Phoenix can't be mentioned in the same sentence as the others. It's an actual self-custodial lightning wallet that works, seamlessly. "Outrageous fees": as an experiment, I went through my last 5 transactions. Tx1: $2.22 fee: 14 sats 2: $142 fee: 643 sats 3: $141 fee: 641 sats 4: $586 fee: 2644 sats 5: (deposit on chain) $1555 fee: 210 sats. Does that seem outrageous to you? The $586 payment had a high fee of a little over $2, which is like 0.3%; Lightning is like that, it's percentage based. But "high": this is way lower than many other payment methods, and it's instant, sovereign and mainly private. Overall it's crazy to me that for years now, every time I recommend Phoenix, saying the actual tradeoff is a slightly worse privacy model (but really not bad), I hear people dismiss it as "crazy fees". Just because immediate onboarding (which is a one-time event) to an actually self sovereign wallet costs a couple of bucks doesn't mean "crazy fees"! You don't get everything working perfectly for zero dollars, sheesh. View quoted note →

An ignored part of the current quantum computer fud^H^H debate, because it's a counterfactual: back in 2015-17 a lot of people got very excited about a proposal from Greg Maxwell to do "confidential transactions" on bitcoin. I was very much in the group of people both fascinated and excited about the prospect and went very deep down the rabbit hole on it, learning a lot about cryptography along the way. But the energy to even suggest a fork to include it slowly dissipated; my own personal reason for rejecting it was *not* the obvious "the range proofs are too large" (see: Bulletproofs, work that was heavily inspired by that scaling problem, though it ended up being far more significant w.r.t. "folding"). It was "pedersen commitments are only computationally binding" [1], to put it another way an EC break means we get unbounded, invisible inflation. At the time it was fun to predict that Zcash had this failure mode and indeed it was borne out (look up their history if you don't know). It felt weird justifying this to people sometimes: "I don't want a bitcoin where amounts are not visible because the total might not add up" sounds Luddite ... I remember being asked on a panel by Giulia Fanti "are you scared that P=NP or something?" ... it was not felt to be a quite logical thing to worry about this, since we rely on EC in Bitcoin anyway ... and if we trust EC, the math of homomorphic commitments *guarantees* it adds up! But a computational bound on that is not OK. i.e. i don't want *any* computer to be able to break it! not just normal computers! - and that's exactly where a quantum computer comes in. I am FAR more worried about breaking bitcoin's fixed supply than about a million old P2PK coins getting stolen. Stealing is not minting. [1] A counterpoint is that ElGamal commitments exist, at the cost of even more space. But hey, it's still less space, by a huge margin, than current post quantum signature schemes! Something worth considering? #cryptography #bitcoin

Linux desktop stuff is such a mystery to me. This honestly seems batshit insane, but in GTK3, it appears that if you use a FilePicker, something like (Rust here but w/e): rfd::FileDialog::new().set_directory(&my_specific_dir).pick_folder() ... it refuses to open the file picker in your specified directory. It just flat out ignores you, and *always* opens the dialog in its "Recent Items". So not complaining about a default (though it's a terrible one honestly), but the baffling decision to just ignore the developer's setting. I would love to find any justification of this anywhere, but I can't. This "documentation" (

Gtk.FileChooser.set_current_folder

) just points at a non-existent other documentation section to justify why you shouldn't use the function (Not "deprecated" but "warning, you'd better not use this function, but we won't tell you why!"). The code itself basically defaults to recent items, and that can *only* be overwritten with a GTK setting, outside of the developer's control, and here's the best bit: if you somehow get your user to override it, they can *only* change the location the FilePicker opens in, to $HOME! Your directory setting will still get ignored! Btw this restriction did not exist in the previous GTK version; they actively added it as an improvement. #linux

I did this. It worked. Cool software! View quoted note →

If you plan on creating a new tech/wallet/project in bitcoin, be sure to set aside several days to choose a name that isn't already taken by some altcoin or token.