I like the idea of designing a wallet for a scenario where you may need to use it in a hostile environment. Maybe a good test for this would be to use Nostr as a data store.

Or, since you could just store it on Bitcoin's blockchain because why not? Maybe that new ordinal or inscription stuff could be used for this? I don't know.

Probably so. I think people assign their idea of economic systems to Bitcoin but ultimately Bitcoin is unique and distinct from any economic system we have come up with to date. It is only a tool and you can use it to shape humanity however you want. If anyone assigns anything more specific to it than that then they are projecting.

Ok an update to my previous response. I looked into this a bit more and it is true that they have an MTL for Texas: https://strike.me/legal/licenses/

But it also lists they have an MTL for South Dakota, which they no longer operate in because Prime Trust is not currently operating in that state.

Could go so many directions so I guess we will have to wait and see.

That is good to know. I did not think to check but they probably list their licenses some where on their website. I am going to check Swan too but they probably have a license as well.

I can't imagine either are very happy with Prime Trust right now. Maybe they know the "why" behind it all though. Prime Trust does not explain it to sufficient understanding beyond "We pulled our license, will reapply ASAP".

Prime Trust honestly kind of sounds like a bit of a shit show of a company from what I am gathering.

Someone stop him before he fucks it up. Let me know when he is actually Bitcoin only rather than randomly slipping "Crypto" into his language when the subject comes up.

Yeah there it is in the article. "The proposal specifically mentions that restaurants, gift shops and vending machines within Capitol Buildings should work with persons accepting cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin"

Why not just say Bitcoin?

Yall dumb as fuck for thinking this is the guy who is going to Trojan horse the government with an orange pill. His agenda involves profit off Crypto and he will use your smooth brains to do it.

Yeah places like Swan are really awesome and provide a great service, I think. The problem is there are two major reasons companies use services like Prime Trust.

1.) Resources. They built up tooling and provide good starting point if you have minimal resources or capital as a startup.

2.) This one may be a bigger reason. Offloading these things to a provider also offloads legal responsibility for your business. Prime Trust is responsible for storing and securing that data. Should a breach happen Swan is not on the hook for it.

You should do your DD on Prime Trust though. They nearly have a monopoly.

Yeah I saw that language. Even compared to the language from this: https://support.primetrust.com/hc/en-us/articles/8738244438299-South-Dakota-FAQs it is more hopeful.

But it isn't clear what the time frame of "swiftly" means. If it has no legal definition then that could still be years. If it is still what any normal human expects the word "swift" to mean then why does their FAQ state accounts will be closed, new accounts cannot be opened, etc?

Seems like that is pretty destructive because it still means exchanges will need to close down accounts. It seems like there would be a better way to do whatever they are trying to accomplish so I am suspicious of the language.

My guess is that will accelerate a spin down of what I suspect to be a large portion of their business. Prime Trust will work to offboard accounts so there is likely some sort of grace period. I would expect every second of that grace period to be milked by any company who is reliant on Texas to boost their customer base.

In any case they still have a few days to announce. May not need to give any advanced notice at all. Maybe they have some sort of ace in their pocket to keep operating in Texas. That is always possible. I am hopeful for that anyways.

Most likely yes. Prime Trust is a single point of failure across the board, they are huge. They provide liquidity, custody, KYC and anti-fraud services so they are a whole workshop of tooling for Bitcoin or Crypto based startups.

I also suspect another reason Prime Trust is used is because they handle a good amount of licensing and legal issues state to state, which leads us to our current problem. Unless these exchanges have a money transmitter license or can switch out to a different provider (lmao) they have to shut down in the same regions as Prime Trust because they relied on Prime Trust's licensing to operate in that region in the first place.

So many companies are totally fucked.

Strike uses Bitcoin technology to offer instant payments globally, with no added transaction fees. Use Strike to pay your friends, buy goods and services online, make micropayments, tip content creators, as well as buy and sell bitcoin.

To offer these services, we’ve partnered with Prime Trust, LLC, a state-regulated trust company, which holds your funds in custody and enables funds transfers. You can contact Prime Trust here.

Any more details? Prime trust has also stopped supporting other states recently. I would love to learn what is happening at a state level to cause this.

Unlike other states, Texas is a BIG DEAL. No KYC ops or market making ops for that state is a death sentence for some businesses.

Many exchanges are entirely reliant on Prime Trust to operate at all and Texas is one of the biggest markets across the board for this stuff.

Even companies like Swan and Strike rely on Prime Trust for a lot of different things. I love both and really hope to see them navigate through this.

This is much more devastating than people realize. I would anticipate fallout or major changes in the way theses businesses operate in a very abrupt manner.

Yeah I had always been under the impression people liked them because I would always see clips on Twitter. I eventually bookmarked the site to check out their daily live news streams and if I am being honest, its difficult to get through.

Not because of the content really, I can't even begin to digest whatever the content even is. The pacing of their interviews and the way their reporters handle conversations is just completely awkward and jarring. I cannot pay attention to anything else. There are moments of dead air. It is closer to a parody of a morning news show minus the humor of being a parody.

I figured it was just me so I stopped using it as a source for Bitcoin news, but maybe other people have had the same experience.

Yeah it is hard to consider the person on the other end when we all strive to be so invisible.

I will look into this. I was thinking of some sort of way to have the hardware master vault on multi-sig, but each watch only wallet under the same master seed phrase + whatever private password phrase they choose and no multi sig.

If that could happen then I think most of what I want can happen. They could use the hardware wallet to access their vault under their passphrase to spend funds. The main family vault on the hardware wallet could not be spent by the individual but the balance should be viewable and xpubs exportable so all family members can still verify funds in the main vault are good.

The only missing piece of this would be the fact that all funds are separate and members would need to contribute to the main vault rather than the sum of everyone's balance be apart of it.

I definitely have a vision in my head on how to solve that last piece but there is no way I could do it on my own. It will require building a wallet from the ground up.

Ordered some hardware wallets to see if I can at least execute on everything else though.

In order for things to work smoothly clients need access to pull in as much data from relays as possible and as quick as possible. It can end up generating hundreds of thousands of events that the client might have to display which can take a chunk of memory and cpu time.

The further back in the sequence of events the client has to look based on its query, the more it will struggle to display it quickly. No matter how you query relays this always seems to be the case. Relays need to be way less dumb than they are.

So this morning you make a post about enjoying a nice cup of Coffee. Everyone from the void responds and you get comments and likes from somewhere. Crazy!! You log out for the day so you can really consider what just happened.

You log back in the next day to see if anyone has left you notifications or messages or anything. No messages are showing! You leave it idle for a few minutes and suddenly you're getting notifications for something that happened hours ago.

The client has to work harder in order to retrieve that historical data. I think relays will need to be less "dumb" because there are a few ways to query a relay but nothing in a way that makes it easy for the client to manage memory, state, and the flow of data.

Here is a challenge I noticed with managing data.

Suppose I have a batch of posts. Each post has a pubkey. This pubkey represents the entity that created the post. I want to find out if this pubkey has a username or nick name.

In my code, I might have a query to a relay or multiple relays like this:

This will ask the relay for two event types. Event type 0 contains profile information and event type 1 will contain posts. You must match the pubkey of one event to the pubkey of another. Easy!

That query will query 500 of the past events based on current date/time in total. If there are 400 posts events and 100 user events, the chances of the username being in that batch of events is not likely. Even if you have 500 post events and 500 profile events that won't matter if the entity has created a profile that happened 600 events ago then you're not going to get that event and the post will not have an associated username.

I can only speak from the perspective of someone who barely does development stuff until I find projects I think might be fun like Nostr. I know some Javascript and that is about it but can wing it most of the way.

I can tell you that from my own experience most things fall apart once you test your client at scale. It is why I keep iterating and I just feel like I am making no progress at all when I see all these other clients that are beautiful and amazing. Even though they have similar problems. I do think a lot of devs who rely on frameworks are in for a rude awakening. Anyone who builds native clients in languages like C or builds clients from scratch in JavaScript without stuff like Vue or React will end up building the better experiences.

I could only dream of ever building one of the few successful clients out there. I don't even have the financial resources to eat so I have no idea why I am putting any time towards this at all

If there are any companies out there trying to build a client with more resources than I have please reach out. Would love to be able to continue to do this.

Yeah my bad about that. Have some Sats for your trouble. The reason is even though that is the correct path, my family members are 1 password using (and sharing) type people. There just isn't a reality where they care enough to do this responsibly or reliably.

Even worse than this just being isolated to my family, this is not at all uncommon. It is the majority of people. I hope for change on that some day, but we do not live in a society that even allows for the thinking skills needed for that to happen in the first place.

The end goal being no one person with the main wallet phrase can take or spend anyone else's funds.

I have a good chunk of this worked out in my head if I were to develop my own wallet software but I wouldn't know the first thing or be able to do any of the math to do that.

I think though it is a matter of wallet UX. A Bitcoin seed phrase can have an additional passphrase called a two factor phrase. This can be anything you set it to.

The way I understand it is that the additional passphrase means you have a completely independent wallet because the hash or whatever that seed phrase + passphrase represents is different from just the seed phrase.

So that means you can have crazy scenarios like this:

Main wallet | |-sub wallet1 | | -sub wallet2 | | -sub wallet(2of3)

So you can have multiple "sub wallets" and have "sub wallets" that are also multisig. I don't know if the main wallet can be multisig or not and what the implications of that would be.

But each of those so-called sub wallets can have their own balance entirely unknown and undependable by anyone else who also has the passphrase of the main wallet. While this is typically used as an additional layer of personal security I think with enough ingenuity it could be used in some way to facilitate my goal.

The problem is there isn't really a reliable way to have some sort of global family balance. I guess to be even more clear what I am looking for isn't a savings solution for my family exactly. It is more of a family managed pool of money where participating members can collaborate in a democratic way about how the collective funds are spent.

Someone mentioned nunchuck so I am looking into that. I am really just trying to find ways to lessen the burden of self custody while still maintaining good enough security. Not an easy task but there are few collaborative solutions in Bitcoin. Inheritance solutions are worse.

I don't think this will be something I go through with because the more thought I put into it the harder it seems to pull off. I thought about setting the family up with multi sig stuff but that actually just adds to the complexity of things to track and keep secret as far as I can tell.

Yeah once you explore the nuance of how some of these exchanges integrate LN you learn some really interesting things. For example with Strike you can buy Bitcoin the normal way, but also if you just have cash in the account and scan a LN code, the recipient gets BTC but there is no purchase of BTC or conversion for the person who paid the money.

This means Strike is taking your money and moving BTC from their own private reserves rather than from their market maker. You didn't buy it, so technically that BTC is KYC free. All you did was send it to a wallet via a LN payment.

Now, Exchanges like Strike run their own LN nodes and probably are required to report those transactions, so the government would then need to get reported transactions off the node the BTC got sent to in order to determine the wallet that might be in custody of it. I don't know if they need both sides of that data, or just details from one of the LN nodes. This is most likely the reason they allow this, because there is a path to compliance.

From that point since its difficult to tell what wallet it comes from you send it on-chain to whirlpool or coinjoin.

I have some ideas how robosats can be used to do some fun things too. Personally I have not had a need for non-kyc BTC.

I honestly have no idea if any of that would work, but according to my understanding of things the theory is there.

Why are so many people interested in predicting the future when you have on chain metrics to know in as much detail as you want what is going on now? You cannot get that level of detail with any stock or company on this planet and if you could that fact alone would be an advantage. That is why insider trading is illegal.

It cant be insider trading if all the data is open for everyone. You can front run every single one of these TA snake oil sales man by just looking at on chain data any given day of the week.

Wouldn't it make the most sense to use exchanges that will send straight to a LN wallet to optimize privacy right from the start, assuming you're buying from KYC sources?

From there, you can then send it back to the base layer into a Samurai wallet for whirlpool which is similar to a coin join. Ideally you'll want to send and privatize more than you need because you want to avoid attacks where fund flows can be followed by tracking exact or similar amounts.

So you let it sit for a while and then move what you need back into a clean LN wallet when you need it. From that point I don't think it would be too difficult to get it back into Fiat if you really need it.

What is the purpose of multisig for you? Why not share just the one key? Having two keys seems like you just double your attack vector in this scenario.

I am not completely familiar with multisig, but if its something that you can only do on the Bitcoin base layer, then you don't have to worry about testing lighting. If Blue wallet lets you set the node to connect to, you could just run a Bitcoin testnet node locally and do your tests with as many sats as you need.

Don't even need to run test net. Can just run Bitcoin node locally by creating a genesis block too.

Excellent. I recall hearing some things about this and will look into it more. Between this, blue wallet, and fedimint I belive I can cobble together a working solution worst case scenario.

I will try to keep an eye out for your report!