Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/docs'

docs/manifesto/scalability.md

@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ notmine: false
 
 ::: myabstract
 [abstract:]{.bigbold}
-Bitcoin does not scale to the required size. The Bitcoin reliable broadcast channel is a massively replicated public ledger of every transaction that ever there was, each of which has to be evaluated for correctness by every full peer. With recursive snarks, we can now instead have a massively replicated public sql index of private ledgers. Such a blockchain with as many transactions as bitcoin, will, after running for as long as Bitcoin, only occupy a few dozen megabytes of disk storage, rather than near a terabyte, and each peer and client wallet only has to evaluate the root recursive snark to prove the validity of every transaction that ever there was, including all those lost in the mists of time.
+Bitcoin does not scale to the required size. The Bitcoin reliable broadcast channel is a massively replicated public ledger of every transaction that ever there was, each of which has to be evaluated for correctness by every full peer. With recursive snarks, we can now instead have a massively replicated public SQL index of private ledgers. Such a blockchain with as many transactions as bitcoin, will, after running for as long as Bitcoin, only occupy a few dozen megabytes of disk storage, rather than near a terabyte, and each peer and client wallet only has to evaluate the root recursive snark to prove the validity of every transaction that ever there was, including all those lost in the mists of time.
 :::
 
 # Scaling, privacy, and recursive snarks
@@ -30,7 +30,7 @@ This explanation is going to require you to know what a graph,
 vertex, edge, root, and leaf is, what a directed acyclic graph (dag)
 is, what a hash is, what a blockchain is,
 and how hashes make blockchains possible.
-And what an sql index is and what it does, and what a primary sql index is and what it does.
+And what an SQL index is and what it does, and what a primary SQL index is and what it does.
 You need to know what a transaction output is in the context of blockchains,
 and what an unspent transaction output (utxo) is.
 Other terms will be briefly and cryptically explained as necessary.
@@ -91,13 +91,13 @@ of which the current root of the blockchain is the root hash.
 ## structs
 
 A struct is simply some binary data laid out in well known and agreed format.
-Almost the same thing as an sql row, except that
-an sql row does not have a well known and agreed binary format,
+Almost the same thing as an SQL row, except that an SQL
+ row does not have a well known and agreed binary format,
 so does not have a well defined hash, and a struct is not
-necessarily part of an sql table, though obviously you can put a
-bunch of structs of the same type in an sql table, and represent an
-sql table as a bunch of structs, plus at least one primary index.
-An sql table is equivalent to a pile of structs,
+necessarily part of an SQL table, though obviously you can put a
+bunch of structs of the same type in an SQL table, and represent an SQL
+table as a bunch of structs, plus at least one primary index.
+An SQL table is equivalent to a pile of structs,
 plus at least one primary index of those structs.
 
 ## merkle graphs and merkle trees
@@ -129,12 +129,12 @@ If you publish information on a reliable broadcast channel,
 everyone who looks at the channel is guaranteed to see it and to
 see the same thing, and if someone did not get the information
 that you were supposed to send over the channel, it is his fault,
-not yours.  You performed the protocol correctly.
+not yours.  You can prove you performed the protocol correctly.
 
 A blockchain is a merkle chain *and* a reliable broadcast channel.
 In Bitcoin, the reliable broadcast channel contains the entire
 merkle chain, which obviously does not scale, and suffers from a
-massive lack of privacy, so we have introduce the obscure
+massive lack of privacy, so we have to introduce the obscure
 cryptographic terminology "reliable broadcast channel" to draw a
 distinction that does not exist in Bitcoin.  In Bitcoin the merkle
 vertices are very large, each block is a single huge merkle vertex,
@@ -146,11 +146,11 @@ which is what is happening with Ethereum's use of recursive snarks.
 So we need to structure the data as large dag of small merkle
 vertices, with all the paths through the dag for which we need to
 generate proofs being logarithmic in the size of the contents of
-the reliable broadcast channel.
+the reliable broadcast channel and the height of the blockchain.
 
 ## merkle patricia tree
 
-A merkle patricia tree is a representation of an sql index as a
+A merkle patricia tree is a representation of an SQL index as a
 merkle tree. Each edge of a vertex is associated with a short
 bitstring, and as you go down the tree from the root (tree graphs
 have their root at the top and their leaves at the bottom, just to
@@ -158,23 +158,26 @@ confuse the normies) you append that bitstring, and when you
 reach the edge (hash) that points to a leaf, you have a bitstring
 that corresponds to path you took through the merkle tree, and to
 the leading bits of the bitstring that make that key unique in the
-index.  Thus the sql operation of looking up a key in an index
+index.  Thus the SQL operation of looking up a key in an index
 corresponds to a walk through the merkle patricia tree
-guided by the key.
+guided by the key.  So we can generate a recursive snark that proves
+you found something in an index of the blockchain, or proves that
+something, such as a previous spend of the output you want to spend,
+does not exist in that index.
 
 # Blockchain
 
-Each block in the chain is an set of sql tables, represented as merkle dags.
+Each block in the chain is an set of SQL tables, represented as merkle dags.
 
 So a merkle patricia tree and the structs that its leaf edges point
-to is an sql table that you can generate recursive snarks for,
+to is an SQL table that you can generate recursive snarks for,
 which can prove things about transactions in that table. We are
-unlikely to be programming the blockchain in sql, but to render
-what one is doing intelligible, it is useful to think and design in sql.
+unlikely to be programming the blockchain in SQL, but to render
+what one is doing intelligible, it is useful to think and design in SQL.
 
 So with recursive snarks you can prove that that your transaction
 is valid because certain unspent transaction outputs were in the
-sql index of unspent transaction outputs, and were recently spent
+SQL index of unspent transaction outputs, and were recently spent
 in the index of commitments to transactions, without revealing
 which outputs those were, or what was in your transaction.
 
@@ -182,7 +185,7 @@ It is a widely shared public index. But what it is an index of is
 private information about the transactions and outputs of those
 transactions, information known only to the parties of those
 transactions. It is not a public ledger. It is a widely shared
-public sql index of private ledgers. And because it is a merkle
+public SQL index of private ledgers. And because it is a merkle
 tree, it is possible to produce a single reasonably short recursive
 snark for the current root of that tree that proves that every
 transaction in all those private ledgers was a valid transaction
@@ -191,7 +194,7 @@ and every unspent transaction output is as yet unspent.
 ## performing a transaction
 
 Oops, what I just described is a whole sequence of complete
-immutable sql indexes, each new block a new complete index.
+immutable SQL indexes, each new block a new complete index.
 But that would waste a whole lot of bandwidth. What you want is
 that each new block is only an index of new unspent transaction
 outputs, and of newly spent transaction outputs, which spending
@@ -236,8 +239,8 @@ registered, you can create a new unspent transaction output for
 each transaction input to the failed transaction which effectively
 rolls back the failed transaction. This time limit enables us to
 recover from failed transactions, and, perhaps, more importantly,
-enables us to clean up the mutable sql index that the immense
-chain of immutable sql indexes represents, and that the public
+enables us to clean up the mutable SQL index that the immense
+chain of immutable SQL indexes represents, and that the public
 broadcast channel contains. We eventually drop outputs that have
 been committed to a particular transaction, and can then
 eventually drop the commits of that output without risking
@@ -248,8 +251,8 @@ public broadcast channel.
 
 So that the public broadcast channel can eventually dump old
 blocks, and thus old spend events, every time we produce a new
-base level block containing new events (an sql index of new
-transaction outputs, and an sql index table with the same primary
+base level block containing new events (an SQL index of new
+transaction outputs, and an SQL index table with the same primary
 of spend commitments of past unspent transaction outputs to
 transactions) we also produce a consolidation block, a summary
 block that condenses two past blocks into one summary block,

docs/manifesto/social_networking.md

@@ -945,6 +945,10 @@ Then take over Monero's niche by being a better Monero.
 Then take over Bitcoin and Nostr's niche by being a better Bitcoin and a better Nostr,
 because recursive snarks can do lots of things, such as smart contracts, better than they can.
 
+This is the tactic that keet, holepunch, pear, and Particl are attempting to deploy, but
+their software is so far unusable.  The niche is still effectively vacant and open 
+for the taking.
+
 ## failure of previous altcoins to solve Cold Start.
 
 During the last decade, numberless altcoins have attempted to compete with
@@ -976,9 +980,10 @@ network, and without the rest of the network needing to know what that there was
 a contract, what that contract is nor to be able to evaluate it.
 Because of its privacy mechanism,
 
-Monero cannot do contracts, which prevents atomic exchange between Monero
-and Bitcoin, and prevents Monero from doing a lightning network that would
-enable fast atomic exchange between itself and Bitcoin lightning.
+Monero cannot do contracts, which renders atomic exchange between Monero
+and Bitcoin difficult and unduly complicated, and prevents Monero from
+doing a lightning network that would enable fast atomic exchange between
+itself and Bitcoin lightning.
 
 In order to do atomic exchanges between two blockchains, which is to say,
 to enable people to move value between one blockchain and another without
@@ -1004,7 +1009,7 @@ being, unlike Monero, a better Bitcoin.
 ### Bitmessage
 
 The lowest hanging fruit of all, (because, unfortunately, there is
-no money or prospect for money in it) is to replace Bitmessage.
+no money or prospect for money in it) is to replace Bitmessage, 
 Which is currently abandonware, which has ceased working on most platforms,
 has never supported humanly intelligible names, and lacks the
 moderation capability to grey list, blacklist, and whitelist names 
@@ -1016,6 +1021,11 @@ So next step, after capturing its abandoned market niche,
 is to integrate payment mechanisms, in particular to integrate 
 core lightning, which brings us a little closer to the faint smell of money.
 
+Bitmessage is long overdue to be replaced, and Keef and Particl attempted
+to replace it, as a starting point to get their respective crypto currencies of the ground
+so far without success, for their software is so far even less usable and more broken
+than Bitmessage.
+
 ### Integrating money
 
 So we create our own currency.  But because it will be created on sovcorp model

docs/setup/set_up_build_environments.md

@@ -251,6 +251,12 @@ ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f  /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key
 Note that visual studio remote compile requires an `ecdsa-sha2-nistp256` key on the host machine that it is remote compiling for.  If it is nist, it is
 backdoored
 
+To change the snake oil certificate:
+
+```bash
+make-ssl-cert generate-default-snakeoil --force-overwrite
+```
+
 ### .bashrc
 
 If the host has a domain name, the default in `/etc/bash.bashrc` will not display it in full at the prompt, which can lead to you being confused about which host on the internet you are commanding.