GM omg it's glorious out there - I'm gonna spend the day on the beach, or there abouts. It finally feels like summer 🏝️🌞🥳

Maybe get as well make a meme out of it 🐶🐾😂😂😂 nostr:note1wvrqsx9zzxva294ax8lvjqtke5unjpk0wke23u66dlj9tya88a9qg835cw

Totally agree with you, the whole eCash thing is turning into a grotesque spectacle and has many red flags.

ALLOW ME TO RE-INTRODUCE MYSELF, my name is _ _ _!

I made my first #introductions post 1.5 years ago on nostr. I’ve made a few new friends since then, so let me reintroduce myself.

In my past life I was a CPA but was pushed away from the industry during Covid and pulled into bitcoin

My little brother and I run a golf company called KNG Golf. We make custom leather headcovers for individuals, businesses, and events. Each headcover is made by hand right here in a Manitoba 🇨🇦!

We also have other golf apparel including hats (our 110 SnapBacks are the best hat in golf), hoodies, zips, and our brand new polos. Our polos are high quality material made for slimmer guys.

And I do a live show every morning at 9am EST called the Daily Bitcoin Journey. The live shows started in November ‘23 and somehow we keep finding things to talk about.

The community is growing by the day (we had over 1,000 new subscribers in the month of May alone). Big shoutout to everyone who shows up in the live chat and makes the show what it is.

I’ll share some links below if you’re interested in checking things out.

And since the last introduction, we also got a puppy named Arnie. King Arnie for long.

He’s a rescue pup with about 100 different breeds.

The eyes of a husky

The neck and ears of a shepherd

The intelligence of a collie

And the stubbornness of his mom 🤣 (and dad)

It’s the first dog either of us have had in our lives. And he’s perfect.

Joining nostr was the second best decision I’ve ever made.

#introductions #golfstr

>What they mean is that if you lose your ecash, it cannot be recovered. This ecash is the unique proof, and there is no account that can restore it.

I understand this but how does that change anything/why does that matter? Your Bitcoin isn't under your control anymore whether you traded it for ecash or some other shitcoin token.

#coffeechain

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.

archive.is dead? 😭😭😭

I just found a new style of bitcoin transaction that I wanted to do but could not find any tools that could express it, even bitcoin-qt. You could of course do this with the commandline but I wanted something that was a bit safer.

The idea is you create a single input and single output transaction for privacy and efficiency reasons. Now let’s say it might take awhile to confirm and you just remembered you want to add another output to the same transaction.

I want a way to take that unconfirmed transaction, double spend the input, adding another output, reducing the amount from the original output, redirecting some of that to the new output, and also reducing the overall amount by some value to bump the fee for the miner.

Maybe this is too advanced, but it would have saved me having to do another bitcoin transaction.

In general I think what I want is a way to edit a transaction in flight, but bitcoin-core only allows fee bumping. Maybe they don’t want to make double spending easier 😂

so you think you can fix the world, but you can’t even keep your room clean. 🤔🤓

Yes, it was reported. It has been spewing all sorts of trash lately like adding glue to pizza and smoking while pregnant.

Google Recommends Jumping off the golden gate bridge to cure depression. It also recommends eating one small rock per day.

Its not