At the beginning of 2025, I mentioned in a number of places that I thought during 2026 we’d get to the point where building your own highly competitive self-custody bitcoin wallet would be doable with an LLM during the year.

Sadly, what mostly happened instead is that wallet developers continued to double-down on fully trusted and custodial platforms, further centralizing Bitcoin and bringing pervasive censorship on Bitcoin closer to reality.

Still, we did (almost) deliver the software required to bring the original claim to bear, with a full graduated wallet in a simple library allowing wallets to offer highly competitive fees and overall UX being close to ready…if anyone wanted it.

I spent a few days over the holidays testing it out, having an LLM build me a native iOS graduated wallet, and it nearly entirely works, basically only missing some bugfixes and the ability to store and display transaction descriptions. At least we built it.

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

Oh, I had one of those. Do you remember this game?

Under Texas law, I can't liquidate a UTMA account. And since it's with the idiots at Vanguard (my father-in-law set it up), I have to find the closest thing to bitcoin, which is MSTR.

Dafuq you yakkin on about?

Gm.

What’s your favorite movie made in the past five years?

"please stop the shitcoin slur"

no

The beauty of having to fetch data from relays to render them in the app. Nostr will always be slower than fetching from SQL. By design.

I'm reading a book about anti-gravity. It's impossible to put down. 😆

I’ve been looking at artists for my sci fi novel potential book cover, should I somehow decide to publish it.

These things often need advance planning, if you get a really good artist.

I don’t even know if my text is good, but assuming it is, I’m looking out 6+ months for a good artist.

Luckily my business throws out enough free cash flow that I don’t care financially. I just don’t want to hurt any artists’ feelings if I don’t use their stuff.

So I’m like, debating between two great artist portfolios. Part of me wanted to hire both, and then see which turns out better. But I didn’t want to hurt eithers’ feelings. I was like “maybe whichever one is not as good could be a limited edition.”

I wanted to run it by my husband, but I already knew what he would say. And yet, I asked him, and he was like “Yeah, hire both obviously. Fucking hunger games thereafter. Pick the best.”

Alas.

A lot of sci fi and fantasy books tell an incomplete story and then go on for tons of books and thousands of pages to complete it.

What if, and hear me out since I know it’s weird, you actually tell a full story in under 400 pages.

That looks sick, that your own copy?

Anybody play OSR RPG's ?

#AskNostr

Damn vibe coding is real

How does the USG know *which* USDT to confiscate after it has been teleported across the Lightning Network? ht nostr:nprofile1qqsg2zqd8wkhpnxu6lm5c2dyfa2mhpwte57apjae2ldp6g2mmwf3ypqpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7qgcwaehxw309ahx7um5wghxvmt59emkj73wvf5h5tcpr9mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuumwdae8gtnnda3kjctv9urj9dyf and Luke Gromen chat about this topic.