Starting Zig Bitcoin Community effort: https://github.com/zig-bitcoin

Zig language is still very much underrated IMO.

One thing that is awesome is the way you can use it progressively:
- First as a toolchain. You can replace a complex build system for your C/C++ with a simple build.zig that gives you easy portability and other great things.
- Then, you can seamlessly build new parts of your projects in Zig, and connect it natively with the rest of your codebase. So you don't have to engage in a big and complex migration.

I love how Zig is (similar to Go) idiomatic by default. Don't forget the fact that we read code more than 10x more than we write code. So the ability to read and understand code is extremely important.
Put it simply, in Rust, for one problem / thing, depending on the Rust dev who will work on it, you can have a lot of different possibilities / style / practices to solve it.
On Zig, this is drastically reduced, usually there is one obvious way to do one thing. Rust is getting more and more complex, and there are so many ways of doing the same thing.
So even Rust senior devs can be lost when working on a new code base.

I like the simplicity of Zig, communicate intent precisely, no macro and magic code.

Zig has to catchup the Rust ecosystem in terms of tooling and libraries but clearly this language has a very strong potential.

Those are some reasons why I want to start a Bitcoin Zig Community initiative. The goal is to build primitives, libraries and tooling in Zig for Bitcoin ecosystem.

It can be great educational content and way to onboard to Bitcoin ecosystem as a developer.

Also, it can help increase diversity of implementations. For instance, similarly to what Roasbeef is doing with btcd, which I think is great.

We start by those projects:

- bitcoin-zig: Core Bitcoin primitives implemented in Zig, including base58, bech32, and more.

- btczee: A full Bitcoin protocol implementation in Zig, including a node, wallet, and miner.

- coconut: A Cashu wallet and mint implementation in Zig

- libsecp256k1-zig: Zig bindings for the libsecp256k1 library, essential for Bitcoin cryptography.

So if you are a developer and you like Bitcoin and you are fan of Zig (or you don't know it yet), come and contribute to this open source initiative.


Are there any other Proton Nostr accounts or just Wallet (for now!)


It's great they sent a third rover to get a pic of the helicopter and Ingenuity together 🥰


Yeah, it's difficult -- 'normal' people don't know how Swift, Fedwire, SEPA, FasterPayments, CHAPS, CHIPS, NSS, BACS, ACH, Visa etc. etc. *work* or how they even relate to each-other and what they actually *do*, they can just use the appropriate one in a pretty seamless way without having to think about it. Ultimately we'll have to match and exceed that usability, but it's a harder (or at-least rather different) problem to solve without relying on the "do it centrally and let your bank handle that for you" option.


Linkydoo: https://opensats.org/donate

Brink also fund work on Bitcoin Core: https://brink.dev/donate

Also because Craig is a legend: https://www.sparrowwallet.com/donate/


Before I get jumped on, I’m not saying Assange donations aren’t warranted, but OpenSats and others are funding critical work that doesn’t always have the immediacy to rake in large sums, and it’s a slow grind where it is hard to see “what you got” for your donation — nonetheless, you can’t donate to Assange, fight the good fight, or use Bitcoin at all and talk about it on Nostr if it they don’t work, and OpenSats and others are funding that good work


I’m slightly upset that more Bitcoin has been donated to Assange’s flight (₿ 8.104) than to nostr:npub10pensatlcfwktnvjjw2dtem38n6rvw8g6fv73h84cuacxn4c28eqyfn34f ever (₿ 5.369) 😢

Going to guiltily go donate to FOSS Bitcoin devs and maybe you should too, if you’re able


Thanks for reporting, saw on GitHub 🤙 -- for anyone else reading this was fixed (https://github.com/AngusP/phoenixd-lnurl/pull/14)


You’re almost certainly going to be right, maybe 0.5% chance this will be an ‘anyone can use’ API


Apple Pay Tap to Cash

iiiinteresting…… I wonder if this might be useful for us or if it’ll be heavily nerf’d
https://m.primal.net/IfqT.png


I've been happy with Firefox, has some good extensions like "Tab Containers"


The Bitcoin protocol is like dial-up modem protocols and no I don’t think I’ll elaborate


Yeah I did, thankfully the underlying issue that was blocking Zaps is fixed but now I’ve got to add some kind of persistence for zap notes (as phoenixd now won’t remember them for me) and want to do it in a minimally-complex way to avoid adding a ‘proper’ DB


Yeah I couldn’t find orange 😭 but this was close enough and does match the LAMY


If you take your phone between even just your home and work —doxxed locations— it is trivial to associate it with your true-name identity even if all of the hardware and services are perfectly anonymous. Even journalists have managed these kind of investigations. "Anonymized" location data is unfortunely not anonymous — it *can never* be anonymous. And yet it is sold like any other product.

Your phone's movements through physical space are unique. Even if you live in a building of 400 people, the movements of 399 of them are not going to match the tower records of your phone's movements. Even if you work in the same office. People's geographic movements are unique—and identifying.


“Leak: EU governments double down on penalising privacy-friendly and encrypted messaging services with chat control bulk scanning orders”

Badbadbadbadbad, #EU #chatcontrol not looking good (not that it could ever look good)

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/leak-eu-governments-double-down-on-penalising-privacy-friendly-and-encrypted-messaging-services-with-chat-control-bulk-scanning-orders/


Being a Bitcoiner is a bit exactly like being an Audiophile.

Some of us just love music; others love arguing about the best equipment and “the right way” to do everything and have strange fetishes for specific brands of cap and gold plated everything and hate on others for just having fun - while normies still think we’re all a bit mad but we’re sure they’ll feel liberated when they finally get it 😂


iPod gang
https://m.primal.net/INFr.jpg


You can put like 500GB/1TB in these puppies and get like a week or more of battery live now with mods!

Though I am expecting pain and a sync rugpull in a few years moving to a new Mac 😂


Rather randomly, I’ve recently picked up an old #iPod classic 5th gen and am loving it so far.

(despite the upgrade to use SD card storage being way harder than it’s supposed to be on this cursed iPod 🤣)

iPods are low time preference. Streaming is just somebody else’s music. Listening to a podcast on an iPod is strangely a more engaging experience, and interruption free - you can’t just check Twitter/Nostr/get a call.

A related note, I can’t find an existing solution for “buy my whole music library” which is weird because I want to give someone money and they’re making it hard 🤷♂

Also Apple Music is a bit jank with importing MP3s - it works, but 50/50 whether it matches to the streaming version of the album you already had (yay) or creates duplicates (not yay)


$1B ‘valuation’ with 350k paid users and ~$600k revenue is a hilariously high PE ratio of what, 1666x?! And people think Tesla is crazy overpriced at a meagre PE of 80x ish

nostr:note17x8rjr3p95y8aa3ya2avv05c38rhuw0vjw6meqvdr5ry7y05dmfsxq2keg


🙋♂ Hoffmann is pretty great

(Though I’ll enjoy a Gregg’s coffee too given how cheap it is)


Read this article anon.

https://mullvad.net/en/why-privacy-matters/going-dark


Huh? 99% of 2FA setups include a set of backup codes that you should write down. I'm not sure copying/saving the QR is a great idea... IIRC there's also at-least one 2FA I saw where the precise time you set it up was imporant, i.e. if you re-scanned the QR tomorrow the codes were completely different


This does sound pretty insane, though the counterfactual "what would have been the 'criminal funds generated annually' had €0 been spent on compliance instead of €144Bn" is worth thinking about (that which is unseen) -- but the bar is still very high, if expenditure is €144Bn then the crime it prevented would have to be on the order of €1Tn to be merely ~10% complicance loss... which is a lot of 'crime'.


I am currently obsessed with Radicle and trying to shill it to anyone that’ll listen 🤣


Also https://radicle.xyz


Checking out https://radicle.xyz, a P2P Git thingy -- I really like what I'm seeing... It's not Nostr but I'm not sure it would actually be better if it was. Supports DIDs so `did:btc:...` (Orange) and `did:key:` for Secp256k1 keys (bitcoin and nostr) would work, they're just not implemented (yet 😏)

Nostr-based decentralised git things also progressing (https://gitworkshop.dev/ and probably others?), which is great, beacuse IMO there's so much complacency around GitHub as the one big centralised repository for all open-source software just continuing to work fine forever.

#git #radicle


I can see why it doesn’t, similarly AFAIK Mutiny doesn’t, because you don’t really need them for the use case of end-user spending wallets on a phone. But they are kinda required for Nostr Zaps to work properly


I took a look a few weeks ago when it was WIP, but not more recently. Assume they’ve not found a workaround for description hashes? (Pretty sure that’s not possible? 🤔)


Increasingly thinking “on top of Nostr” isn’t a good idea, Radicle’s protocol seems very well thought out.

Feels like adding Nostr would be unnecessary mess - storing everything (code, issues, PRs, identity/ownership *in* git itself is kinda genius)

nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m I seriously think you should look at radicle.

(Only slightly butthurt that it’s ED25519 not the clearly superior bestest curve Secp256k1 😂)


It's all fun and games until we finally fix our NIP05 and you all shit your pants.


It does, just not with a message in them


Compare: https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/seed.radicle.garden/rad:z4G6sJdYgCqKswKnrBbYgn9QaHBqh vs https://github.com/AngusP/phoenixd-lnurl/


Love to see it 💯


💯 -- though can be a bit of a pain when they're all 99 but not 100% compatible! Gossip (https://github.com/mikedilger/gossip) is a great one to have even if you use others more often, as it can save you from some other client nuking your follows as it only publishes list changes when you ask it to


Coming soon ™ https://github.com/AngusP/phoenixd-lnurl/pull/11

As far as I’m aware the code works, but Phoenixd doesn’t like the really big invoice descriptions it makes so waiting on a fix for that.

Will also look at mutiny-server as an option when/if that’s shipped (AFAIK it’s basically the same idea) https://github.com/AngusP/phoenixd-lnurl/issues/12


Reminds me of https://grugbrain.dev

“grug wonder why big brain take hardest problem, factoring system correctly, and introduce network call too

seem very confusing to grug”


At least the LLMs will be more based


Anyone playing with Nostr and Bitcoin on #LORa and #meshtastic ? 👀


Or “Your feedback is appreciated , now pay $219”


You can’t route the token itself, but there is a (bit of a convoluted) route using Cashu for USD —Lightning—> USD


Already a thing if you route a Lightning payment between two Cashu mints that support synthetic USD eCash


Renewed screeching about people using Casey’s envelopes to put data on chain is nauseatingly boring. Stop being Bitcoin redcoats and get over it


Ubuntu works when it works, but if you poke it the wrong way wow does it break completely 😂

I'll give them credit only for being fairly good by comparison to other distros for graphics card support (sometimes) and working on AI/ML things; but that's often because those things are so poorly written that they basically assume Ubuntu and don't work properly on other distros


Fedora Silverblue is also a pretty cool project, if you can put up with its compromises https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/


Snaps suck, everyone else uses Flatpack. Upstart was a waste of time, everyone else uses SystemD or init.d. Unity was a waste of time, everyone else uses Gnome/KDE. Mir was a waste of time, everyone else was using Wayland; etc. etc. No idea what Juju is but probably also a waste of time.


Ubuntu is a shitcoin, dunno why everyone uses it as 'default Linux', change my mind;

Fedora, Debain or Alpine are the three to go for from shiny-newness to most boring and stable.

Honourable mention for FreeBSD as the so-stable-you-turn-it-on-and-it's-still-running-four-years-later option.

nostr:nevent1qqsd0k5lhs9ptfvzjyxnkcasjp6u7kxg8dv0t40e8380g602qplagcspzpmhxue69uhkztnwdaejumr0dshszrnhwden5te0dehhxtnvdakz7hgq9ul


In fairness this is an improvement for Revolut, you used to not be able to withdraw it at all, only sell or send to another Revolut user 🤦♂


Could that work for complex order types, or is it limited to only simple maker/taker market buys (can’t really think of how you’d add limit orders etc unless the mint can check that when someone tries to redeem)


The moral of nostr:npub17u5dneh8qjp43ecfxr6u5e9sjamsmxyuekrg2nlxrrk6nj9rsyrqywt4tp ‘s testnet drama is that it’s probably sensible to support all the test networks as you never know which is going to rug when 😂

(Though wen TBTC flipping BSV? Currently BSV at $64, TBTC at $0.63)


Even then, if the source was viewable but nobody looked, what difference would it make if it was closed source?

No-one is reviewing the whole Linux kernel + drivers + firmwares + microcode + etc. etc.

"Reflections on trusting trust - Ken Thompson" https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf


Been thinking about this a bit -- *perhaps*, one of the reasons Lightning has taken so long is that we're only just realising how important the LSP component is. Wallets/nodes that work with a LSP are so much easier to run and use for non-dev and non-in-it-as-a-business people. Even as a dev, I'm fairly hesitant to sign myself up for the maintenance effort of running a normal Lightning node.

Things like Phoenix, nostr:npub1xnf02f60r9v0e5kty33a404dm79zr7z2eepyrk5gsq3m7pwvsz2sazlpr5, Phoenixd and nostr:npub1mutnyacc9uc4t5mmxvpprwsauj5p2qxq95v4a9j0jxl8wnkfvuyque23vg (mutiny server soon! 👀) are just so much easier to work with than "just" run LND/Eclair/C-Lightning/LDK-Node etc. Is the logical conclusion that for Lightning node-running to become prolific, LSPs (or more accurately, a way for nodes to 'buy' inbound from and get channels with others) have to become an inherent part of the Lightning protocol? Feels like it to me.

nostr:nevent1qqsrm3dsqsmwwd2matwqqqwak3u7g4wfjsj2q8mf8q2rlwxa0h9q5jqppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0dv67jn


Simultaneously the most and lest based pool

nostr:nevent1qqs8sz359u7ysd8hw39v99hlxl5zs7mzsrrw5rwpsctm0ufart2g0ngppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qywhwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnzd96xxmmfdejhytnnda3kjctv9uq32amnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwv3sk6atn9e5k7tcrncqp6


Fun fact, banks seem much less inclined to close your accounts when you owe them money 😉


There is also signet, which is a different testnet that works more like Liquid where blocks aren’t mined by hashing, instead they’re just signed by a set of known keys. Mutinynet is another signet.

Arguably signet is better for testing Lightning as the blocks are more predictable and shenanigans like Lopp’s attack can’t happen - testnet is useful for testing anything that needs the chain to behave more like actual Bitcoin (mining software, ASICs, reorgs etc)


I believe it’s because people started testing runes on testnet, then started selling testnet runes and testnet-Bitcoin. So attacking the chain was a fairly effective but coarse way to stop that.

A testnet reset is being discussed on the mailing list (testnet4) but a reset has not happened for ages so opinions  are mixed so there’s not currently consensus on what exactly to do


Credit nostr:npub1vsl40cuqlthgjacl5vplm4vj2mt9390wvrp7cjuwmhzeg20nfu3q4qund7 on X https://x.com/bill_fowler_/status/1784242051397058719 (afaik)


Oh also on the topic of git/VCS you might find Pijul at-least academically interesting https://pijul.org/manual/introduction.html

IMHO it’s patching model would likely work better for Nostr buuut it’s not very mature and no way people would just switch away from git 😂


That’ll be $10


Yeah, it’s just a bit of a shame – they were a tad early to notice Nostr and secp is a bit of an esoteric curve


As others have posted there seem to be some NIPs for that, but you could “just” secp256k1 Schnorr sign the binary/hash-of-it with the same private key you use on Nostr as its already associated with your Nostr notes


Yeah saw it was ed25519 — it’s not too late for them to switch to secp256k1 😉


Haha tbf “non-custodial” being the same thing as “self custody” is confusing


If you want to buy $10 for $1,000,000,000 I’ll sell it to you friend


Surely that’s custodial Lightning?


Using Nostr even just for IDs seems sensible, you get the existing Nostr social graph for free


👀 (though it’s not Nostr 🤔)

nostr:note1nl4pjclyjp9zl8pc47e2g7ws9gyujx5t9yr3aj28ff2raa46d60qujzm6z


Hot take: Bitcoiners labelling an informed, consensual contract between adults “a scam” are freedom larpers

It’s a scam when one party is being deceived, otherwise it isn’t. They know they bought a sat for 3,300,000,000 sats


I'm not here on Nostr because I run away from Twitter. I'm here because I'm in search for an internet as it once used to be.

I'm a hacker who fucking hates that social media is in the hands of private companies. I remember using IRC and meeting likeminded anons online. I remember what the internet utopia felt like. People who didn't care what your name or status is, people who aren't interested in sharing their boring holiday pics with random strangers online. I'm not interested in what politicians and influencers have to say. I don't care about the latest mainstream trend that's going viral.

I want random weird interesting smart people around me who share their ideas in a free and open space that isn't controlled by anyone.

That's all I'm looking for. There aren't many such spaces on the internet.


If it makes you feel better I like the way this is going! 💯


nostr:nevent1qqszd7eqtcmdtk4f2gcq2sml3ske7hxc5g5348jae4gpcm7sacpw4wgpzpmhxue69uhkztnwdaejumr0dshszxnhwden5te0vfhhxarj9ekx2cm5w4exjene9ehx2ap0qy88wumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmv9ukhx6je

uh-oh 😂


Mostly agree; though it's always sad and painful to see people that aren't "in the Bitcoin camp" enough to have got the advice about Lightning and UTXO consolidation hitting pain with on-chain fees and not knowing what to do, feeling lied-to or misled somehow. Good motivation to keep building and be better, though


Yes, but if and only if you already know the merkle tree structure, no? If I’m looking at an old Nostr note and want to find the image it had in it now the original URL is dead, and only have the whole file hash, I wouldn’t know what the merkle root hash is. Pretty easy to solve by having both hashes available, but it is a slightly different problem


awwrritebruv


Progress 🤝


That has the issue that the merkle root hash is not the same as the file hash, so how do you then do discovery? (I want this file hash has to be resolved to a merkle root then I also have to download the whole thing before I can verify that that is indeed the file I wanted)

*technically* there’s no reason you couldn’t build BitTorrent on top of blossom, after all .torrent files are files and parts of files are also files 😉


Agree, I’m not a fan of the1001 different shades of dark grey-blue you often get. Inky black and decent contrast is way better


Bad 😂

It’s inconsistent - the sat/USD toggle doesn’t look the same as the eCash/Lightning toggle, button style is all over the place, border raises are inconsistent, the table doesn’t have one at all, I can’t guess what the three dots do, and I’m not sure why there’s a horizontal rule/card split in the middle


Merkle tree of what? Split the file into chunks like BitTorrent and a tree of those chunks’ hashes?


😍🌸 nostr:note1rhfyhlrdpcpvvustclms0l2xccfa7w2jj8glfm3catgt7t2wytwqd0c3qk


Unlikely/not much point yet as Nostr is all secp256k1 already -- though yeah private stuff not being pwned when public is is perhaps a nice "it could be worse" disaster situation


Sauce? Which NIP?


Introducing https://github.com/sommerfelddev/sentrum
A daemon that monitors the blockchain for transactions involving your wallets and sends you notifications on many different channels.

Hope you find it useful! More details later.


Stop Doing Cloud

Comments ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40098405 )

https://grski.pl/self-host


Ok I've built this for fun and it's incredible.

A Cashu gateway: it's a normal Cashu user who has a Lightning node (or another Lightning payment backend). Everyone can act like a gateway as long as the mint supports ecash HTLCs (NUT-15).

If you as a Cashu user know of such a gateway, your wallet can send your Lightning payment request to it instead of to the mint.

The gateway responds with an amount (it can take a fee). If you agree, you send it ecash, and it pays your Lightning invoice. The process is atomic.

What does that mean? Let's think a little ahead and imagine this was deployed on a significant scale.

Even if the mint is full KYC for peg-in and peg-outs, a user could still make Lightning payments anonymously with the help of other users.

(!!! this alone would be huge !!!)

This would also enable us to make on-chain-only mints which opens up a whole new way of building mints (reserves could be in a multisig for example).

Crazy part: Gateways can be lazy and use custodial Lightning backends. The user doesn't care as long as the invoice gets paid.

Yes. That means you could use your Strike or Blink or LNbits account to act as a Gateway for a Cashu mint you like.

There could be many of crazy people like you. Nobody would ever know. Neither the mint. nor your LN service provider would notice. They all just see invoices.

It gets weirder. Gateways could use *another Cashu mint* as an LN backend. I know sounds like an inception nut but bare with me.

A user of mint M1 can ask a gateway of mint M1 to pay an invoice. The gateway could pay the invoice via mint M2 and receive ecash from M1 in return.

I always thought "you could run a mint for a thousand users on a Strike or a Blink backend without them even noticing the smallest thing".

Now I think you could probably run a mint for 100k users without them noticing, if there are other gateways handling payments for everyone.

Note: this is still experimental. Only paying works right now over the gateway, not receiving (more complicated).

The bast part though is that it doesn't require any Cashu protocol changes and the mints don't have to give you permission to do this.

It's all pretty nuts.

nostr:note142qdxj9dnp9nsmsuet9vw5pgtgtwj4e7vxv5qa0wvk8vdqy76cdqw3d5kr


Welcome to the 5th Epoch https://image.nostr.build/2c8b0aa15a2df034a42b85923e0ffabbd71317cbbec17a57d49f92193e4a60eb.jpg


Wen testnet working again? 😂


Degens on the brink of a second bailout for miners 🫡


Ooof, Ocean template enjoyors missing out on a cool THIRTEEN WHOLE BITCOIN in fees 🤯
https://m.primal.net/Hxcn.jpg


WOOOOOO! 🎇🎆
https://m.primal.net/Hxba.jpg


839999
https://m.primal.net/Hxap.jpg


Thanks, you seem to have in-jammed it 😂


Waiting for 839995 be like 👴😴


nostr:npub1kyxqqqq8n2pu7f5pthr48zqcmr2k52vrud6wxzjpg0jsqcyhs3tshfc6vv ‘s stream is cool:

nostr:note1mlqvfgcx6wwp4vc7f2caua6zdyz3xur8rhejtpl38w7z22mjc87shumgqx


nostr: note1mlqvfgcx6wwp4vc7f2caua6zdyz3xur8rhejtpl38w7z22mjc87shumgqx


Gentlemen, to your halv 🥂


GM from London on #bitcoin halving day 20/04/2024 🤙


This is also pretty cool nostr:note1mlqvfgcx6wwp4vc7f2caua6zdyz3xur8rhejtpl38w7z22mjc87shumgqx


25 blocks to go, halving stream is live

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6D9OEjnWmA


“You think I own one set of clothes walking around my home butt naked working on Bitcoin and the Lightning network?”

I mean…. 😅 Nothing surprises me anymore

There’s definitely *someone* that does do that


Completely obsessed with Sleep Token’s album “Take Me Back to Eden”. It’s just f*cking incredible

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kR2XaVymdtE2e0WXdnqYIViBNemh6_wT4

#metal #music 🤙


I love learning something new about Bitcoin every day

nostr:note19r0kfz85m3ll7splnmz26x86e4pq5mcs5gagee9ed447jvq7gy8skare06


Yeah, the fundamental difficulty is LNURL needs you to control a clearnet domain somewhere so it's easy for people to fnd you and resolve a human redable ID like `satoshi@lightning.gmx.com` -> long LNURL pay thingy `LNURLPBLAHBLAHBLAH.....` -> An actual Invoice from the Lightning Network.

That need to start with a clearnet domain makes it difficult to get working at all from an Umbrel-at-home, and difficult to make it work reliably. I assume it would work over Tor, but 99% of people then probably can't pay you as running Tor on a phone is not normal 😅 and also a tad difficult


NetBSD 10: Proper old-school Unix, not like those lazy, decadent Linux types

Comments ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40062774 )

https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/30yo_netbsd_releases_v10/


Thanks, will do


Great read for those that haven't already (/didn't get the reference) https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/


Deleting person list


Struggling to test this right now because of the testnet shenanigans, my nostr:npub1xnf02f60r9v0e5kty33a404dm79zr7z2eepyrk5gsq3m7pwvsz2sazlpr5 testnet LND is *not* happy haha. Thanks nostr:npub17u5dneh8qjp43ecfxr6u5e9sjamsmxyuekrg2nlxrrk6nj9rsyrqywt4tp 😆

nostr:nevent1qqsdswmqq4cvr42t6k4s3qgeygapg76nft6xtf9yp4kqwk4fv9t3vaqpzpmhxue69uhkztnwdaejumr0dshsz9nhwden5te0vfjhvmewdehhxarjxyhxxmmd9uq35amnwvaz7tmzdaehgu3wd3jkxar4wf5kv7fwdejhgtc3jqpcp


It gets better.

If the pool uses PPLNS payouts they can issues ecash tokens for each hashrate share. These tokens have indeterminate value until the next block is mined. When the pool finds a block the value of the tokens is discovered. This forms a natural boundary to rotate the ecash privkeys and start a new epoch. Once the epoch is fully cleared the pool can publish proof of reserves exactly like your proposal. Mining payouts are 100% private, transparent, and verifiable.

But wait, it gets better! Miners can sell their hashrate tokens immediately to buyers who value on-chain privacy. The buyers get a fresh KYC-free coinbase output. Miners get compensated for the privacy premium of mining rewards.

But wait, it gets better! The pool can also auction off the rare sat at the beginning of the coinbase using sighash anyonecanpay. The auction proceeds flow directly into the coinbase, allowing all miners to profit from the rare sat premium. You don't have to believe in ordinals to profit from them. Again 100% private, transparent, and verifiable to the whole world.

I can't stop thinking about this idea. DM me if you want to help build it.


Bitcoin mining pools should issue rewards in ecash so that participants can mine without an account and remain private. Miners can withdraw their ecash balance to Lightning or on-chain whenever they feel like it.

Nobody needs to know who you are and how much you've earned while mining. This is more important than most people realize.


Looking at the merkle branches that mining pools send to miners as part of stratum jobs, it's clear that the BTCcom pool, Binance pool, Poolin, EMCD, Rawpool, and possibly Braiins* have exactly the same template and custom transaction prioritization as AntPool.

 https://image.nostr.build/33d5ac0f59082e8fbb5d02ccd9a50dccea43327ae97e10db06effaede7f7c064.jpg

Stratum v1 jobs include (parts of) the coinbase transaction and the merkle branches a miner needs to compute the merkle root. If all branches are equal across pools, the block template is exactly the same.

This is a smaller merkle-tree with the stratum job branches highlighted.

 https://image.nostr.build/dab683037cc63f0e4805ae16561800dd342dd53dbb646c91e6c066044a51b2d6.jpg

Here, branch0 is the txid of the first transaction in the block after the coinbase.

In the AntPool/Binance/BTCcom/.. template, it's a manually prioritized transaction paying 9.03 sat/vbyte https://mempool.space/tx/c938e8027a7fba782a092695a53d37654021bf20df71ca91b4a6daa9198b0c73

Many of the other pools didn't prioritize a transaction and included the highest feerate transaction https://mempool.space/tx/96608dc747677d6dfbc3a2b37f8a0146abae132799b13c130066bd3716fdf91a paying 301 sat/vbyte. ViaBTC prioritized another transaction and has a vastly different template.

This indicates that F2Pool currently is not using the AntPool templates, even if they share the the same custody provider. We know from multiple occasions that F2Pool has been building their own templates (https://b10c.me/o11, https://b10c.me/o9, https://b10c.me/o8)

Note that SigmaPool and SecPool both seem to share the same template (distinct from AntPools template). Two names, but probably one pool.

Some overlap in the first branches of distinct pools is expected as these branches consist of few (usually high feerate) transactions. For example, Ocean's "default" and "core" templates overlap up to branch3. At least the first 15 tx (2⁴ - 1) in the template are equal.

* similar to EMCD in the picture, Braiins sometimes differs from AntPool in the later branches of the template. This could indicate they're only helping with AntPools transaction accelerator and directly syncing with AntPools mempool, causing occasional differences in templates.

I've heard speculation about this all being liked to an FPPS partnership with AntPool/Bitmain.

Bitmain insures against bad pool luck but you have to use Bitmains templates/transaction prioritization and pay the mining reward to the insurer for later distribution.

Essentially a pool of pools and a lot of mining centralization.


Though it is very attackable, because it is so similar to Bitcoin but ofc massively outclassed in therms of hashrate. Also has the consensus difficulty reset bug that also would make it suck for actual value. Also also lots of bitcoin devs have massive bags of testnet sats they could dump and crash the price. Though I think we're all in agreement this is dumb anyways so 🤷♂


Phoenixd is a Lightning node (https://phoenix.acinq.co/server/) that works a lot like thir app, uses ACINQ as the LSP so you never have to worry about liquidity or finding people to open channels with, they handle all of that for you, for a fee.

So, you just need to run phoenixd to have self-hosted lightning, and phoenixd-lnurl alongside it to have self-hosted LNURL and Zaps.

Currently does kinda require that you've already got a server running somewhere, more work needed to get this to work on node-in-a-box solutions like Umbrel, Start9 etc.


Gah, the difficulties of hopping between various Nostr clients and their different ways of doing tags and linking URLs 😭

https://github.com/hzrd149/blossom


Listening to Citadel Dispatch with nostr:npub1ye5ptcxfyyxl5vjvdjar2ua3f0hynkjzpx552mu5snj3qmx5pzjscpknpr and nostr:npub1lunaq893u4hmtpvqxpk8hfmtkqmm7ggutdtnc4hyuux2skr4ttcqr827lj -- Blossom (BLObs Stored Simply On Mediaservers 🤣) sounds awesome! Nostr is amazing for gossiping text, but totall sucks for other file types. Blossom hopefully fixes this. Bullish, especially as a data hoarder 💯

https://github.com/nostr:npub1ye5ptcxfyyxl5vjvdjar2ua3f0hynkjzpx552mu5snj3qmx5pzjscpknpr/blossom (this does not have nearly enough attention)


nostr:npub1xtscya34g58tk0z605fvr788k263gsu6cy9x0mhnm87echrgufzsevkk5s you have no idea how many times I’ve seen this darn screen

Great troll 🤣 https://image.nostr.build/d00b589f9599f3db66430d08ebb83410230a63b7c4602394e8849fabe01b0504.jpg


Yeah, for now you can still receive ‘zap’ payments but as phoenixd-lnurl doesn’t know how to handle them, the zapper doesn’t get a receipt and it doesn’t show in any Nostr clients


A public square that is owned by a corporation isn't a public square, it's a mall.


Yep


Proper Nostr Zap support ⚡ for phoenixd-LNURL coming in two weeks™ (probably sooner)

Also optional NIP-5 server because it was easy

Easily self host your Lightning address and Nostr NIP-5 ID 🤙

#zapathon #phoenix #lightning

https://github.com/AngusP/phoenixd-lnurl


+1 for Kraken, seems pretty popular in the UK. Mutiny or Phoenix for withdrawing in Lightning works well


Noticed this a few months ago on Kraken too, GBP->BTC->AUD rate was beating Wise even with fees for the amount I was moving

Fiat->BTC->Fiat is the real rate nostr:note1lpkjs3dr0evxxevrhnw85hgg2vwrj2m0xq88j8y4gta98zv7uqvq92npq3


Heh, Heineken of all companies trying to punt a prison phone at probably 100x ~~leverage~~ markup

nostr:note1gfd56muyevkfrdrjqlddasra7crwtxrdpn7djqvq5wjq56ur83jqkpmzw4


With the Bitcoin halving almost upon us, I made a fun little treat 😄

Here is how much miners/pools have been earning in USD over the past 4 Bitcoin epochs!

These are actually animated race charts across 15 years, but my Nostr client keeps crashing when I try to upload those, so I’ll just link to then here. https://twitter.com/SDWouters/status/1780594555429290311
https://twitter.com/SDWouters/status/1780594557853577610

Hope you enjoy, took a lot of time to make these 🙂 https://image.nostr.build/418c82857a694c192ab66768defbd078b110e1446e5a93e8cab126141be81bf8.png https://image.nostr.build/bb0ad85bcc70a88d6ff97f3624f03fbdd7bec840c279fd2ba6d0b1000bbcb161.png


Decentralised everything with LORA + Nostr + Bitcoin + Secp256k1 is the kind of future I want to live in

nostr:note12vsg5vw3v8fva06yp4wvwtjztvv8r6rh4fv0lygsazpuuskdr7fsxvdkgn


More apps should strive for this and more consumers should demand it. https://image.nostr.build/b9b23cb06e5db05a12b502b64db393ebb19722a47ad170f5aa09fa1f935f83b8.jpg


GM 🤝

nostr:note1ffmrcadvfx263gsm9776zrcc7sq5jns0tgl48kdgkpm9g50hxvmqh34x0k
https://m.primal.net/Hucn.jpg


BOOM!

That was the last difficulty adjustment of Epoch 4! https://video.nostr.build/96afba38897029cdcb06143db47357edf99a4ba9feb72f3bcc71eddb95ada015.mp4


😒 URL mangled: https://github.com/AngusP/phoenixd-lnurl/pkgs/container/phoenixd-lnurl


Docker image now available  https://github.com/AngusP/phoenixd-lnurl/pkgs/container/phoenixd-lnurl%E2%9A%A1%EF%B8%8F 🐳

See repo for example docker-compose with nostr:npub1tr4dstaptd2sp98h7hlysp8qle6mw7wmauhfkgz3rmxdd8ndprusnw2y5g ‘s phoenixd container: https://github.com/AngusP/phoenixd-lnurl?tab=readme-ov-file#docker-setup


And just like that I have my own simple, non-custodial, entirely self-hosted LN stack in seconds.

Bravo, amazing work Phoenix and 1f52b_xyz

https://sethforprivacy.com/lnurl

If you want to test it out, don't tip me, tip the creator of this awesome LNURL tool 1f52b_xyz!

https://1f52b.xyz/lnurl

Once we finalize the Docker image + publishing for this and phoenixd, you will literally just register a domain, create a text file, run a single command, and have self-sovereign LN, LNURL, Zaps, etc.

nostr:note1468crxa4u0yd99h5g76uavn0h0y3vlma5ctxnnvf8np5g69sstdq9evukf

https://m.primal.net/Hrdj.jpg


Phoenixd handles liquidity for you automatically; so basically payments will never fail for a lack of inbound. But, there’s a fee you pay ACINQ for that service
Details here: https://phoenix.acinq.co/server/auto-liquidity


/ how much my COLDCARD Q reservation cost at today's price 🤣😭
nostr:nevent1qqsxgz2uzdey87f653k0upe456q9av083qjtduquh9200pt5fnz20pcppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qywhwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnzd96xxmmfdejhytnnda3kjctv9uhsl49e


Momentum is building to "child-proof" the internet by requiring social media age verification. It appears likely that a combination of legislative action and immense political pressure on tech companies over the next 2-3 years will lead to what amounts to a Digital ID for virtually any website where users interact with each other. Online anonymity will become vanishingly rare.

This is one way Nostr becomes a final refuge for those seeking surveillance-free, unmediated communication.


LMAO that’s not the real Phoenix wallet 🫣


I made a simple LNURL thing for nostr:npub148qm45zettnf6ekgkatnyfadunxwjpu8sy88mjdsgwc5f202d93qmejra7 ‘s new phoenixd

https://github.com/AngusP/phoenixd-lnurl

Has a tip page and supports a LNULR-pay address
https://1f52b.xyz/lnurl


Been playing with Crux, for cross-platform app dev in Rust. It’s cool: https://github.com/redbadger/crux


Reminder 20sat/vByte transaction feerates at $70k #Bitcoin is as expensive as 60sat/vB was when the price was $23k

As adoption increases transactions may get more expensive because blockspace is limited, but that doesn’t mean the fee rate will be ever growing higher and higher


Waiting patiently for the BITCOIN ABSOLUTELY RIPPING TO PRICES NOT SEEN SINCE YESTERDAY MORNING headlines and tweets 😴


Don’t jinx it!


Quantum threat to cryptography does actually worry me a lot for Bitcoin, we can’t simply react to it quickly. Changing Bitcoin is super hard normally, then even once post-q cryptography is available the entire UTXO set needs to transact to be safe. Don’t know if it’s possible to add new cryptography as a soft fork (maybe as a future taproot version?) so a hard fork will be more contentious still. It will take years.


If you're the richest out of 100 people in a room, that's not that rich

If you're the richest out of 10,000 people, that's probably rich


The middle class *is* the 1%ers

Few.

nostr:note10f8ejlc2h5g5x5ufp8glhuttrpg6ss7h9ggst7q7v53gqadxlu9sn9xqyu


Wen Bitcoin  goes 1M I might buy a Lambo just for the memes

then donate it to a kids hospital or something

idk have you seen how expensive parking is these days mom said I can’t keep one in the garage


g m


hah had exactly the same thing on my mind @note1zg0em73zjzppwkw0k7pzfs58y252d57agtha9de7hjjxwvvq50kseme27w


For the #Bitcoin class of 2022 and onwards, now comes the hard part of buying the most expensive sats you've ever bought

stay humble and keep stacking anon 😉


https://www.shoosmiths.com/insights/articles/waiving-privilege-be-on-guard-7623

presented without comment 🍿


Dr. Wright if your Citrix setup and Adobe Acrobat software are incapable of even glancing at a file without viciously mangling it, why do you even use them!?


Yes, it works - I’ve got the same wallet working in sparrow and nunchuck with all three signers working 🥳


Landlords Are 'Handing Back the Keys' with Offices 23% Empty

Comments ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38615525 )

https://www.yahoo.com/news/offices-sitting-empty-landlords-handing-150748386.html


nostr:note17gfm0k0ssw4qctpge32dp3nulu975mjpdl9nqmrs78msp622d90qvdral4

A bit of scope creep, but IMO a Nostr-based VCS might work (a lot?) better with Pijul http://pijul.org/ than git


Somewhat for the same reason NOSTR is JSON not a smaller binary packing, because JSON is near universally usable, even if pretty crap

Low dev effort to get started using a thing is important, perfect enemy of good


Bitcoin Zaddy


When do we get to the point that #USDT #Tether FUD is about the risk and volatility of their USD Treasuries and not claims of crypto-shenanigans? 😂


When do we get to the point when Central Banks get #Bitcoin FOMO?

Like, the Bank of England 🏴 should have around ~1% of the BTC supply held as reserves (maybe up to 3%?), which would currently cost £5.8B

Which is a lot, but not actually for Govt. They can afford to lose £6B but can they afford to have no Bitcoin? It’s an asymmetric bet.

It’d have cost £600M less if they’d pulled the trigger a few weeks ago, and £2.9B less if they’d done it in November last year.

One day it will cost too much to be doable - that day might be coming real soon


PROJ tax?


Knead me daddy 🥖


So much this 👆


Following nostr:npub1s9c53smfq925qx6fgkqgw8as2e99l2hmj32gz0hjjhe8q67fxdvs3ga9je on Nostr is great because it helps me stay on Nostr…

Any other #bots people recommend for the same?


The Linux Foundation has practically abandoned Linux

Comments ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37749530 )

https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4666420/the-linux-foundation-has-practically-abandoned-linux


If you have a recent macbook M1 or M2 with enough RAM make sure to try out GPT4ALL.

It's easily good enough to be useful especially if you don't have access to OpenAI's API. It's free and it's private. No data leaves your computer. This is how we should be using AI.

https://gpt4all.io/


Capitalism is great

Beats smoothbrain govt every time 😂 nostr:note1uljwg8j67v49s9p9k8zlcztjfjuyg3nulkzcxgd9h0qnntq5wsashdmdlu


Barbie and Oppenheimer are two of the best films I’ve seen in a long time

Think I’ve only just got over post barbenheimer-induced depression

Still spending a lot of time thinking about what both of them meant


Technically yes because Phoenix (and Breez)

But ‘not really’ for a few reasons - mainly unsure about where to get inbound liquidity and if that’ll be worth it, not super confident about managing a node, and want to know the backup/recovery process well before putting money at risk


Imagine how the goldbugs feel 😅


Damn this is so well done and clean.

https://oddbean.com/

https://image.nostr.build/baf7a0e882f72cf88a5f5ee8921c0f1ff96d07719d046683f66279904dc448ab.jpg


The Online Safety Bill is terrible but great for Nostr


What happened in May 2022?


Direct to the note: nostr:note1dhegyrfsn9frpwxdxampwvhs7m9mxz6u97v2rug5dhahva2ujl2suwgmgq


Reminds me of https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/appendixa.html


I’m convinced history will remember the 20th century thru now to ? as the period of the American Empire.

They don’t think of themselves in imperial terms, but the existence of the empire will be obvious when it collapses, the absence of the thing making the thing apparent


Nah, file system doesn’t fit. Nostr is a new protocol sitting alongside email and HTTP, starting with genuinely different principles.

I’d pragmatically define a FS as anything you could write a sane FUSE for


At the moment my OpenTimestamps calendars have a bit less than two weeks worth of funds remaining. At current fee rates it costs ~$30/week to timestamp every ~5 hours.

Donations would be appreciated. You can donate either on-chain, or with lightning, via: https://alice.btc.calendar.opentimestamps.org/ or by zapping this post.


Fair point. I don’t really have a counter other than the lazy “Nostr DMs are kinda broken already” and that spam on Nostr is going to be a lot like email


Not sure I agree, would you buy an nsec from me knowing that I could easily keep a copy and continue to use it?

What are you getting by having the nsec that you didn’t have with the npub? (other than being able to read DMs and create new events with it)


**Originally posted May 2023 at [1f52b.xyz](https://1f52b.xyz/article/2023/05/can-ledger-recover/)**. Read there for sidenotes & references.

---

[Ledger](https://ledger.com), the leading Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency hardware wallet manufacturer launched their new [*Recover*](https://www.ledger.com/recover) product last week. It's a subscription backup service that offers users a different way to protect against lost funds in the event that their Ledger hardware signing device is lost, stolen or destroyed. Ledger Recover does this by splitting up their key into three shares which are uploaded to and stored by Ledger and two other custodians. Rather than having a Seed Word as backup in a disaster, with *Recover* you upload proof of ID to the custodians, to convince them to send your shares back to you.

This announcement... didn't exactly go down well on Twitter. People started freaking out, having previously understood that their private key was permanently locked within their Ledger -- yet here was Ledger themselves proudly announcing a feature that'd extract it and upload it to the internet. Ledger has been forced into damage-control mode, and has paused the roll-out for *Recover* while the atmosphere is hot.

Let's back up for a second.

## Seed Words

The industry has standardised around *seed words* as the way to back up Bitcoin and crypto wallets. These are usually 12 or 24 words that you write down and hide safely, to be able to load them into a new wallet if you ever lose access to the original. When you set up basically any new wallet, it'll prompt you to write down these words as a backup.

Yet many people have fallen victim to lost or wrong seed phrases: forgetting where they put the backup; realising they wrote it down wrong years ago, or having their [mum run it through the wash](https://twitter.com/EbolaDarkness/status/1613654780555022338). New users can struggle to grasp the significance of the seed words, not understanding that the backup is *literally the same thing* as their wallet's private key, and having the seed is the same as having their coins -- so they set everything up correctly, doing everything right up until the moment they type the seed into a Google Doc; not understanding how that last step has just *irreparably* compromised the wallet.

> Met a new bitcoiner today:
>
> - Proud they bought a whole coin
> - Proud they bought a hardware device
> - Proud they moved coin to device
> - Proud they secured device
> - Proud they backed up seed phrase in a Google Doc
>
> Where did they go wrong?
>
> Peter McCormack 🏴☠ [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/PeterMcCormack/status/1615514940508356609)

Ledger believes *Recover fixes this*. Instead of a user taking the responsibility upon themselves to safely and securely store a seed phrase, all they have to do is be able to identify themselves to the *Recover* custodians, who handle the hard part of storing a seed for them. As Ledger puts it, *"you become the key to your wallet"*.

The seed is split into three pieces, or shares, where each of these on its own not enough to know what the original is. At-least two shares are required to recover it, and *Recover* splits all the shares up geographically and jurisdictionally between three custodians: themselves in France, CoinCover in the UK and EscrowTech in the USA.

So, none of the custodians on their own are able to access the private key, meaning they are unable to see or steal any of a user's funds without colluding with another.

![Illustration of Shamir's Secret Share key split](https://1f52b.xyz/media/2023/2023-ledger-shamir.svg)

The tech underpinning this is a 2-of-3 [Shamir's Secret Share](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_secret_sharing) of the private key, which isn't something Ledger have just invented, and has already been used extensively by cryptographers since its invention in 1979. Each of the shares are also encrypted as a protection against loss or theft, but with encryption keys known to the custodians not the *Recover* user.

When you initiate a wallet recovery, you first authenticate yourself to the custodians using a Passport or National ID through a 'KYC' process, then each sends the share they have to your new Ledger device where they are recombined, revealing the private key and reconstructing the wallet on the device itself.

## Maybe it's just not for you?

Depending on who you are, you might absolutely hate this idea; or you might quite like it and be wondering what all the drama is about.

I'll be honest, I don't like it at all, but here's the thing: there a number of different Hardware Signing Devices (aka Wallets) available, and each is trying to be the best to a different user. This necessitates making different design choices, and making different trade-offs, and these choices aren't for me. But maybe they are for you?

What matters is whether adding this feature inherently makes Ledger's devices *less secure* for those that don't want to use *Recover*.

We've seen similar controversy before, four years ago when Ledger launched the *Nano X* adding Bluetooth connectivity. Many then were worried about this broadcasting that there was a Ledger nearby to any other devices with Bluetooth, or thinking that the private key would leave the device over the connection whilst signing transactions (it doesn't). Today this controversy has largely been forgotten, and the *Nano X* has gone on to be a popular device.

Sure, there are Signing Device puritans for whom Ledger's design choices are unacceptable, and only the [ColdCard](https://coldcard.com) and those with similar principles like the [Passport](https://foundationdevices.com/) and [SeedSigner](https://seedsigner.com/) will do. And they're right, Bluetooth *is* an attack vector, as is ever conncting it to a computer via USB as you do with all Ledger models, as well as the [Trezor](https://trezor.io/), [BitBox02](https://shiftcrypto.ch/bitbox02/) and others -- even the ColdCard can be used over USB, though this is discouraged.

![The ColdCard hardware wallet](https://1f52b.xyz/media/2023/2023-ledger-coldcard.jpg)

**Above**: The [*ColdCard*](https://coldcard.com) Hardware wallet, by [Coinkite](https://coinkite.com)

The ColdCard is perhaps the high-water mark for key security, though that's not a universally held opinion. It does many things right -- it uses dual multi-vendor Secure Elements (SEs); encourages airgapped-use with disabled USB and NFC, only passing transactions to and from the device by physically moving a SD card around. It comes in a tamper-proof bag; you have to get it direct from Coinkite; focussing on Bitcoin-only keeps it simpler; the firmware is on GitHub for anyone to view and verify; there are half a dozen or so decoy and trap security features you can use. Basically, there's a laundry list of security features that add complexity, but bring with them extra protection.

But then, the ColdCard is also not for everyone. Its no-compromise approach to security does make it less forgiving, and easier to mess-up for yourself. A super-paranoid maximally secure ColdCard setup guide runs to around thirty separate steps.

## Maybe it is for you?

Fundamentally, *Ledger Recover* is an opt-in feature. If you don't want to use it, you're not going to be forced to, and your Ledger will never create these backup seed shares and export them without you initiating it on the device. This is the same level of trust you've already had in your Ledger that it isn't going to approve a transaction and sign it until you've pressed the buttons to do so.

Nevertheless, the security trade-offs are substantially different between a classic Seed Word backup and this.

But, lots of people struggle with storing Seed Words safely and responsibly. According to Ledger's CEO, lots of customers and potential customers they've talked to want this.

> People online are saying our customers don't want this.
>
> A lot of our customers actually want it.
> A lot of future customers want it, and most of the people that saysay "I don’t want to use a ledger" are saying that because "I don’t trust myself with the 24 words."
>
> So actually we're trying to solve one of the biggest pain points to onboard the next generation of users into self-custody. Self-custody is much safer than any other form of custody that you have in the market.
>
> *Pascal Gauthier*, Ledger Chairman & CEO on the [What Bitcoin Did Podcast - Ep.661](https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/ledger-recover)

If you choose to use *Recover*, it's important to recognise that you're extending your trust beyond just Ledger and placing it in their two co-custodians too. The issue is not only that Ledger-the-company may turn out to be a malicious actor -- that's highly unlikely -- but more whether a rogue employee, hostile state infiltrator (a spy) or more-generally another adversary (a court) can force Ledger into revealing your private key or circumvent their security, against both your and Ledger's wishes. This too is improbable, but it can and has happened in the past.

Again, the backup is split between three different companies, which can't individually access your private key -- so this isn't just as bad as leaving your coins on an exchange.

But you may lose some privacy. *Recover* uses KYC to authenticate you when restoring a backup, so your face and ID are going to be stored alongside the *Recover* backup to make that possible. If you already accept KYC risk by buying coins from KYC exchanges like Kraken, Coinbase or Binance, then maybe this isn't a concern for you. You'll also have to be guarded against phishing and social-engineering attempts looking to get you to give an attacker KYC data so they can pretend to be you and steal your backups, an attack that doesn't really apply to Seed Words.

Are you concerned about legal risk? If one or more of these backup companies is subpoenaed, Ledger acknowledge that they would have to comply and turn-over your backups, giving the authorities access to your funds and on-chain transaction history. Ledger's CEO, Pascal Gauthier, thinks this is highly unlikely to happen, and not a concern for the vast majority of Ledger's customers.

It's true that *should* be the case, but we only have to look a few years back to the Canadian Trucker protests of 2022 where the government of an ostensibly free country invoked an Emergencies Act and rapidly seized and froze the cryptoassets of protesters, as well as other financial assets. I'm sure most of them never thought that would happen to them.

![Canadian 'Freedom Convoy' Trucker protests of 2022](https://1f52b.xyz/media/2023/2023-ledger-canada.jpg)

Long before the crackdown on the Canadian protests, the IRS in the United States has used broad 'John Doe' summonses to force the Coinbase exchange to hand them the identities of *"U.S. Taxpayers who have used virtual currency"*. Your financial data may have already been requested and duly received by your Government. In fairness, Ledger's CEO is correct to point out that they are distinct from Coinbase in that they are not an Exchange, so the IRS does not have the same 'legitimate' interest in whatever data they may have.

The three backup custodians for *Recover* are based in France (Ledger), the UK (CoinCover) and the USA (EscrowTech). It's fair to say these three have a good relationship, and frequently co-operate on enforcement matters and foreign policy. If you're lucky enough to get put on the OFAC list, is it not likely that the French and British custodians will also comply with that American sanction?

Both *Ledger Recover* and Trezor's new CoinJoin implementation that also recently attracted anger after announcing that it would be gated by Chain Analysis suggest a trend amongst some hardware manufacturers -- they have a diminishing willingness to build products that *could* work for criminals. If you're an ordinary Joe, don't worry -- but don't expect your wallet manufacturer to take any heat to protect you.

Again, here's a trade-off that manufactures make: Ledger have their companion software *Ledger Live* that provides an easy oven-ready setup with everything you need; whereas Coinkite doesn't talk user numbers, deletes sales data as soon as they can, and doesn't have a companion app with hosted Bitcoin Nodes to avoid the liability of knowing who you are or ever seeing your public key. You have to pick a wallet app like [Sparrow](https://www.sparrowwallet.com/) made by someone else for yourself. Not as easy, but safer.

At the end of the day, the decision is yours, whether you prefer the risks and trade-offs of sticking with seed words as backup, or if you'd prefer to use *Ledger Recover*.

## Should I worry about my Ledger?

Is this new feature a concern even if you *don't* want to use *Recover*? Is the security of a Ledger inherently reduced by this feature?

Unfortunately, it seems many people have misunderstood how Signing Devices work. Whether they use Secure Element chips or not, they are *basically all* capable of extracting your private key from their enclave into the main microprocessor, with varying caveats. Ledger can, even a ColdCard can! And if that's possible, and the main microprocessor is also responsible for the display and interfaces like USB, then it follows that it's possible to write malicious firmware for *all of them* that would extract the private key or seed, and hand it to an attacker over USB.

Don't believe me? With a ColdCard, you can view the seed words on the device's screen once it's unlocked. `Advanced Menu` → `Danger Zone` → `Seed Functions` → `View Seed Words`. If they're on the screen, they're not just in the Secure Element. The difference between writing them to the screen and writing them out over USB is just a difference of software.

So, while it seems to come as an unwelcome surprise to many, yes, it has always been possible to write firmware that facilitates key extraction. You've always trusted Ledger not to deploy such firmware whether you knew it or not.

Moving to a different signing device is *not* going to change that fact -- *although*, using a device that can be *airgapped* -- that is, used without ever being directly connected to a computer does immediately allay most of this fear. Even if your device has been poisoned with private key extracting firmware, getting that key off the device over an airgap is really hard to do.

So, ditch Ledger if you want to -- but please understand that the other devices aren't different in this fundamental aspect.

> The Recover code in the firmware is not a malicious code nor does it open a way to arbitrary extract the seed.
>
> If you trust the device to sign a transaction only when you press a button, then you can trust the device to compute a SSS (a shard of the seed) only if you press a button.
>
> Éric Larchevêque, Ledger co-founder an CEO of the company from 2014 to 2019 [on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/ledgerwallet/comments/13layt7/my_personal_view_on_the_pr_disaster_from_a_ledger/)

## Messaging Matters

The crux of this whole fiasco may then just be a matter of messed-up messaging. Ledger have previously claimed that it was *impossible* to issue a firmware update that could extract the private key, which as we've seen now is clearly incorrect:

> Hi - your private keys never leave the Secure Element chip, which has never been hacked. The Secure Element is 3rd party certified, and is the same technology as used in passports and credit cards. A firmware update cannot extract the private keys from the Secure Element.
>
> *Ledger [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/Ledger/status/1592551225970548736)*

Contrast this with the reality that hit in this tweet that's since been deleted by Ledger Support:

> (1/2) technically speaking it is and has always been possible to write firmware that facilitates key extraction. You have always trusted Ledger not to deploy such firmware whether you knew it or not.
>
> *Ledger Support [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/Ledger_Support/status/1658892462440456192)*

This kind of sloppiness with detail has clearly led many people to believe their relationship with Ledger is *trustless*, as Éric Larchevêque, Ledger co-founder phrased it on Reddit. That trust has been broken as Ledger users realise their relationship to the company isn't as secure as they believed it to be. It doesn't matter that the trust was misguided, it matters that it was broken.

> My mistake as a CEO during my tenure was probably not be relentless enough about explaining the security model, but at some point you just give up as people don't care at all. Until they care again, like now.
>
> The hard truth, which has been confirmed by many experts who took the time to actually deep dive on the subject, is that nothing changed. Absolutely nothing happened. The security model is the same than before you knew Ledger Recover existed.
>
> What changed is the perspective some of you had on the trustlessness, which appeared to be much more nuanced than you thought, and as this is a very sensible subject, many became extremely angered because they felt lied to.
>
> Éric Larchevêque [on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/ledgerwallet/comments/13layt7/my_personal_view_on_the_pr_disaster_from_a_ledger/)

This is a sequencing and communication fuckup, not a technical one. [Just enough info](https://twitter.com/ledger/status/1658458714771169282) to freak people out was pushed out on Twitter, but not enough to understand what was actually happening, what the risks and protections were.

![A tweet from a user showing a binned Ledger and two new BitBox02 wallets](https://1f52b.xyz/media/2023/2023-ledger-bin.jpg)

Naturally the reaction to this is negative, with confused and angry users posting about their concerns and many others including big names in the space dogpiling on to accelerate the fire. A Twitter search for *"bye ledger"* yields a stream of images of new wallets from other makers and even some Ledgers being smashed and binned.

> Yo @Ledger, does this mean you can access my #BTC?
>
> OR
>
> Does it mean you can access my #BTC only if I subscribe to your Ledger Recover service?>
> Which one is true? Or are they both? 👀
>
> *Duo Nine ⚡ [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/du09btc/status/1658381334224715776)*

The concern above isn't valid, but how was the poster supposed to know?

You have to wonder how this new feature went down when internally circulated. To their credit, Ledger's [DonJon](https://donjon.ledger.com/) security research program has spent millions supporting Bitcoin and cryptocurrency custody relentlessly, and has made Ledger's own devices and many of their competitors' safer as a result. So, surely that team might've had a similar initial scepticism (or "ick") towards the idea before seeing detail?

As a result of this self-inflicted hailstorm, Ledger have damaged their reputation and handed their competitors free marketing and users.

## So, can Ledger recover?

In the end, this is about trust. Treating the manufacturer of your hardware signing device as an adversary in every way is a non-sequitur. You *have* to have a degree of trust in them to produce and deliver to you a product that does what it says.

Ledger have acknowledged the mess and the miscommunication, and are taking steps to be more transparent in the future -- open-sourcing more of their code, responding to criticism and apologising for the upset.

Despite the controversy, I think Ledger will be fine, and even that *Recover* will be a successful product. But rebuilding lost trust and reputation is going to take them a while.

If you have been using a Ledger and it's worked well for you, I don't think this is a reason to drop it and switch to a new wallet. It's not for me, but it might be for you -- it's a great piece of hardware, and one I think I'll still recommend to people that might have a hard time with a ColdCard.

> We believe wholeheartedly in the need for a service like Ledger Recover—those of us who have been in the space for a long time, over a decade in my case, have a responsibility to ensure everyone can be self-sovereign and can have self-custody over their digital value. This is the ethos of crypto. The main pain point for crypto self-custody adoption is precisely the problem of seed phrase recovery. The majority of users in crypto today either don’t own their private keys and/or are putting their private keys at risk using less secure forms of self-custody, and hard-to-use forms of storing and securing their seed phrase.
>
> [Ledger Recover: A Message From Pascal Gauthier](https://www.ledger.com/blog/ledger-recover-a-message-from-pascal-gauthier-chairman-ceo-at-ledger)

When Ledger, the leading Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency hardware wallet manufacturer launched their new Recover product, the announcement… didn’t exactly go down well on Twitter. People started freaking out, having previously understood that their private key was permanently locked within their Ledger – yet here was Ledger themselves proudly announcing a feature that’d extract it and upload it to the internet.


This is an excerpt from our response to the *Bank of England's* consultation on the "Digital Pound", a proposed CBDC in the UK.

**Originally posted June 2023 at [1f52b.xyz](https://1f52b.xyz/article/2023/06/the-digital-pound-a-new-form-of-money-for-households-and-businesses/)**. Read there for the full piece, sidenotes & references.

---

**INTRODUCTION ⇝**

Physical cash in the form of banknotes and coinage is a bearer instrument.

If you hold it you own it, and have the responsibility upon yourself to custody it. You can spend and receive it privately and anonymously without record. In the United Kingdom, cash is also central bank money, representing a claim that can be redeemed against the Bank of England. Central bank money is, as the Bank puts it *"financially risk-free in the sense that there is no credit, market or liquidity risk."*

For a digital asset to deserve to be called both *cash* and *central bank money*, it must have all of these properties: bearer instrument, privately holdable, anonymously spendable, liquid, fungible, divisible, and a direct liability of the central bank.

In their consultation paper of 2023 and earlier discussion papers of 2020 and 2021, the Bank of England and HM Treasury set out a policy and architecture proposal for a *"Digital Pound"*, a central bank digital currency (CBDC) to provide a digital solution to the decline of physical cash and to maintain public access to central bank money.

While not opposed to this in principle, we find the Bank's Digital Pound proposal deficient on two fronts:

 1. The proposed Digital Pound is not a digital cash-equivalent: it is not privately transactable nor a bearer instrument, as physical cash is.
 2. The Platform Model does not actually provide retail access to central bank (public) money as the public will not have direct access to the Bank’s CBDC system and ledger. It requires custodial intermediaries which adds counterparty risk.

These objections are pertinent because they address the Bank's motivations and intentions for developing the Digital Pound:

>  - To sustain access to UK central bank money -- ensuring its role as an anchor for confidence and safety in our monetary system, and to underpin monetary and financial stability and sovereignty.
>    - Uniformity and safety could be threatened by [...] lower [physical] cash use.
>    - That the Digital Pound will not be remunerated (bear interest) and that this is not a motivation for issuing the Digital Pound.
>  - To promote innovation, choice and efficiency in domestic payments as our lifestyles and economy become ever more digital.
>    - That the Bank proposes the Digital Pound should be designed following a platform model.
>
> *Consultation Paper, pp.11,24,27,48*

And further they are relevant because the Consultation paper requests:

> - Views on the proposed approach to privacy.
> - Views on the proposal re. efficiencies in payments.
> - Views on the key features of the model we intend to take forward in the next phase.

The Digital Pound will not and should not accrue interest, in the same way that cash does not. Remuneration has implications for monetary policy as it would affect inflows and outflows into the Digital Pound from commercial bank deposits and other stores of value, and would alter the effective-lower-bound of interest rates. This lack of remuneration makes it clear to consumers what the Digital Pound is, and avoids cannibalising other cash-equivalents such as bonds and other money-market instruments. It will be a means of exchange with no expected nominal return, not an investment instrument.

The Bank does not give "provide a digital cash-equivalent" as an explicit goal, but in its reasoning for the Digital Pound makes reference to the shift in *"the balance of public and private money used to make payments"*, citing the decline in use of physical cash meaning the same as a decline in the use of public money. *"If current trends continue, the public's access to, or use of, central bank money will diminish and the monetary system could become fragmented, posing a risk to monetary and financial stability"* In its Discussion Paper of 2020 the Bank also cited *"Addressing the consequences of a decline in cash"* as a motivation for exploring a CBDC.

The decline in use-of and access-to physical cash does not only mean reduced access to central bank money, but also the elimination of a highly private and anonymous method of payment and storing value. The Bank's 2020 Discussion Paper did make reference to this, albeit absent from later papers:

> Physical cash has certain unique characteristics that would be lost if it were to fall out of general use. For example, cash offers a level of privacy in transactions that is not always available with existing electronic payment systems. Cash also has an important role in financial inclusion.
>
> *2020 Discussion Paper, p.18*

Rightfully, the Bank seeks to maintain public access to cash, and its concern that the decline of physical cash presents a hazard is legitimate.

> We are exploring a digital pound because money and payments are changing
>
> Cash, of course, remains vital for many. Around 1.2 million UK adults do not have a bank account and around one fifth of people name cash as their preferred payment method. Cash remains important to a large cross-section of society. Even those who do not use it regularly consider it an important back up form of payment. For those reasons, UK authorities are committed to ensuring continued access to cash.
>
> *Consultation paper, Part A, p.10*

What the Bank of England currently proposes with its Platform Model for the Digital Pound is unfortunately something that will look and behave much more like a bank deposit than cash, dependent on an unavoidable layer of new bank-like intermediaries to handle it for the public.

To suppose that intermediated access thru *"pass-through"* platform providers qualifies as *"public access to retail central bank money"* is not that far from claiming that the public *already* have access to central bank money intermediated through commercial bank deposit accounts — that is, not true in any useful sense.

If you cannot custody 'your' money yourself directly, it is not really yours.

This would, in practice, make the Digital Pound more of a wholesale CBDC, rather than a retail CBDC. Then, the utility of such a wholesale CBDC is doubtable, as the Bank of England's existing interbank settlement networks (RTGS and CHAPS) are functional and have an upgrade roadmap already in-progress; Commercial banks already have access to central bank money which is how they store their reserves; and they already use digital central bank payment systems to perform interbank settlement and other large payments; and consumers are already able to make quick and easy digital payments using banks and other payment systems.

Our position is that instead of this Platform Model, the remedy is to provide a digital equivalent to physical cash, and that this ought to be an explicit design goal of the Digital Pound.

Of-course, if the Digital Pound fails to replicate the properties of *physical* cash then it cannot claim to be equivalent to cash. If a Digital Pound is to be worth developing further, it must focus on providing a digital cash equivalent bearer instrument, with direct public access, as this is the only condition in which we find any CBDC to be compelling. If the Digital Pound is not *actually* cash, then we contend that it is largely pointless and unwarranted, as it will do nothing to help *"maintain public access to cash"*, with the Bank of England needlessly attempting to build a public competitor to existing payment platforms that already meet public demand. The one thing that the Bank of England can actually do that no-one else can, is provide a digital cash equivalent for the pound.

Cynically, the Digital Pound as currently proposed could be labelled as no more than an affinity scam, deploying buzzwords that make it seem to be a government response to cryptocurrencies and emerging novel payment and money technologies, without being substantially distinct from existing digital fiat payment networks and functionally inferior to cash.

It is not a novel opinion that the system the Bank proposes for the Digital Pound does not qualify as *cash* -- cryptographer Hal Finney made this observation in 1996:

> On-line electronic money, [where] the merchant must [authenticate the spender's identity and ownership] with the bank for each transaction [...] does not deserve to be called cash, though, because it **lacks the distinguishing characteristic of digital cash: it is not anonymous.** When the bank sees serial number `123456` being deposited, the bank recognizes that this was the same bill that *Alice* withdrew. The bank can therefore deduce that Alice spent the money at *Bob's*.
>
> *Hal Finney, [Detecting Double Spending](https://web.archive.org/web/20010308153733/http://www.finney.org/~hal/chcash2.html) 15th October 1993*

Many respondents to the Bank's Discussion paper of 2020 placed great emphasis on the importance of privacy and anonymity, supporting our claim that these are both desireable and widely held to be necessary for cash-equivalence:

> Feedback from respondents has [...] emphasised the importance that users place on having privacy in their transactions.
>
> Security and privacy were often cited as aspects on which there **should be little or no room for compromise.**
>
> The imperative to protect privacy was also regularly cited by respondents as potentially having implications for transparency and financial inclusion.
>
> Views varied on the degree of privacy that would be necessary or desirable for a CBDC system. Of those who felt that CBDC should be highly private or even anonymous, some respondents **grounded their privacy expectations in the example of cash.** Others pointed to the principles and technologies underlying **decentralised cryptocurrencies as benchmarks** for privacy for CBDC.
>
> *[Responses to the Bank of England’s March 2020 Discussion Paper on CBDC](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/paper/2021/responses-to-the-bank-of-englands-march-2020-discussion-paper-on-cbdc), 7th June 2021*

CBDCs have only recently emerged as a central bank and government infatuation.
While over a hundred countries are in varying stages of exploration or development, thus-far only The Bahamas, Eastern-Caribbean currency union, Nigeria and Jamaica have actually deployed one.

However, none of the CBDCs that have launched demonstrate strong public support or adoption. The Bahamian Sand Dollar makes up less than 0.2% of currency in circulation, only US$1.1 million in value -- while incurring nearly US$7.5 million in costs by 2022, two years after introduction. Jamaica's JAM-DEX facilitated transaction activity equivalent to no more than US$2.3 million in 2022, 0.01% of that year's ABM and PoS volume. Fewer than 1% of Nigerians have adopted the e-Naira, according to the IMF.

It does not feel unfair to say that these early CBDC projects are not going well.

By contrast, a staggering 32% of Nigerians have adopted Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This, despite the Nigerian central bank having banned banks and other financial institutions from dealing with or facilitating payments to cryptocurrency exchanges. Bitcoin is not the same thing as a CBDC, and in many respects is superior, but this demonstrates that a public that has already adopted one digital currency will not automatically embrace a CBDC if its design and properties are not compelling.

The technical means to achieve a digital cash-like instrument are well known, most notably the Chaumian eCash construct introduced in 1983. Chaumian eCash is a cryptographic digital token system that operates without a distributed ledger and without requiring a Byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanism such as Bitcoin's proof of work, because it operates using centralised consensus.

eCash successfully implements a digital equivalent for the salient properties of physical cash. It is private, self-custodial and can be transacted anonymously. It cannot be counterfeited, yet the issuing bank (or mint) is blind to the holders identity. With extensions, it can also be transacted offline. The Swiss National Bank, and other central banks and government bodies have already evaluated the suitability of eCash for a CBDC and found it to be compelling, though the SNB have not yet committed to building a CBDC of any form.

In our view, the architecture of the Digital Pound should be Chaumian eCash.

We acknowledge that the Bank does not currently believe that a bearer instrument model is appropriate, and we contest this assessment.

> Another approach [for a CBDC] is a bearer instrument model, where ownership of digital pounds is recorded on individual user devices, and transactions take place between users, with no interaction with the central bank. **This is close to the way cash works at present.** Such an approach presents several challenges. While hardware devices (for example, phones, wearables, cards) are difficult to hack, if that happens it is difficult to detect and to fix.
>
> *Consultation Paper, Box G, p.61*

The Bank is presumably concerned about theft of the bearer instrument from end-user's custody. This is of-course a risk, but one that is understood and tolerated by the public when using physical cash, and is an inherent property *of* cash.

This risk is surely tolerable. People have been content with not being able to un-lose and un-have-stolen physical bank notes and currency for millennia. This risk is also precisely one of the earliest reasons banks came in to being, providing safe custody (and the amusing risk of that not always being true). This downside for bearer instruments can also provide a balancing incentive for people to not ape their entire liquid wealth out of banks and into the Digital Pound, and use it predominantly as a payment technology not a long-term store of value.

> Further, there is no trusted intermediary involved in transactions. That could give rise to 'double spend risk', where a user attempts to copy and spend the same digital pound multiple times.
>
> *Consultation Paper, Box G, p.61*

eCash is not vulnerable to double-spending for online transactions because the bank (mint) intermediates each payment. It can be extended to detect and mitigate offline double-spending by de-anonymising double-spenders, though this extension does not necessarily need to be implemented, because an eCash requiring the recipient to be online is sufficient for most use-cases -- in the same way that very few merchants accept offline card payments.

> Also, a bearer instrument approach, where users never have to check back in with a central ledger, would lead to completely anonymous payments.
>
> *Consultation Paper, Box G, p.61*

This is a misapprehension as it is not true that transaction anonymity derives from not checking in with a ledger. Bitcoin, eCash and some other cryptoassets like Monero enable anonymous payments despite every payment requiring interaction with a ledger for settlement -- although it would be true that a system where no check-in at all is required would inherently be anonymous -- though we are unaware of any such system that exists, but would be very interested to hear more if the Bank knows of such a construct.

> This would go against our design principles for privacy and data protection, as well as laws to prevent financial crime (see Section D.2). There is additional complexity for conducting transactions between two individuals over distance as both hardware devices would need to be updated accurately. For these reasons, bearer instrument models are not appropriate as the only operating model for the digital pound, but they may have uses as part of other use cases: bearer instruments may be the best approach for offline payments, for example.
>
> *Consultation Paper, Box G, p.61*

Again, that there is *"complexity for conducting transactions between two individuals over distance"* is not a true characterisation of eCash nor most other digital payment technologies, as their transaction mechanics do not depend on user proximity, in eCash's case merely that the receiver be able to contact the mint to redeem the received tokens for new ones.

The Bank may wish to surveil and have powers to observe, intercept and censor Digital Pound transactions and users for AML/CFT purposes, and subject users to invasive and arbitrary KYC checks just to be 'allowed' to hold the asset -- but notably it does not have this ability for current physical cash beyond what law enforcement can achieve in physical space. The Bank commits to maintaining consumer access to physical cash *"as long as there is demand"* and therefore implicitly accepts this limitation on the Government's enforcement capability going forward.

It seems that the Bank must either accept this inability and so could tolerate it for a novel payment/money system, or must declare that under its current expectations for the prevention of financial crime, it would not find physical cash sufficient and so would not allow for its issuance. This latter stance, we're sure, would not be supported by the public.

**SUMMARY ⇝**

The Digital Pound will be most beneficial and best-placed to be a digital substitute for physical cash if it simply inherits cash’s properties: a bearer-instrument with robust transaction anonymity and ownership privacy, directly claimable against the central bank by the public. If it does not have these properties, we do not believe it will be compelling and thus that the public will not be inclined to use it in lieu of existing digital payment systems, as disinterest in the e-Naira and other already launched CBDCs has demonstrated.

Further, we don't believe that the Bank’s currently proposed design has sufficient grounds to be implemented and presents a threat to civil liberties and unduly extends beyond the Bank’s constitutional and statutory obligations.

We propose that the Bank instead adopt a Chaumian eCash design for the Digital Pound, as this construct has all the desirable properties of physical cash and is private, secure, resilient, performant, simple and energy efficient.

Responses to the Bank's previous consultation papers support this view.

---

This response continues at [https://1f52b.xyz/article/2023/06/the-digital-pound-a-new-form-of-money-for-households-and-businesses/](https://1f52b.xyz/article/2023/06/the-digital-pound-a-new-form-of-money-for-households-and-businesses/) with responses to each of the Consultation Paper and Technical Working Paper questions.

The Digital Pound: A new form of money for households and businesses?

This is an excerpt from our response to the *Bank of England's* consultation papers on the "Digital Pound", a proposed CBDC in the UK.