This week we shipped 4 interactive explainers on the crypto foundations of Bitcoin and Lightning: Hash collisions Every Bitcoin address has an absurd number of valid private keys that can spend it. Collisions are guaranteed… and still impractical to find.

Amboss Technologies

There are collisions in Bitcoin. Trillions of them.

They are guaranteed to exist. Nobody will ever find one. That gap is the whole story.

Signatures: Nonce reuse Sony lost the PS3 master key because one number got used twice. The same bug drained Bitcoin wallets in 2013. Run the attack yourself on real secp256k1 — 77 microseconds.

Amboss Technologies

Bitcoin has no passwords.

Every coin is guarded by a number nobody has ever seen — not even the network that checks it belongs to you.

What the blockchain sees of a Lightning payment Nothing. No block. No confirmation. No permanent record. Nobody along the route can take a single sat.

Amboss Technologies

The blockchain never sees a Lightning payment.

No block. No record. Still impossible to steal. Channels, penalties and hash-locked routing, computed live in your browser.

SWIFT vs Lightning In 2016, hackers stole $951M from Bangladesh’s central bank using correctly authenticated SWIFT messages. SWIFT only carries instructions, which is why international wires still take 1–5 days through correspondent bank hops.

Amboss Technologies

SWIFT doesn

11,500+ banks send 60 million SWIFT messages a day. Not one dollar moves through the network itself.

Happy routing ⚡