The cat's out of the bag with the newest episode of TFTC - announcing here first on Nostr: Sigbash v2 is live! We've switched to a new approach that I've decided to call Oblivious Signing: thanks to the power of MuSig2, WebAssembly, and zero knowledge proofs, our signer never sees your signing key *or* the transactions you want us to sign. instead, when you register a key, first you commit to a signing policy (anything - input and output amounts, destination addresses, time windows allowed for signing, you name it) - and we'll only sign transactions that match your policy. Policies are as complex as you need and as private as we could possibly make them. Our beta is live on signet now at https://www.sigbash.com!

I heard you can just do things? So I wrote a book on the political economy - the 'who gets what and why', to use Susan Strange's definition - of Internet protocols, and decided to self-publish it. Find it at

Grand Decentral

Something More Profound: The Political Economy Of Network Protocols

Something More Profound: The Political Economy Of Network Protocols

in HTML and PDF format. Free as in beer, enjoy!

Watched the U.S. presidential debate last week between Trump and Biden. Watching the Iranian presidential debate between Pezeshkian and Jalili now. All the "this is fine" dog in burning house memes ever made aren't enough to convey what I'm feeling.

I just run realized Van Morrison has two songs about the exact same thing - 'Dancing In The Moonlight' and also 'Moondance' - and they're both absolute bangers gm

Putting the finishing touches on a new Sigbash release based on all the feedback I've gotten over the past month. Definitely announcing all the changes here first instead of Xitter. (Maybe I can just screenshot the note and post it there?)

Wrapping this up now. Excellent framing, contrasting Tim May's vision of crypto anarchy with Julian Assange's idea of 'crypto justice', exploring what 'privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful' means in practice.

gm, Chainalysis is astrology for spooks

"Nearly all threshold ECDSA based TSS implementations are vulnerable to key extraction attacks despite having undergone multiple security audits." TL,DR: Most MPC implementations appear to be vulnerable. Bitcoin users unaffected.

No Bullshit Bitcoin

Verichains Discovers Critical Key Extraction Attacks in TSS for MPC Wallets and Digital Asset Custody: Native Bitcoin MultiSig Not Affected

Verichains announced that it discovered critical Key Extraction Attacks in many popular Threshold Signature Scheme (TSS) implementations, a Multi-P...

Them: you shouldn't celebrate when banks fail Me:

I would simply not build software that requires permission from the NYAG. It's not complicated

Reading Dr. Niel Ten Oever's Ph.D thesis right now for the University of Amsterdam and it's such a banger: The entanglement of the Internet with the daily practices of governments, companies, institutions, and individuals means that the processes that shape the Internet also shape society. In this dissertation, I study the norms that shape the Internet’s under- lying structure through its transnational governance. Norms are the ‘widely-accepted and internalised [sic] principles or codes of conduct that indicate what is deemed to be permitted, prohibited, or required of agents within a specific community’ (Erskine and Carr 2016, 87). Internet governance is the development, coordina- tion, and implementation of policies, technologies, protocols, and standards. Internet governance produces a global and interop- erable Internet functioning as a general-purpose communication network in transnational governance bodies. I examine four cases of norm conflict and evolution in three key Internet governance institutions: the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF); the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN); and the Réseaux IP Européens Network (RIPE). https://www.academia.edu/44194819/Wired_Norms_Inscription_resistance_and_subversion_in_the_governance_of_the_Internet_infrastructure

🎶 3AC was first in line 🎶 🎶 Now Silvergate and Gemini 🎶 🎶 SBF, Caroline 🎶c 🎶 Gensler wants Binance to die 🎶 🎶 We didn't play with shitcoins 🎶

The combo of: a) this Politico oral history with Biden admin officials marking the one year anniversary of the war in Ukraine - in which sanctions against Russia are described in terms of 'shock-and-awe' and collective punishment, with Treasury officials imagining themselves as warfighters deterring enemy behavior and blithely ignoring collateral damage https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/02/24/russia-ukraine-war-oral-history-00083757 and b) this Bloomberg article published on the same day, quietly admitting that sanctions proponents have given up on them having any impact on Russia's behavior https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-24/russia-sanctions-to-stop-putin-s-war-in-ukraine-became-300b-distraction has convinced me we're in the final stage of the decline of the dollar system, in a "where are we going and why are we in this handbasket?" kind of way.

I think it's great that this mining pool came back from the dead right after that first non-standard ordinals transaction was mined and people started getting shouty. Definitely not an existing player spoofing the OP_RETURN in the coinbase transaction to avoid criticism!

Sharing this to help motivate me to get finish Chapter 7 and what I anticipate to be a loooong slog through Chapter 8:

Excited to announce Based, a new programming paradigm for aspiring blockchain developers! How it works: * You send me a DM on Nostr * I explain to you that you don't need a blockchain * You call me a poisonous feminine hygiene product, or a toxic maxipad, or whatever, idk * Five years later you realize you're wasting your life and rebrand as being 'Pro Bitcoin', just in time to buy the top of the next cycle. Welcome to the future. It's Based.

gm, thinking of ways a client can bootstrap a list of relays and test that they're minimally trustworthy in some way. maybe we end up defaulting to nip-05 relay recommendations - if that happens, would providers injecting their own relays into a user's records be helpful or viewed as an attack vector? maybe a canary bot that tries to send restricted samizdata - 3D PDW files, politcally sensitive speech, financial transactions to blacklisted addresses - through a list of relays and testing end-to-end delivery would be useful?

I've added the word 'canary' to the description field for for wss://nostr.relayer.se. So, if for some reason, you wanted to run this command in your terminal: curl -H 'Accept: application/nostr+json' https://nostr.relayer.se ...and check whether the word 'canary' is in the description, or if the word 'canary' was for some reason removed? You can do that now.

Finally set up my lud16 address, just gonna start zapping randos

me: ordinals pass the bar for rough consensus and running code, you can do as you please with your sats, there are no protocol police also me: the decline of usenet began when users figured out how to use it to store data

Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet.

Usenet History: How Binaries Took Over Newsgroups

How Usenet—a protocol intended for conversations—was forever changed once the public figured out you could transfer binary files through it.