pull down to refresh
@supertestnet
stacking since: #96
30 sats \ 0 replies \ @supertestnet OP 5h \ parent \ on: Bitcoin vs the World: how big is btc's network compared to other large networks? bitcoin
Have you checked out Pubky? I'm told they did it right
If something is good to invent, more people should invent it
Reinvention is good for the soul
The reason is simple: it's easier
We do not choose lazy-friendly design patterns because it is smart but because we too are lazy, no cap
Liquid is less private than lightning
- every liquid transaction exposes the sender's address to everyone who cares to look
- every liquid transaction exposes the recipient's address to everyone who cares to look
- every liquid transaction exposes partial info about the amount sent (namely, the fee paid) to everyone who cares to look
Lightning is more private by default, but not completely untraceable unless you take extra precautions, and maybe not even then. What makes lightning better "by default" is that you don't expose information about the sender/recipient/amount to everyone; you sometimes expose some of it to routing nodes along your path, but not to everyone who cares to look, and lightning also provides tools (like blinded paths and multipath payments) for obscuring that info from routing nodes too.
there were about 20 people there. About 10 of us are deeply into bitcoin. The rest were somewhat familiar and have even come to a couple of our other bitcoin events, but it's not their primary interest. It was basically "friends and friends of friends."
Everybody needed an LN wallet that supports lnurl withdraw. Two of the people had Aqua which apparently doesn't support lnurl, so their wallets failed on the first try. But within an hour, they had redeemed their qr codes. I didn't ask how they did it, but if I had to guess, I would guess they asked someone else what wallet they used, and it was probably wallet of satoshi, so maybe they downloaded that, then redeemed the qr codes, then sent the money to their Aqua wallet. Or maybe they just asked someone else to redeem theirs and then send them the money. I'm not sure.
I don't know of anyone else who had any issues. Happily, all 51 qr codes were redeemed within an hour.
You should! I couldn't believe how easy it was. It took like two hours of time to set up the node + lnbits + ssl certificate, and like ten minutes to print/apply the stickers. And the cost was super low -- $5 for the VPS, $2 for the foam and sticky paper, and I'm not sure how much the piñata costed (someone else got it) but it might even have been home made. (Piñatas are apparently very easy to make.) The only real cost was putting money in the qr codes, and even that was cheap, we decided on just $100 to fund them. Everyone can do this for any bitcoin-themed party!
I didn't think of it! But later I added this comment which discusses bittorrent, and that's largely just a wrapper around Mainline DHT, so I think the comments I make about peers there also apply to Mainline DHT.
true
I don't know why they differ so widely but I do think this: when in doubt, be conservative
so I went with the more conservative estimate
oh, very cool idea! You reminded me that I could include several industries that have global branches:
- All couriers (Fedex/UPS/post offices)
- The banking system (all branches)
- All fast food franchises (McDonald's/Subway)
- All gas stations (this is really just another type of node on the highway network, but it's probably a better metric for how large the freeway system is than just counting all major cities)
Someone else reminded me that I should have included bittorrent, and after looking up bittorrent stats I found it's bigger than all the other networks by several orders of magnitude: over 126,000,000 bittorrent users run the equivalent of a bittorrent node. And you might think "but almost all of those are just users, they aren't transmitting other people's messages" -- you'd be wrong because they are!
That's one of the brilliant things about bittorrent. The standard clients support a feature whereby, if you are downloading a file, you also automatically share the parts you've already downloaded to anyone who requests them. Brilliant! It turns "normal users" into "node runners" by default. I want to do something like that in bitcoin too. (Just have to think of an equivalent thing to do. Maybe a block explorer where, if you look up a block, you also start sharing that block data with other users of the block explorer, if they request it.)
I don't know how useful this information is
Me neither. Maybe I could make a chart like these:
It could show how the bitcoin network is climbing the charts I suppose
Another metric for decentralization
Unfortunately, this metric is pretty easy to game -- it doesn't cost much to spin up a few hundred nodes on Amazon just to game the numbers
You're welcome! I thought it was interesting too. A few days ago I observed that bitcoin's network is almost as big as the internet itself, if you treat ISPs as the "internet" equivalent of bitcoin nodes. And then I wondered what other networks are of similar size so I started brainstorming. And although I'm sure there are some relevant points of comparison that I didn't think of, the stuff I did think of seemed to me to be interesting enough to post about.
132 sats \ 3 replies \ @supertestnet 19 Dec \ parent \ on: Is ecash private enough for dark markets? privacy
it's still much easier to achieve privacy on monero since it is private by default
I think this leads people to get arrested. The monero users who got arrested in October (link) probably assumed that by merely using monero, they couldn't be tracked. But if you aren't careful in many other respects, you can be.
- You have to be careful to use tor to communicate with your peers
- You have to be careful who you peer with
- You have to be careful to remix your old utxos frequently so they don't stick out
- You have to be careful not to create a transaction that spends utxos that you received "close together"
Similar considerations apply to lightning. Neither network protects you if you are careless in these other regards. Comments like "monero is untraceable by default" or "if you want privacy, just use monero and you're done" might very easily get people arrested if they believe them and then don't take care of their privacy in other respects.
It's similar with lightning; you can't "just use lightning" if you want decent privacy. But it offers better tools than what you get on monero.
I don't think that is a vulnerability in any meaningful sense
From what I understand, classical computers cannot execute Shor's algorithm within the lifetime of the universe
And quantum computers, if they are not a scam, are supposedly decades away from being able to run it
I'm not aware of any security considerations, but the standard bitcoin advice still applies: avoid pubkey reuse, make a new one every time
You mean P2PK? Who uses that nowadays?
I'm not aware of any wallet that supports it except electrum, I think (I've never tested it). Taproot also uses a form of p2pk, though I'm not aware of any taproot-supporting wallet that lets you send to a "raw" pubkey; they all want it wrapped in the bc1p format, where there is a checksum.