GM and happy new year Nostr!

El termo de mi señora con stickers de Bitcoin 😂

#hispano

GM my word for 2025 is:

Grounded

What’s yours going to be?

#asknostr

Except that’s incorrect. Your hardware wallet only knows with certainty the value of the assigned outputs. It believes the value of the input it is told by the software used to create the transaction.

Just because your hardware wallet says the fee is 500 sats doesn’t make it so. Hardware wallets require a node to tell it the balance of a utxo…hardware wallets can’t know this automatically.

Lying about utxo value isn’t a common attack vector because the only party standing to gain is a miner…and such an attack ruins the value of their primary product: block space.

A trusted but malicious attacker could easily screw an individual by lying about utxo value. This is why running your own node and connecting your wallet to it very much matters.

The ways to mess up are growing over time. For example, is it really self custody if you don’t also run your own node? I’d argue it’s not ideal because your hardware wallet has no idea about anything other than addresses and keys. The node you connect to in order to find out how much value is at each utxo is a potential attack vector.

Suppose you want to buy a coffee for $1. A maliciously node might report a value of 0.001BTC for the value of a utxo to use as an input and your transaction creation software will compute 0.00001 for the spend, 0.00099 for the change address (or less, allowing for tx fee). This would all be fine to sign with your hardware wallet if and only if the input value really is 0.001BTC…what if it really was 1 BTC? What happens then? Is the transaction still valid? Yes, it’s still valid, but your tx fee is now almost 1 entire BTC.

Remember, the tx fee is merely the difference between outputs and inputs. Anything not spent is by default a transaction fee. So, know your utxo! The only way to do that is for your transaction creation software to query your own node before constructing a transaction for your hardware wallet to sign.

Might even want to double check input utxo value on a few nodes if you don’t run your own!

If you have this you are richer than a billionaire.

1 year

#Asado while we wait for baby Jesus.

Merry Xmas pleb, much love PV 🫂

GM and Merry Christmas! 🎄 💫 #nostr

merry christmas fuckers

Feliz Navidad #Nostr

Merry Christmas #Nostr

What are y’all getting your girlfriends for Christmas?

#asknostr

I suspect few people in the world have interacted with more individuals who lost bitcoin than I have.

I answered support tickets for a non-custodial web wallet that, at the time, was the most popular in the world.

I'm talking about 100,000+ tickets over five years, many from users who lost access to their funds. Not just tiny amounts, mind you.

Sometimes hundreds of bitcoin.

My inability to help them still weighs on me.

We added warnings and info about the importance of backups. It's not that I could have done more. The nature of the old Blockchain(.)info wallet made that impossible.

The bottom line is personal responsibility demands extraordinary effort, and not everyone is up for the challenge.

Lost password? Sorry, I can't help.

Lost seed phrase? Sorry, I can't help.

Funds stolen by a phishing site? *Sigh*

What troubles me most isn't the sadness I felt from doing this daily for so many years. No, eventually you grow numb to it.

That's what truly hurt.

I imagine this is a lesser version of what people in the medical field have to do to cope with their jobs - learning to stop caring so much.

It takes a toll on your humanity if you live this way for too long.

I could have stayed in that job. Stacked more sats. It made sense, financially. I'd have a lot more bitcoin today if I did.

Instead, I left, choosing to be with my family and focus on self improvement.

Anyone who has worked during the early years of a startup will understand how incredibly burnt out you are once you finally step away. It took me years to push through that.

But I still think about those users.

The ones who made all the mistakes of the past that you, the bitcoiners of today, would learn from.

Almost seven years have passed since I left, and I'm no longer numb to their pain. I feel sadness for them again.

And I'm grateful for that.

I hope you all have a Merry Christmas, and take some time to reflect on the things that truly matter in this life. 🧡✌️