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waxwing
npub1vadc...nuu7
Bitcoin, cryptography, Joinmarket etc.
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waxwing 4 days ago
Citrea, which has been live on mainnet since January, uses basically the entire BitVM stack to create ~ trustless proof of a valid withdrawal. But then it also lets N of N signers just sign off an exit unconditionally?. Section 8 of their Clementine bridge protocol paper: "Optimistic Payout. The protocol we described above guarantees that any peg out is completed even if all Signers are offline and all but one are malicious. However, if all Signers are honest and online, they have some time (in Clementine, it is ≃ 1 hour) to sign an issue a user’s peg out by posting an OptimisticPayout transaction. This transaction resembles the Payout transaction, with only two differences: (i) it spends the output of the MoveToVault transaction, so that the funds given to the user do not come from the Operator, and (ii) there is no OP RETURN output. If no OptimisticPayout transaction appears on-chain within some time, the peg out request is picked up by the Operator and the Clementine continue as described in Section 5. To enable the optimistic payout, Signers must not erase their keys, making the protocol secure against a non-adaptive adversary." I've spent the last half hour trying to find any discussion of this. It looks like a very bizarre decision as it seems to throw away most advantages over multisig federation control. Notice how the signing keys have to remain essentially hot.
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waxwing 1 week ago
Archiving joinmarket-clientserver ; see "final" (almost certainly) release: . A couple of years back I pulled away from doing anything more on the project, hoping that it would kind of "organically" continue somehow or other, but activity was a lot less than expected (though it was actually maintained, we weren't producing releases etc. ) .. but i was also kind of vaguely "expecting" that some people might fork and/or rewrite, as rewriting could make a lot of sense; more recently, m0wer has actually done that; see ; as per notes, I can't literally "recommend", not without an absolute ton of work, and even then, it's only my opinion which isn't much. But what review I *have* done has been positive. The most interesting part is finding anti-DOS and anti-fingerprinting solutions that are practical; it's very difficult, but interesting work, so if anyone is interested, I'd recommend heading over to that repo.
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waxwing 1 week ago
To @Jameson Lopp and @Matt Corallo and other people that are advocating for coin freezing as a possibility: the responses in this thread I think provide a really useful window on the user level perspective. It seems like more than half of the responses to this Arbitrum tweet are saying "shucks, I guess we only have bitcoin to rely on not to freeze funds", e.g. a typical response is "Cash under your mattress and bitcoin are the only truly decentralized things" or the most apposite: "Well, bitcoin has no "security council" .. and I'm happy for it". But if you keep reading the replies you'll eventually find one that says "even in bitcoin they talk about freezing funds for whatever reason. Only left is monero then?" I know that a decentralized system can't depend on goodwill, and everyone is always free to propose whatever the hell they want, but what things like bip361 are proposing is "let's completely destroy bitcoin" - because you're proposing replacing it with something that has a "security council". Users of bitcoin absolutely don't want that thing as the thread above illustrates, it's *the only thing that makes bitcoin valuable*. I honestly think even the discussion so far, because it has included a lot of influential devs (and not just a lot of suits who we are used to ignoring) has already damaged bitcoin's value (sorry don't mean to sound histrionic, lol, but I really do; it's a new threat vector that some of bitcoin's devs are proposing to destroy it!).
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waxwing 2 weeks ago
Glad to see a large number of people expressing themselves over the suggestion of freezing coins. It will not work; a Bitcoin in which that happens is basically worthless. I mean that both functionally and monetarily. Because the main thing that makes Bitcoin distinct from all the other coins is that it has no rulers. Users and eventually hash power will leave and go elsewhere if it proves to have rulers. And no it does not have rulers today because soft forks have somehow got activated, occasionally. In a decade there have been 4, iirc, and *crucially none of them impacted any user's existing property rights*. Just giving you more options, not 'rulers'. Still it's appropriately nearly impossible to make such changes. While contrary to the false statement in BIP361 about 'supply changes', there is no certainty about what happens if someone gets access to those old keys. It could be a big clusterfuck, or not, but at least it won't kill the project if a viable PQ alternative exists by then.
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waxwing 3 weeks ago
I think Kimi is better than Claude for complex mathematical reasoning. It's probably more or less the same basic model but they seem to have tuned it to really investigate and reflect more carefully.
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waxwing 0 months ago
It's a pretty good heuristic for judging which side is evil in a conflict. Which side prioritizes preventing communication rather than enabling it? This is why I consider my own government system evil (the UK). There are a lot of things you can argue about, but this started actualizing in the 2000s: criminalizing or semi-criminalizing speech (see e.g. "non crime hate incidents"). That was the point at which I decided the UK's governing system had become evil (and after that, rapidly despaired of any reversal, because the population did not in general reject it as such). View quoted note →
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waxwing 0 months ago
This kid's energy reminds me of Kasparov at a similar age. Not necessarily playstyle, just the self confidence. It's one thing to get the advantage in the opening, but to literally crush players of Caruana and Nakamura's stature after having done so, that's something else. View quoted note →