I must admit, I am really impressed by the lizards at blockstream…I’ve been playing around with Andrew Poelstra’s codex32 project for mnemonic string representation of the BIP-39 seed phrase…I love how I can purposefully change characters in the seed backup string and it can tell me which character is wrong and what to change it to. Now I’m working on making this trick work for xpubs and wallet descriptors.

Friday night. Me vs. AI vs. My ability to make AI do something useful while it is _ridiculously_ cheap. Such a massive subsidy will not persist indefinitely. If there is something AI can do that you want to see in the world, exactly right now is the right time to start as if your life depended upon it. I spent 16 hrs a day x 5 days last week on my Claude max subscription…I used my 7 day AI allotment in 5 days. I spent $50 to finish a task as the then current context was highly relevant…that $50 lasted about 40 minutes. Thats it. 40 minutes. I can easily afford but can’t mentally justify such a rate outside the Claude max $20/month charge (heavily subsidized). So my goal is to make the bitcoin software I think the average Joe needs while I can do it reasonably affordably.

Unpopular opinion: there are only so many corporations that can benefit from a Bitcoin treasury…if you don’t get in before price increases by a bitcoin price of $500,000 (today), your company isn’t going to effortlessly benefit from the required money printing that must occur to avoid financial collapse. $0.5M is only a meager 6x return away from here. If bitcoin reached $0.5M in the next few years, that’s it! There is no major reason for bitcoin to be higher in price in the next 5 years or so after that. As this will probably take 4-5 years, we are talking a maybe 10-20% return average annual return after $500,000-$1M. The treasury strategy will only work in unthinking fashion for 10, maybe 20 years tops! For the remainder of my life, the winners are being written today. Choose carefully.

I have published a set of libraries and command line interfaces and a rudimentary gui for doing all sorts of unwise and dangerous things with bitcoin wallets and keys…and some risk free things too…but if you’ve ever wanted to do SLIP-39 secret sharing or seed xor or just calculated that last dang word in a seed phrase from Mac, Linux, or windows, it exists now. It’s all only been tested with test cases supplied in BIP/SLIPs and not even close to tested by a human. This should not be used for real on an internet connected machine. If you do not know what the following line is and why you should not paste it into your command line, I hereby forbid you to do so. You’ve been warned. sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bg002h/mnemonic-toolkit/master/scripts/install.sh)%22

People talk about Bitcoin like it never goes down…but in a very real sense, every network is almost always down. Bitcoin is down but once every 10 minutes, on average. We believe it to be up because of proof of work, but in any thin slice of time you can never be certain that Bitcoin is up.

Getting closer to my goal of a hand written / metal stampable custom miniscript wallet backup system with fault tolerant recording and unambiguous character set. It can’t do full custom miniscript wallets yet, but it can do a fair amount of (fairly useless) wallet descriptor backups for well established types. Can backup everything from just wallet templates to specific wallet policies with keys and paths to a full fledged backup of everything including keys… But it’ll be a while yet before it’s truly usable.