshop](https://nopara73.medium.com/pay-to-endpoint-56eb05d3cac6) from which the concept emerged. It referred to the resulting idea as Pay-to-Endpoint (P2EP), because it combined the concepts of Coinjoin and BIP-21 to allow a sender and a receiver to collaboratively contribute inputs to a transaction via a BIP-21 compliant endpoint provided by the receiver. Here is an example given in the article of what an endpoint provided by the receiver may look like:
+
+![P2EP Example](/images/articles/payjoin-better-future/p2ep.webp)
+
+Of note in particular is the `p2ep` parameter, whose value is an endpoint (in this case a `.onion` address, but it could just as easily be an `http://` address or any other compatible endpoint), which signals to receiving wallets that the sender would like to try a P2EP payment. If that fails, wallets should fall back to the sender paying the address normally, just using the sender's inputs.
+
+Because the contribution of inputs are collaborative in P2EP, and don't result in the "coin-tainting" uniform outputs that Coinjoin creates, Payjoin transactions are much more difficult to identify.
+
+The idea was a major step in the right direction, but the idea was still nascent and unformalized, and had some additional complexity to be removed.
+
+#### Aside - Satoshi's Pay-to-IP (P2IP)
+
+A variation of this idea, called [Pay-to-IP](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4isxjr/comment/d30y3k4/), was actually implemented by Satoshi in the _very first_ version of Bitcoin. There were, however, major privacy concerns with this approach, and so it was abandoned in subsequent versions of Bitcoin.
+
+### Bustapay
+
+Later that same month, Ryan Havar emailed a [revised version](https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2018-August/016340.html) of the idea to the Bitcoin developer mailing list, and formalized it into a BIP which he called [Bustapay](https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2018-August/016340.html). This version simplified the initial P2EP protocol and removed some of the complexity in favor of simplicity, the idea being that simplicity would prove essential for adoption.
+
+The Bustapay proposal still had a few major issues that needed refinement, and the protocol was not as refined as it could have been. But it was a further step in the right direction, and its focus on simplicity for the purposes of wallet integration was a key one, especially for the slow-moving and cautious Bitcoin developer ecosystem. Although Bustapay never took off, it was a final precursor to the Payjoin proposal we have today, which is ripe for wallet integration, and positive transformation of on-chain transactions.
+
+### The Payjoin Proposal
+
+Finally, by mid-2019, the concepts for Bustapay and P2EP were further refined and added to by Nicolas Dorier, founder of BTCPayServer, and Kukks, with the publication of [BIP-78](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0078.mediawiki), titled "A Simple Payjoin Proposal".
+
+With our background of the protocols leading up to payjoin, the meaning and purpose of the opening abstract of the proposal should now be clear:
+
+> This document proposes a protocol for two parties to negotiate a coinjoin transaction during a payment between them.
+
+This proposal laid out, in much more rigorous detail than prior methods, how to conduct a coinjoin transaction between a sender and a receiver in a way that breaks the common-input ownership heuristic that is simple, flexible, and cheap.
+
+## How Payjoin Works
+
+Let's say Alice wants to pay Bob 1.1 BTC, and a chain surveillance company sees a transaction like this:
+
+![Example assuming common-input ownership heuristic](/images/articles/payjoin-better-future/regular-tx.webp)
+
+They might assume that Alice paid Bob the 0.5 BTC output and gave the rest to herself as change, like this:
+
+![Example that assumes the common-input ownership heuristic was used](/images/articles/payjoin-better-future/regular-tx-named.webp)
+
+And the vast majority of the time, they'd be right! After all, normally the change is the larger amount, and 0.5 is more "round" and thus likely to be used for payment, than 1.1.
+
+They might also wonder why she used an unnecessary input (the 0.8 and 0.3 BTC inputs would've sufficed), but they can never know for sure that this wasn't a normal transaction, and they can't know for sure why an extra UTXO was used. She could have just been consolidating a UTXO for easier management later. It _could_ be a payjoin, but even if you assumed it was, which UTXO's are Alice's and which are Bob's? It's impossible to know. Since most transactions _aren't_ payjoins, they'll probably make the faulty assumption that it wasn't.
+
+Alice, however, is smart and wants to preserve her privacy, and she knows about payjoin, so she asks Bob to contribute one of his own inputs to the transaction. Bob agrees, so he creates a transaction that spends one (or more) of his UTXOs as an input, and proposes it to Alice. If the transaction looks good to Alice, she broadcasts the payjoin transaction to the network. In this case, the transaction actually looks like this:
+
+![Example payjoin transaction](/images/articles/payjoin-better-future/payjoin-tx-named.webp)
+
+If chain surveillance made the assumption that both inputs were owned by Alice (as they did in the first example, and currently do in practice), their assumptions about what both Alice and Bob own would be wrong!
+
+It's also interesting to note that Alice and Bob conducting this transaction helps everybody gain privacy. Because, unlike coinjoin, it looks like a normal transaction, if enough people use payjoin chain surveillance will be unable to trust whether any transaction is normal. By foiling chain surveillance's attempts at spying on their transaction, Alice and Bob make _every_ transaction a little bit suspect. If there are enough people doing it, it makes them all suspect. Online privacy is often a numbers game, and the more people participate, the better the privacy.
+
+In this example, Alice and Bob collaborated to create a transaction that used both of their inputs to preserve privacy. Now, of course, this whole process can be automated (and _is_ in practice).
+
+In BIP-78, the process is more formally defined as follows:
+
+1. A receiver shows the sender a BIP-21 URI with a query parameter `pj=` that refers to an endpoint/server people can send [partially signed bitcoin transactions](https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/psbt/) (PSBTs) to. The endpoint can be HTTPs, .onion, or any other authenticated encryption protocol. For example:
+
+![Example PJ](/images/articles/payjoin-better-future/pj.webp)
+
+2. The sender creates a finalized, broadcastable PSBT using only their own inputs that is fully capable of making the required payment, to the receiver's endpoint. This is called the "Original PSBT".
+
+3. The receiver modifies the PSBT to include his own inputs, signs his inputs, and gives this back to the sender. He does not modify any of the inputs or outputs of the sender. This is called the "Payjoin Proposal".
+
+4. The sender verifies the proposal, re-signs her inputs to finalize the transaction, and broadcasts it to the network.
+
+If something goes wrong at any point in the process, such as, for example, the receiver doesn't have any UTXOs with which to create the Payjoin Proposal, then the receiver simply broadcasts the Original PSBT and it goes though as a normal transaction. Although this uses all inputs from the same owner, again, if enough people are using payjoin, it becomes impossible to make the assumption that the two parties _didn't_ payjoin, and surveillance will simply have to assume they did and try to find other methods of tracking payments.
+
+## Payjoin's Many Benefits
+
+### More Broken Surveillance Heuristics
+
+The common-input ownership heuristic is not the only privacy-destroying assumption that payjoin breaks. BIP-78 identifies two other heuristics that can be used to identify owners:
+
+- Change identification from the `scriptPubkey`:
+
+  In Bitcoin, `scriptPubKey` is the "locking script" that specifies the conditions under which Bitcoin can be spent. It's called `scriptPubKey` because the locking condition requires a valid signature matching the public key (the address) to unlock it. In other words, only the person who controls the private key to a particular UTXO's associated public key can unlock it.
+
+  There are multiple types of `scriptPubKey`'s in use, (P2PKH, P2WPKH, P2SH, P2TR). Typically, wallets use the same `scriptPubkey` for all transactions, and therefore, the _change_ amount (the amount the sender sends back to themselves after consuming UTXOs as inputs) will likely have the same `scriptPubkey`, while outputs sent to the receiver are much more likely to have a different `scriptPubkey`. This means that UTXOs with the same `scriptPubkey` in a transaction [can be identified](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Privacy) as likely belonging to the spender, assuming the outputs sent to the receiver are different.
+
+  BIP-78 specifies a method to allow the receiver to only use `scriptPubkey`'s matching the spender's, breaking the above heuristic's ability to tell which outputs are the change outputs.
+
+- Change identification and payment from round payment amounts:
+
+  Normally, payments made to peers have round amounts since it's far more natural to transact with round numbers. If Bob is charging Alice (and they aren't basing the bitcoin price on a direct conversion to a "rounder" fiat price), he's more likely to charge her an amount like 0.00010000 as opposed to a non-rounded amount like 0.00010231, for simplicity. For transactions in which only one output is round, it's very likely the case (for now) that the non-round output is the change output.
+
+  Payjoin also allows for this metric to be broken by describing a way for the receiver to add extra round outputs when constructing the proposal.
+
+### Asymmetric Gains by Uniting with a Bigger Crowd
+
+As mentioned earlier, one of the main drawbacks with coinjoin from a privacy perspective is that: 1) coinjoins are easily distinguishable from other transactions and 2) few people do them relative to non-coinjoin transactions. This creates problems for the fungibility of Bitcoin, because it's possible for people to mark coins as tainted, since some may have the ludicrous perception that the desire for privacy implies malicious intent. Of course, as _most_ transactions, or even a threshold of transactions, preserve privacy, then they cease to stand out.
+
+Payjoin appears like any other transaction, and therefore doesn't draw attention. An external observer has no reason to even look at a payjoin more closely, because the payjoin shows no effort to obfuscate the payment and change amounts.
+
+By appearing like any other transaction, even marginal gains in payjoin adoption mean that everyone's privacy is harder to invade, because surveillance heuristics quickly become unreliable. Adam Gibson, a foundational contributor to JoinMarket and an expert in Bitcoin privacy, [sums it up well](https://reyify.com/blog/payjoin):
+
+> If you're even reasonably careful, these PayJoin transactions will be basically indistinguishable from ordinary payments.
+> [...]
+> Now, here's the cool thing: suppose a small-ish uptake of this was publically observed. Let's say 5% of payments used this method. The point is that nobody will know which 5% of payments are PayJoin. That is a great achievement [...], because it means that all payments, including ones that don't use PayJoin, gain a privacy advantage!
+
+## UTXO Consolidation
+
+Clearly, payjoin and it's predecessors were aimed at solving privacy problems. But there is a nice ancillary benefit to using payjoin, specified right in BIP-78 itself: UTXO consolidation.
+
+Satoshi's suggestion to use a new address for every received payment results in user's wallets having many UTXOs to manage. When these UTXOs are all used together as inputs to new transactions (and assuming it's not a coinjoin or payjoin), these transactions cost more in fees. Fees are calculated based on the size of the transaction in bytes, since block space is the scarce resource, so more inputs equals more fees for a single large transaction.
+
+It should be noted that using payjoin for UTXO consolidation does not necessarily save on fees, because the expense of each UTXO for chain space still needs to be paid at some point. Rather, it spreads the fees out over time and gives an opportunity to batch the UTXO with the payment. Batching makes UTXO consolidation cheaper than doing it as its own transaction. It also makes for easier management of UTXOs, and less data stored on disk. In addition, it is possible for wallets to implement a way for a receiver to specify that they would like to consolidate their UTXOs when mining fees are low in advance, making UTXO consolidation an automatic and smoother process.
+
+## Lightning and Payjoin: A Perfect Match
+
+### Opening Lightning Channels with Payjoin
+
+The [Lightning Network (LN)](https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf) is a second-layer solution built on Bitcoin that takes transactions off-chain to allow for near-instant, final settlements with far lower fees, tremendously increasing transaction throughput, improving privacy, and allowing for new use cases for Bitcoin such as [micropayments](https://brandonlucas.net/articles/bitcoin/micropayments). It uses a network of payment channels between nodes to route payments from source to destination. These channels require node operators to lock up "liquidity" (bitcoin that can flow between one node and its channel partner) between their channel partners. How much bitcoin you can spend in a channel is limited by how much liquidity exists on your side of that channel.
+
+Most of the complexity in managing a lightning node comes from opening these channels and managing the liquidity in them. Onboarding is one of the biggest pain points, since there are several steps involved. Let's say Alice wants to open up a channel with Bob and she has setup a brand-new, unfunded lightning node. Alice has to do the following:
+
+1. Send an onchain transaction funding her newly created lightning wallet with sufficient funds to at least open the channel and wait (at least 10 minutes) for it to be confirmed.
+
+2. Use her lightning wallet software to negotiate a channel opening transaction with Bob and wait for it to be confirmed.
+
+At a minimum, Alice has to pay two fees and wait ~10 minutes per transaction, which can be tedious.
+
+![Lightning Channel Open Process](/images/articles/payjoin-better-future/lightning-open-channel.webp)
+
+Payjoin can simplify this process and help Alice save money by doing both the funding and the opening transaction at once.
+
+In this scenario, Alice preconfigures her payjoin receiving endpoint with the details of how she'll open channels: including the amount of bitcoin and which channel partners she'll open to. Then, using a wallet with payjoin support, someone (presumably Alice) will send a payjoin proposal, negotiate the payjoin transaction with the receiving endpoint, and upon receiving the funds, the endpoint will make the necessary API calls to open a channel with Bob's node.
+
+In other words, the sender (probably Alice in this case) will send a payjoin proposal to Alice's receiving payjoin endpoint to create a transaction that pays directly to the 2-of-2 multisignature output between Bob's node and Alice's node to construct a lightning channel between them. Which turns the process into a one-step transaction:
+
+![Lightning Channel with Payjoin](/images/articles/payjoin-better-future/lightning-open-payjoin.webp)
+
+One interesting thing to note is that both LN and payjoin currently have a _liveness_ requirement (though, in the case of payjoin at least, perhaps [not for long](https://gist.github.com/DanGould/243e418752fff760c9f6b23bba8a32f9)), meaning that participants must be online when transactions take place. This is fairly limiting in comparison to on-chain Bitcoin, which only requires the sender to be online _at the time of payment_. However, this also allows for the two protocols to pair together quite nicely.
+
+For example, Lightning is great for increasing privacy by taking payments off-chain, and for massively increasing Bitcoin's ability to be used as a medium-of-exchange (i.e. something you would actually use to buy everyday things) in addition to a store of value. But the requirement to open channels on-chain means that the size of your channels and the people you open channels to leaves an onchain footprint. For reasons already discussed, payjoin can obfuscate and destroy many assumptions made by snoops.
+
+It also makes things _simpler_ because users now only have to make one payment instead of two to open their first channel, _faster_ because they only have to wait for one transaction to be confirmed, and _cheaper_ because they only have to pay one fee. In fact, more than one channel can be opened by these means. What if you could make a list of all the nodes you wanted to open channels to, make a single transaction to a BIP-21 payjoin receiving endpoint, and have them all open at once, automatically, waiting for one transaction to confirm and paying one fee. _For all your channels_. Well, you can!
+
+There is already a project which implemented this idea, called [Nolooking](https://github.com/payjoin/nolooking), which allows you to queue up a list of public keys and _batch_ open multiple lightning channels at once! This way, Alice can not only open a channel up to Bob, but she can open up channels to Bob, Carol, and Dina, all the while making _just one on-chain payment_! Needless to say, the potential for this to simplify Lightning UX is huge. It's exciting to imagine a future in which Lightning wallets just have payjoin on by default, and the _de facto_ user experience is to just pick your channel partners, make a single Bitcoin transaction, and _voila_! You now have a lightning node with as many channels as you can afford, and paid _one_ transaction for it. How amazing would that be?
+
+It's easy to imagine how this could simplify self-custodial lightning adoption. It would be interesting if lightning wallet software could just have a "quick setup" option, where all the user has to do is input how much Bitcoin they can lock up (i.e. how much liquidity they want), set to a default of opening a few, reasonably sized channels with decent tradeoffs for routing and fees. For advanced users, there could be an "I know what I'm doing" option.
+
+## Weaknesses
+
+As with any protocol, there are tradeoffs to payjoin.
+
+One of the main issues is the liveness (or online-ness) requirement. The receiver's payjoin web server must be online at the time the transaction is sent in the current implementation, due to the need for both sender and receiver to negotiate (programmatically, of course) the resulting transaction. This might limit adoption to merchant servers or lightning nodes, as they are the only people with an incentive to always stay online. It would be much more convenient from a user's perspective if a transaction could be sent at any time irrespective of whether the receiving server is online.
+
+Another less likely but more dangerous weakness is that if a payjoin server (i.e. the receiver's server) is on an unsecured server, the receiver's outputs could be [modified in flight](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0078.mediawiki#unsecured-payjoin-server)(before they reach the sender) and stolen.
+
+However, as we'll discuss later, a solution to the above two problems has already been proposed.
+
+Finally, one weakness of the protocol is simply the fact that it faces adoption barriers as wallets must do the work to integrate it. A particular challenge is that the ideal user interface would be one in which payjoin is just enabled by default. Sending wallets and receiving wallets just try to payjoin without a user necessarily needing to be burdened with setting up that privacy feature. The best privacy is default privacy, since requiring users to take action to defend it means they probably won't. Therefore, for payjoin adoption to really take off for the average user, it needs to be a seamless experience that they don't have to think about. Wallets should enable it by default. Remember, it's built right into the protocol to fallback on regular transactions without requiring any additional action from the user in case the payjoin fails.
+
+### Serverless Payjoin
+
+Dan Gould has submitted a [draft BIP](https://gist.github.com/DanGould/243e418752fff760c9f6b23bba8a32f9) for a version 2 of payjoin which allows it to be done _asynchronously_ and without using a server. This _serverless payjoin_ would solve both the requirement for a receiver to be online at the time of payment, and the security issues related to this being done on unsecured servers, mentioned earlier. As the always-online nature of payjoin receivers is perhaps the biggest user experience barrier to adoption, the implementation of this BIP could be a huge benefit for payjoin adoption and passive Bitcoin privacy.
+
+## The Current State of Payjoin Adoption
+
+As of late 2023, payjoin adoption is still relatively low, but has been steadily increasing since its inception in 2018.<sup>[1](https://payjoin.substack.com/p/tracking-growth-in-payjoin-adoption)</sup> Since payjoin is ready to use today and doesn't require any Bitcoin consensus changes, the only real impediment is for wallets to write the software to adopt it, and the tools to help them do so are getting better every day. [Payjoin Dev Kit (PDK)](https://payjoindevkit.org/introduction/) is a new payjoin implementation with modules that wallet software can use to integrate today. It even comes with a `payjoin-cli` tool that allows you to create payjoins from the command line. The library is written in Rust, but bindings allowing other languages to use it are currently being built.
+
+### Wallet Support
+
+BTCPayServer and JoinMarket already support both sending and receiving, although not by default. BlueWallet, Sparrow, Wasabi, and BitMask support sending. A few other wallets support it via an extension, [including Bitcoin Core](https://github.com/payjoin/rust-payjoin). There are active PRs to integrate payjoin into Mutiny Wallet today. See [here](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/PayJoin_adoption) for the current state of payjoin adoption.
+
+## Payjoin and Bitcoin's Future
+
+As mentioned earlier, Adam Gibson has proposed that even just 5% of on-chain transactions being conducted with payjoin could have a huge impact on Bitcoin privacy. We just need a threshold number large enough that analysis companies can never safely assume they're interpreting the transactions correctly. Once their methods of spying on us are broken, then ill-informed, arbitrary, and bad-faith restrictions on Bitcoin privacy imposed by those who neither understand its benefits nor have any interest in preserving our right to privacy will become irrelevant.
+
+And as we've seen, due to the many possibilities opened up by payjoin's flexibility, it is not merely a privacy solution, but an extensible cooperative transaction protocol that allows for solutions such as fee reduction and single transaction multi-channel opening for lightning nodes, among others. The benefits it would provide to Bitcoin could be enormous and achieved today without changing anything about Bitcoin itself.
+
+So what are we waiting for?
+
+## Support
+
+If you'd like to support or contribute to payjoin's development, start by joining the [discord](https://discord.gg/6rJD9R684h), [donating](https://geyser.fund/project/payjoin/), or checking out [payjoin.org](https://payjoin.org/).
+
+## Acknowledgements
+
+I want to give a huge thank you to Dan Gould for reviewing and suggesting very helpful improvements to this article.

projects/blu-site/content/articles/2025-06-20-fear-to-attempt.md

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+---
+title: Fear to Attempt
+description: Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt
+date: 2025-06-20
+tags: philosophy
+---
+
+> Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt
+>
+> - Shakespeare, _Measure for Measure_
+
+We _need_ you to dream; then pursue those dreams with vigor. You are a human being. You are a machine with hopes and dreams; a calculator who looks at cold, mute, void, dead nature, and somehow sees God and meaning despite yourself. You are a [teetering bulb of dread and dream](http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/russell_edson/poems/15012). You cannot help but see the world in infinite terms. Despite your best efforts, you believe in right and wrong, black and white, good and evil. Nihilism is your greatest lie to yourself, and you feel the nausea it induces when it [crawls into your heart and dies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5xuzSjl8eU), because it is _unnatural_ and anti-life. Are you truly so bored with the ease and comfort that the vast array of the past has struggled, and suffered, and died to provide you with, that you have to cut yourself to remember you can feel?
+
+> Shall I be carried to the skies,
+>
+> On flowery beds of ease,
+>
+> While others fought to win the prize,
+>
+> And sailed through bloody seas?
+>
+> Laura Ingalls Wilder, _Little House in the Big Woods_, p. 96
+
+---
+
+_Use this life_. Determine what is good, or at least, what is not evil, then _act_ as a humble servant of the former, and in direct repudiation of the latter. Your heart will thank you for it, even if the world never does. It is a cooling salve for your depression and melancholy. Though at the cost of greater anxiety. But anxiety is excitement also, and adventurousness, and _worth the struggle_.
+
+> Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
+>
+> Theodore Roosevelt, [_Strenuous Life_](https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/roosevelt-strenuous-life-1899-speech-text)
+
+You are hopelessly finite; but your actions can and do graze infinity. You can make a [dent in the Universe](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs_(book)>). Some of us little people have. And they who have are frightfully similar to you.
+
+---
+
+How can any honest person look around at their world and not see that it is a [museum of passion projects](https://x.com/collision/status/1529452415346302976)? A handful of souls through the brief span of history shake off their multitude of excuses, doubts, fears, false friends, oppressive family - shed the dying skin - to chase these impossible dreams, and oftener than we should expect, achieve them. Even in the infested rivers of Calcutta, what is all that trash polluting the river? It is the unmaintained dreams of the past piling on and on into a neglectful present. Plastics and juice boxes and old toys are miracles if you stop them from coalescing into growing piles of grime.
+
+Work passionately to some purpose. Most of those who regret working hard worked hard as slaves to some lower passion like money or cheap status. Those who conduct their work in service of Eternity have a cleaner conscience. Did we hear honest words of regret from Socrates? From Cicero or Cato? From Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, or Washington? Only in their moments of weakness and fear when their tasks ahead bore relentlessly down on them. But, determining to answer the Call of Duty, they steeled themselves and pressed forward, leaving behind a trail of proud memories which sustained genuine pride in the shade of life.
+
+---
+
+> My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known — no wonder, then, that I return the love.
+>
+> Soren Kierkegaard, _Either/Or: A Fragment of Life_
+
+Work toward depression and nothingness, and you will achieve it.
+
+Weekends we spend alone, absorbing Netflix, Youtube, ads. Burning away the candle on video games, where we pretend we are heroes, when _real_ knighthood beckons to the brave. Doomscrolling our ten-second videos of AI-generated sequences of ever-more unintelligible noises and images, then we complain that we can't afford a house. Watch porn, then complain there are no good women. Work harder and smarter on justifying our inaction, and find enemies to our supposed purposes everywhere. We will never find an enemy sufficient to outsource our self-loathing. In this way we will never be cured of it. We are not taking our problems seriously by failing to recognize ourselves as their root cause. And who can we expect to take us seriously if not ourselves?
+
+You are not jealous of the past. You have more than them if you cared to look. You are jealous of your own better nature which you glimpse buried within yourself manifesting forthrightly in others. Their lived virtue is recognizable to you as your own dormant morality.
+
+You are not jealous of the past, except their Hope for the future. Reclaim the Hope, and you'll quickly see the thousand conveniences and asymmetric advantages afforded to you not given them.
+
+That hope will be reclaimed with the youthful vigor of active optimism; never by a passive pessimism.
+
+---
+
+> "Friends," said he, "the taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly; and from these taxes the commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing an abatement. However, let us hearken to good advice, and something may be done for us; _God helps them that help themselves_.
+>
+> Benjamin Franklin, _The Way to Wealth_
+
+You have the _internet_ friend! And you're using it to watch cat videos and porn. What's wrong with you? How many philosophers through the millenia have _dreamed_ of this moment, where anyone and everyone had access to the voluminous fount of human knowledge! So many of them thought this day would [unleash the golden age](https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einsteins) we've finally been waiting for. You can, for next to nothing, read the minds of the greatest thinkers, inventors, and scientists who've ever lived. But instead, we discovered that we are easily hackable, we will still use the evil software of companies we know are ill-designing against us, or at best do not care. We sell our souls in as near literal a sense as anyone could have possibly imagined, for a little convenience, a little fun, a little dopamine, and say that it is impractical to live without them, and give up. If we use this great tool for knowledge at all we're most likely to use it for a petty win in a debate not worth having. For the most part, we've shortened our attention spans and become addicted further still to our baser instincts. This is not Utopia. This is a Brave New World, and we, for the most part, feel oppressed by a future we wrongly think we have little power to avoid.
+
+---
+
+> The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
+>
+> [Alan Kay](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTPI6wh-Lr0)
+
+Knowledge and wisdom are now cheap, and as such, unvalued. Even our educated don't know much today, because knowledge and understanding are no longer the point. The knowledge of our college graduates is the kind of knowledge any true thinker hates. Commoditized and packaged so they can "get a job" and "have a career", and rarely develop the mark of a truth-seeker:
+
+> So many people today - and even professional scientists - seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is - in my opinion - the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.
+>
+> Albert Einstein, [Correspondance to Robert Thorton in 1944](https://www3.nd.edu/~dhoward1/AEquotes.pdf)
+
+---
+
+You can adopt the whole human heritage. Do not be bound by superficial alliances. Be bound by vision and destiny. The human race is your anchor. Any giant's shoulders are shoulders to stand on if they are good and true. I admire Socrates and Pericles, though I am not Greek. Cicero and the Antonines, though I am not Roman. Confucius, Nietzsche, Kant, Petrarch, Da Vinci, what do I care for their allegiances? They painted their minds to us, and now they are mine.
+
+Even within these flawed humans, or any flawed human, we can take the good and discard the bad. No human is really one human. We are instead a hash of blurry archetypes, oscillatingly present or absent from person to person, and within the same person at different times, places, and circumstances.
+
+> Every man I meet is in some way my superior, and in that, I can learn of him.
+>
+> Emerson, _Think_, Vol. 4-5 (1938), p. 32
+
+---
+
+Is the state of society not to your liking? _Good_. _Fix it!_. What else do you have to do? Complain? Settle? You are not allowed to be angry and _do nothing_. Society will sink under the festering weight of this accumulated hypocrisy. I do not intend to imply this is easy; swimming against the tide never is. Far from it. Only that it is worth it. It is _necessary_.
+
+Do you see problems? Well I see an army of problem-solvers; an array of latent potential waiting to unleash its energy, and hold back the tide of societal decay. Your mission in life is waiting for you. What excites you? If you have nothing that excites you, then what bothers you? What do you wish was, that isn't now? There is your destiny. Only a liar can't think of a worthy pursuit that will provide him a lifetime of work. Worthy pursuits and things worth doing are ever-present. You are far more limited than they are scarce. If you cultivate reasons enough for Being, imbibe enough meaning and purpose in your daily diet, a panoply of destinies scream and beg for you to take them on.
+
+I've heard the cry from other people my age that "everything's been done", and all this noise about artificial intelligence isn't helping young people dream about brighter futures. It seems to be feeding their already weak grasp on the meaning of life. They constantly ask themselves what they will have to do, not realizing the opportunity lying latent in every problem. Every where I look I see little issues, and have reached the point that I lament the fact that I don't have the time or energy to work on all of them myself, as they would distract too much from an even greater or more exciting mission.
+
+Do you feel that the problems are too big? Start small. Rome wasn't built in a day. Do you feel unmatched by the impenetrable weight of what you're fighting? Fight it anyway, and become a salient force to be reckoned with along the way, growing strong from each victory, and stronger still from each defeat. A scattered array of untrained militia defeated the might of the British Empire at its height, with muskets they used to hunt birds and deer. Can you honestly decry that your petty worries are anywhere near _that_ insurmountable? You have been living through the _Pax Americana_, and you and I spent the whole of it complaining, and if we're not extremely careful we will be reminded what real pain and suffering is.
+
+---
+
+> I think that there is only one way to science - or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part - unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children, for whose welfare you may work, with a purpose, to the end of your days.
+>
+> Karl Popper, _Realism and the Aim of Science_
+
+So long as there are problems, this world needs your hidden and unique offerings. So long as there are problems, you can be the solution. Do not deprive us of your secret skills. Meet your destiny head-on. Cast your gaze upward toward the Lights of the Firmament, and dream.

projects/blu-site/content/articles/2026-02-07-introducing-lyceum.md

@@ -0,0 +1,228 @@
+# Introducing Lyceum: The Richest Interface for Reading Ancient Greek Texts
+
+<https://lyceum.quest>
+
+I built a tool with the goal of making Ancient Greek authors more accessible in their own words. I started trying to learn Ancient Greek a few months ago with the goal of reading the Greek pantheon that shaped history like works by Homer, Plato, Aristotle, the New Testament, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, etc. without the meaning being filtered through a translation. I started by using the available online resources and books such as _Athenaze_ and _Reading Greek_ (and still am!), but became bogged down by trying to memorize endless nuanced rules of grammar and decipher stories made up by the authors, which made the learning experience boring and tedious, and full glossaries often weren't given (so many of the morphological forms required inference). I don't care about some random made up Athenian named Δικαιοπολις and the silly hijinks of his small family farm, I want to read the _Iliad!_. And more importantly, despite after knowing more about Greek grammar than English after a few chapters, I still couldn't read a word of it! I became skeptical of this method, and began looking for ways to just learn it by _reading what I wanted to read_. There are a couple readers online which have the Ancient Greek texts in the original language, the best of which seems to be [Scaife Reader](https://scaife.perseus.org), but even that is buggy, difficult to use, and was missing features I wanted. So my goal was to combine the freely available datasets for lemmas, morphologies, and original texts and (some) of their translations into one unified reader that had all of the features I wanted for my own personal study. This way, I can hopefully learn Greek closer to the way the man who discovered Troy, [Heinrich Schliemann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Schliemann), learned it:
+
+> "In order to acquire quickly the Greek vocabulary," Schliemann writes, "I procured a modern Greek translation of _Paul at Virginie_, and read it through, comparing every word with its equivalent in the French original. When I had finished this task I knew at least one half the Greek words the book contained; and after repeating the operation I knew them all, or nearly so, without having lost a single minute by being obliged to use a dictionary....Of the Greek grammar I learned only the declensions and the verbs, and never lost my precious time in studying its rules; for as I saw that boys, after being troubled and tormented for eight years and more in school with the tedious rules of grammar, can nevertheless none of them write a letter in ancient Greek without making hundreds of atrocious blunders, I thought the method pursued by the schoolmasters must be altogether wrong....I learned ancient Greek as I would have learned a living language."
+
+## Current Features
+
+So far, the reader includes:
+
+- A browseable catalog of 373 ancient authors and 1,837 works in Ancient Greek
+
+![Browseable catalog of ancient Greek texts](/images/articles/introducing-lyceum/browse.png)
+
+- Multi-language translations when available from the data
+
+![Multi-language translations side by side](/images/articles/introducing-lyceum/translations.png)
+
+- Word-level definitions and morphology lookups from Perseus and LSJ. Click on any word to see its definition and other info!
+
+![Word popup with definition and morphology](/images/articles/introducing-lyceum/popup.png)
+
+- Anki-style vocab card import from texts. Learn the words of the texts you are trying to read as you read them with spaced repetition!
+
+![Spaced repetition flashcard](/images/articles/introducing-lyceum/srs-card-1.png)
+
+- Dashboard to track progress
+
+![Progress dashboard](/images/articles/introducing-lyceum/dashboard.png)
+
+- (For select texts): Word-level interlinear contextual AI definitions (show what each word means in its context)
+- (For select texts): Word-level AI generated Latin transliteration (for pronunciation clarity)
+
+(side-note on the use of AI: I know that it is discouraged in the rules on this subreddit, but please read my case for it in the [full article]()).
+
+And there are many features and cleanup items on my TODO list, like:
+
+- Add missing translations for popular texts (e.g. Meditations)
+- Add more transliterations and contextual glosses (e.g. interlinear)
+- Make texts downloadable in nice readable formats. A fun thing might even be to allow PDF generation in whatever display format options you've selected for offline reading.
+- Fix any missing or incorrect dictionary definitions, with a user-driven feedback mechanism.
+- Audio for pronunciation
+- A mobile app
+
+I would love any feedback on this. Try it and let me know what you think!
+
+With side-by-side English (and other language) translations when available in the data. There is a sidebar which allows for viewing selected grammatical information for each word as you read, which includes color-coding for parts of speech (e.g. noun/article/verb etc.), color coding of inflected form endings, and grammar badges above each word. In the Greek originals, you can click on any word to see a popup of its definition from the [Perseus Digital Library]() or the [Liddel, Scott Jones Ancient Greek Lexicon (LSJ)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Greek%E2%80%93English_Lexicon). Since many Greek words have many potential definitions in different contexts, the Pro version provides Contextual AI generated meanings for select texts (with many more in the works) so that you can see the definition of a Greek word _in the context it was written in_, instead of having to guess which of the definitions is being used in that particular instance.
+
+There is a reader view to show just the text (or translations if you like beside it) for distraction-free reading.
+
+![Reader view for distraction-free reading](/images/articles/introducing-lyceum/reader-view.png)
+
+Finally, one of my personal favorite features is the Anki-like spaced-repetition cards, where you can add cards as you read them (or by section, or in bulk) to your deck for review.
+
+## Why Build This?
+
+### Love of History
+
+Living in Boston, my fascination with history has grown immensely over the past few years. The natural starting point was American Revolutionary history, and the epic adventures of founders Jefferson (Jon Meacham), Washington (Ron Chernow), Franklin (Walter Isaacson), Hamilton (Chernow), and especially John Adams (David McCullough, the _John Adams_ TV series) ignited a passion that resulted in _their_ historical heroes becoming mine also. Cicero and Rome became my fascinations as they were Adams'. And recently, Greece became my passion as it was Cicero's. And this was cemented with Will Durant's excellent books _Caesar and Christ_ and _The Life of Greece_.
+
+### For Most of History, Greek was An Essential Aspect of Education
+
+One interesting thing to note was
+
+### How Best to Learn?
+
+I attempted several methods, and in each I felt something was lacking. At first, I researched on Grok and Reddit and discovered books that came highly recommended and bought them: _Athenaze_ and _Reading Greek_. After being "troubled and tormented with the tedious rules of grammar" as Schliemann wrote, I had an understanding of the foundational grammar and some of the most common words. But with full-time work commitments, family responsibilities, and other hobbies, this was unsustainable and a painful way to learn, and after all this tedium I discovered that I knew a lot about made-up Athenian farmer Δικαιοπολις and couldn't read _any_ _Iliad_. I became demotivated and burnt-out.
+
+I did some searching, and found the book _Complete Ancient Greek_ by Gavin Betts and Alan Henry, which agreed with my sentiment that Greek should be learned with the material the student _wants to read_ top of mind. Even so, the vocabularies given were often incomplete (a surprisingly common problem in these Greek textbooks!) which made deciphering even the basic exercises unnecessarily painful, and the choice phrases from works like _Odyssey_ were modified and simplified, which still gave me a sense of inauthenticity (although I felt much closer), and an unnecessary roundabout-ness to the learning process. So the search to learn by getting closer to the source continued.
+
+I figured I'd start with the beginning of Western literature, the _Iliad_, and I searched for an interlinear/Hamiltonian translation (where each word is translated according to its contextual definition). I thought I'd be able to do this for any of the major texts I wanted to read, but these sorts of translations are surprisingly sparse! I found one on [archive.org](https://archive.org/details/iliadhomerwitha00clargoog/page/n12/mode/2up), and began making an [Anki]() deck for each word and memorizing it. There were still a couple problems. Although this was probably good enough to learn from, it was still difficult for me to completely understand what was happening, and I wanted to pull up a couple other translations side-by-side for comparison. This way I could simultaneously compare multiple editions of natural English to Hamilton's interlinear version to get a comprehensive sense of the meaning where it wasn't clear from the interlinear. Also, adding Anki cards manually for each word became a very time-consuming process.
+
+Here the idea for the website began to take shape. What if I could combine all the features I was looking for (interlinear texts, side-by-side translations, and the ability to import words into an Anki-like system for spaced-repetition word learning from whatever text you were reading) into one web interface?
+
+### Finding Texts in the Original Greek, in the Format You Want, is Very Difficult
+
+If you go on eBay or Amazon and search for the Odyssey in Ancient Greek, you'll probably be presented with the Loeb Library edition. As far as I can tell these are the best in-class
+
+One of the key features I needed for this was an interlinear translation. Going on eBay and finding your book of choice in _only Greek_ is very difficult. Finding it in
+
+### Alternative Solutions Are Insufficient
+
+The best viewer I've found online for reading Ancient Greek texts is the [Scaife](https://scaife.perseus.org) viewer from Perseus, and it has many problems. It is old and outdated, and the web deserves something better. You can start by taking a look at its [Google Lighthouse](https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse) score:
+
+![Scaife Lighthouse score](/images/articles/introducing-lyceum/scaife-lighthouse-score.png)
+
+### There is No Substitute for the Original
+
+When I started looking into ancient Rome and Greece, my desire to forego translations kept rising. More and more, I began to realize that translations are often not what they say they are. They are often more like movies based on books -- which is to say that they deviate frequently and often significantly from the source material, and even in translations which attempt to be faithful the author's voice inevitably intrudes.
+
+I actually learned this most plainly while building this website. While building the contextual glosses for Aesop's Fables, I noticed a word I recognized in Book 1, _ἀλώπεκος_, which means "fox", didn't appear at all in the famous [Townsend](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Fyler_Townsend) translation, which is considered a standard translation. Here is the original Greek:
+
+> Λέαινα ὀνειδιζομένη ὑπὸ ἀλώπεκος ἐπὶ τῷ διὰ παντὸς ἕνα τίκτειν·" Ἕνα, ἔφη, ἀλλὰ λέοντα." Ὅτι τὸ καλὸν οὐκ ἐν πλήθει δεῖ μετρεῖν, ἀλλὰ πρὸς ἀρετὴν ἀφορᾶν.
+
+Here is the [Townsend translation](https://demo.lyceum.quest/read/tlg0096.tlg002.perry-grc1?ref=257&trans=tlg0096.tlg002.perry-eng1):
+
+> The Lioness
+>
+> A CONTROVERSY prevailed among the beasts of the field as to which of the animals deserved the most credit for producing the greatest number of whelps at a birth. They rushed clamorously into the presence of the Lioness and demanded of her the settlement of the dispute. 'And you,' they said, 'how many sons have you at a birth?' The Lioness laughed at them, and said: 'Why! I have only one; but that one is altogether a thoroughbred Lion.' The value is in the worth, not in the number.
+
+You can see at a glance that there are a lot more words in the Townsend translation than the original Greek, which arose my suspicion, which was further aroused by looking at the contextual meanings I had generated for it:
+
+![Contextual meaning comparison](/images/articles/introducing-lyceum/read.png)
+
+The AI-generated contextual meaning claims that this is the genitive form of "fox", i.e. "of fox". Is it wrong? Well, the nice thing about our tool is that we can immediately cross-reference with the LSJ dictionary, or, better yet for our purposes, Perseus for the various morphological forms of a word. We can click the word to open up the popup, as below, to compare:
+
+![Popup showing morphological validation](/images/articles/introducing-lyceum/popup.png)
+
+And we see that this does indeed mean "fox". So there is an entire character in the original Greek fable that is missing in a widely-respected translation! Cross referencing multiple AI responses and combining that with a by-hand interlinear-ization using Perseus data, we can see that the original fable translates to something more like:
+
+> The lioness was being reproached by the fox because she always gave birth to only one.
+> “One,” she replied, “but a lion.”
+> For the noble is not to be measured by quantity, but one should have regard for virtue.
+
+This problem pervades all translations. This sentiment is better expressed in the introduction to the book _Complete Ancient Greek_ by Gavin Betts and Alan Henry than I could give myself:
+
+> A modern translation of an ancient classic such as Homer’s Iliad often puzzles readers with
+> the difference between the work’s overall conception and the flatness of the English. The
+> work’s true merit may flicker dimly through the translation’s mundane prose or clumsy verse
+> but any subtlety is missing. Instead of a literary masterpiece we are often left with a
+> hotchpotch of banal words and awkward expressions. Take this version of the first lines of the
+> Iliad: _The Wrath of Achilles is my theme, that fatal wrath which, in fulfilment of the will of
+> Zeus, brought the Achaeans so much suffering and sent the gallant souls of many
+> noblemen to Hades, leaving their bodies as carrion for the dogs and passing birds. Let us
+> begin, goddess of song, with the angry parting that took place between Agamemnon King of
+> Men and the great Achilles son of Peleus. Which of the gods was it that made them quarrel?_
+> (translated E.V. Rieu, Penguin Books 1950) Can this really represent the work of a poet who
+> has been universally admired for millennia? Or is it a TV announcer introducing a guest
+> singer, whom he flatters with the trite phrase goddess of song?
+
+> Compare the eighteenth-century translation of Alexander Pope:
+
+> _Achilles’ wrath, to Greece
+> the direful spring
+> Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing!
+> That wrath which hurl’d to Pluto’s gloomy reign
+> The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;
+> Whose limbs unburied on the naked shore,
+> Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore:
+> Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,
+> Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove!
+> Declare, O Muse! in what ill-fated hour
+> Sprung the fierce strife, from what offended power?_
+
+> Here we have genuine poetry. Only when the translator himself is a real poet can the result
+> give some idea of the original but even then its true spirit is lost and, as here, the translator’s
+> own style and personality inevitably intrudes. There is no substitute for getting back to the
+> author’s actual words. To understand and appreciate the masterpieces of ancient Greek
+> literature we must go back to the original Greek.
+
+There is no substitute for the original. The only solution is to learn the languages.
+
+### Building with Claude: AI is Surprisingly Good at This
+
+With all the noise being made about how great AI is lately, I wondered if I could use it to create something that satisfies my requirements. Could I use it to speed up the process of collecting and organizing various data sources for word definitions, morphologies (the various forms of each word _lemma_ and how that changes its meaning), source and translation texts? And since interlinear versions of most texts do not exist (and even less in a machine-readable format), could I use an LLM to create a pipeline to generate them? Could I get it anywhere near the quality of Hamilton's system?
+
+The questions, in essence, became:
+
+1. Could I create a system that achieves parity with the best available tools for making original Greek sources and their translations accessible?
+2. Could I improve upon them with new features and ways to engage with the texts?
+3. Could AI reliably create interlinear versions of the texts with enough accuracy to be more helpful than harmful?
+
+I believe the free features already surpass the top competing sites (Perseus, Scaife, etc.) and combine their best features into a much more accessible view. The Pro features add even more helpful features of Anki-like spaced repetition, Hamiltonian-style interlinears with contextual meanings, and progress charts. This is the
+
+The r/AncientGreek subreddit rules state the following:
+
+"Machine translators and AI are not reliable.
+
+ChatGPT, Google Translate, and the like will confidently give you wrong answers about translations and Latin grammar. And if you only have a beginner's proficiency in Ancient Greek, there will be enough correct information to trick you. Generally, posts about machine translators and AI will be removed."
+
+I sympathize with this sentiment, especially about AI's tendency to hallucinate. But I think it is a) a partially outdated opinion (AI tools have gotten better and better under the right supervisor), and b) it underestimates the value AI can bring from doing "grunt-work" which can later be validated.
+
+Interestingly, there is a relatively recent [discussion]() on the same subreddit where several users talk about how AI has come in handy for their personal study of Ancient Greek. I wonder if these rules had been set in the earlier days of AI, when the false positive rate was high enough to render it more harmful than helpful. But I think two points need to be made here about AI:
+
+1. Humans can (and do) make mistakes or simply make things up to suit their retelling (as in Townsend's translations above -- or really any of the mainstream Aesop translations that I've found).
+
+2. The possibility of errors do not inherently mean something is more of a hindrance to learning than helpful. Rather, the question is is the error rate high enough that it is doing more harm than good.
+
+3. Since learning Ancient Greek is a far more niche activity than it used to be, quality resources for learning it are becoming rarer and rarer based on the earlier discussion of the Townsend translations, we can see it's often the case that the current state
+
+4. AI can do the initial grunt work no or few humans are willing to do, and thus make the problem one of _validation_ (which can be done either by careful reviews of experts)
+
+To be clear, AI _does_ hallucinate, and it does so frequently, but many of the current models are quite good at doing proper interpretations,
+
+### Data Sources
+
+#### Texts
+
+- [Perseus Digital Library](https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit) Greek texts and English translations from canonical-greekLit repository. 50+ authors, 631 works, from Homer through the Church Fathers.
+
+- [Diorisis Ancient Greek Corpus](https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/The_Diorisis_Ancient_Greek_Corpus/6187256): 820 pre-lemmatized XML texts with word-level morphology, POS tagging, and sentence boundaries. Used to aid in generating contextual meanings.
+
+- [First1K Greek Project](https://github.com/OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek): Additional Greek texts from the Open Greek and Latin project at the University of Leipzig.
+- [Chambry Aesopica](http://www.mythfolklore.net/aesopica/): Chambry's critical edition of Aesop's Fables with Perry numbering, multiple recensions, and scholarly apparatus.
+- [Townsend Aesop Translation](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21): George Fyler Townsend's 1867 English translation of Aesop's Fables, used for parallel reading.
+
+#### Morphology & Glosses
+
+- [Perseus Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank](https://github.com/PerseusDL/treebank_data) Syntactic annotations (dependency trees) and glosses for select texts including Aesop, Homer, and Attic prose. Used for word-level alignment with translations.
+
+- [Diogenes](https://github.com/pjheslin/diogenes): Morphological analyses for 400K+ Greek word forms. Each entry maps an inflected form to its lemma, part of speech, and full grammatical analysis (case, number, gender, tense, voice, mood, person).
+
+#### Definitions
+
+- [LSJ](https://lsj.gr/): 116,000+ dictionary entries from the definitive Ancient Greek lexicon (9th edition, 1940). Full scholarly definitions with citations, etymology, and usage notes. The "gold standard" comprehensive Greek definitions.
+
+#### Claude AI
+
+- **Content**: AI-generated contextual glosses that analyze word meaning within specific passages. Used to disambiguate words with multiple meanings (e.g., "λόγος" as "word" vs "argument" vs "reason" depending on context).
+
+### Building the Tool I Wish Existed
+
+Ultimately I'm building this because I want it to exist. I now use the spaced-repetition feature every day and am learning the words from the _Iliad_ and Aesop's _Fables_ using it. I will continue to add features I (and others) think are useful, I'm sure there are plenty of mistakes to correct and improvements to be made that I'm missing, please join our Discord or send an email to <support@lyceum.quest>.
+
+### Gratitude for Previous Work
+
+Ross Scaife, Herculaneum project, Loeb Library, Athenaze, Latinium
+
+History dies under two conditions, I think:
+
+1. A failure to _preserve_ the present. This is the job of the people who were alive during the events.
+2. The failure to _breathe new life_ into it, to unearth the bones and tombs and scrolls of the past. That is the job of posterity.
+
+We can't do anything about (1), but I believe it is our duty to pursue (2). The majority of the debates we have about X or Y social or political or philosophical issues are not new -- they were, for the most part, already debated in Ancient Greece, and with a few exceptions, it's debatable to what extent we improved on the groundwork they laid for any given topic.
+
+Emerson said history must be rediscovered