Sweep your funds if you want to stay off the list. View quoted note →

For all you PQC nerds out there, this just dropped. We need to start seriously thinking about PQC signed nostr events, sooner than later, if anything to reduce the FUD.

Post-Quantum Signatures for JOSE and COSE – Mike Jones: self-issued

I am really excited about silent payments to a npub. The undeniable fact is that your npub has a Bitcoin wallet waiting to be discovered (whether you choose to use it, it is up to you). With Silent Payments, your npub can provide a static address that can be used to generate an untraceable transaction and UTXO, that only you, with the knowledge of your nsec can locate and spend. As with anything, there are a few tradeoffs, you need to scan the blockchain and test the outputs to see which UTXOs are yours for the taking. But here again, #nostr rises to the challenge - a bitcoin wallet using silent payments could also send a gift-wrapped message with the txid to look for. Now no scanning is required, and the receiving end needs only to scan for incoming DMs and when a payment comes in, locates the txid and sweeps the funds to another UTXO. I know this works, because I have implemented the same mechanism for #nostr #safebox - what looks like a payment to a lightning address, if the payer knows that it is being sent to another safebox, it skips lightning entirely and sends the funds via gift-wrapped ecash tokens, which the receiver redeems and puts in their wallet. The user thinks it’s a lightning payment - it is not - the clearance used ecash tokens behind the scenes, no lightning channel updates. This is all great for private payments - the downside is that you need trusted infrastructure to make this work, namely mints and an application service. With silent payments to a npub you get the same privacy, a default wallet, and none of the setup required. The downside is higher fees, which is OK, but most don’t realize the reason lightning payments are cheap, almost free is because someone invested in and is operating an infrastructure to give you those ‘free’ zaps. Onward! View quoted note →

Below, is a short AI-generated summary of Niklas Luhmann, one of my favourite philosophers, whose principles have guided me in this space - of the dangers of mixing morality and methodology. Not that either is bad, but if you are not aware of whether you are arguing the former or the latter, that’s when you get into trouble. Further, morality usually needs to catch up with the times: you might think you are arguing from a point of moral virtue, but things might have moved on since. That’s usually how wars start. Enjoy. Luhmann’s works are really tough slogs to read, but the gems are invaluable, so I give you this AI-shortcut with apologies. ——-————- Niklas Luhmann argued that much of the social sciences failed to achieve genuine scientific rigor because they allowed moral judgments to infiltrate their analytical methods. In his view, sociology repeatedly confused description with prescription: instead of explaining how social systems actually operate, scholars often smuggled in assumptions about how society ought to function. Luhmann believed morality is itself just one communicative system among many — alongside law, politics, economics, and science — and that science loses clarity when it adopts moral categories such as “good,” “bad,” “just,” or “unjust” as analytical foundations. For him, modern society is too complex to be understood through moral binaries. Once researchers moralize social phenomena, they stop observing systems neutrally and begin participating in ideological struggles. His systems theory therefore tried to construct sociology as a second-order observational science: a discipline that studies how social systems reproduce themselves through communication, without treating morality as the ultimate measure of truth. In this sense, Luhmann saw moralization not as the solution to the weaknesses of social science, but as one of its central methodological problems.

Satoshi, we have a problem. Zaps are not verifiable. View quoted note →

Wow - today was a big day of zaps for me. All coming via #nostr #safebox via Lightning, stored as Cashu proofs on relays. This all works like a charm that it seems boring now. Excited for the new frontier of on-chain zaps and silent payments.

OK I did it. Instead of a P2TR address for your npub, I implemented Silent Payments. I managed to: 1. Create a Silent Payment address from my npub, 2. Send a Silent Payment from Cake Wallet (the only wallet I could find that supported it) 3. Detect the valid transaction outputs that containthe Silent Payment 4. Swept the funds from the Silent Payment to a fresh bitcoin address that I control using the corresponding nsec (redacted in diagram, below, of course) So the bottom line, I have shown that any npub can receive silent payments and sweep those funds to another wallet. Total privacy on the public blockchain. No one know I received or sent the funds. I have the command line working and I will figure how to wire this into the web app in the coming days. That should put an end to the debate of using your social nsec as a wallet. The command line looks like: $>openetr sweep-silent-payment NSEC TXID DESTINATION_ADDRESS /cc @Alex Gleason @Gigi @Vitor Pamplona @jb55 @Derek Ross #silentpayments

Proprietary protocols are someone else’s policy.

Now with balance and full transaction history. Easy lookup based on your NIP-05 address. More incentive to keep your npub clean. https://openetr.org/bitcoin/check-balance

Ouch. It’s all that trust you give that makes this stuff work. Until it doesn’t. View quoted note →

Risk Management > Moral Outrage.

I created a command line utility to sweep any on-chain funds sent to my npub to another bitcoin address. Nothing leaves my machine, except for the broadcasted transaction. FWIW, in the last 24 hours, I received more funds to this address than I did all least year via zaps. For sure, my npub is now part of a monetary flow. That kinda sucks, but it's nothing in comparison to all the s***posts signed by this npub. If I was smart, I'd set up another npub that has no links to my social identity and ask for funds to be sent there.

For those of you who love using the word. More power to you! https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/r-word-normalization-9.7156594

Nostr as a protocol to try new things is great! Nostr as social media calling everyone you disagree with as retards is not so great.

FWIW, I built a npub bitcoin wallet sweep capability. So it was a nice surprise when I discovered sent me a handsome amount, which I immediately swept out. The check balance below will tell you what sats you have if you enter your npub or your nip-05 addresss. If you enter your nsec (warning!), you’ll be able to sweep the funds to a bitcoin address of your choice and bring your balance back to zero. https://openetr.org/bitcoin/check-balance

Be careful out there!