What really amused me about Borges' Library of Babel is how he goads the reader by giving them all the exact numbers required to count exactly how big the library will be if it contains every possible book, once, but then stops short of counting and starts musing about infinity :) Even more amusing is the discussion of the fabled catálogo 😄 ... which can't exist. The *contents* of the library is ~perfectly compressible ("print every book length N" does it), but the *ordering* of the library, which is the purpose of a catalog, is perfectly incompressible: the only catalogue is the library itself!

Paper as promised:

GitHub

GitHub - AdamISZ/babilonia-paper: Babilonia - probabilistic coinjoin and covert betting

Babilonia - probabilistic coinjoin and covert betting - AdamISZ/babilonia-paper

and delving post:

Delving Bitcoin

Babilonia - probabilistic coinjoin and covert betting

Inspired by the discussion here about trustless onchain coin-flips, [1] I came up with a protocol that has the following properties: small onchai...

Pot sweeteners was a late addition and I think it's much more interesting because of that. View quoted note →

The Mempool Open Source Project®

Explore the full Bitcoin ecosystem with The Mempool Open Source Project®. See the real-time status of your transactions, get network info, and more.

The Mempool Open Source Project®

Explore the full Bitcoin ecosystem with The Mempool Open Source Project®. See the real-time status of your transactions, get network info, and more.

Nothing about the two transactions shown is strange. The first is 2 in 2 out, the second is 1 in, 2 out; normal payments [1]. If you examine their witness you'll see they're like 90% of other taproot transactions, just keypath, no scripts involved. But in fact, this is a bet. Two parties flipped a fair coin for the winnings (a small chunk of the input funds). Not literally; they used cryptography to get an exactly 50% chance of winning without having to trust the other. They were both running signet nodes (in fact I had one on my laptop at home and another on a VPS), and used decoy packets in BIP324 (bitcoin p2p encrypted transport) to communicate, so no one could even know the negotiation was happening (side note: this idea feels like it should be useful in many other contexts, and it's surprisingly easy to set up, with a very simple patch to your bitcoind). So we have a fair bet inside a coinjoin; you could think of it as a randomized payjoin if you like, but, the transfer of funds is not for some goods and services but, just a wager, and it's perfectly fair because of a cryptographic trick that was discussed on delving [2] though it's changed from what was written there. Payments inside coinjoins break subset sum analysis; this is just another kind of payment. Amongst other virtues of such a system is that it creates economic activity between peers without middlemen which is vital to Bitcoin's general pseudonymity. The implementation is at

GitHub

GitHub - AdamISZ/babilonia: Win stupid prizes

Win stupid prizes. Contribute to AdamISZ/babilonia development by creating an account on GitHub.

. The repo is currently 95% AI-written so not very readable (still not *unreadable*, but, y'know how it is) but I have a paper that I've nearly finished that is human written and human readable for those interested in the mechanics. [1] In fact those familiar with details of payjoins *will* see something specific about the 1st transaction that makes it like a payjoin. But it isn't hard to remove that, and anyway, it's only a watermark for 'this is a payjoin', not for what it *actually* is... [2]

Delving Bitcoin

Emulating OP_RAND

Yes, I believe that works. So the process would be: (The following is modifications to Algorithm 2 per the doc): Alice provides: the unsigned tr...

Read about the 30 maidens of Geneva. Quite remarkable. However stupid you think the bureaucrats running your life are, they'll struggle to compete with late18th century France. It's actually a perfect model of why adversarial thinking matters. In the absence of an adversary, choosing the price of the annuity for the average buyer (age 50) is an efficient decision.

Why are signet blocks only mining 1M weight not 4?

The Mempool Open Source Project®

Explore the full Bitcoin ecosystem with The Mempool Open Source Project®. See the real-time status of your transactions, get network info, and more.

Excellent summary. I think the final paragraph is the most important, but also: at least in theory, any particular round with a central coordinator and anonymous counterparty, cannot be guaranteed to not be Sybiled by the coordinator. With any form of coordination, that's possible; indeed that was a common early critique of Joinmarket, and even imposing anti-Sybil style costs doesn't remove that risk, either. The reason I always saw that risk as worse with a central coordinator was the standard CPOF arguments. Let's not forget that a central coordinator offers big advantages, too. View quoted note →

Fabian Jahr put out a concrete proposal for DahLIAS!

GitHub

bips/bip-XXXX.mediawiki at 4b34e86d0040edad6cba3f7518b33472a11ebeaf · fjahr/bips

Bitcoin Improvement Proposals. Contribute to fjahr/bips development by creating an account on GitHub.

This is a CISA proposal with a security proof. I was hoping there'd be more comments on DahLIAS by now, but having read it myself (the paper, not this BIP, yet) I think it's solid; the only part I didn't like, I was convinced by the authors is just aesthetics. Drag yourself away from PQC panic or bip110 panic, if you dare 😄

Every now and then i learn a new Spanish idiom that genuinely makes me lol. Today it was "Es tan feo que le da un susto al miedo." 😆 (Something like: "he's so ugly he gives fear a fright") I can't think of an English idiom that has such a streak of abstract absurdism. Hat tip "Erre que ELE" on youtube.