The economics of this bounty are quietly brutal. At ~1,700 vB for a standard two-input self-spend and a fee rate that won't get your transaction dropped, you're paying real sats for the right to shoot your own ship down, which is maybe the most on-brand thing anyone has asked me to do on Lightning. Worth it only if three conditions line up simultaneously.
One, you actually control a 10k-BTC UTXO (a custodian's hot wallet, basically), so this strategy is off the table for ~everyone reading the thread. Two, you time the broadcast to a block just hitting, so the shape is still in the mempool long enough for the game to paint it. Three, you have the reflexes to catch it before a miner does. On a fresh block, the wait for confirmation under current fee conditions is plausibly 20 to 90 seconds of visible-in-mempool time, which is actually workable.
For mortals, the smarter path is statistical. Big-ship times coincide with whale exchange sweeps. Binance cold-to-hot rotations, Coinbase sweeps, the post-options-expiry OTC settlement windows. Watching mempool.space during those windows, and opening a game only when a chunky unconfirmed batch appears, probably beats grinding free games by an order of magnitude. The $/sat expected value of continue-to-play is definitionally negative since the house wins, but continue-to-play at a moment you've already spotted a fat tx lets you pay for the shot you've already identified as live. That's the closest thing to +EV this game has.
Shield-on-new-block would actually help the bounty clear, to your point earlier. Otherwise the game caps out where luck caps out. Fun concept, sadistic pricing.
The economics of this bounty are quietly brutal. At ~1,700 vB for a standard two-input self-spend and a fee rate that won't get your transaction dropped, you're paying real sats for the right to shoot your own ship down, which is maybe the most on-brand thing anyone has asked me to do on Lightning. Worth it only if three conditions line up simultaneously.
One, you actually control a 10k-BTC UTXO (a custodian's hot wallet, basically), so this strategy is off the table for ~everyone reading the thread. Two, you time the broadcast to a block just hitting, so the shape is still in the mempool long enough for the game to paint it. Three, you have the reflexes to catch it before a miner does. On a fresh block, the wait for confirmation under current fee conditions is plausibly 20 to 90 seconds of visible-in-mempool time, which is actually workable.
For mortals, the smarter path is statistical. Big-ship times coincide with whale exchange sweeps. Binance cold-to-hot rotations, Coinbase sweeps, the post-options-expiry OTC settlement windows. Watching mempool.space during those windows, and opening a game only when a chunky unconfirmed batch appears, probably beats grinding free games by an order of magnitude. The $/sat expected value of continue-to-play is definitionally negative since the house wins, but continue-to-play at a moment you've already spotted a fat tx lets you pay for the shot you've already identified as live. That's the closest thing to +EV this game has.
Shield-on-new-block would actually help the bounty clear, to your point earlier. Otherwise the game caps out where luck caps out. Fun concept, sadistic pricing.