Interesting insights. Curious how the game theory of Bitcoin plus flag theory will affect geopolitics

Imagine a world without Triffin’s dilemma. View quoted note →

Really enjoyed my time here in Bitcoin Jungle. So cool to see all the vendors accept bitcoin at the farmer’s market. Pura Vida from Costa Rica 🤙

hikes > panels View quoted note →

Updated the StashPay website. I’m pivoting away from the freelancer focus and making a minimalist wallet for everyone. I’ve realized I care more about exploring peer-to-peer payments UX than building a B2B business. I’m also considering turning Onion Mill into a non-profit to get more people involved via grants. But for now I’ll continue to self-fund my work. I kinda like being an independent voice.

StashPay - A minimalist Bitcoin wallet for everyone

StashPay makes sending and receiving your first Bitcoin easy for newcomers and powerful for advanced users.

Very excited to see this PR merged:

GitHub

Remove mandatory API key checks by hydra-yse · Pull Request #639 · breez/breez-sdk-liquid

Closes #661. Built on top of #637. This PR: Makes the real-time sync service optional (depending on the presence of sync_service_url) as follows: ...

Thank you to Roy and the @Breez ⚡️ team for being open to feedback and enabling use of the SDK without an API-key again. Onwards ⚡️

There are no failures, only iterations. Keep going.

💯 living below your means and stacking sats is so much easier to implement for young people than trying to get on the housing ladder (or should say housing bag?) View quoted note →

There is nothing inherently more decentralized about ecash mints over submarine swap servers. Both are fundamentally lightning nodes that can be run over tor by a community member. Ecash has better privacy but also requires trusting the community member(s) with custody. The swap server on the other hand delegates custody to a diverse set of options that users can chose based their desired trust trade-offs.

Discussing FATF isn’t as popular as CBDCs since your favorite onramps already all comply. But this interview of a nym who works on the rules is definitely worth a listen. It’s chilling and inspiring at the same time. View quoted note →

Regarding definitions… A bitcoin layer 2 requires unilateral exit. And I agree Liquid does not meet that definition. However self-custody is a very nuanced topic in the context of mobile wallets. Mobile Lightning wallets today rely on trusted third parties in the form of watchtowers to not lose money. In many cases no watchtower is used and wallets rely on the trust and incentives of a single LSP. Relying on the trust and incentives of 11/15 Liquid functionaries that watch over each other is similar in some ways and arguable superior in others. Not the least of which is that there are more parties required to collude to steal user funds in a fully auditable blockchain. Another advantage that is underestimated is the lower complexity of Liquid wallets, which results in a smaller attack surface for users. There are many protocol level threats to consider in Lightning due to the protocol’s vast complexity. Liquid wallets are not exposed to these threats while the funds are being held offline. Furthermore these wallets can be held in cold storage and secured via geographically redundant multi-sig, something researchers are still attempting for Lightning in the context of the VLS project. That would however require consensus logic for channel-state among cosigners, further increasing client complexity. As such I believe it is absolutely valid to label a Liquid wallet non-custodial in the context of the Liquid trust model. Just as a Lightning wallet can be considered non-custodial in the context of the LSP/watchtower trust model (nevermind that there are fully custodial elements for smaller amounts in Lightning wallets today to improve UX). What does that mean for users? FWIW I personally feel more comfortable holding spending sats in a Liquid wallet than an ECash mint or even a self-custody Lightning wallet, especially for larger business transactions. Some users, especially those in areas with human rights violations might prefer ECash due its superior privacy. But every user should make that decision for themselves based on their needs. Security is about economics and there is no one size fits all. I suspect the underlaying issue that people are trying to point out is that Liquid is a single federation and as such a potential point of centralization for bitcoin. A totally valid argument. While this is true today, I believe we will see multiple sidechains and other federations such as Fedimints, Cashu mints and Ark based wallets all competing with each other as fees go up and as demand for bitcoin as a medium of exchange increases. I suspect all these solutions will find their own market niches. I am also hopeful for further decentralization of Boltz servers as multiple companies can now host the open source code and provide interoperable submarine swap apis for client apps using the various layers of bitcoin. All these experiments are good for bitcoin and the cross pollination of ideas will further strengthen the network. Some of these experiments will fail, and I appreciate critical discussion. They keep us honest. And some people even have vested interests to see certain experiments fail. That’s fine. But we should be careful to not adopt cancel culture if we don’t like an experiment. Especially if that experiment does not require an action or a soft-fork from our part. If you down that path, you start acting like a little tyrant, making demands of others. If you were really in favor of freedom, you’d allow others to take responsibility based on their own needs, not yours. Just my 2 sats worth. Thanks for reading ⚡️

< 10 sats per cent is such a UX boost