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Notes by matt | export

 Another great resource that talks about why bitcoin core has various policy (hint: it’s not because of some concept of what people “should” use bitcoin for) is https://bitcoinops.org/en/blog/waiting-for-confirmation/ 
 Yea, basically this. It makes it incredibly difficult, and possibly impossible in practice. Let alone with the available resources for this kind of thing (which is not much). 
 This is not true. Bitcoin Core does not try to “maximize the user experience of…transfers”. It has filtered transactions for various reasons, and maybe that previously, but that hasn’t been true in a long time.

Indeed, the system only works if miners are including transactions on the basis of fee alone; anything else is a slippery slope towards broad censorship. The fact that the protocol doesn’t enforce this is one of the biggest failings of bitcoin.

Ethereum is even working on fixing this, while we’re talking about whether it’s okay to live with it 😭.

There’s a great deep dive on all things policy at https://brink.dev/podcast/1-mempool-policy/ nostr:note108kxq3j38nk9dt5369ltwappamcn354u3ysw6l5ynl22kud2q3ms838h8k 
 I would love to make puzzle transactions on bitcoin but I can’t because they are non-standard, ... 
 Kinda, but for very different reasons. https://brink.dev/podcast/1-mempool-policy/ 
 All the talk about Ocean Pool, meanwhile https://dmnd.work/ actually out here offering StratumV2 live and not getting talked about. 
 Okay, admittedly they aren’t doing pooled rewards yet, so not really a “pool”, but far ahead of everyone else. 
 I mean miners will need to use a proxy anyway to incorporate their own work whether their miner supports Sv2 or not. 
 Nah, they’re just doing a staged rollout of their new pool. It’ll be a “real pool” soon. 
 Man, it is really sad to walk around Vegas. 
 Get off the strip, go on a nice hike outside the city, much less sad there :) 
 tuesday night in vegas … what should i do 
 Go on a hike. There’s great nature in Vegas but people never take advantage… 
 But probably do that during the day. Scorpion bites kinda suck, I hear. 
 Before you celebrate nostr:npub1qtvl2em0llpnnllffhat8zltugwwz97x79gfmxfz4qk52n6zpk3qq87dze , cons... 
 No one is failing then for trying new things, only for highly misleading marketing. 
 I don’t see anything about this pool that is decentralized in any way. More pools is good, though. 
 Ocean absolutely does construct the template. 
 That is not true as of today. They’ve stated privately they want to move to StratumV2 where that would be the case, but I don’t see anything on the website publicly committing that that. 
 I haven’t seen anything publicly which states that, though I’m told they’ve privately indicated they want to build that. 
 I missed the last part, thanks!

I’d still suggest the pool is not at all “non-custodial” - they both mention needing to be a custodian for small miners, but also, from a miner’s perspective, there’s just as much trust in them as any other pool. The pool can always decline to pay out and there’s no recourse available in-protocol. 
 Also, most pools provide detailed analytics of miner hashrate, and often even hardware monitoring.

I’m really happy more people are building pools, but I really struggle with the marketing here - it seems like there’s really nothing special (they’re far from the only pool that has said they want to support StratumV2), but the marketing is all about how they’re the only pool that’s providing some kind of fantastical properties. 
 It’s different, yes (though generally it’s not done that way for legitimate technical reasons), but I’m incredibly dubious that it’s different in any legal sense. The pool is ultimately still tracking clients and deciding when and how much to pay them. 
 The pool in this setup is perfectly capable of simply pocketing the money for as long as there are still miners mining on it. Sadly there’s no technical enforcement of the pool behaving correctly, and building that is not really practical (without just rebuilding p2pool from scratch and starting over). 
 1) not sure how, I mean they can just change the website and remove miners they don’t want to pay and pretend they were never there. Or add some fictitious miners with huge hashrate to siphon money off to themselves.

2) yea, dunno, obviously they’re custodial for smaller miners. I’m dubious “custodial” is the right way to think about a pool. More like “liability” - the pool has some liabilities to their users which build up over time, and the user can withdraw at some points. They aren’t depositing and don’t really hold custody, they just build up liabilities. 
 More generally, I don’t think “custodian of user money” isn’t really the way pools will be regulated, if they are - they’d be regulated under very different laws. 
 Stratum v2 is great, but I wonder if it really makes any sense to operate a pool as a company in ... 
 Someone needs to rebuild p2pool but with faster blocks and tradable shares…that’s the real solution but it’s a ton of work. 
 Doing it as a fedimint module adds no value. 
 I really wish it were “decentralized”, but it’s really not at all? It’s just faster payouts, sadly. 
 Maybe there’s some plans to make it decentralized, but I don’t see them listed anywhere on the page? 
 When there’s not a single centralized party that controls everything about block building and payouts. 
 Plus a seven hour wait for the US ER lol 
 I'm losing patience. I need BIP-118 and 119 now!  
 So make it happen 
 PRs don’t make forks happen. Talk to people, engage in conversation about whether this is the right direction. Convince them it is. 
 UASF doesn’t make forks happen. Talk to people, engage in conversation about whether this is the right direction. Convince them it is. 
 > Furthermore there are deep problems in the technical community too, where a small minority is pretty loud in refusing any covenant solution whatsoever, even if 10000 use-cases are presented to them.

I do not believe that you’ve had an honest conversation with that “smart minority” if you think that’s an accurate description of the situation. Maybe actually have an honest and open conversation at a conference sometime before you start throwing shade. 
 Ha, meant small minority. 
 But, if you want to throw shade and assume bad intent, feel free. That’s a great way to make sure nothing ever happens and you can keep complaining on social media for clout. 
 Woah the new nostr:npub1xnf02f60r9v0e5kty33a404dm79zr7z2eepyrk5gsq3m7pwvsz2sazlpr5 looks incredible 
 Remote control lightning nodes are finally not cool anymore :) 
 I wasn’t gonna post about the war, but it’s worth pointing out: Israel is decisively losing.

Hamas’ goals are:
* to reduce global (esp US/EU) support for Israel, even if that only reaches the halls of power in a decade,
* to ensure palestinians (continue to) feel powerless and targeted. Bonus points if the war creates more orphans, their recruiting base. Both ensure the organization will be around in a decade.

Maybe also worth pointing out that this isn’t losing for Netenyahu. Wartime unity is maybe the only thing left that could possibly save his political career. Maximizing the deployment and force deployed contributes to that.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/israel-could-lose 
 None of that addressed my point in the slightest: Israel is helping Hamas achieve its goals. I did not advocate for any specific immediate action, which you seem to have assumed, rather I only pointed out that Hamas is getting exactly what it wants. 
 If you do it via max-in-flight it improves network-wide privacy as a side effect! Better yet, LDK nodes will (slightly) prefer to route though you because you’re offering better privacy. nostr:note1qgyz76gx3lems6lck22j8929klazfscd7kuscj5ezju8tm279grq39x4j0 
 nostr:npub1qny3tkh0acurzla8x3zy4nhrjz5zd8l9sy9jys09umwng00manysew95gx nostr:npub185h9z5yxn8uc7ret... 
 Sure, but, like, it’s similar to what we already knew. 
 what ln wallets act as a selfcustodial ln node on phone rn that can both receive and send zaps?  
 Why? There’s no fundamental reason for that, just “the current tech sucks on mobile”. 
 Lol wtf my Waymo made a wrong turn and made me late?

It wanted to turn left but no one would let it into the left lane so it went around the block 🤦‍♂️ 
 Oh they happily take it. 
 Apple *just* pushed out updates to all apple products (iOS, Apple Watch, Mac).

Details on vulner... 
 How much bounty would it take to get a mobile wallet based on JoinMarket (buy-side only)? 
 That’s not a mobile app? 
 Hmm, does it require installing bitcoin core/JM remotely? That’s a huge lift that most people won’t do. 
 MP-ECDSA, tho. Ewwwwww 
 Multi-Party ECDSA protocols (ie multisig but it just looks like a single signature on chain) have a long history of being broken. Much, much prefer direct on-chain multisig or FROST. 
 What are your favorite hardware wallets, among the latest generation of them?

And are there any ... 
 In general don’t use a device dedicated to storing bitcoin to store bitcoin. Any hardware wallet that isn’t (a) exclusively multisig or (b) is designed to not be able to leak your keys via nonce (I believe only bitboxv2 and Jade) should be considered incompetent at best. 
 Problem is you have a device that you cannot realistically audit the supply chain of, and which is at incredibly high risk of supply chain attacks. Deterministic nonces are great but they’re not auditable - there’s high risk of the machine telling you its doing a deterministic nonce when it is instead leaking your private key with an attacker-derivable nonce!

The point of deterministic nonces is “include a hash of the private key and message in the nonce so that you know you didn’t screw up”, that’s great, but you can also build on top. The computer driving the hardware wallet can input randomness which the hardware wallet can prove was incorporated into the selected nonce. This allows the device to prove to the computer its not leaking your private key, requiring an attacker to compromise *both* your computer and the device, not just the device!

Hardware wallets that don’t use such a protocol should absolutely be considered, at best, incompetent, maybe malicious. 
 So why haven’t you implemented provable randomness in the nonce yet? https://damus.io/note1xl5tvtlr9tc9yhyfcy28a4f9uglth9r320y80gp5sadlwsqrkxlszh5gkl 
 Point is the signature nonce, not the private key itself 
 Hmm? No, the average user uses a hardware wallet and corresponding software control wallet which implements such a protocol completely transparently to them. 
 The “air gap barrier” isn’t broken lol. The computer is sending instructions (in the form of amount/address) and the hardware wallet is responding. I’m just saying add a nonce to those instructions. 
 Signature can leak the private key to an attacker via the nonce :) 
 Okay? Add an extension to the PSBT with requested nonce. This is really trivial stuff. 
 Nope, just compromised firmware/hardware. 
 Nope! There’s no tradeoff, what I’m proposing allows you trust that *both* need to be compromised, instead of just the hardware wallet. 
 Nope! The magic of XOR (or pre-committed EC points) is that neither gets a “part” but rather the full thing is random if either input is fully random. 
 That awkward feeling when the ISP sends out a technician and you know more about networking than ... 
 If you file a complaint with the FCC, most US ISPs will suddenly be aggressively trying to fix your problem (rather than aggressively trying to ignore it). Easy cheat code to skip first level support. 
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 Indeed. Somehow they got tons of people to repeat that it’s somehow “decentralized” despite not being in any way decentralized. Quite impressive. 
 I don’t see how it’s more decentralized than any other pool. The only difference from any other pool is payouts are marginally faster, but some pools offer fast payouts already, even over lightning which is even faster. 
 Ocean does not use Stratumv2 (yet). 
 The rewards are not noncustodial, the pool still tracks them and decides when and how much to pay. The only difference is the pool pays out faster/more often than many other pools. However, pools doing lightning payouts are even faster! 
 Also, it’s important to note that many miners can only handle coinbase transactions of a certain size, so there’s a very low limit on the amount they can pay out in coinbase transactions, much higher than dust. 
 Incredibly so 
 I mean sure, only in the sense that every pool is a “more centralized P2Pool”. 
 Right, and it’s strictly less trusting of the pool if the pool pays you out via lightning every second rather than once a day via block.

Also worth noting that because of hardware limitations they can only include a handful of outputs in a coinbase transaction, so most miners either get nothing or see custody. 
 I believe there is only one pool currently doing Sv2 - https://dmnd.work/ which was also only announced this week. 
 With work selection, that is. Braiins (formerly slush) pool has done Sv2 for a long time but never supported custom work afaik. 
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 I largely only see stuck payments when probing. Force closes sadly are still a thing mostly when (a) routing a lot with HTLCs that get stuck cause of lnd 16.0-16.2 nodes or the new lnd hang with hodl invoices or (b) nodes that give nonsense feerates and leave you either insecure by accepting it (lnd does this) or force-close (others do this). 
 If you have an lnd peer you can also see it. Sadly the feerate issues are only half lnd’s fault, half bitcoin core, so other nodes can also exhibit it. 
Event not found
 lol what happened now?