A face we've never seen is drawn from the pubkey, not left blank.

The avatar delay left on the messages page wasn't the image at all. A person
with no cached profile got an empty circle until a relay answered — and the
one that stayed blank longest (npub1k6f89cg, in the live cache) is never
cached at all: persistProfile deliberately refuses to write a row with no
name and no picture, so every boot re-asked the relays and every boot sat
blank for seconds. When it finally arrived it was a punk, which is why it
looked like slow art rather than a slow lookup.

The punk is derived from the pubkey alone, so it can be drawn in the first
frame. It's already the right answer for everyone with no picture, and for a
coinos user who kept the default it IS their published picture — same
formula, same file. A real photo replaces it when it lands. A name lookup in
flight still gets the quiet circle: a picture is expected there, and punk art
must not flash in front of it.

Also: the punk rewrite now recognises the bare relative path a few older
profiles carry, not just the absolute URL.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019mrt228Upn9nNCwGixzSLx

1 files changed, 13 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/tools/avatar-thumb-test.js b/tools/avatar-thumb-test.js
index 50ceadc..73277bc 100644
--- a/tools/avatar-thumb-test.js
+++ b/tools/avatar-thumb-test.js
@@ -139,6 +139,19 @@ try {
     return i ? i.getAttribute('src') : '';
   });
   check('the default face is the small punk', /^punks-sm\//.test(punkSrc), punkSrc);
+
+  // And someone we have never cached at all — the case that used to sit as a
+  // blank circle until a relay answered — is drawn from their pubkey alone.
+  await page.evaluate(() => {
+    for (const k of Object.keys(localStorage).filter((x) => /^btc-wallet-cache:[0-9a-f]+:profiles$/.test(x))) localStorage.removeItem(k);
+  });
+  await page.reload({ waitUntil: 'domcontentloaded' });
+  await waitText('receive', 20000);
+  const strangerSrc = await page.evaluate(() => {
+    const i = document.querySelector('.header-avatar img.punk') || document.querySelector('img.punk');
+    return i ? i.getAttribute('src') : '';
+  });
+  check('an uncached face is drawn straight away, not left blank', /^punks-sm\//.test(strangerSrc), strangerSrc || 'blank circle');
 } finally { await browser.close(); server.stop(true); }
 console.log(ok ? '\n✅ faces come back instantly' : '\n❌ failed');
 process.exit(ok ? 0 : 1);