Christoph Ono's avatar
Christoph Ono
gbks@nosta.me
npub1kuc7...0eyw
Designer & developer. Helping improve bitcoin design with many others at https://bitcoin.design . I write a weekly update at https://gbks.substack.com . ✌️
Christoph Ono's avatar
GBKS yesterday
Been seeing several conversations that it is not important for L2 wallets to implement unilateral exits. Good people, who else is going to do it? And who can actually do the unilateral exit for you when only your wallet has the data needed for it? The primary task of a wallet is to ensure your bitcoin are safe. Swapping to the 1000th stablecoin is way lower on the priority list.
Christoph Ono's avatar
GBKS 1 week ago
OK, it appears that no Spark or Arkade Labs Ark wallet actually implements unilateral exits. Protocol-level capability or separate CLI tool is not usable for most and does not count. Pretty disappointing. So if the server goes away, your funds are gone. The feature to claim them is not implemented. And by the way Arké has a great unilateral exit flow. The Second crew provides a really good toolbox there. Let's maybe hold off with the stablecoins and yield and all that and make sure the basics are solid.
Christoph Ono's avatar
GBKS 1 week ago
Has anyone tried a unilateral exit on Spark? How is it?
Christoph Ono's avatar
GBKS 2 weeks ago
Looks like there are 294 different Stablecoins based on the US Dollar. The biggest one, Tether, exists on 126 different blockchain networks, 17 of which have 100M or more circulating USDT, and 60 have 1M or more. The second biggest, USDC, exists on 141 different blockchain networks, 18 of which have 100M or more circulating USDC, and 76 have 1M or more. When you want to pay with USDC in the Stripe Crypto Checkout Demo, you have to choose one of 400 different wallets. Decentralization at its finest. Just kidding, but how is this not super messy and a world of pain in regards to interoperability and payment UX?
Christoph Ono's avatar
GBKS 0 months ago
Quick demo, making 100 bitcoin (signet) transactions to see how Arké responds. Getting quite smooth overall.
Christoph Ono's avatar
GBKS 1 month ago
Bit of a restyling of the Arké payments detail screen, along with some information architecture changes of the refresh indicator. image
Christoph Ono's avatar
GBKS 1 month ago
Can every one please stop implementing Spark? The privacy problems are real and annoying.
Christoph Ono's avatar
GBKS 1 month ago
The new USDC site has some nice videos on how people use it. But I cannot get over the fact that all these chains are based on single-address re-use. If you organize your wedding in some other country and pay everyone with USDC, are you OK that they can see your full balance and all past and future transactions in that wallet? Or your employer or employees? Your grocery store? Or am I missing something?
Christoph Ono's avatar
GBKS 1 month ago
New Arké version is up on TestFlight, with a roughly estimated 1,000,000,000 improvements to the Send flow. Goal is that you can throw all your bitcoin/ark addresses, lightning invoices/offers/addresses, BIP-21s and BIP-353 in all kinds of combinations at it, and it will try to make sense of it all and present whatever comes out on the other end in a simple way. Quite intricate. It's a good iteration, with some more to come. Definitely feels like the most intricate part of the app. image
Christoph Ono's avatar
GBKS 1 month ago
Chuck Norris’s public key was his private key. Nobody dared to use it. RIP
Christoph Ono's avatar
GBKS 1 month ago
Arké looks, feels, and works differently than other wallets. Wouldn't be much of a contribution to the ecosystem if it was like all the other ones. Some experiments will work and some will fail. But if we want more people to use this stuff, we need to try things.
Christoph Ono's avatar
GBKS 2 months ago
First Arké push notification ever! The text obviously needs work, but very cool that it works now (this was an intimidating piece of code for me to work on). The bark mailbox system makes this very convenient to implement (those Second people seem to know what they are doing). image Privacy-wise, this requires a relay to connect the app, Ark server and Apple push notification servers. The relay can connect your device ID, mailbox ID, and incoming Ark payment VTXOs. Don't like it, don't turn on notifications. I'll have to see how I can only store the least amount of data possible, since I really don't care to know what people do. The only interesting thing to know maybe would be a simple counter that tracks how many payments were made. That would at least give some broad insight into activity.