If a unilateral exit falls in a forest and no one was around to see or hear it, was there any bitcoin transacted at all?
Yesterday I asked @k00b if anyone testing the Spark wallet on SN were able to redeem their Spark wallet funds for onchain, to which he replied:
We haven't. Others have. It's doable but it's impractical in many cases, especially ours, and is not implemented in a production wallet yet afaik.
Then, I woke up today and saw the deluge of skeptics, whom I am grateful for, and whose skepticism I feel is warranted. Aside from the privacy issue, if we are not giving an easy path to onchain btc, then what are we doing?
The possibility of being able to unilaterally exit from Spark is great, but "impractical" and "not implemented in a production wallet" doesn't feel good enough.
NOT YOUR KEYS NOT YOUR CORN
Once upon a time people used the adage, NYCNYC.
Those were the days....those were the days, because the difference between custodial and non-custodial was simply
A - Leave your keys with an exchange, and get an iou, aka, rugged
B - Don't, and use bitcoin as intended
It was clear that 21milli could be enforceable only by people transacting with their own keys and even better from their own node, because only thus the transactor enforces the rules of the network (i.e. there will only ever b 21 million bitcoins, no double spends etcetc). Transacting or hodling your bitcoin on an exchange was/is still no better than putting your dollars in a bank, i.e. you trust them to honor the balance they show you on the screen. Not the p2p electronic cash satoshi had in mind, clearly.
Enter lightning
The appeal to self-custody grew, because you could start to do more cool things like open lightning channels for instant payments between you and your counterparty.
Even still, there were sharks. Wanting your corn and told you that you could skip the complexity of starting your own LN node, told you that now bitcoin was easy and fast because They SOLVED mass adoption, and medium of exchange was needed, and wohoo bitcoin is money ..... Well --what They didn't say was that they were selling you a shit-sandwich, packaged like a delicious burrito with real-beans and real meat, with delicious home grown chives and corn. Wrong. The convenience of having that nicely packaged Chipotle-looking, foil wrapped and grilled crispy burrito for no-cost at all was that you would eventually bite in and find yourself sick to your stomach, projectile liquids excreting from all ends. Privacy, custody, and network rules mean nothing, because trust Us.
And now Spark. I was told it was non-custodial because i can do something called a unilateral exit. i was told it was needed for bitcoin adoption, for bitcoin to be moneh. i was told it was developed by the best and the brightest who cared about bitcoin succeeding. i was told no more shit-sandwiches.
Well, if it smells like shit, and it looks like shit, and it feels like shit, then it probably is ......
Self-custody never meant 'being able to unilaterally exit from a statechain as long as you have a minimum amount and can use a command line terminal, and oh yea, you need to know what your tx root and a leaf are, sucker muah-ha-ha.'
Once upon a time, self-custody bitcoin meant you didn't need trust 3rd parties to transact, just a wallet interface and your keys
and that you and only you could control what happens to your corn
and that you could do neat things to improve your privacy like open lightning channels, or coinjoins, or p2p transactions
and that you didn't need anyone's permission
and you could say fuck off, Randy, you cheeseburger eating motherfucker
and you could restore your wallet and funds wherever the fuck you are with just a wallet and an internet connection
and that nobody, not an operator-coordinator-litigator-shitsandwichmaker, nobody, noone in their right mind can do anything about it, short of finding you and violating your sacred right to your own body and life.
Beware the wolves sheep's clothing telling you that self-custody is anything besides.
Until I see a method that lets the average user redeem their Sparkcoin for on-chain bitcoin, I will maintain this view and won't consider it viable option for new users.
Just my 2 sats.
Thanks for these 2 sats. With respect to SN specifically, what do you think new users should use?
For instance, I have a prominent economist coming to do an AMA in October. He is not familiar with using Bitcoin. When he sets up his account, how should I advise him to proceed?
Options before this latest update were:
Now with Spark we are essentially back to where SN began with a custodial wallet users can access out of the box. The default case is slightly upgraded from CCs in my mind because he can now send his sats to any other lightning wallet or to an on chain UTXO of he gets enough sats. Would you characterize the situation differently?
The situation is different because the custodian is 3rd party. So where before you'd put "trust" in the SN team to not rug you, now you put trust in SN to not mess up the integration, and Marcus to not rug you. So I think that this is a bad comparison.
I do understand the compliance issue - better than I like to - though, and like I said elsewhere, there are no good solutions for earners right now; only tradeoffs.
Exactly. Apples and oranges:
Fair, yet many users have adjusted to SN's decision not to be a custodian by accepting trust in CoinOS or some other ecash mint not to rug them...with what seems likely relatively light assurances.
We (SN) were offloading the decision of who newbies should trust and mostly pretending not to notice that they are all just trusting a single custodial wallet. Indeed, the standard advice found on SN for which wallet to connect tended to be CoinOS. They operate a great service, I have used it in the past and have nothing bad to say about it -- however it felt a little like an "accidental" default for new users.
That wasn't what I was challenging though. But please be careful in what you make non-accidental. If the above means that you're no longer deferring who newbies should trust and the choice is "trust spark", then I'd like to find out why you and I have such different opinions regarding what trustworthiness looks like.
What about Spark makes it a better choice than any option you've seen so far, after 2 weeks of testing while everything else in the wallet list, including other custodial solutions, has been in use much longer? What is that magic that within 2 weeks makes it a recommendation over an option?
If you ask me which service has more to lose by rugging users, I would say Spark does.
If you ask me which service is more likely to shotgun kyc users, I'd say Spark.
As you say, it's tradeoffs.
I think there is a lot of antipathy towards Spark because they look like "the man" and they may indeed be entirely under the thumb of the government, but I do not think that it is wise to assume something like CoinOS is not just because it is small.
But then why would anyone recommend this tradeoff over the CoinOs one? It's fine if it's only technical considerations (I really feel like it is, reading the release note), but I think that that should then just be said out loud instead of trying to find other narratives. The narratives are what make things bad in Bitcoin. That's exactly where the scammers operate. It's the thing we have no defense against.
Perhaps I am naive, but I think the likelihood of Spark introducing shotgun kyc is lower than the likelihood that CoinOS abruptly shuts down.
I have been advocating for something like a "one-click" wallet in SN for a while. My hope is that we get a dead-simple way for new people to start using SN. And I find CCs to be a confusing solution to this.
CoinOS seems to operate a good service and I don't want to insinuate anything about it. However, in my mind Spark has more to lose if they rug people, even if the rugging is "excused" by calling it compliance.
I don't want to introduce a narrative here where k00b kept it technical, and if that's what I'm doing it is entirely my own way of thinking about this problem (and possibly not even something he agrees with).
For me, at least, the problem has been that there was not an easy way for new users to get a wallet and i think Spark has a better set of tradeoffs in solving that problem than CoinOS.
Edit: it occurs to me that the problem here may be that I want an easy way for new users to get a water, rather than believing that education + UX can achieve "dead-simple"
I don't want to beat a dead horse, but coinos does not engage in the deceptive advertising that Spark does. Bitcoin doesn't need any more newbies getting rug pulled, particularly newbies who are told the wallet they are using is non custodial.
This whole conversation honestly feels to me like all of us shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.
With ETFs and Saylor and banks holding bitcoin, bitcoin has bigger problems.
We'll all be paid handsomely to pretend "this is what adoption looks like." All anyone really gives a shit about is NGU.
Perhaps I am still in the last waning stages of the flower of optimistic youth, but I don't think all bitcoiners are quite so degraded yet.
Many people here seem genuinely interested in figuring out how to use Bitcoin for a number of purposes (including making social media better).
I posted some days ago about all the various groups around the world pushing Bitcoin development forward #1551573, I don't know all of them personally, but the ones I have met struck me as sincere in their desire to increase the strength and usefulness of Bitcoin as freedom money.
Don't let the stupid Saylor boys and ETF heads convince you that everyone has sold out.
Perhaps I'm just old and cynical. I hope you're right.
Right now you're being cynical. But we'll revive the spirited siggy again. No worries. Got your back.
Key. Also,
makes me wonder, how can spark be compliant here? because of the VTXO model?
I haven't seen any kyc required, so they must not be a license money transmitter.
Because they ride this little hole that is to date mostly unenforced, but every (US) legal counsel has been warning about since 2016: "if you can block a transaction, you're a custodian."
It's the same liability shifting into the void that the AI labs that are taking no responsibility for the actions of their models employ. "It wasn't me, it was the AI" -> "It wasn't me, it was the chain".
Just give me a tag: 🔓 custodial / 🔐 non-custodial next to each wallet and call it a day
You can't get on SN without a Lightning wallet to begin with, so what is a fake L2 wallet solving?
I assume you'll be paying for his admission to work around that, so he's your guest.
Since he's not going to set up a node, he's never going to use non-custodial Lightning. An SQL wallet is fine for this, cheaper and more reliable than Spark.
So again, fake L2 solved nothing.
This couldn't be more wrong. It's extra fragility, extra fees, an extra trust layer.
And still doesn't answer for the fact you need sats to get on SN to begin with.
Since you're paying to onboard him, you're abdicating your responsibility as a host mid-journey. Like picking up up for the airport for a visit, and then dropping him off in the combat zone instead of bringing him back to catch his return flight.
The hospitable thing to do would be send him an invite link to your Lightning Pub, since that's where trust is already implicit.
Sending an invite link with attached sats has worked for some of the people I've on boarded.
But my most successful approach so far has been to ask them to post a bio (which they can do without sats) and then zap it. Then, when they want to post, they already have sats (well, more precisely, they have CCs).
I am not convinced that an SQL wallet is more reliable than Spark. Seems to me that it all comes down to the operator (in both cases), and Spark has stronger incentives to keep things running.
Maybe this is where we disagree: I don't see Spark as an extra trust layer compared to a custodial lightning service. Nor do I see it as extra fragility. You are probably right about fees, though.
I'm talking re:
SN already wraps invoices and takes a percentage of payments, it's still a custodial intermediary (CC's never made sense to avoid the appearance of being custodial, but I digress...)
So Spark can't get us back to the original SN state, its no different than any other custodial wallet on top of the original trust in SN.
There's all the inherent Lightning fragility, plus the fake L2 swap fragility on top of that, which is also where the fees come from. Again, relative to SN internalizing.
A 3rd party SQL wallet vs. fake L2 you could argue is the same on the fragility side in theory, but not in practice. Abstracting a database over Bitcoin is inherently more complex than just using a database.
CLINK might already obviate the need to send a Lightning.Pub invite directly from ShockWallet
If you run a Pub and are using CLINK with SN, SN already has your Pub's nprofile.
SN also already tracks signup referrals.
The new CLINK
enrollmethod could be used in SN to automatically provision a new users wallet on the referring users Pub automagically.Use Pub on SN -> Refer users to SN -> New SN user is a Pub guests of yours.
No, I wouldn't.
In fairness though, he probably won't set up an other LN wallet either, so then that pretty much just leaves him with one option, which is something like a boltz swap back on-chain.
I think my main gripe is the bastardisation of the notion of bitcoin custody.
Is a bitcoin on Spark a bearer asset in a similar manner to the old guard of Lightning wallets? It is hard for me to see it that way.
Well, here we are. The overton window has shifted dramatically, even on SN. I see it every day. The decision - ignore the wallet or leave SN? Each of us must make up our own minds. For me, @k00b has a lot of trust equity built up, but I can understand leaving.
More importantly, we need more Trailer Park Boys references😀
as someone who loves bitcoin but doesn't follow the "bitcoiner world" or associated personalities and controversies, I was a bit taken aback by how strongly people feel about Spark...
Is it really about false advertising?
I read up on how it works and while I wouldn't say it's "self custody", it seems step more secure than custodial lightning
For me personally? No. I won't use it even if they did a proper disclosure of all the caveats and things you need to have and do before you can be reasonably sure that this is "your coin".
But predatory advertising / lies is about the worst thing in our space since the beginning of our little adventure; the greatest sin against Bitcoin adoption. This is because y'all don't read the code. So you're going to go off what others are saying.
That means that you're the one (potentially) being lied to. Not me because I don't even read it most of the time - only when it's being pitched here on SN, and even then I am reluctant to respond every single time to every single lie. I really don't care about it for me, as I just don't use it. But I'd like you and every other awesome stacker as my potential trading partner. I'd like you to not get rugged. I'd like you to not get KYC shotgunned and be so disappointed that you give up. I'd like to be able to sell to you and buy from you. I'd rather buy from you than from some fiat corpo offering the same. I'd rather sell to you than some fiat hoarder. I'd rather hire you in sats than someone else in fiat, and I'd rather you hire me in sats than someone else hires me in fiat.
Just curious about what drives the hate. Because as @Scoresby has pointed out multiple times, why doesn't CoinOS or WalletofSatoshi get the same hate, given that they're also custodial and vulnerable to rugging?
I just wonder if it isn't some Twitter drama I'm not aware of, like the founders of Spark are extra jerky or extra scammy or something.
Me, I'm old and slow, but also careful. So in that sense I don't tend to jump on these things until I develop an understanding of them. Hopefully, that protects me from a lot of rugpulls.
Lastly, it feels like to me people haven't learned the lesson in humility from ColdCard. You may love this service and hate that service, and you may feel your bitcoin righteousness burning.... but didn't the ColdCard incident teach any of us to slow down in both righteous indignation and righteous promotion of anything?
Personally, I've advocated against both. I'm not even advocating against Spark with the intensity I advocated against coinos. Here's a random one y'all apparently never read: #1464906 - it's not the strongest, not the weakest. I'm sure you can use the search function.
Yes, the Spark dude is extra scammy and jerky because that's the Meta/Libra dude. Was even too scammy for US Congress - the palace of professional scammers. But whatevs. That doesn't even matter.
I hope so.
Explain what you mean.
Source
so... would you say that the hate is more about the person and their associations than the technology?
i already think bitcoin is a lifestyle brand for most people, so I wouldn't be surprised.
I didn't intend to be hateful, nor do I harbour any, but I can hazard a guess about those who do.
Calling a service non-custodial (as lightspark does) when the means for enforcing custody hasn't been built out for the consumer crosses a line. Bitcoiners being intransigent on what it means to hold corn in self-custody is as old as the first exchange/custody wallet hacks.
Didn't know that. Is important context.
Just to not get overly righteous about stuff in Bitcoin. Because even the "gold standard self custody" solution that all the maxis were hyping turned out not to be.
So you prefer to be scammed then? Because I think recommending something and warning about something are different things altogether.
My question would be: is k00b's disclaimers not sufficient? He explicitly says you should treat it as custodial. So why layer on extra hate on top of that.
I'm not leaving. Nowhere else do people get my TPB references.
Unless I misread the announcement, no one has to use this on SN.
I’m also glad to see the skeptics pointing out problems with Spark, but why is the reaction stronger to this than allowing custodial wallets to be attached?
Once the sats from either hit your self-custodied wallet, they’re identical to any other sats.
My issue is in calling it a non-custodial solution, which @k00b did not, but which others have.
Also, I don't mind it being an option, but noobs need to beware.
For you and me, that's fine. But why would we use Spark when we already have the means to self-custody.
The issue, as I see it, is that people will use Sparkcoin as "money," while there's not a viable way of enforcing their ownership of those sats, unless they are someone who already has the knowhow of using non-custodial. But the latter is obviously not the target user. So then the target user just won't.
Exactly. Most of us won’t, at least not for meaningful quantities, and that’s what I see being communicated by SN.
For people who are using Spark, at least they’ll be exposed to a reality check when they use it here.
I think that’s a fair standard. If self-custody is the selling point, the exit path should be simple enough that an average user can actually use it.
It's a valuable 2 sats.
Note though that your requirement is not going to help you unless you have consolidated all these 15 sat zaps you accumulated, same for Ark fwiw, so be careful with formulating acceptance criteria that buy you nothing in case of a total wipeout.
another good post about fake L2s.
Nyms leaving is a very expected move for this implementation since here host the largest number of bitcoiners really truly connect about bitcoin that I ever see.
yeah, that’s the part that worries me too.