Silent Payments are clever: you create a shared secret (ecdh) from a utxo and a public silent payment address. Then you simply add (tweak) this shared secret into this silent address.

The receiver then scans the entire utxo set, looking for any payments to this silent payment address tweaked with the shared secret from all taproot/pubkey inputs.

For onchain zaps, you can skip the scanning process and just send a giftwrap with the txid and the receiver can verify that you sent it and control the utxo just by knowledge of this shared secret.

To generate the shared secret from the sender side, you need the inputs private key multiplied by the silent address pubkey.

On the receiver side, you multiply the silent address secret key by the input’s pubkey.

This gives you the same shared secret which you can use on both sender and receiver side to validate the onchain zap.

The nice thing about leveraging silent payments is that the receiver doesn’t have to use nostr, they could just be using a silent payments wallet to receive the zap.

On the nostr side, all you would need is a silent payment address in your profile. Heck you could even use the users pubkey itself as a key as a less secure silent address fallback if they don’t have one in their profile.

I think there is still lots of confusion around fake zaps.

I trust my node to not fake zaps. That gives me strong guarantees if I want to use my node’s zaps for spam filtering and ranking things based on zaps to my posts.

Zaps aren’t as useful if you are trying to rank things from other untrusted zappers, aka zaps from other people. If you suspect a fake zapper, then you should either block that persons zapper or the person themselves.

Since there is no general mechanism for validating if a lightning invoice is paid, the best thing to do is use zaps in ways that are safe and reliable to use them. Ranking stuff from your own zapper or zappers you trust is fine, in general from other people outside your web of trust, it is not.

If you are using a custodial service that sends zaps you have to trust they aren’t doing something weird, but that is a less common scenario and you can switch wallet providers if they do weird stuff like that.

why people put their bitcoin into this hell machine will never make sense to me

I went to a dinner with 5 other bitcoin devs and they all were into climbing without each of them realizing.

I was told climbing is a cerebral thing. Solving puzzles + exercise. Makes sense now.

Fuck Reddit

Privacy is not a crime!

I am on NOSTR now. Let's see if I can find anyone I know here.

no haven’t worked on it yet

I'm thinking about feeding it a large nostr chunk of code or documentation.

And then ask it to build something using the protocol.

Any advice on what should I use as an input?

It would be nice if we come with a prompt that makes gpt 4 understand nostr.

Do you think it is doable?

“Why does my follower count change”

Great explanation:

#[0]

Which is why as clients we need a better method of calculating this.