Developer Spotlight: nym21, Bitcoin Research Kit#884
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Add hero/featured (derived from the charts collage), the parse/arithmetic diagram, the Bitview genesis-block explorer (light/dark), the tardigrade "I use Arch btw" avatar, the riced desktop, and the charts collage.
…ollage Crop the light tweet variant pixel-perfect to match the dark one (offset 31,63 at 1196x420), place it after the Lopp quote, and move the charts collage up to the 'thousands of charts' line now that the hero uses the tardigrade render.
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Arvin21M
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Jul 3, 2026
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Made edits based on answers from a second round of questioning that came back from the spotlight grantee.
Arvin21M
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- Suggested edits and additions marked separately aside...
- All the links work and point to the proper destination.
- Reads well and really pulls the curtain back on BRK.
- Great work!
Co-authored-by: ARVIN <141419722+Arvin21M@users.noreply.github.com>
TumaBitcoiner
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GM! I did a first round of reviews on this!
Generally speaking, it is good!
| It started, like most of his projects, with an itch. He was building himself a | ||
| portfolio tracker and wanted to add investment strategies. That work pulled him | ||
| down into on-chain indicators, a concept he first came across watching explainer | ||
| videos on Glassnode, narrated, as it happened, by an analyst named James Check. |
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Maybe adding link to YT channel or something?
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| The first public version went out as satonomics, short for "satoshi economics." He | ||
| renamed it kibō, Japanese for hope, which was the most hopeful thing about the |
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This sentence is not totally clear to me.
which was the most hopeful thing about the project
| nobody. In 2024 he put up a Geyser crowdfunding page to buy the server that would | ||
| run it. Then James Check found the page. | ||
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| Yes, that James Check: the one whose Glassnode videos had taught nym21 the subject |
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| Yes, that James Check: the one whose Glassnode videos had taught nym21 the subject | |
| Yes, the very same James Check whose Glassnode videos had taught nym21 the subject |
| run it. Then James Check found the page. | ||
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| Yes, that James Check: the one whose Glassnode videos had taught nym21 the subject | ||
| in the first place. Check didn't know him from anyone. "He somehow got aware of |
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| in the first place. Check didn't know him from anyone. "He somehow got aware of | |
| in the first place. Check "somehow got aware of |
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| running conversation. Over the next two years Check went from donor to self-hoster | ||
| to running the entire on-chain side of CheckOnChain, his own widely-read analytics |
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| running conversation. Over the next two years Check went from donor to self-hoster | |
| to running the entire on-chain side of CheckOnChain, his own widely-read analytics | |
| running conversation. Over the next two years Check went from donor to self-hoster, | |
| running the entire on-chain side of CheckOnChain, his own widely-read analytics |
| "Limiting the use of dependencies has been an on-going quest of mine," he says, and | ||
| he means it almost literally. The hardest one to shake was the price itself: he'd | ||
| been burned when Coingecko changed its terms under him, and again when exchanges | ||
| rewrote their APIs. The oracle from earlier was the finish line of that fight: once |
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| rewrote their APIs. The oracle from earlier was the finish line of that fight: once | |
| rewrote their APIs. The on-chain oracle was the finish line of that fight: once |
| anything again. | ||
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| The rest he removed the same way. He keeps the whole thing speaking plain HTTP, so | ||
| it runs behind anything, on anyone's hardware, offline if it has to. |
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| it runs behind anything, on anyone's hardware, offline if it has to. | |
| it can run behind anything, on anyone's hardware, offline if it has to. |
Maybe?
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| He prunes the Rust crates he leans on as aggressively as he can, wary of the | ||
| supply-chain surprises that come from trusting too much code you didn't write, a | ||
| bet that looks smarter every month another npm package turns out to be malware or |
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| bet that looks smarter every month another npm package turns out to be malware or | |
| bet that looks smarter every time another npm package turns out to be malware or |
| around 250% of the blockchain's own size. "I took it as a challenge," he says, and | ||
| got BRK's equivalent down to roughly 45%. | ||
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| And that equivalent is no toy: BRK reimplements the mempool.space APIs wholesale, |
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| And that equivalent is no toy: BRK reimplements the mempool.space APIs wholesale, | |
| That equivalent is no toy: BRK reimplements the mempool.space APIs wholesale, |
| nym21 has been an OpenSats grantee since December 2024. The grant lets him work on | ||
| the [Bitcoin Research Kit][brk] full-time and keep it free to use, verify, and | ||
| self-host. If you want to support nym21, tell someone the project exists. (Just | ||
| remember to credit him for the work.) |
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| remember to credit him for the work.) | |
| remember to credit him for the work!) |
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Adds a new Developer Spotlight on
nym21, the pseudonymous lead developer and maintainer of the Bitcoin Research Kit, covering how he built free, self-hostable on-chain analytics that even paid providers ended up relying on.Build preview: