@lightcoin_
stacking since: #205506
226 sats \ 0 replies \ @lightcoin_ 13 Dec 2023 \ on: Privacy Club - January 2024 📆 privacy
You could also use duckduckgo email protection to generate an unlimited number of email addresses, for the purpose of signing up for email newsletters, throwaway accounts, etc.
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/email-protection/what-is-duckduckgo-email-protection/
This post I wrote a while ago might be helpful for people who want a step by step guide for doing this: https://lightco.in/2020/12/21/personal-privacy/
GrapheneOS is the best option here imo. Can use Aurora Store with built-in "anonymous login" to install apps that are only available via the Google Play store, and F-Droid or APKs for everything else.
https://blog.privacyguides.org/2022/04/21/grapheneos-or-calyxos/
Adding XMR into the mix adds exchange rate risk. The longer you hold it, the bigger the exchange rate risk. You also have to be careful when you swap back to BTC to use different addresses and different amounts than you used when swapping from BTC to XMR (and to not use a wallet that shares your addresses with a third party, or they could link your addresses together). If you accept these risks and manage them well then what you suggest may be an effective way to de-link your spending wallet from your KYC vendor. Though, if you are willing to take on the exchange rate risk of an altcoin you may as well use state of the art privacy technology i.e. shielded transactions -- as implemented in Zcash and its forks, Railgun, and quite a few other projects, DYOR. Monero's RingCT is outdated at this point. See: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=9s3EbSKDA3o
L-BTC does not hide the transaction graph, so you are probably not achieving much by adding it as a step in the middle there.
L-BTC does not hide the transaction graph, so you are probably not achieving much by adding it as a step in the middle there.
Privacy = Unauditable, obfuscation is preferable to privacy on a public ledger
"Unauditable" is a misnomer; you can audit the code. If the crypto is implemented properly then there is no need to be able to do simple-coin-count-auditing. Additionally, obfuscation may be preferrable for you but it is not for me (and many other people I know). In any case, if you don't like the strong privacy provided by zero knowledge protocols then you don't have to use them. It can be an optional feature available for anyone who wants to use it, and ignorable by anyone who doesn't want to use it.
Scaling = possible through lightning, fedimint and various solutions that don't require soft forks or big blocks (I see you roger)
Lightning will need more block space as usage increases. Fedimints have a weaker security model than other protocols that could be implemented with a soft fork (e.g. L2 rollups, validia chains, drivechains, Enigma/Ark).
Self custodial security = What? Bitcoin already has this. Plus there's multi sig and miniscript.
I was referring to vaults and smart accounts, which have more flexible spending conditions that enhance the security of self-custodial setups. Multisig and miniscript are useful but can't implement the kind of spending conditions that I would like to have for my coins.
I wouldn't say that bitcoin isn't innovating, but rather that the space of innovation is inherently more limited than it otherwise could be if bitcoin had more capabilities (which can only be added via consensus fork). Some of the potential innovations bitcoin is missing out on -- in the realms of privacy, scaling, self custodial security, to name a few -- would be hugely valuable to me personally and I think to many other Bitcoiners as well.
In fact, in any game theory simulation, the miners should wipe out the lenders, because they are making bad choices.
please show us this "game theory simulation", in full detail.
if a big portion of the economic activity were to be going on in one of the drivechains, there would be pressure on wallet projects to add support. That would increase the complexity of wallets and workload for developers.
as there is for lightning or rootstock or nostr or whatever else users demand. wallet developers can either go along with the user demands, or not. their choice.
drivechains' value is as a technical playground, which undoubtedly has value but prompts the question: Is it worth implementing through a soft fork in Bitcoin? For many Bitcoiners, the primary feature of Bitcoin is its secure value storage. Anything perceived as a distraction to this capability is likely to be met with resistance and in a consensus driven network, this means doom for the proposal.
Many if not all Drivechain proponents consider drivechains more secure than the centralized or federated systems people use today (CEXes, fedimints, federated sidechains, statechains, etc) and think Bitcoiners should be able to opt-in to this new security model. Maybe drivechains are not secure enough for life savings but secure enough for a right-sized portion of the stack to get some extra features e.g. vault-style covenants, or stronger privacy, or new L2 protocols like Ark, or whatever else users want. As a point of comparison, few people would suggest Lightning is secure enough for life savings but it may be worth the risk to users to deposit some right-sized portion of the stack to earn routing fees or make cheap, fast payments. So is Lightning, or the soft forks that enabled it, a distraction? I think not, and the same logic applies to Drivechain.
(As a technical point, note that in the case of a soft fork, some minority of resistance can be tolerated, since the change is backward compatible.)
Overall I agree with the main thesis, that drivechains alone won't eradicate altcoins. I've said as much before, in less certain terms then but it's probably safe to say that altcoins will always exist at least on the fringes. I do think that drivechains weaken the altcoin narrative "our coin has value because bitcoin can't do [insert unique altcoin feature]", which won't stop the most degenerate gambling on alts but would probably make the smarter investors think twice before buying another coin whose "unique feature" could be quickly copied onto a drivechain.
Bitcoin's real strength lies in its monetary nature and the decentralized scarcity it creates. Overemphasizing its technical aspects risks overlooking this foundational economic characteristic.
Balance is appropriate. Bitcoin's economics -- PoW, monetary policy, block size limits -- are pretty solid. It took the community almost 10 years and a civil war to get here, but we now have strong consensus on these things. Thinking about how we can make BTC as a monetary asset more useful by evolving its capabilities (without harming that solid economic foundation) is a natural next step. This is where proposals such as drivechains, covenants, L2 rollups, Simplicity, and APO come in. I wouldn't say these discussions "overemphasize technical aspects" I think it's just that improving the technology (rather than the economics) is the main thing we have left to do.
People don't buy altcoins because of features, they buy altcoins because they want to gamble.
This is true for some people but not others. I've used altcoins for their features, I know other people who have and still do as well. It is probably impossible to say what the ratio of holding-to-speculate vs holding-for-utility is; any measurement is further complicated because the lines between speculation and utility can be blurred (as they are with bitcoin e.g. "holding is using"). But the number certainly isn't zero.
if it was just technical features, wouldn't other sidechains like Liquid and RSK be more popular than the thousands of altcoins out there? The past seven years suggest that drivechains won't change this.
There probably are many altcoin chains that Liquid and Rootstock are more popular than, if you look at metrics like TVL and daily active users. I don't know offhand where those sidechains rank but if I had to guess, somewhere in the 100 or 200 on those metrics. Out of thousands of altcoins.
As to why Liquid and Rootstock aren't even further up the rankings on those metrics, like in the top 10 or 20, as someone who has spent time professionally as a builder in both sidechain ecosystems and altcoin ecosystems, based on my conversations with users and devs/entrepreneurs there are several factors:
-
Bitcoin sidechains rely on federated bridges. Based on feedback I've heard from users and builders, this is actually one of the bigger things holding sidechains back, and based on feedback I've heard drivechains are seen as a meaningful improvement. The need for centralized or federated bridges to use a sidechain today is unattractive for users and devs/entrepreneurs building on these chains. It's also daunting as the builder of a new sidechain, because creating and securing a bridge is no small task (compared to simply plugging into a consensus-layer bridge like drivechain's hashrate escrow). Trusted sidechain bridges are widely considered to be less secure than holding/using the native asset of any given chain. The 10s of thousands of BTC worth of value lost in bridge hacks over the past couple of years reinforces this view. That said, the Liquid and Rootstock bridges have a pretty good track record and are probably the most secure bridges on the market... but they are still riskier than using native assets. So then the tradeoff for users here is: use a native coin that might lose value against USD or BTC (whatever your benchmark is) OR use Rootstock or Liquid and possibly lose everything if the bridge gets hacked. We can simply look at the market to see what users and devs/entrepreneurs have ended up choosing to do.
-
Quite a few altcoin chains have much larger app ecosystems and much more liquidity, developer tooling, exchange integrations, grants funding, investors, etc etc, which overall makes them comparatively more attractive to use and build on. Rootstock and Liquid are very small and immature ecosystems by comparison, requiring a big up front investment in effort and resources to build products with good UX. And for end users, the main reason to use Liquid or Rootstock instead of some alt is most likely ideology, not utility (since you can probably find the same app with more liquidity/better network effects on an altcoin chain). Again, we can look at the market and see what users and devs/entrepreneurs have decided to do when faced with the available options.
If bitcoin had drivechains I think more people would be willing to try using bitcoin sidechains, more developers would try building sidechains, and we would see a more vibrant sidechain ecosystem. Entrepreneurs might experiment with new incentive models to attract developers and liquidity to their chains and compete with altcoins for users (not the coin speculators/gamblers but the users who are there for utility). BTC the asset has the biggest network effects and brand recognition, so with the right incentives and interoperability protocols I could see drivechains becoming competitive with the most popular altcoin chains relatively quickly compared to the federated sidechains we have today.
I'm sure that's a very deep cut
Yeah. Of the ones I distinctly remember, I recall some reddit posts by Greg Maxwell back during the segwit activation days, which I cannot find because because reddit search sucks and I neglected to favorite them at the time. So they might be lost to history. But Greg was discussing how miners could run some soft fork software next to Bitcoin Core, and it would use the soft fork software to validate incoming blocks, and use Bitcoin Core to validate outgoing blocks (to ensure that the blocks would be accepted by non-upgraded miners).
More recently, there was related discussion prompted by the CTV activation debate in 2021. That might be easier to find, and more diverse discussion since many people took part in it. Jeremy had proposed using an alt-client to activate CTV, which was controversial in and of itself, aside from the proposed Speedy Trial activation mechanism.
But a supplementary sentinel network allows us to eliminate the slow feedback issue of BIP-300 without requiring miners to run every sidechain node.
This does seem like it could be a useful add-on for Drivechain. Although I think validity proof verification of drivechains would be even better, good to have this kind of setup as an option.
The roles of Sentinels are not to enforce sidechain consensus but Bitcoin consensus. Specifically, the exact difference between Bitcoin Core consensus and the consensus rules necessary for the Sentinel chain to operate peg-outs on Bitcoin.
I realize that, so you can read my comments with that understanding :)
The difference is that instead of deploying a soft fork via a change in Bitcoin Core, we are deploying the soft fork OUTSIDE of Core.
Stated this way, it seems safer that the kind of "emergent consensus"-like process I pictured in my head before, but also in practice, for it to be safe, the rollout would have to be quite similar to how soft forks have historically been done, which to me makes the Sentinal and WoT concept somewhat (if not entirely) redundant. Will have to think about it some more though.
How did we know that miners would actually run taproot once they signaled? And once we activated it, how did we know they wouldn’t back out? The answer is the same for Sentinel chains: they are incentivized to stay in consensus with the economic majority.
Ah, well in that case Blockstream should not only look for hashpower majority support but also economic majority support. In which case as I said above, this looks like any other soft fork, just a different delivery mechanism (which has been discussed in the past in various venues).
Bulletproofs+ makes the RingCT proofs smaller, it doesn't change the fundamental flaws with decoy protocols as described in the talk
It reminds me of two things.
One is the Ripple Consensus protocol, with its use of a trusted "Unique Node List" in its consensus. This comparison makes me wonder: why limit the Sentinal mechanism to only determining consensus on peg-outs? Why not other aspects of consensus, maybe even replacing proof of work? (I am not proposing to do so, of course, I am just thinking out loud about how far out the thought experiment could be extended.)
Another thing it reminds me of is Bitcoin Unlimited's configurable block size limit. The BU example might be the closest comparison for this design. And it has the same problem: that different users who have different configurations could end up on different chains for extended periods of time, maybe forever.
if Blockstream and their partners decided to transition Liquid from a federated sidechain to a Sentinel chain, they might make sure they have a majority of miners watching for thefts before they even made their transition active.
This is like a less-good drivechain. Less-good because it isn't guaranteed to be enforced by the broader full node network and because the majority of miners today may not be the majority of miners tomorrow, so Blockstream could find their security model drastically change overnight (think about how quickly the hashrate distribution changed when China banned mining in 2021, for example).
Overall I would agree that the design has some novelty to it because I haven't seen anything like it proposed before specifically in the context of a two-way peg, but I do not consider it a good replacement for BIP-300 and wouldn't use a two-way peg secured by this mechanism myself.