Crypto Update 12-10-2021 | Lightning, Umbrel, and Splinterlands

Trapped on Lightning

I've been 'waiting' for a lightning channel to close for months now on this derelict Lightning Labs wallet. The shitty thing about it is they just quietly dropped support for it. I was able to close other channels and withdraw the associated Bitcoin, but for whatever reason this one is stubborn. I'm not really sure how to close it, I even imported my seed into a different wallet to no avail. I'm guessing it has something to do with the opposite side of the channel. This is what I get for playing with experimental software. Perhaps all is not lost, I still have the seed and what not. It might take a command line utility or something to close the channel. We'll see what happens. Now I run an Umbrel Bitcoin/Lightning node. Speaking of that...

Umbrel Nodes

You can run a full Bitcoin and Lightning node on a Raspberry Pi. I chose to run mine in this case, because I am old enough to know what this is and actually had one as a kid.

They are easy to run, you just need:

• Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (8GB)
• 1 TB SSD (To store the blockchain)
• 64 GB Micro SD card (for the OS)
• A case (custom, Nintendo clone, or otherwise)

All can be found for less than $200.

Assemble the hardware, download and install Umbrel on the SD card, boot up the node, then BAMMM! Your very own Full node and Lightning node! From there you can connect your wallets to your full node and cut out the middleman. Below is the interface for connecting your Ledger to a full node:

Splinterlands

So now that my main account is a rental machine. I have decided to play around with my alt account @joshmansters. It currently has zero cards and zero rank. I don't have a ton of time to dedicate but I thought it might be fun to start over and see which types of increments have the biggest impact. I did notice that the Beta cards are completely gone from the starter pack, and have been replaced with the Chaos Legion cards. I suppose that was the right way to go, since Beta cards are so much more expensive and rare.

Speaking of Chaos Legion, the launch went so smoothly, and the infrastructure seemed to handle the massive number of people opening packs. I get about two dozen vouchers per day for phase 2 for my main account, so I'll be picking up that number of packs at the very least. At some point I will switch to filling out my deck with individual cards as I always have. Once you get the bulk of what you need in packs, it's too much like gambling to get the rest in packs in my opinion. It's so great to be an early adopter of such a massively successful game. I only regret not joining the alpha and the number of extra cards I sold off (particularly gold foil ones).