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Chris Belcher is the founder of JoinMarket, the first complete privacy tool for on chain Bitcoin. Fidelity Bonds protect coinjoiners who pay fees from feeding bots who spam many identities. [2019]

1010 sats \ 11 replies \ @k00b 26 Jul

looks like @adlai commented back then

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2031 sats \ 10 replies \ @adlai 26 Jul

I quit collaborating on reasonably good terms rather than turn things acrimonious by politicsing over technical decisions, especially after Greg Maxwell said that Bitcoin has dealbreakingly bad UX already, and my planned ideas for JM would only make it worse.


thank you for the highlight, and ... did you have any question for me?

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@adlai would you do an AMA? I will zap it big. I am not familiar with your work.

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115 sats \ 8 replies \ @adlai 26 Jul
@adlai would you do an AMA? I will zap it big.

thanks for the interest; how do you suggest I pick a time? people don't seem to vote much on my SN polls, although it could be from getting muted by folks who prefer vibes and slop over bitter prose.

I am not familiar with your work.

there's not much of it; I honestly don't like driving the world from a computer keyboard.

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how do you suggest I pick a time?

I often miss AMAs because the author only stays around for an hour to answer questions. Just wait until you have the biggest time window availability, you don't have to sit at the keyboard the whole time.

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217 sats \ 6 replies \ @adlai 26 Jul

I think part of the appeal is the pseudo-synchronous nature of it; even if someone doesn't have their own questions, they can show up and vote on pending questions while waiting for the next answer to appear.

I think Reddit sometimes opens an AMA thread some fixed time [e.g. 24 hours] before the answers begin. I doubt that's necessary in this case, although it could at least help to post a tl;dr of why anyone would even care to read mine, maybe as the description text for the poll about a convenient timing.

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If you let me know with a little lead time, I'll be happy to advertise it a bit (or to help out with gathering questions in whatever way you like).

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112 sats \ 4 replies \ @adlai 28 Jul

I'm leaning towards either this weekend, or sometime next week; and have no strong idea regarding timezones.

One thing I'm wondering about is whether I should even aim to have it be synchronous like the classic AMA concept, or rather do a preliminary poll for timezone interest, and then post earlier, and come back after a few hours to answer questions.

For example, if most site users are going to be posting and reading during afternoon-evening EST, then I could post the final AMA thread at noon EST [which is around sunset, local time], go to sleep, and return to answer questions after waking up.


the delay of a few days is because my Alby Hub isn't restarting nicely after not having any logins for a few months, and I need to figure out how to restore it after possibly having trusted the wrong password manager

5055 sats \ 1 reply \ @adlai 26 Jul

quoting my old comments, in case github dies next week or people just prefer comment sections over anubis "catgirls":

It is my understanding that Sybil attack mitigation via fidelity bonds as described in the above text would reduce available liquidity.

It would be preferable for a system that allows the relevant coin-age accumulation to proceed in isometric parallel to a coin's availability. I don't recall ever making a formal writeup of the idea to factor accumulated coin-age into the taker algorithm for counterparty selection, although this has been discussed on IRC. This idea has the advantage of not requiring any modification of the existing protocol while tacitly acknowledging that certain participants choose to allocate their liquidity in a manner other than a single lump sum, and the disadvantage of requiring the takers to burn their utxo commitments at a greater rate.
clarifications after IRC discussion of the above:
  • One such a system would be that takers validating the offered liquidity would consider utxos as probabilisticially invalid, according to the number of confirmations on each utxo. This would reduce reuse of recently active liquidity, and prioritize liquidity's participation according to properties of the specific coins in question, instead of associating the participating liquidity with other coins.
  • coin-age, also known as bitcoin-days, is the bilinear product of an unspent transaction output's value, and the number of confirmations on the transaction from which it originates.
  • proceed in isometric parallel coin-age can accumulate in a linear manner, although arguably the metric used by takers should increase superlinearly in confirmations, so that takers would express a strong preference for joining with older coins
  • a coin's availability is the inclusion of a given utxo in the liquidity pool that can participate in a coinjoin at the given moment, i.e., presence in a hot wallet attached to a live liquidity provider.

tl;dr: The most significant unspoken question is whether "liquidity" can even be defined without some level of de-anonymization of the UTXO set; my idea was to avoid violating fungibility in principle, by having takers consider all available counterparties a single Sybil swarm, and selecting the UTXOs that produce the best resulting overall graph, when considering the iterated result.

bit of a mouthful

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121 sats \ 0 replies \ @adlai 26 Jul

In my opinion, the implementation direction that was ultimately pursued by the quorum of Joinmarket devolpers worsened the actually resultant privacy, or at least, made an equivalent level of privacy more expensive to obtain, than what could have been achieved by the halfbaked bullshit that I never implemented because literally nobody else had anything positive to say about my idea.

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His Coinswap (teleport transactions) project got forked after ill health forced him to stop working on it, but i dunno what your view of any of the versions would be - it seemed promising to me at the time, based on what i'd read from him, but maybe take a look at it.

https://github.com/bitcoin-teleport/teleport-transactions

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