Austria's governmental debt reached $400 billion in 2023 and is over 70% of their GDP. Down with Austrian economics! Replace it with bitcoin economics!

https://twitter.com/TheVladCostea/status/1741428811365810631

yes but with three big differences:

(1) firefish uses a 2 of 3 multisig escrow, and the lender only has 1 key. So the other 2 parties (firefish and the borrower) can collude to steal your money. Loan shark doesn't have that problem, the lender and the borrower are the only two counterparties involved (other than bitcoin miners, because according to my standards, miners are counterparties to every transaction they mine)

(2) firefish is not bitcoin only. You use them to borrow fiat with your bitcoin as collateral. Loan shark lets you borrow *bitcoin* with your bitcoin as collateral.

(3) firefish requires KYC info. Specifically, they require "your full name, your address, [and] details about your bank account." source: https://docs.firefish.io/legal/terms-of-service Loan shark requires no identification whatsoever

My last project of the year

https://stacker.news/items/371764

Are there characteristics you would add to my list? Or remove from it?

I just thought of a new definition of a bitcoin maximalist that might satisfy everyone

You're a bitcoin maxi if you meet these three characteristics:

(1) You have some bitcoin

(2) You don't have any other cryptocurrency

(3) You think ethereum is a scam

The only thing that comes to mind is that you can make a bitcoin address with two spending paths, one of them is a "happy path" allowing the money to be spent the way you want, the other is an "unhappy path" that is only valid after the timelock expires. E.g. the "unhappy path" might let everyone involved have their money back. Or it might let anyone spend the money, which pretty much ensures it will all end up being sent to miners as fees.

The timelock on the "unhappy path" effectively puts a time *limit* on the "happy path." Either do as you're expected to do before the time runs out, or the unhappy path gets triggered and, well, you won't be happy.

Untested

I suspect something like 57 transactions

Also, notice how the program counter counts to 10 and then jumps back to 2? That's called a "JMP" command or sometimes a Loop

"But I thought bitcoin doesn't have loops!"

Well, uh, you see life, uh...finds a way

Someone made a multiplication function for the STU-1, my 8bit computer that runs on bitvm (and thus on bitcoin)! It's true, you can write bitcoin smart contracts in Assembly now instead of learning boolean logic circuits. Try it yourself here: https://github.com/supertestnet/8bit-cpu-for-bitvm

https://video.nostr.build/4efaf6669ab2e30602ac016a1947a64e2c68310ca5e3f663714415a31cd6487c.mp4

I am out here. I saw your pr and started reviewing it but I haven't finished, and then I lost interest again

I recommend not worrying about keeping your branch in sync with mine

If you have something better, use it, I won't be offended. That's why I made it public domain

It works great! Here you go: https://github.com/supertestnet/pulsar

> you could just as easily argue that by NOT soft forking to CTV, you are censoring my CTV transactions that I want to publish.

I agree and I do make that argument

> One is voluntary and peaceful, the other is violent and prevents others from listening

IMO there is such a thing as peaceful, nonviolent censorship. E.g. when a university disinvites a conservative speaker who planned to say anti-woke things, that's definitely censorship, but it's not necessarily violent.

I just forgot how it works

> By your definition, not only #Bitcoin but also all protocols is censorship.

Yes, unironically. If they don't kick out (i.e. censor) those who don't follow the protocol, then they are not a protocol. Protocols imply rules, and rules imply consequences. If you don't follow the protocol's rules, your message is excluded from the people who are listening via those rules.

> A softfork is a consensus. We MUST/CAN have a deep discussion to make a decision. It is not a censorship.

I am glad you did not say "it's never censorship if there's consensus on what to censor." Because sometimes a group attains consensus that it should censor one of its members, and very often that's a bad thing.

No because murder is not text

Censorship is when you stop text (e.g. a transaction) from appearing somewhere (e.g. on your copy of the blockchain)

You can't be both anti censorship and pro soft fork

Soft forks *are* censorship

For example, if you soft fork in CTV via modifying the behavior of an OP_SUCCESS opcode (as I'd like to do) you necessarily censor transactions that try to use OP_SUCCESS the old way

If they steal from you or shotgun kyc you is pretty cold comfort to recall "will at least I chose them voluntarily"

I rewrote this reply six times and right now I think that will probably usually work at first, but only when the blocked person can find someone who trusts them, and that would get harder over time.

The reason it would only work if the blocked person can find someone who trusts them is this: if Alice gets blocked she can sell withdrawal rights to Bob and Carol at the same time, and one of them will get screwed, because the mint won't honor the same blind signature twice. But Alice will have gotten paid with real bitcoins twice, so she would be ecstatic.

You might think Bob and Carol can fix this using atomic swaps, but it won't work: in order for atomic swaps to work on an ecash mint, the mint has to transfer your money into an HTLC. But Alice can't get them to do that without identifying herself to the mint, and she can't give the blind signature to Bob or Carol to have them do it, because as soon as one of them has the blind signature, they do not need the HTLC anymore. Bob and Carol can only try to redeem the money as soon as possible, but only one of them will win, and the other one already sent Alice their money.

At first it would probably be easy to find people who trust you not to doublespend, in fact I suspect that almost everyone who knows how to use a mint would trust you not to doublespend because they themselves wouldn't know how to actually do it. But that trust factor would mean there are a bunch of suckers out there who will give you real bitcoins in exchange for a blind signature that you can easily sell to two people at once, thus getting paid twice. So game

theory suggests that scammers would exploit by intentionally getting banned and then double spending people until randos on the

internet are unwilling to trust people who ask them to buy their blind

signatures offchain.

At that point you wouldn't be able to rely on randos on the internet buying your blind signatures from you, so you can only do this with people who have a mutual trust relationship with you. That makes it a lot harder. You have to disclose that you got censored to someone you trust, then hope they aren't censored too (often a whole region gets censored at the same time), and finally hope they are willing to help you in this situation (which might be hard if they've never used a mint before and you have to teach them).

So yeah, it would probably work fine at first, but then it might get harder over time.

They can distinguish users via shotgun kyc. Refuse to process any transfer unless its creator self-identifies. Most users will happily do so. The victim has two options: stay anonymous, in which case you don't get your money, or self-identify, in which case you *still* don't get your money.

fedimint is this

Equally important: federations are only the problem "sometimes" -- e.g. when you're being canceled and the federation is pressured to either steal your money or at least stop serving you

until you make the wrong people mad, federations work well enough for most transactions

Federated means a group of people has custody of your money

Federations are the problem, bitcoin is the solution

I remember when you were a nostr bear

Now you're a nostr beast

Packing some bitcoins together

Yes

the sha256 program is very large and it might freeze your browser tab for a few minutes while it tries to run it

for me it succeeded after I left it sit and process for about 5 minutes