Pretending to be a good person is easier, and much cheaper than doing good; you just need to criticize those doing real good for not doing it well enough.

Here we go again, that's why Wasabi tries to minimize the number of dependencies to three: NBitcoin, Avalonia, and NNostr (from a reputable dev, but I will remove it anyway). However, every time someone requests a feature, the conversation goes like this: "Why don't you use LDK, NDK, _DK? There are already bindings for .NET!" Look, you shouldn't even trust your own team, much less a team of unknown people. And yes, it sounds crazy and makes all features to come late but safesty is THE feature for a Bitcoin Wallet. View quoted note →

Imagine you want to know the distance of each of your coins from the nearest coinjoin transaction.

Wasabi coordinators will be published as onion services automatically by default in the next version. Wasabi coordinators' operators won't need to even install Tor. Additionally, Wasabi coordinators will be able to run not only with heavily pruned nodes but also with nodes running in BlocksOnly mode, which uses less bandwidth and CPU at the expense of not having fee estimations.

View quoted note → This works better than what you would expect, but not always. Two good friends of mine asked for my advice about how to bring their salary into the country without having to go through the forced selling imposed by the central bank, and I convinced them to ask their employers to pay them in bitcoins. Both complained that by doing that they would be seen as problematic or unreasonable, but I insisted and told them that if their employers do not want to pay them in what they want to be paid, then they were not valued by their employers. They have been paid in bitcoin since then. A few months after that, an old employer of mine requested me to help them with a very serious problem they had with their biggest customer, and I accepted only if they would pay me in bitcoin. They accepted the condition and I solved their problem that same day, but then they refused to pay me in bitcoin, arguing that it was difficult and that their accountant was not happy and so on. I also refused to accept pesos and that was all. Now they cannot call me never again, what is okay.

Very interesting. @nopara73 had an account in Coinbase which he hadn't used in more than ten years. Then, suddenly he received an email saying that he had been deplatformed because his account had engaged in prohibited uses. @nopara73 seems to believe that he is on a blacklist, but I think he is not. Here is an alternative explanation: As you should all already know, exchanges spy on you not only before depositing but also, and even more importantly, after you withdraw from them. That means that if you did something that they don't like, like coinjoining a UTXO that they know was yours, they will close your account.

When I was a kid, even many years after the Argentinian civil war, it was still pretty common to assume that your phone calls could be intercepted. That sentiment changed during the nineties, and I forgot the old days, but it wasn't until during a talk with a prominent local laywer I mentioned something that made him hang up the call immediately. Then I undertood, we don't undertand how important privacy really is, but people in power do.

In Argentina, it was prohibited to buy, sell, or exchange foreign currency. Whenever the "blue dollar" (the free/black market exchange rate) surged significantly, the government dispatched police to apprehend currency exchangers and intimidate potential participants. I struggle to see how this same pattern won't eventually replicate on a global scale. We may soon witness the emergence of a "bitcoin blue" rate that substantially diverges from the prices listed on regulated exchanges. As I have observed in my country, the incentive to arbitrage are an overwhelmingly powerful. Purchasing restricted, undervalued bitcoins and reselling them in unregulated markets at repetition is something that no government intervention can stop.

I've just published an article discribing how to integrate your software with LLMs: https://nostrudel.ninja/articles/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzpx6cqnjzhe6n3m4p4gae2dum2calpksx56qp0cwxtvyfptauqz3cqy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hj7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgtcqxptkzumpvf5j64mpd3kx2apdv9hxgt2pwf6xjenfvd5kzmpdf9h8getvd35kwetwvdjj66ehwccr2wgjhy5vc

I've ported a small Scheme interpreter from F# to C#. This is for adding safe scripting capabilities to C# projects.

GitHub

GitHub - lontivero/CScheme: A Scheme interpreter in C#

A Scheme interpreter in C#. Contribute to lontivero/CScheme development by creating an account on GitHub.

The Next Wave: How Religious Extremism Is Regaining Power

A new alliance of religious extremists, far-right populists, and oligarchic funders is reshaping European politics. The Next Wave describes this co...

My youngest son asked me what web3 is.

Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua show Latin American politicians that their totalitarian dreams are possible, that if they convince enough people that they can get an unlimited number of new rights—free stuff produced by somebody else's labor—that population can not only be enslaved but also that they deserve to be enslaved because that's what makes them happy. These examples are even worse than what they look like because while we can find cases in recent history where dictators were killed by the people (Nicolae Ceaușescu) cases like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez are examples of dictators who not only died in power but also named their own successors. That's not the right message, is it? It is unbelievable the level of support in favor of those regimes, and that's dangerous. I think all politicians would behave better if the peoples enslaved by those regimes took them down. That would be the best for all of us.

Ashigaru's Whirlpool can steal your money. This is something I mentioned in passing in a previous note, but it is important to develop in some detail. Basically, it is the Whirlpool server that tells the client how much it must pay, and the client trusts that blindly. This allows the server to instruct clients to pay as much as it wants. But why not simply check that the coordination fee is the promised 5%? Because Samourai had "discount codes" (scode) designed to allow some users to pay lower coordination fees. These codes were opaque to the client and only understandable by the server. This means that the client had no way to know how much it had to pay and it had to be the server the one that makes the math. As a side note, it seems these "discounts" were not verified and could even be negative. Fortunately, it seems the Ashigaru team removed the "discounts" functionality, which is the right thing to do. The next step should be to hardcode the 5% coordination fee on the client. It would also be good to clean the code and remove all what it is not being used anymore because all the variables and messages are still there making the auditting much harder.

There is a long chain of fake wasabi coinjoins. Here is just one:

The Mempool Open Source Project®

Explore the full Bitcoin ecosystem with The Mempool Open Source Project®. See the real-time status of your transactions, get network info, and more.

If Bitcoin is inevitable, another 6102 is inevitable too. View quoted note →