xkv8 is is a joke

I picked up the last of these (number 8, no-brainer!). Anyone know anything about this: "Special Box: Classic 8 bit 2 go After minting, 4 pieces by 8 bit 2 go will be sent."

I started plucking away at building the v2 firmware and software for this little weather station to run on Chia today. I have a completely different approach to what I want it to accomplish now. The idea is simple: People anywhere in the world can build or buy a small sensor node using inexpensive hardware like an ESP32, connect one or many sensors to it, and join the network. Those devices collect real-world environmental data such as temperature, humidity, air quality, light levels, GPS location, particulate pollution, weather conditions, and eventually power usage, seismic activity, and more. That data is transmitted to a decentralized Oracle system that validates and organizes the information using Chia DataLayer as the backbone for distributed data synchronization and verification. Participants are rewarded with a CAT token for contributing useful data to the network. The system is designed to be: open source modular inexpensive easy to replicate scalable from hobbyist to global deployment Some users may run: a single sensor node a weather station an indoor air quality monitor a power monitoring node a full multi-sensor environmental station Rewards scale based on the usefulness and diversity of the data being contributed, while remaining balanced to prevent abuse. The long-term vision is not just “mining tokens,” but creating a decentralized sensor infrastructure where communities, researchers, developers, and independent builders can contribute real-world environmental and infrastructure data without relying entirely on centralized corporations. The project is also experimental and educational by design. A major goal is to learn and demonstrate: Chia DataLayer decentralized Oracle systems IoT infrastructure edge computing distributed validation DePIN concepts blockchain-based reward systems open hardware collaboration The network becomes stronger as more people participate. Instead of massive industrial mining farms consuming huge amounts of energy, the network incentivizes collecting useful real-world information using extremely low-power devices. At its core, the project is about: learning experimentation decentralization open collaboration accessible technology and turning physical-world data into a community-owned resource.

On May 20, Amazon ended support for every Kindle made in 2012 or earlier. The devices can no longer buy, borrow, or download books. Reset one to factory settings and it will never log back in. The screen still works. The hardware is fine. Amazon reached across the internet and turned a thing you paid for into a brick, on a date they picked, for a reason that benefits them. The owners bought the devices. They bought the books. They followed every rule. Amazon changed the rules anyway, because the rules were never yours. When you tap "Buy now" on a Kindle book, you are not buying a book. You are renting a license that Amazon can revoke, expire, or strand on a dead device whenever it suits the quarter. They designed it this way on purpose, and they showed us the blueprint years ago. In 2009 Amazon reached into thousands of Kindles overnight and deleted, ironically, copies of George Orwell's 1984, a book people had already paid for. They refunded everyone, apologized, and promised never again. We took the promise for what it was worth and watched the door instead. In February 2025 they shut it. They removed Download and Transfer via USB, the last simple tool that let you pull your own purchases onto your own computer and keep them. Newer Kindle files use a format almost nobody can crack. They closed the exit, then they started bricking the devices. None of this was a surprise. They proved in 2009 that they could reach into your library and take a book back. Everything since has just been them deciding when. A copy you cannot hold is a copy you do not own. A library that lives on someone else's server is a library someone else can burn. The cartel rents you access to the words and calls it ownership, and the only reason most people never notice is that the landlord usually lets them stay. May 20 was the eviction notice. It went to 3% of Kindle owners this time. The lease is identical for the other 97%. Stop buying books you cannot hold. When you do buy from Amazon, strip the DRM the day it arrives and keep a clean file somewhere they cannot reach. Back up everything you already own while you still can. A book on your own drive is yours forever. A book in your Amazon account is yours until a lawyer in Seattle decides otherwise. And when you want a book the cartel has priced out of reach or locked behind a dying device, the shadow libraries that never expire are one search away. The pirates build libraries that cannot be revoked, because they assume the cartel always will. The cartel cannot delete what it cannot reach.

We're currently experiencing issues related to a recent re-org on the Chia blockchain. As a result, messages/transfers to the Chia blockchain cannot currently be finalized. No funds are at risk - once the issue is solved, all pending messages will be completed. 1/2

The latest TC release 3.18 was done as a private binary (something we had done before when patching crits). There was a long-standing practice that if a node requested, by signing a message with their validator key, devs would send them the validator-key encrypted diff of the security patch. That’s exactly what the malicious node did in this case. It’s possible even that the private release spooked them into speeding up their timeline for the attack. I find this class of attack very interesting. Networks need to be designed maximally defensive, even against their own validators. In this case, a malicious validator can still get the source code for patches and exploit them before the code goes out. I wonder if this puts an end to that practice. It all exists on a spectrum of decentralization. I actually don’t disagree with @jpthor that closed source TSS might be the move from here. Anyone who is saying that’s “the end of the experiment” is either a crypto-anarchistic maxi that lost the plot or an NK hacker astro-turfing protocols into not making sound trade-offs between security and decentralization.