A random update on what I've been doing. This project isn't quite ready, but I'm very happy with my progress since I got back into this about ten days ago. I hope to ask for testers soon: MONAD is a system with some similarities to Tor, and also to the everyday usage of the word "VPN", a system to allow you to access websites and systems while obfuscating your location, e.g. access Netflix from another country. I started it as a demo for @Sovereign Engineering and now I'm going to try to get a usable system out It's funded by Cashu, specifically by the Spilman channels, so that you can easily pay tiny amounts (one sat, or even one millisat) as needed to keep the stream alive. This helps privacy because it makes it easier to use a different payment for each session, so that the relay operator can't easily link your sessions together Like Tor, you can select multiple relays in a chain for extra privacy, and you pay each one separately. It's onion routing, with sessions nested inside each other Lots of encryption of course, using secp256k1. And blinded paths already implemented as an option, in order that the client doesn't know the IP address (or FIPS address) of every relay @FIPS A few days out of date, I'll update it fully when it's ready for some testing:

GitHub

GitHub - SatsAndSports/MONAD: Monetized Onion Network Access Daemon - onion-routing, where you pay each node via Cashu spilman channels for their service

Monetized Onion Network Access Daemon - onion-routing, where you pay each node via Cashu spilman channels for their service - SatsAndSports/MONAD

@Cashu

Lots of interesting FUD in this anti-stablecoins piece. This one paragraph stood out to me, making the false claim that dollars are issued by the Fed. The vast majority of dollars that normal people use nowadays are bank deposits, issued out of thin air by commercial banks with the same mechanism used by stablecoins. (I'm not necessarily defending stablecoins. I'm just cringing at the bizarre arguments that we're going to see rolled out against Bitcoin again and again) The complaints he makes about stablecoins also apply identically to the conventional banking sector that he is desperate to defend. Commercial banks generate IOUs ('deposits' is essentially synonymous with 'stablecoins') for this purpose in order to buy other assets (loans, T-bills, ...) His comments about 'stability' and so on, very predictably without realising that commercial banks are as bad In fact, the balance sheets of stablecoin companies are better if anything! Their assets are t-bills, compared to the range mortgage and private credit crap that commercial banks have. I wish more people, *especially Bitcoiners* actually knew the facts about how commercial banking works. No conspiracy theories, just the sort of boring factual analysis that helps you see all the bullshit here and also to help you see through all the pleb slop https://xcancel.com/fintechfrank/status/2059239138042298571

I just took a look at the BIPs repo, thinking that maybe I can be slightly helpful by looking the open PRs and maybe trying to find some very small thing that I can be helpful with The first open PR at the moment is a childish attack by two feds on BIP-54

GitHub

Split BIP54 into bundle constituents by JeremyRubin · Pull Request #2175 · bitcoin/bips

This is largely an editorial question for the BIP Editors, although authors of BIP 54 may care... Largely looking for approach ack at this step bef...

I'm getting more bullish on Payjoin When I first read about it, it seemed a little simplistic and I wanted everyone to go straight to the "perfect" solution. But now I'm really warming to it. It increases privacy by a non-negligible amount. And the protocol is simple enough that many wallets will be able to support it. Then, as more wallet developers are used to the idea of doing this basic form of collaborative signing, the developer community will then have the experience necessary to become more ambitious (full coinjoin privacy, with blinded tokens for registering inputs and outputs, ...). And Cashu is moving in that direction:

GitHub

feat: payjoin by thesimplekid · Pull Request #376 · cashubtc/nuts

Cashu protocol specifications https://cashubtc.github.io/nuts/ - feat: payjoin by thesimplekid · Pull Request #376 · cashubtc/nuts

I'm switching to X this evening, away from Nostr, because I'm getting bored of the repetition - and egotistical attacks - that's on Nostr

On Silent Payments, I'm getting much more optimistic in the last hour or so, since deciding to dig into more detail. Seems like about 150 KB per block (BIP158 filter + 33 bytes per tx) is sufficient in terms of bandwidth. And this table of CPU-only scan times is much better than I expected. There is room for further bandwidth improvements. According to the BIP (352), if you want a couple of weeks a huge fraction of relevant UTXOs are already spent, and so the 150KB can be shrunk further by discarding transactions which no longer have any unspent taproot outputs. It's still not realistic for everybody, especially noobs, to run their own 'sovereign scanner' like this. But it's interesting nonetheless.

GitHub

GitHub - sparrowwallet/frigate: Frigate Electrum Server

Frigate Electrum Server. Contribute to sparrowwallet/frigate development by creating an account on GitHub.