I see people making the argument that the Coldcard bug was a result of the fact that the license prevented others from using their code in products, so there wasn't enough incentive to audit it. I strongly doubt it. I bet a *lot* of people did examine it, but didn't spot the error. And unlike every other piece of functionality --- apart from entropy generation --- just looking at the output, even looking at hundreds of outputs, wouldn't have revealed the bug.

Would be funny if Dario and Sam and their EA friends all end up being right - but that AGI escapes containment and starts destroying humanity via the Chinese open source models.

Another possible break on a (in this case *long established* PQC scheme (McEliece)):

IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive

Quasipolynomial Cryptanalysis of the McEliece Cryptosystem (or: PIR Meets McEliece)

The McEliece code-based cryptosystem, utilizing binary Goppa codes, is the earliest public-key encryption scheme that is still considered post-quan...

If you are praising libsecp256k1's code quality, then 2 things: 1/ you are very right. It is outrageously well tested and high quality. 2/ it deliberately omits the most dangerous thing: generating entropy, leaving that to the caller (where it's needed, which, thank god, isn't very often).

Anyone confused by Luke-Jr's response to today's events hasn't been paying attention for the last 15 years.

OCEAN

Lightning Temporarily Suspended

"once the situation is unambiguous (a single sharelog operating)." ?

This is better than the world cup.

Do we have a fork?

BIP110 Situation Monitor: Live

A BIP-110-enforcing node vs a regular Bitcoin node, side by side, live.

I guess not until there's a 110 signalling block mined. This will be a bit of a damp squib unless they get lucky, I guess.

I find it really striking that, take the last 6 months or so, the intelligence of the models has increased a lot, but their writing style is still as hackneyed and stereotyped as before. Something a bit weird about that. I guess it might be different if you actually used it for writing tasks: you might choose to ask it to write in a particular style, but for people like me using it for discussion of technical things, maybe i'm just getting "vanilla writing style" (which by the way is annoying to read, but whatever).

citadelfoss.xyz is interesting. Decentralize all the things.

in 1838 the Chartists in England proposed the first proper universal ballot. Remarkably, a guy called 'Jolly' designed a voting machine that honestly sounds a ton more trustworthy than most of what is used today (including cryptographic schemes tbh): "Voters using Jolly's voting machine were to vote by dropping a brass ball (the ballot) into one of the holes in the top of the machine. Each hole was to be marked with a candidate's name. The ball, on passing through the machine, would advance a clockwork counter one step before dropping into a tray on the front of the machine, in clear view of the election judges. During the election, the counters would be sealed behind a closed door, so nobody could see the count until the polls closed, and the voter would vote behind a partition, so nobody could see which hole the ball was dropped into. If a voter brought an extra ball into the polling place, the judges would see two balls falling into the tray." From

Douglas W. Jones Illustrated Voting Machine History

History of voting technology, with pictures

Philosophical reflections incoming: A famous anarchist once said "privacy is not a right, it must be taken". There's also the more catchy "privacy is a human fight". You should look at bitcoin ownership similarly, except a bit more optimistically: *general* privacy is stupidly hard bordering on impossible; bitcoin ownership is just "bloody hard". There's two ways in which this affects my personal philosophy around bitcoin self-custody. 1/ i consider myself in a permanent war against others trying to steal my coins, and in an even more violent war against my own stupidity and errors. I know this sounds a bit exhausting, but it is realistic. This feeds into 2/ don't put all your life savings in bitcoin; even 50-70% of your life savings in it is *way* more risky than most should be comfortable with. 2/ almost seemed liked heresy at some points in recent years. And that's insane. It didn't used to be, it used to be common knowledge/obvious that you don't put in more than you can afford to lose. Somehow this idea that 'everything fiat is crap so put all your accumulation of wealth in btc' became not just acceptable but required in some social groups. it's wrong mainly because of the above - namely that holding bitcoin is not super-safe, people make errors, people get hacked, people get unlucky with software. it's also a bit wrong because of bitcoin's high volatility. it's also a bit wrong because diversification makes sense with savings (perhaps not so much with investments, where you need growth), but with savings, I think so. So plan around the worst outcomes, including losing your btc (and you can plan around that by diversifying *that* into different storage clumps, but of course how much complexity you can stomach will depend on you). All of that sounds like I'm saying, meh, bitcoin, useless, but never forget: you can lose fiat money too, just as unfairly and cruelly, in different ways - mostly through "powers-that-be" just shafting you. It's happened to me, and more than once. With that system you're little more than a slave, just hoping your masters don't decide they don't like you today. There's a reason a system as impractical as bitcoin exists.