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What would you do if you stand to lose all your sats?
1678 sats \ 15 comments \ @optimism 25 Jun AskSN
LARP time, inspired by @kepford in #1015492
Some catastrophic flaw in p2tr gets found by an <insert your flavor of evil nemesis> tomorrow and your watchtower, which you of course run because you're not a noob, starts alerting you that:
(a) you lost all your cold storage coin, and (b) in about 50 blocks, your LN outbound liquidity is gonerz unless you do a fee race to the bottom to reclaim it
what do you do?
PS: fees are high because you're not the only one getting rugged.
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115 sats \ 2 replies \ @SimpleStacker 26 Jun
Maybe I'm dumb, but, how would a watchtower know if I'm losing all my cold storage coins? I thought watchtowers were a LN thing?
If I'm about to lose all my LN liquidity, I'll do what I can to save them paying whatever fee is necessary, but won't stress too much since it's not much.
If I'm about to lose all my cold storage I'll be very stressed. But what I do depends on the scenario of why I am about to lose them?
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130 sats \ 1 reply \ @optimism OP 23h
how would a watchtower know if I'm losing all my cold storage coins?
Just like you have a watchtower for LN, you can have a watch-only wallet setup for your cold funds. Maybe you just have that in some app. Personally I have it in Core and it notifies me of all txs.
But what I do depends on the scenario of why I am about to lose them?
If your cold storage funds are p2tr and there's a weakness in it, consider it as if it's someone being able to spend every p2tr utxo. Similar to the bug in the TheDAO contract on Ethereum that infamously drove Vitalik to call for a trading stop and a roll back.
This is also why I am asking: is code law? You can technically amend your validation rules to reject every block containing a utxo spend of your wallet past block n (and thus be chaintip forking until the attacks stop) and if everyone would do that (non-centrally) then there could be organic consensus at some point.
I honestly expect that most people would just follow a central leader nowadays - i even fear that'd be Saylor if it'd happen tomorrow - and be exactly as centralized as Ethereum was and that everyone on bitcoin twitter (obv the same people that would follow Saylor) right now points to as why Eth is a centralized wefboi scam, but the optimist in me hopes to be wrong about that.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 21h
I think you're right that there'd be a fork, and that most people would choose a leader to follow, and I'm guessing most people would consider the chain that modified consensus to reverse the attack to be bitcoin, but I guess there'd be some disputing over that.
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126 sats \ 1 reply \ @Aardvark 23h
If i somehow do something stupid enough to lose all of my sats, I'll be extremely upset with myself. I take security very seriously.
However, step 2 would be to start over.
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80 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism OP 23h
Yeah if you'd do something stupid, that would suck. Like being me in 2017 and losing almost 9 BTC on a paper wallet due to a flooding and not keeping copies.
But consider this would be global, not due to a mistake you make, but due to a bug. The reason why I think this LARP is important is because it's good to know that no system is infallible. We can only hope that with all non-evil players together we catch all errors before they get exploited (preferably: released.)
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130 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT 23h
It would be tragic, but I really believe that what a lot of us know about Bitcoin is enough. You would simply need to start stacking again. Whatever you save goes into Bitcoin.
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100 sats \ 4 replies \ @Scoresby 15h
p2tr is about 0.1% of addresses in the UTXO set. So, in this case, I'm screwed because I was using p2tr for my cold storage and so are a number of other people, but I wonder if this issue is big enough to galvanize the entire bitcoin community into action like "fork the chain."
if I saw my watch-only wallet notifications soon enough (ie. before the transaction gets mined), I'd do a fee-war RBF'ing until all the funds are burned in mining fees or I manage to get the attacker to misstep (if they're attacking me, they're probably attacking a lot of people and even running a bot, they might not be able to stay on top of all the people who are doing the same as me).
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119 sats \ 3 replies \ @optimism OP 13h
It was 0.1% in 2023, but it's the #1 output type nowadays according to https://bitcoinisdata.com/utxo/ (I used to have a script for this myself, but can't seem to find it.)
they might not be able to stay on top of all the people who are doing the same as me
Yeah. This is why I personally don't consolidate utxos unless they're like 10k sats
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505 sats \ 2 replies \ @Scoresby 13h
fair point, but if you look at it by value rather than number of UTXOs, it's still pretty small:
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102 sats \ 1 reply \ @optimism OP 12h
I stand corrected. The distortion is real.
I wonder now if it was actually a good idea to roll over to p2tr earlier this year.
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105 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby 12h
I wonder now if it was actually a good idea to roll over to p2tr earlier this year.
That is the question!
Space savings are good. and if we get more support for FROST and MuSig, I'd be really interested in having a multisig that looks like a singlesig. Until then...
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105 sats \ 0 replies \ @stack_harder 11h
To me, it's basically the same as saying 'you have lost all your savings' because my sats are my savings.
Now, I don't actually spend them really, I horde and assmilk and dca, and in my mind, I am saving them for pension age or something else. I don't make much money and BTC is my Hail Mary.
But I would be pretty devastated, and I would be quite bitter, possibly forever. Shit, I am bad enough thinking about how much I would have theoretically if I hadn't been shitcoining.
I'd be Lieutenant Dan, without the redemption arc, and I would go on about it so often that my children would probably subsequently pen a bitter memoir about me.
I'd keep on living and doing regular things and trying to rebuild, but I'd always be thinking about what could have been.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @d680ecaa8e 14h
I lost all my satoshis several times what I do is leave crypto world for a week or even a month and be back with new strategy.
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105 sats \ 0 replies \ @Silent_Hodler 18h
I'd commit seppuku. Mentally. Then improved my security and started over. 21M in 21Y. Sill got the time.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @satgoob 21h
The evil nemesis is me. I have discovered the flaw. Send me 1 BTC, and I will spare you
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