⚡ WoS self-custody giveaway⚡

Post your Lightning address (self-custody only!) and we’ll send you a random zap of sats.

Keeping it simple. Just like the new wallet.

We’ll stop whenever we feel like it 😁

What does that even mean?

This big beautiful consolidation transaction has been in my mempool for the last six blocks and was actually rejected by Foundry USA 3 times, viaBTC, and Binance in favor of a bunch of garbage spam. This is where core 30 is taking us. Core nodes now favor bloating the utxo set over shrinking it.

My knotty node has been trying to mine this transaction the entire time but it was displaced by spam that core 30 is optimized for. Why is core software rejecting valid transactions that are actually beneficial to the blockchain in favor of flooding the blockchain with bullshit dust transactions.

This transaction was eventually mined by F2Pool and turned 1000 utxos into 1. Why are we optimizing bitcoin to be free data storage service for miscreants instead of prioritizing transactions that clean up that junk. I'm sure this is just some scammer preparing another mint of dick butts on the chain but it still begs the question. Why is it easier to spam the chain than clean it up. Seems like the incentives are perverse.

nostr:nprofile1qqs9xtvrphl7p8qnua0gk9zusft33lqjkqqr7cwkr6g8wusu0lle8jcprfmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuumwdae8gtnnda3kjctv9ukqzxrhwden5te0wpex2mtfw4kjuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgch5k0n I see you're doing "memes of the day." Isn't there any "news of the day"? In the same spirit 😅

GM

Plot twist: the kid is a robot

Hiding My Seed Phrase in Pyongyang - Day 1

Bitcoin just over took Amazon to become the 4th largest asset on the planet.

our biggest risk as bitcoiners is complacency

push forward

never stop 🫡

Hi i am giving my nostr:npub167n5w6cj2wseqtmk26zllc7n28uv9c4vw28k2kht206vnghe5a7stgzu3r expo ticket away.

Who is interested?

May the 4th be with you!

Happy Star Wars Day.

#grownostr

Summarizing my thoughts on ecash

For some reason this ecash trend seems to be gaining steam instead of going away, so I'll try my best to detail my thoughts on ecash into one post.

1. The incentives are broken

Ecash finds itself between a rock and a hard place. For users to trust the mint, they need to know that the people behind the mint are trustworthy. If the people running the mint reveal their identities (or even just nyms), they're a trivial target for regulators and law enforcement as it's clear a mint is an MSB.

If the people behind a mint don't reveal their identities or nyms, users of that mint are subject to trivial rug pulls with no recourse. Which do you prefer as a user? Mint operator rug pulls or government rug pulls?

If a mint had been targeted like Samourai Wallet was, instead of just a potential privacy loss, all users would have lost all of their Bitcoin.

2. Ecash is not "self-custodial"

For some reason this concept of ecash being "self-custodial" is a thing, merely because the tokens themselves are self-custodied (and require proper backups of seed phrases etc.) While the lines get a bit weird, it's important to separate two things:

1. The asset people want is Bitcoin, not ecash tokens.

2. The asset people give up custody on is Bitcoin.

The ecash tokens themselves are completely worthless IOUs without the Bitcoin behind them, so even if I can take custody of my ecash tokens, I have 100% given up custody of my sats to a third-party.

Because of this, talking about ecash as self-custodial is disingenuous -- no one wants empty IOUs, they want Bitcoin. When they use ecash they do not have custody of their Bitcoin.

3. Ecash still requires all of the hurdles of Bitcoin self-custody

The hardest hurdle for many people to adopting Bitcoin is the simple first step -- writing down 12 words and making sure not to lose them. With ecash you still have this single greatest barrier of entry as you must backup a seed phrase or secret in order to restore your ecash tokens.

4. There is no incentive for custodians to implement ecash

While a custodian could switch to ecash out of the goodness of their heart, the incentives are broken for custodians. Not only does ecash harm the UX their users are used to (not having to store a secret seed phrase), it also introduces additional infrastructure complexity. Instead of just running a database, now they have to run additional mint software to provide their users with tokens, and handle support cases where users lose their tokens.

In theory a custodian could just also store the seed phrase for their users, but then have we actually improved on custodians at all? They even have custody of the ecash tokens in that case.

5. Custody is a line that cannot be crossed

The core of what makes Bitcoin unique is that we can actually take custody of it ourselves, gaining immense freedom and self-sovereignty through a bit of personal responsibility. Even though I am a massive proponent of building better privacy tools, sacrificing custody to get better privacy is a non-option for me.

Surely we can do better and build privacy tools on top of Bitcoin (or directly into Bitcoin's consensus layer) that allow us to have both privacy and self-sovereignty via self-custody.

I will not give up custody of my Bitcoin, no matter what, and you shouldn't either. "Better custodians" are just custodians with extra steps, and still strip us of self-sovereignty and thus freedom.

6. Time is a more scarce resource than even Bitcoin

Even though I have been very outspoken on what I view as a pointless venture, I am not here to stop anyone from building what they enjoy in the space. Devs working on ecash are free to do so as of course I have no control over them, though I fear that time spent on improving custodians is time that we will not get back. It's clear that the US gov and many in the EU are seeking to ramp up their attacks on Bitcoin privacy and self-custody, and our time to build tools to route around them is growing shorter and shorter.

P.S. - None of what I write is a direct attack on any ecash dev, and I have immense respect and personal relationships with most of the people working on this stuff. Respect for an individual doesn't have to mean I agree with them on every avenue they pursue.