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263 sats \ 0 replies \ @petertodd 23 Nov \ parent \ on: BITCOIN CORE'S LOSS OF FOCUS bitcoin
Vaults make the self-custody scaling problem worse, not better. They're very inefficient, requiring approximately double the on-chain space to perform a signalling function that could be done just fine off-chain with a normal multisig wallet.
I need to write up a good article on them one of these days... They're just not a very compelling idea.
The legacy technical leadership in bitcoin is becoming increasingly less effective.
Right off the bat James gets something wrong: the leadership of Core right now is mostly not "legacy". They're newcomers like Chow and Zhao who got involved relatively recently.
Instead they are distracted with valuable but secondary issues like mempool policy
Good mempool policy is essential to making L2's work; L2's are the only viable solution we have to scaling self-custody to more people. While I disagree with Core on some of the detailed specifics of the mempool policy that has been adopted, the reasons why so much work has been done on mempool policy are correct.
When the regulatory hammer comes down, tens of millions will look to withdrawal their coins into self-custody. But they may not be able to.
Bitcoin can open about 1.1 billion channels/year with the existing Lightning protocol, with fairly simple changes to existing wallets. Tens of millions is not a big deal.
The irony here is that James has been wasting a bunch of time on an unimportant proposal that does nothing to scale self-custody: OP_Vault. In fact, OP_Vault makes the problem worse, by encouraging a particularly inefficient way of doing self-custody, approximately doubling the amount of chain space needed.
Meanwhile we have good reasons to not want to rush into multiple user per UTXO systems.
If you think that most people should be able to DCA and withdrawal to self-custody once a month, maybe spend once every few years for big purchases, I've got news for you
No-one has flushed-out proposals that let the world population DCA to genuine on-chain self-custody with minimal fees. Sorry. But we just haven't figured out how to do that. Ark is one of the things that comes closest. But holding a true self-custodial balance on Ark will require fees to pay for liquidity.
The most straightforward way to do DCA with minimal costs is to DCA to a trusted token, eg ecash, and periodically use the accumulated balance to resize a lightning channel. We have about enough on-chain capacity to resize about 470 million LN channels per year.
The world population with a cellphone is estimated to be roughly 4 billion people. So that gets us reasonably close.
Note that SN has a relatively small maximum payment size, and a limit on total balance. People might be running into issues due to that
In practice a lot of VTXOs will be of too small value to actually unilaterally exit... But yes, you are supposed to be able to if you're willing to pay the necessary fees.
Why not just let people do what they want?
The only possible issue here is spamming mentions. But a filter for small value zaps fixes that just fine.
On the receiver size, a 1sat payment is genuinely worth 1sat; Lightning doesn't have anything similar to the dust UTXO issue that on-chain Bitcoin has. Sure, sending 1sat is costly in terms of fees. But so what? It's the sender's money.
(Obviously I'm talking about external wallets here as the stacker.news custodial wallet is going away)
1sat is 1000msats; a 1sat payment does not trigger any issues with msats on any wallet I've ever seen, and I don't see how it could.
If they exist, blockchains and lightning channels are a worse place to do that than other systems like sql databases
Other people answered the rest of your comment well. But for this specifically, you're wrong. SQL databases have essentially zero auditing capabilities.
Even in an environment with centralized trusted third parties, blockchains are better than pure SQL databases. It's to the point where I would be very dubious about working on a trusted third party system with significant dollar value, that didn't use a blockchain for auditing.
As a store of value, they're worse than btc
No, they're different. They're a better short term value for people who need to store fiat. That's a perfectly valid use case.
Like it or not, a lot of people have fiat-denominated obligations that they need to be able to reliably pay. The volatility of BTC relative to their fiat currencies is expensive to deal with.
Jake Sullivan is the same guy that is doing everything he can to ensure that Ukraine doesn't actually win. He's put absurd restrictions on how Ukraine can fight, even trying to prevent Ukraine using their own weapons to hit targets like the Russian airfields that are bombing Ukrainian civilians. He's a coward at best; a traitor at worst.
Lots of people genuinely need a car for their job and can't accept unreliability. For example, think of a nurse who simply has to be able to show up to their job on time, whatever the schedule is. For them leasing a reliable, brand new, car is often a good financial decision and saves a lot of hassle.
Nothing wrong with paying extra for predicability.
So?
It's war. Giving Iran information on how accurate their missiles actually are helps Iran in the next missile strike.
In Ukraine it's also illegal to film to results of missile strikes, for the exact same reason.
15.1k sats \ 5 replies \ @petertodd 9 Oct \ on: Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery | Movie Review movies
Peter Todd made a post on BitcoinTalk, shortly before Satoshi disappeared, seeming to complete Satoshi's thoughts from an earlier post.
Greg Maxwell made a really good point this morning regarding that:
"Also, at the time petertodd's account was named 'retep' and didn't have any immediately obvious connection to his identity. If there had been a slipup he could have just abandoned the account and certainly not later had it renamed to his legal name!"
-https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41783503#41784045
A chat leak in which Peter Todd allegedly claims to "know more about sacrificing Bitcoin than anyone else", or something to that effect. The implication is that if he's Satoshi and he burned his keys, he'd know more than anyone else about sacrificing Bitcoin.
Utter nonsense. I was just talking about proof-of-sacrifice, a cryptographic technique used in things like Joinmarket: https://github.com/JoinMarket-Org/joinmarket-clientserver/blob/master/docs/fidelity-bonds.md
Satoshi's posting history allegedly follows a school-year type pattern, more active during the summer and less active during school semesters. Peter Todd would have been in school during those years.
That sure narrows it down to what... 1 billion people? :D
To be clear, Ukraine is mainly getting weapons. There's some funding to support the UA government too, eg to pay salaries. But the supermajority of funding is weapons. And most third party fundraisers are for weapons too (esp drones).
I did a few interviews with Cullen for the documentary.
As it turned out, his camera man is Satoshi. He burned out after doing too many elliptic curves and decided to quit Bitcoin to film documentaries.
1136 sats \ 0 replies \ @petertodd 2 Oct \ parent \ on: Code implements specification or Code is specification devs
OpenTimestamps uses the "code is specification" model.
Also, the OPUS audio codec includes a C implementation: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6716#appendix-A A lot of cryptography standards do this too.
TCP/IP is a lot simpler to implement correctly than Bitcoin. Unlike Bitcoin, it's not a consensus protocol... and a full implementation of Bitcoin mostly requires TCP/IP anyway! But even then, TCP/IP isn't actually defined in RFCs the way you think it is. In reality it's defined by running code. When push comes to shove, the running code wins. That's why early networking development relied on "testing parties", where multiple manufacturers got together to verify that their stuff actually worked.
L-mount is an even simpler standard. And again, it's not a consensus protocol, making everything a lot simpler. It's ok if two different cameras/lenses aren't bug-for-bug compatible. And again, like TCP/IP, I can guarantee you that camera and lens manufacturers maintain big libraries of lenses/cameras to test against.
Sorry. All your examples are things that are a lot easier to get right than Bitcoin. Which is why standards for them can get away with lose English language specs. Though as I explained with TCP/IP, in reality the English language specs aren't actually good enough.
Writing clear specifications in English is incredibly difficult, essentially impossible. That's why the Ethereum yellow paper – an attempt at doing just that – was an utterly unreadable mess.
If your specification is code on the other hand, you have the enormous advantage of being able to leverage highly sophisticated tooling to help you understand what exactly that specification means, and actually implement it: compilers.
And yes, even a code specification isn't actually an implementation. You still need a compiler (or interpreter) to actually turn that specification into the actual opcodes that the CPU actually runs – the implementation.
This question is one of those things that distinguishes competent people who actually understand how Bitcoin and consensus systems work, and the incompetent blowhards. No-one who has actually worked on this stuff in detail thinks human readable specifications are sufficient. You're always going to end up referencing code specifications to really nail down what you are actually specifying. You can write pseudo-specifications that aid in understanding the real spec. But they'll always be just an explanatory aid.
So many top Hezbollah members have been killed that it seems like it took them awhile to figure out who was still in charge to actually confirm the death.
Anyway, Israel's main goal here is to stop the rocket attacks on Northern Israel that have forced ~50,000 Israeli's to flee their homes. If Israel follows this up with a ground invasion to take the southern Lebanon region that Hezbollah operates out of, Israel will be able to achieve they goal indefinitely. At worst Hezbollah might retaliate by launching rockets that land on Lebanon – not Israel's problem.
This is similar to how Ukraine has been able to stop cross-border attacks by invading the Kursk region of Russia. Russia is now attacking Russian land in that area, allowing Ukrainians to live fairly safely all the way to the border.
You can easily do that with Libre Relay: https://github.com/petertodd/bitcoin/tree/libre-relay-v27.1
The rule against multiple OP_Returns is not a consensus rule.