One thing I find particularly appealing about Bitcoin, is that nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is, and therefore there's no creator for big brother to go to and force a change in code to bring the network down. I realize most of this comes from decentralization, and copies of the ledger being distributed in such a vast way that no one node holds more information than any other, and an attacker can't hit every ledger at once.

Is NANO protected in the same way, despite having Colin as an identifiable "CEO" of the Nano Foundation? Am I missing the point here? Is NANO decentralized enough to be resistant to any kind of future government ban on cryptocurrencies? I am an altcoin enthusiast, but I have worries about many altcoin's perpetuity when it comes to government oversight and shut down.

Thanks for your help in bolstering my understanding on the subject!!

As a recap: A group of Nano Center members (@ESKA, u/jaycoxx, u/Json, u/ktom7, u/mitche50 and u/nanoissuperior) have set up a Christmas Tree in the Pixel Bar, an e-sports themed bar in Leeds, UK. u/CDRhots and his team have been kind enough to allow us to live stream their bar and set up the hardware to enable Nano donations to trigger animations on the tree based on the last digit of the amount that you send.

The Nano Xmas Tree has been a pretty successful project so far. Currently, there has been 97.9352 Nano donated to the account, with our largest single donation being 7.7 Nano. When this project is complete, we will be donating these funds to the Simon on the Streets charity which helps the homeless population in Leeds, Bradford and Huddersfield through reaching out to people who lead solitary, harmful lives, with little or no vision for a better future and giving them a path forward to turn their lives around.

We have recently added some more statistics to the website, so take a look over at https://xmas.nanos.cc/ to see the top 10 donations, how much has been donated and check to see if anyone is triggering anything to show on the tree! We thank everyone's generous contributions and look forward to helping out Simon on the Streets!

Hi all! I started writing the Reddit TipBot about a year ago, and honestly, was doubtful that I would actually have a working product. Nonetheless, here we are one year later! The response from the (best) community (in the world) has been incredible, and this is one of my favorite projects I've ever worked on! The bot has been running smoothly with almost no intervention on my part for the past 6 months. It has been shadowbanned three times, but the moderators are always responsive and very friendly. 1983 users have activated their accounts.

In the past year, I've learned a *ton* about Python, and even landed my first job as a Python Software Developer back in June! For this reason (as well as buying a house in September and going to three weddings in October...) I had been pretty quiet in the community. Fortunately, my life has started calming down a bit, and I can get back to important things -- like writing tipbots!

That being said, I'm planning on some maintenance on the bot, starting tomorrow (Sunday). In this time, I'll be upgrading the Nano Node to V20, and pulling a new version of the bot. I'm not sure how long this will take, but hopefully it will be less than a day. Most of the updates are maintainability, but there are a few new features I'm planning. ( https://github.com/danhitchcock/nano_tipper_z/branches )

New Features

• Subreddit Moderator Controls -- I will be introducing a bot command that will allow subreddit moderators to add the bot to their Subreddit without any intervention on my part. Moderators can, at will, enable or disable the when they please
• (Coming Soon) Banano Functionality -- I have been in discussion with some members of the Banano community, and they would like to run a tipbot with the same codebase as the Nano tipbot! To do this, I will add an option in the configuration for Nano/Banano which will shift decimals appropriately, change text to Banano, and point the PoW server to BoomPoW instead. I'm not sure if I will be running the bot or not, however, I will continue development of both bots.
• (Coming Soon) Opt-Out -- Some people don't like the tipbot at all, so I will be adding an `opt-out` command. This command will disable the bot for the use, preventing anyone from sending to that address via TipBot commands. I'm not entirely sure of the details yet, but if a user opts out, I'm considering attempting to return tips less than 30 days old. WIP.

Back End Stuff

I've learned quite a few new tricks at my new job, and these following items will create a much easier to use environment for myself, or anyone else who is interested in contributing.

• Sane Project Structure -- I've separate the source files to a more traditional setup.
• Command Line Interface -- There is now a command line interface so that I can easily write functions and invoke them. I can grab information from the database easier, modify settings -- anything!
• Code Formatter and Linter -- The project now uses Black for a code formatter. Coming soon, precommit hooks...
• Conda Environment & MakeFile -- The environment is now strictly controlled via a 'make setup' command, which will create a conda activate for the bot.
• Git Flow structure -- I've switched to the Git Flow approach for version control. Before, I was crudely using GitHub. This way I can always test my develop/feature branch before merging with Master.
  

If you had some big plans for the tipbot tomorrow, let me know and I'll consider rescheduling. And unrelated, I might be handing the Discord bot off to /u/bbedward.