Ocean. Lest anyone assume Ocean is a monolith.

The people saying that bitcoin toxic maximalism failed us are taking absolutely the wrong lesson here. I know nobody wants to blame victims. I get it. It's not something that feels good. And I'm not calling them bad people. But the issue is that people weren't toxic enough. Even Coldcard's OWN documentation said that using the RNG required trust. The devices literally boot up and say "Don't trust. Verify" on the screen. And people trusted it anyway. This isn't a failure of toxic maximalism. It's people taking shortcuts and either not being accurate or honest with themselves about their adherence to it. The lesson here isn't that self custody is bad. It's certainly not that you should trust the experts. It's that you need to double down on your toxicity. Turn over every fucking pebble. And if that means its easier to just use SIMPLE methods such as skew corrected coinflips an verification of the resultant hashes using independent multiple configurations of verifiably airgapped hardware, do it that way. If you can flip a coin twice to generate a bit, you can flip it 512 times to generate 256 bits. If you think you can't...you're probably wrong. If you actually can't, you probably need someone close to you to uncle jim your set up (as well as a power of attorney on your existing fiat accounts). It's overwhelming, sure. It's not actually hard though. Take it slow, take it smooth, and test what you get as a result to make sure you can still spend from it. I could tell you it's not your fault and that you did everything right. Everyone else seems to want to do this. But this takes your agency away. I'm sorry you operated on bad advice, and if I ever off hand suggested the Coldcard and you thought I meant to just use its RNG I sincerely apologize for any miscommunication. But I'm sure as shit not going to tell you in this moment of despair that you're helpless about it, and that you can't get back up and iterate and do it right this time. Shit happens when you're a sovereign. But as long as you learn from that shit and keep moving forward, you don't owe fealty to anyone else. Sorry if this isn't what people want to hear right now. Maybe tuck it away and read it in a few years. But I'm getting really sick of the sickly sweet poison going around about how everything was done right and how much better people would be on exchanges (or on devices that made it HARDER to get verifiable entropy). Making a mistake doesn't make you a bad person, but refusing to recognize that a mistake was made sure does make you more likely to be at the mercy of someone else in the future. Turn to bitcoiners for help, share what you learned, be of value to the community, and we'll help you carry on amid the aftermath.

Talking with folks about BIP-110, I just brought up Freenet as something that was far more problematic for the concern of arbitrary data, as it's literally a darknet system wherein users designate a portion of their hard drive to host the data of the network as generated by other users. In large quantities, without knowing who those users are, or what that data is. Ever hear of people getting raided for this? Because it's been running for 25 years. If you're quaking in your boots because someone might put something on your node (in the xor'ed blocks) that someone might need to then go parse and strip steganography from, maybe get some perspective. If it's about the ethics...well, I can at least commend that. Prune your node if it helps you sleep at night. And meanwhile, remember that you're paying your ISP to help run a network that is already helping people share and access this content anyway. To say nothing of the money your taxes are used for -- or worse, the value of your labor which is brought to the fiat system whose debasement funds all manner of ills. Pretty sure Bitcoin is worth it.

Seeing Mark Karpeles suddenly all over twitter is amusing. I think he finally realized that NVK was someone we hated enough, and that most people came in well after his platform blew up, that he was relatively safe to come and chill. So idk, if there's anyone who's still got a bone to pick with him, you can find him over there. But otherwise he does seem to be right enough. If you missed the really hilarious part, he's working on firmware for the CC...

GM To everyone swimming and overwhelmed by dice, this article can help.

BTCMaxis Articles

Long-form Bitcoin articles and write-ups.

And remember, you can verify your entropy rather than trusting casino grade dice to be casino grade through skew correction. Detailed here:

Code Crumbs, by Clément Pit--Claudel

Generating uniformly random data from skewed input: biased coins, loaded dice, skew correction, and the Von Neumann extractor

In 1951, John von Neumann presented a way of bias-correcting a loaded coin. This article introduces a generalisation to random dice, so a loaded di...

Summarized, it's flip a coin twice, if it's H,H or T,T, discard it and flip again. If it's H,T write a 1, if it's T, H, write a 0. You can apply the same principles to a die. Even if it's loaded the result will at worst be that you keep discarding bits, rather than getting rekt. Don't trust, verify.

GM Don't trust, verify > trust our RNG. Stay solvent, avoid leverage > Pledge your Bitcoin as collateral for a loan. We really have to get better about actually doing the things we say. Seems like people like platitudes until its more convenient to ignore them. When its hard is when it matters. At the VERY least understand the risks you're choosing to take on. Even with so called 'liquidation proof' loans you're taking on the counter party risk of the issuer of the derivatives in use (if this confuses you I'd look into what happened with AIG in 2008 with their CDS book, specifically with Goldman Sachs). Your wealth is yours to take risks with, but doing so blindly is how we get people wondering what happened when everything is gone.