Why is it that most wallet software seems to be more interested in going through the motions of a half-assed seed phrase test than having the user demonstrate they actually worte down the entire seed phrase exactly correct? There's no point to protecting users from themselves if you don't make them prove they can reproduce the entire seed phrasse from nothing. Spot checking a few of the words or having the user click on words in the correct order is no gurantee they actually wrote down all the seed words legibly and exactly correct. This false sense of assurance to a potentially uncareful user can be more dangerours than not providing a seed phrase test at all.

In case this isn't obvious to everyone yet: Ultimately, "creating your own algorithm" using WoT scores will be meaningless without the ability to create your own algorithm for calculating WoT scores. View quoted note →

"All the reported “purchases” of Bitcoin during most of 2025 are false. They are wallet transfers and perhaps even multiple transfers. This is like the $1 shell game played on the Atlantic City boardwalk in the past." Gotta say I'm not at all surprised. At least as far back as 2024, it was not at all clear what El Salvador's Bitcoin Office meant when they publicly announced a 'transfer' to their purportedly transparent Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

X (formerly Twitter)

The Bitcoin Office (@bitcoinofficesv) on X

🇸🇻We just transferred over a million dollars worth of Bitcoin to our Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

View quoted note →

In general, it's best practice to just assume the police can legally obtain any of 'your' data that you, yourself are not in full custody of - without you even necessarily knowing it. The 4th Amendment protects *you* and *your property* from "unreasonable searches and seizures" without a warrant. It does not protect you from searches and seizures of the property of a 3rd-party (e.g. Google). If the police were to subpoena (or even just ask) Google for 'your' data, Google *could* spend the resources to fight the subpoena on the grounds of protecting the 4th Amendment rights of Google.... but I wouldn't bet on it. View quoted note →

This was a fantastic conversation: View quoted note →

In case you missed it, within the last week, Strategy diluted MSTR by another ~$750m worth of shares so that they could buy more... well, nothing... they just kept the dollars - and increased their dollar reserve by another ~50%. That being said, I get why they're doing it: so that they can give credibility to their recently stated intention to continue to pay preferred stock dividends well into the future almost no matter what. Here's the kicker: The vast majority of their past few issuances of preferred stock has been in STRD. At current prices, they could raise ~38% more capital by instead issuing the same quantity of STRF shares. They come with the same dividend obligation - except that STRD comes with the option for Strategy to choose to just not ever pay any particular dividend. So, to me, by raising less capital to issue STRD than they would by issuing STRF, this signals that when Strategy says they're stock-piling dollars to ensure they can continue to pay dividends long into the future, that doesn't necessarily apply to STRD dividends (because if it did, they'd clearly be better off by just issuing STRF instead).

Pretty good discussion by @Bitcoin Mechanic; but, I have a slightly different take. It seems to me it is potentially even more damaging to privacy software development to necessarily conflate that with the Samourai case at all. Rationalize their reasons for pleading guilty all you want, the bottom line is they pleaded guilty (admitted to the court) to more than just writing software. Did the prosecution actually have any evidence of this? Were they coerced? Unfortunately, because of the guilty pleas - thus, removing the onus on the prosecution to even present its case to the court, the public will never know for sure what we don't know. I have no problem with those who advocate for their release. But, trying to scare an entire privacy software development community into thinking that they'll be next unless Samourai are released is just not productive, IMO.