Profile: b98e16ed...

They still replace the referral code even when there's no coupon found, it's actually unrelated. They go through hoops to trick you into clicking useless modals right before checkout, and snag the referral reward using these clicks. This is what made people angry and uninstall the plugin.

The script they gave youtubers to read is also a bit of a lie, they don't apply the best coupon they're aware of if the merchant has paid what is essentially a ransom to forbid Honey to apply these coupons the merchant would like to keep more exclusive.

Seriously this. Your app crashing because it can't handle the absence of google play services means there's a serious issue on how you handle errors in general, regardless of support. Catch it and print me an explanation damn it.

You can use it un safari too, just browse duck.ai

Bitcoin scales by sharing UTXO ownership. On lightning, a UTXO is shared between two entities. That's a start, but you won't onboard earth population, and they have to be online to transact. Custodial solutions also share their UTXO with all the members they provide service to. Better scaling, but well, you know, it's custodial.

The thing is, we're struggling to non-custodially share a UTXO between more participants, especially if they can't be frequently online. We've been shearching since the early days of lightning. Having a covenant that protects your share of the UTXO while you are offline seems to be the missing piece of the puzzle every single time.

There are proposals that go into this direction, but it still feels unclear for now. I think we need a covenant, coupled with a protocol proposal (Ark maybe ?) that enables just that, and not too much more.

Combine unrealized capital gain taxes with fiat system, and you get an incredible wealth transfer weapon towards the rich, paradoxically supported by socialists that are clueless on what's actually going on.

For example, in France, unrealized capital gains can get taxed during a succession. The original intention was to prevent golden-spoon-fed children to just inherit the wealth of their parent too easily.

The result is killing family owned businesses and farms. Farmers that inherit land or a business do not have the liquidity to pay the tax on the accrued value of their land or equity. At best, you take on debt with your business as colateral, gifting a slice of your revenue to finance bros, at worse, you are forced to sell to cantillionnaires, further accelerating inequalities the law was supposed to fight.

Unrealized capital gain taxes essentially forces everyone that doesn't have deep liquidity to sell at a steep discount their assets to the few that have access to cheap debt.

It's a trojan horse.

On bitcoin you could literally steal money with a good mempool attack, by closing a lightning channel with a previous state in your favor and censoring your peer to broadcast the real final state. There's good money to be made.

On Monero the only financial incentive is your government sponsored wage to de-anonymize users. It's motivating if got the job, but it's not like there's a sea of APT actors continuously looking on how to steal the cake, like North Korean Lazarus Group did on a bunch of ethereum L2 bridges (which I admit are much lower hanging fruits, but I'm sure one day they'll take a look into bitcoin L2s).

"I didn't mind governments attacking the freedom to send money, because I didn't like the people receiving the money anyway."

Replying to Avatar Vitor Pamplona

Testing an old idea: NFC-based transient accounts: accounts that log off as soon as the app goes to the background, deleting all traces of the account from the phone.

It looks like this in debugging speeds: https://video.nostr.build/ef4274d150303fd28f5e7b6b02a7b0102176263dfb1b491969a0caab6b61e6ad.mp4

If you are an activist and if your phone is confiscated, they will never find anything on the phone. Not even your public key.

Walk around with Amethyst installed and an NFC tag hidden in your clothing. When you need to use Amethyst, tap the tag, insert your password and login. Lock the screen to delete everything.

The NFC has a NIP-49 password-encrypted nsec. If you need, destroy and dispose the NFC tag.

Really cool!

Feature request, rather than decrypting the key with the password, it should be like a seed passphrase. It would allow you to have deniability, with a decoy profile in case authorities force you to decrypt that NFC tag.

With NIP-49 it is possible for authorities to know you gave them a wrong password (or the data on the NFC tag is corrupted). But a wrong passphrase will just lead you to a another nsec, where you can put some decoy notes.

Phoenix has bolt12 addresses, but not LNURL addresses, which is what zaps uses.

Not only that, but to be used for zaps the LNURL server should implement NIP-57, at least to receive zap requests, and preferably to also publish zap receipts on nostr.

Couple it with homomorphic encryption and you get a trustless computation market, the future is cyberpunk af

If miners ever collude to censor a transaction, the fee market create a strong incentive to break the collusion. Meanwhile the federation has no incentive, they hold the real bitcoins, the rug is done.

Not to mention mining monero is permissionless, so you can "fight back", joining the liquid federation is not.

We need an equivalent of HFSP for #nostr

Have Fun Staying Centralized?

Have Fun Staying in Walled Gardens?

Have Fun Staying Blinded by the Algo?

Have Fun Giving Your Data?

So many options...

Sounds possible with BIP-32. Generate a seed private key and give its xpub to a miner. The miner can computes as many public key as it wants by bruteforcing non-hardened derivation paths, and once it finds one that matches your criteria, it replies with the derivation path. Only you can compute the private key with the seed private key and the derivation path.

Throw away the seed once you're done, don't reuse, otherwise the miner might correlate your npubs.

I'm not sure what you mean by "there is no proof". Proving you own the private key that can spend a UTXO without revealing that private key (asymetric cryptography) is also complex math, but pretty much everyone is trusting this math and has likely never tried to do it by hand. That's also a mathematical proof, although the assumption being made that it cannot be faked are vastly different.

Maybe I should have mentioned, "bulletproof" is a proving scheme that comes from academic cryptographers, just like SHA256, ECDSA and Schnorr signatures used by Bitcoin, it's not a Monero-specific protocol, although it's likely its biggest user. It follows the same scrutiny from bright and smart people.

At best we could argue zero knowledge proofs are younger than the other cryptographic primitives I mentioned, and we might want to wait to see if new schemes can offer different speed or proof size. But I believe the fear against them is largely unfounded now.

Anyway, as I said, I'm not a zero-knowledge maximalist, they are a means to an end, and the end is large anonymity sets, make multiple users indistinguishable from one another. Maybe we could manage to reach that end differently. But in our search for solutions, it would be a shame to not take into consideration the track record that some of them already have.

Monero supply is auditable. Every time you make a transaction, you have to mathematically prove you have the amount you spent. All you have to do is verify every proofs.

Sure, the maths involved is more complex than a simple summation, but it's still maths at the end of the day. The robustness of bulletproof (the proving scheme used) has been proven mathematically, the likelyhood of crafting fake proofs is metaphorically the same as being able to mine bitcoin blocks without having to do proof of work.

(the metaphor is somewhat accurate, bulletproof literally relies on the robustness of hash functions to be safe)

With that knowledge, let's imagine how an inflation bug would look like. A bug means there's something wrong in the verification process. On bitcoin, the code would not detect an invalid transaction (because it's buggy) but anyone who knows how to sum numbers will spot that something wrong is going on.

On monero, the code would not detect it, but anyone who knows how to verify proofs will spot something wrong is going on. It's pretty much the same.

It's a bit scary because we all know how to sum stuffs (but really there isn't as many people who know how to write code that sums all UTXO), while we don't necessarily know how to verify these proofs, but there are multiple implementation of verifiers, audited and well tested.

If you're not scared of maths, I highly encourrage reading Zero To Monero, it's not that hard and really demystifies the protocol. It's not a magic black box, it's just good old maths.

And finally, I believe there's still plenty of stuffs to improve bitcoin privacy without having to go as far as obfuscating transaction amounts. If we manage to improve anonymity sets, amounts will be obfuscated by being distributed into multiple uncorrelable UTXOs (the uncorrelable is the hard part).

Well it does sound like a lack of programmability expressiveness...

When I make a payment on lightning, I pay a fee, including to relays that don't know the full route or who I am, but they can't claim that fee without fulfilling the service they've been asked for. The HTLCs make the service atomic.

Bitcoin is expressive enough for that contract, but I'm aware it might not be for more complex use cases.

I'm assuming that in order to receive their OXEN, relays have to prove they are providing the service they've been asked - either to the user, or to the network at large. If the verification of that proof could be run on a bitcoin smart contract (which, granted, might not be possible with the current expressiveness of bitcoin scripts) then their is no need for that custom token, the smart contract is the trustless arbitrator of the network.

I think this framing is worth mentioning to bitcoin maxis. Tokens do become useless with enough expressiveness, but we're not there yet.

Why does Session messenger have the strongest censorship resistance known to man?

Explain it to me like I’m 11,

1) Encryption has a public key and a private key.

2) Nostr, Tor Onions, and Session all use encryption as identity, with the public key as your username, and the private key as your password

3) If the government obtains your private key for Nostr or Tor Onion, it’s game over. You lost.

4) But if the government gets your Session private key, you then re-assign your username on the blockchain to another account with a 2nd key. So your speech and delivery to your followers is not realistic to stop.

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Explain it to me like I’m a tech-savvy crypto journalist:

1) Session has unique DNS based on the blockchain.

2) Session is like Nostr, with a public/private keypair for identity, where decentralized permissionless relays host content

3) UNLIKE Nostr, where it goes to the POSTER’s chosen relay out in the open. Session’s relays put 1-on-1 messages on the RECIEVER’S assigned relays using a distributed hash type system on a darkweb. This presents extreme challenges for both censorship and surveillance since the delivery is both hidden and distributed.

3) Unlike Nostr which is on the clearweb, Session routes the messages through an onion mixnet like Tor. So we can think of Session with the analogy of a combination of Nostr, Telegram, and Tor.

4) Unlike Tor Onions, where the encryption key for identity is in the server’s memory and therefore the location is critical to hide. Instead, Session has 2 sets of keys, 1 for the actual messages, and a 2nd keypair for a cold storage crypto wallet that owns the username, and can then re-assign it on the blockchain to another public key.

_____________________________

Explain it to me like I’m a crypto anarchist:

1) These government thugs want to censor speech. They can’t ban Monero or “No KYC” Bitcoin if we can transact freely. We can transact freely if we can speak freely.

2) Tor onions are vulnerable to be seized because the Onion’s private key is at the physical location of the content delivery. If these violent .gov thugs seize the Tor server, it’s game over.

3) Instead, Session divorces physical locations from your push notification speech, by both delivering content through distributed decentralized nodes, and allowing you a 2nd cold storage wallet key to re-assign the username to another public key if discovered. By completely separating physical locations from identity, we deprive corrupt tyranny from the ability to use violence which is their only power.

4) Nostr is on the clearweb, meaning we can see who hosts the content. Cloudflare and Hetzner host more than half of the relays and can like take content down on government requests to just 2 entities.

5) Instead Session not only protects the sender and relays, but also the receiver. This protects your audience which is critical.

_____________________________

Explain it to me like I’m a business entrepreneur:

1) Uncensored free speech has more value in a corrupt society

2) We are moving towards totalitarianism

3) Session allows self-custody of your audience in the same way that Bitcoin or Monero allow self-custody of your funds.

4) Domain names from the government have limited value to conservatives, libertarians, crypto companies, CBC cannabis, gambling, and whatever else is controversial if you can’t say anything on them

5) Session usernames have more value to the relevant stakeholder and when they are easy to spell

6) You can speculate on Session usernames for huge relevant stakeholders now for pennies, and sell them later for a huge profit if humanity realizes the true potential for self-custody of social media identity

_____________________________

Explain it to me like I’m a Bitcoin Maxi:

1) Session has it’s own token in order to function. The system can’t function without the darkweb relays being paid.

2) These “tokens” should not be thought of as money but coupons or shares in a corporation. Because they are only used to buy one product (names on a blockchain) and are not used for anything else.

3) Rather than view this as a competing crypto or challenger to Bitcoin, it should be viewed as a way of bypassing the stock market for a controversial company that’s defying the government.

4) The primary purpose of Bitcoin is to separate money and the state. This should expect a violent response from the state. Other tools are needed beyond the money itself for a marketplace under these totalitarian conditions.

5) Therefore because Session’s crypto is not competing with Bitcoin, and in fact adds to Bitcoin’s value proposition, by allowing for the organization and speech of no KYC transactions to occur.

6) If I were a government thug, I would try to smear Session’s adoption by playing Nostr Bitcoin maxis against Session. This is an age-old tactic of divide and conquering slaves. It’s been used in the Middle East with arming both Sunnis and Shiites. It’s been used in Africa with the Tutsi and Hutus of the Rwandan genocide. And I beg you to realize my brother, it’s being used on you now.

_____________________________

Join the rebellion.

Experimental 2-way bot serving content, Session ID: Freedom

Stable 1-way sending only: Simple

And what prevents darkweb relays to be paid in bitcoin rather than a custom token? Lack of programmability?