Trust Models (refer back to this when someone claims their thing is “non-custodial”, note that privacy is a different spectrum) * Holding Funds On Chain * Trusting you can get a transaction confirmed in some time horizon where your balance is way higher than the on chain cost (LN) * Trusting you can get a tree of many transaction confirmed in some time horizon where your balance is way higher than the on chain cost of the whole tree (in-round Ark for high-ish balances, rollups for *very* high balances after some future soft-fork) ^ non-custodial v custodial * Trusting you can get a tree of transactions confirmed in some time horizon where your balance is similar to the on chain cost (in-round Ark for moderate balances, rollups for most folks after some future soft fork) * Trusting 1-of-N with keys (rollups with BitVM) * Trusting N-of-M to do something honestly once in a TEE (statechains maybe?) * Trusting N-of-M to do something honestly once (statechains/statechains-on-Ark) * Trusting N-of-M with keys (Liquid, Fedimint) * Trusting 1 entity with keys (Cashu, Coinbase, …)

This isn’t specific to BOLT 12 and is really stretching the line on accuracy. Yes, if you reuse a BOLT 12 across two companies they can compare notes and see that you used the same one (duh!), but it’s not “because you reuse the same public key”, it’s because it’s the same thing! But, of course, you don’t *have * to do this. Wallets, by default, should generate a fresh BOLT 12 every time they display the receive key (and LDK will every time the wallet asks for a BOLT 12), including fetching a different “offer_issuer_id”. Ultimately, don’t assume things just based on the name of a field in a spec - the “offer_issuer_id” is a misnomer, LDK actually has a different name for it because of this, and IIRC the spec even says don’t reuse it if you’re a regular end-user wallet! View quoted note →

What dimension am I in?

This neither increases privacy nor simplifies accounting. View quoted note →

I think people here underestimate just how many users Twitter/X has lost over the last year (not counting AI bots…). Looking back at people who were a major part of The Conversation a few years ago most of them simply don’t post anywhere anymore (or a few do on Bluesky). Turns out a bad algorithm is worse than none. Nostr isn’t losing the user race, people just stopped posting.

It’s a real shame the US outlawed this starting next year. Bigger shame the Bitcoin community isn’t constantly beating the drum, too….making it illegal to pay with bitcoin (via a payment processor) without KYC is nuts! View quoted note →

The feed is: “Trump and Musk are bypassing all the controls we had in place, they’re literally overthrowing the constitution by ignoring Congress” “Trump and Musk are saving democracy by throwing out all the unelected officials that actually control the government and installing the will of the people” Y’all need to chill the fuck out, dear god everyone has lost their damn minds.

If this is true bitcoin will fail. View quoted note →

We’ve got to years to pass the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act. We can’t let this pass us.

Okay, my mentions are now filled with spam. I guess that’s cause I “picked bad relays”? How do I (a normal user who doesn’t have the time to investigate the relay offerings out there) fix this?

Run a bitcoin payment processor so that normie merchants can accept bitcoin and we can spend bitcoin (which was half the damn point)? Congrats you have to ask for the socials of people paying 🤦‍♂️ View quoted note →

I once had a discussion with a GNU Taler dev, who argued with a straight face that the government should have a (limited) backdoor into financial systems despite voters sometimes electing bad people because, and I’m dead serious here, the German voters would never elect someone with as authoritarian tendencies as Trump. I guess he missed his history lessons…in literally every year of school there lol View quoted note →

Turns out Taproot is great for post-Quantum in Bitcoin. https://groups.google.com/g/bitcoindev/c/8O857bRSVV8

And that’s 100k

I responded on Twitter too, but this is such a strange rant to me. Bitcoin Core (contributor)’s current push for better mempool policy is *directly* related to multi-party UTXO ownership and scaling. It specifically substantially improves lighting in practice today, and will certainly be required for any future scaling technologies. In the mean time, lots of folks (like James) continue to do research into how to scale Bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies generally). There’s no reason to care if that happens from Bitcoin Core contributors or others, and we’re still really far from having any particularly good ideas on this front. As that research continues, there’s no reason for concrete software towards short-term soft-forks. View quoted note →

I don’t really understand this kind of criticism (and not to pick on Will here, it seems to be from ~everyone). Bluesky took a different approach - first build a product people want whose technology supports decentralization, and add the features the geeks want later. It’s easy to shit on their lack of decentralization, but Bluesky has made clear and consistent progress on that front since day one, and I assume they will continue to do so. The result has been a product that’s growing (those user stats are pretty realistic, doubly so when you look at the number of accounts actually posting real content) way more than nostr with tons of anti-centralization features that nostr is missing (anyone can create a feed algorithm, and there are many, decentralized content tagging is a really cool innovation - different “adult content” tagging services, opt-in different moderation services, etc). The federated model of Mastodon led to a trainwreck of fiefdoms run by weirdly obsessive and controlling mods, but Bluesky took that and addressed the issues by splitting moderation from hosting. Sure, Bluesky’s hosting model means you don’t get the relay-redundancy that sets nostr’s censorship resistance apart, but that’s not all that hard to add in the future (with the sync assumption they make making it easier to make efficient, too). Building the kinds of stuff Bluesky has on nostr is gonna take a huge investment, we can’t leave folks like Will stuck building critical nostr apps by himself. View quoted note →

We need to build technology that protects average users, not only the technologically advanced. (Tweet quoted another pointing out that you should use a VPN when using nostr) View quoted note →

One team is led by a fraud who thinks he knows how to handle a sword, the other hires an actor who can dress up in a puppet outfit and convincingly hold a sword. We are not the same.

JoinMarket remains, by far, the best CoinJoin tech ever built. View quoted note →

LNURL-P indeed should be replaced…. But to replace it with a version of BOLT 12 reimplemented on nostr that misses out on ~all BOLT 12’s features (like, you know, recipient privacy, among many orders) just because NIH would be a massive disservice to Nostr users. View quoted note →