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Peter Todd
ccaa58e37c99c85bc5e754028a718bd46485e5d3cb3345691ecab83c755d48cc

It would be nice if I could open links in incognito mode.

Replying to Avatar Delta, Dirac

They have a market cap well north of $100b based on private investors who think they sound futuristic and innovative by declaring themselves SpaceX investors. They have come nowhere close to meeting their revenue projections over the years. Launch revenues about a billion and maybe another billion for Starlink. Look at Orbital ATK, ULA, Safran, Aerojet Rocketdyne and the telecom companies financials and market cap.

Entirely speculative market cap based on cult of personality, much like Tesla. Stocks are monetized and money needs no intrinsic value. Elon makes a relatively good local Schelling point for store of value to many people.

Their approach of reusable, large rockets is predicated on a surge in demand for launch far greater than anyone is expecting, and the proliferation of smallsats means way less mass/volume per satellite. Starship absurd excess capacity. They wanted to bootstrap with Starlink, but they are finding link budget means they cannot actually deliver great service (costs rising, and congestion reducing speeds).

Meanwhile 5g deployment is growing at such a tremendous pace, there will be wireless broadband in small towns that outperforms Starlink at a fraction of the price. Already the case in most places. I've been in various ~5k population towns where this works great, and the population in sub 1k towns ("true rural") is miniscule.

#[1] said they least about SpaceX because she is not an engineer, yet has enough data to surmise from Elon's character that something is likely awry, and I am happy to back her up.

You remember my ring, Peter? That's the sort of stuff that gets slowed down when people fixate on investing in things that are physically big/shiny, driven largely by reptilian instincts.

“They wanted to bootstrap with Starlink, but they are finding link budget means they cannot actually deliver great service (costs rising, and congestion reducing speeds).”

In other words, Starlink is too successful...

Nothing you've actually said negates my argument. Obviously, SpaceX is a risky venture and could well fail for many reasons. But that doesn't make it a government subsidized grift. It just makes it a high risk venture.

Nothing wrong with a bunch of private investors potentially losing their shirts over that. In the meantime, customers like the US government get cheap launches.

At the very least someone has certainly tried to post CP on substack at least once and gotten banned.

They may also ban porn in general; not sure.

The fundamental problem is he needs to figure out a way to make Twitter profitable, because he can't afford to subsidize it. Just doing that wouldn't be enough, because Twitter wasn't profitable to begin with and was inevitably going to become less profitable as he was inevitably going to lose advertising revenue. The left hate him and have for many years. They were going to get advertisers off Twitter.

Replying to Avatar Lyn Alden

Too many people have given Elon a pass. Don't give him a pass.

He's a marketer, not a founder or an engineer. He didn't found PayPal or Tesla; he bought into them early. He's good at selling narratives and equity valuation for perpetually unprofitable companies.

Everything for him is a narrative. His green revolution was a narrative to sell more cars and get more subsidies. His bitcoin purchase was to gain appeal among bitcoin/crypto people in a bull market. And he shilled doge like a dumbass. His SpaceX narrative is to get money from the government.

His rooftop solar thing was an outright scam; the technology isn't ready and went nowhere because of that. His full-self-driving-in-an-intermediate-term timeline was a scam, and is going nowhere because of that. He makes scams to draw people and capital in, because for him it's all about narratives and equity valuation.

And then he dug unproductive holes, suggested unproductive hyper-tubes, built meme flamethrowers, for what? It's a narrative, not a business. None of this is real productive shit to make peoples' lives better.

His latest "we need free speech" narrative was a scam too. He tapped into something real, which is what marketers do and why it kind of worked. Yes, we need free speech. Yes, Twitter had censorship issues. He saw that and jumped on it maliciously rather than productively.

But what did he replace it with? He replaced it with arbitrary journalist censorship about his private jet, arbitrary censorship of Substack, selective Twitter Files release, won't talk seriously about any of his China connections because Xi Jinping fucking owns him economically there like Jack Ma, has his balls firmly in his grasp, etc.

Elon's playing the narrative, the anti-woke meme of the day. He's a master meme-momentum-player. Don't fall for it.

“His SpaceX narrative is to get money from the government.”

You can tell SpaceX is Elon's most successful project because Lyn has to say the least about it. 😂

SpaceX is selling the US (and many other) governments a much needed service at an unprecedented low price. If course he's getting money from the government. The US and EU need launch services and SpaceX selling them.

BTW here's SpaceX's list of recent launches: https://www.spacex.com/launches/

As you can see it's mainly communication satellites, both government and commercial.

#[0]

I've heard that Facebook, and probably other social media companies, actually throttle the wifi in the office occasionally to replicate the experience of poorer countries to encourage their programmers to be efficient with bandwidth.

Replying to Avatar Kruw

The claims made in this thread include some that are false and presented with no proof or arguments, alongside some useful descriptions of potential attacks and edge cases that can cause less than perfect privacy. Here’s a line-by-line rebuttal:

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"1) Wasabi's funding and willing usage of chain surveillance companies puts your on-chain data at risk when you use them. This usage of CA could ... lead to harming your privacy directly"

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This is simply false, Wasabi wallet never puts your on-chain data at risk:

-Your IP address is never linked to your addresses because Tor is used by default

-Your addresses are never linked to each other because client side block filters are used by default.

Any "usage of chain surveillance companies" by coinjoin coordinators would mean a coordinator is BUYING their data, not SELLING data to them since Wasabi is designed not to reveal any user data.

By comparison, Samourai wallet DOES put your on-chain data at risk:

-By default, all of your addresses are linked together (even the private addresses of your equal output coinjoins) and sent to Samourai's server, which becomes a honeypot of data.

-By default, Tor is not enabled.

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"1a) Usage of CA could also easily be turned into a honeypot where "bad inputs" automatically get sent to mix with only Sybil inputs, providing 0 privacy but not showing that in your client."

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A malicious coordinator can attempt to Sybil attack a target input no matter what coinjoin protocol is used. WabiSabi is especially resilient to Sybil attacks, while Whirlpool is especially susceptible to them,

It's possible to perform this attack with some sort of reliability on a 5 input coinjoin like Whirlpool, especially if the coordinator knows the xpub of other users in the round, turning those users into unwilling attackers as well. The cost of a Sybil attack in Whirlpool is reduced to a one time payment because an attacker’s mining fees for remixes are paid by the victims of the attack.

In WabiSabi, the potential for this attack is also mitigated by the 150+ input size of the round, requiring an enormous amount of luck and liquid capital to even attempt. The attacker would need to get lucky for the target to register their non private input first in order for the malicious coordinator to know to fill the round with 149 dummy inputs and exclude registration from any unknown inputs. In order for this attack to ever succeed, the malicious coordinator would have to be enormously well capitalized and liquid (coins that are unconfirmed cannot be registered) to control that many UTXOs and pay their mining fees.

With WabiSabi, the target of the attack would be also able to detect the malicious coordinator when they try to register their second input (which would be rejected). With Whirlpool, the target would not be able to detect a malicious coordinator this way since they are limited to registering a single input in a round.

Wasabi 1.0 and 2.0 clients are also able to detect/prevent this attack in an additional way since a unique "Satoshi" Tor identity is used by the client to get the round status, which is not connected to "Alice" Tor identities used for input registration.

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"2) WabiSabi as a protocol is only a tool for aggregating inputs where each input/output is blinded from the coordinator, and is not in any way a Coinjoin protocol - it is merely the input aggregation portion of one.

As such, the specifics of the WW2 protocol are unclear."

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It is simply false that WabiSabi is not a coinjoin protocol.

Aggregating inputs privately is a cryptographic advancement made possible by the WabiSabi protocol, but aggregation is not required, you can still register with a single input. By enabling private consolidation, WabiSabi's properties grant the side effect of making outputs that are larger than a smaller single input a potential link since the larger output could have been created from a consolidation of inputs below the output value, not just created by inputs bigger than the output value.

Since input selection and output selection is done by the client instead of the coordinator, there is a specific deterministic process (with added randomness) to get clients to to choose outputs of the same amount by using a frequency table generated from a template of inputs registered to the round and their values: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-April/020202.html

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"3) There is currently *zero* way to verify the privacy provided by a given mixing round in WW2, and even Wasabi themselves don't seem to understand how their "anon score" metric works.

If you can't verify the privacy you get, you *should not trust it*."

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The privacy metric is verifiable, both implementations consider outputs private by using the same method. WabiSabi participants and Whirlpool participants use the number of other outputs in the coinjoin that share an equal value to determine how private it is. The only way your anonymity score will increase in Wasabi's client is if your output has a value matching others in the round.

Although measuring and quantifying the minimum privacy gain is easy, the dispute among Wasabi contributors themselves is how to quantify the additional privacy gains that are created by the composition and decomposition possibilities of WabiSabi, which is a novel property of the protocol. Since there is no consensus on finding a way to measure the exact privacy gained from these combinations, they are ignored entirely, and do not adjust your score to be any higher.  This means Wasabi clients will always underestimate how private your output is and will never overestimate how private your output is.

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"4) "Lonely whales" (i.e. those with larger amounts of Bitcoin) can often gain *zero* privacy in mixes and have 100% deterministic links between their inputs and outputs.

Have seen as little as 6 BTC gaining no privacy from mixing rounds."

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6 BTC significantly surpasses the potential values that can be made private in a Whirlpool coinjoin. The maximum value of Whirlpool inputs is only 0.5 BTC, which is far lower than the 6 BTC whale you observed creating change.

If a whale output (or any output) gains zero privacy from a round, then the wallet will not identify that output as private. Any non private output can simply be remixed again without paying additional coordinator fees.

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"5) Due to the client + coordinator not learning amounts chosen by participants in rounds, you can never be sure that a mixing round provides you with any privacy, as it's always possible no one selects the same amounts as you, providing an anon set of 1 (your input/output)."

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This unlikely (but possible) result will cause the output to register to be remixed.

Even though this standalone output still gains real privacy in the real world (if it is not the whale), the client is not able to measure this privacy gain, so it just gives it the minimum anon score of 1.

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"6) The usage "big TX = good privacy" in Wasabi marketing is BS, as the only thing that matters for privacy in a transaction is the potential outputs to match your inputs.

That is really only the outputs that share a denomination with your output, not all outputs in a TX."

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An output (if it is not the whale) cannot be matched to an input even if there are no other outputs sharing the denomination.

If you think this claim is "marketing BS", then go ahead prove it by identifying the input that created this output:  https://mempool.space/address/bc1qrmmypw3g2ds4aqgh3nqc59qhdp9qk779x2zlru

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"7) If the creators of this purported privacy tool don't know how to measure the privacy provided by their protocol, it should raise red flags for you.

Not knowing how your own protocol actually provides privacy opens up so many potential implementation flaws."

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The minimum privacy gained can be measured, only the maximum privacy gained cannot be measured.  There is no downside to gaining more privacy in the real world than your client is able to detect, quantify, and display.

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"8) There is a *long* history of tracing of Wasabi's previous implementation due to flaws in protocol and flaws in implementation,

so we should be incredibly wary of trusting privacy claims until 100% proven over time."

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[Citation needed]  You provided *zero* examples of this "long history of flaws" you claim exist.

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"9) There remain *zero* post-mix spending tools in Wasabi, something that is absolutely vital to actually gaining  privacy from Coinjoins when spending Bitcoin. Even if the protocol was perfect this would lead to many privacy  issues and ‘foot guns’."

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This is simply false. You can use Wasabi for post-mix Payjoin transactions.

But WabiSabi is so flexible that you shouldn't settle for "post-mix" tools at all: Since there is no fixed standard denomination set by the coordinator, you can send payments DIRECTLY to the receiver INSIDE a 150-400 input coinjoin transaction so that the receiver never even learns the input addresses or the change address of the sender.

It gets even more incredible.  The key verified anonymous credentials (ecash tokens) issued by the coordinator can be used as a completely private second layer for Bitcoin.  This allows Bitcoin payments to be made so privately that the sender does not even learn the address of the receiver: https://twitter.com/MrKukks/status/1619294492854747138

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"This thread comes after spending many hours digging into the WabiSabi protocol, their documentation, and speaking with them at length.

I have no personal beef with Wasabi but try to remain open to learning from new approaches and wanted to give WabiSabi a fair shake."

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I hope that you will use the information you learned from this response thread to issue corrections to the original.

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"As a note to Thibaud and others I spoke with on the Space last week, that was not merely recon or similar, I genuinely wanted to learn and thought that would be a good place.

Unfortunately I didn't really get much mic time or many questions answered and it felt like marketing."

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In hindsight, it would have been great if there were time budgeted for an audience Q&A.  Perhaps you can gather questions from your audience and strongest Samourai warriors to ask a WabiSabi expert about on your podcast.

Excellent line-by-line rebuttal of some Wasabi fud.

This should be a blog post.

#[0]

Replying to Avatar Jameson Lopp

How the hell do you people have such awful experiences with Airbnb? Where are you going?

I've stayed in _so_ many Airbnb's in Europe and Central America without ever running into cleaning requirements and other unreasonable rules. Hell, I've left dirty dishes for the cleaners lots of times and not once have I gotten a bad review (though I always leave tips for the cleaners when I do that).

Certificate authorities are a really convoluted way for browser vendors to maintain control over DNS. We could have easily ended up in a world where this was all handled by dnssec.

There isn't even an OpenTimestamps client package yet. Debian is kinda slow.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=921251

Yes, that's what the doctrine of latches is about.

However a distinction with copyright, as opposed to trademarks, is you have a much better chance of suing new violators even if you have a history of unenforcement. With trademarks, you can easily, formally, lose your trademark entirely.

According to https://www.statmuse.com/money/ask/bitcoin+price+2010 your claim re: the Nov 1st 2010 price is incorrect.

What's the source for that Bitcoin price data?