You mean like doing a swap from bitcoin to monero and having that monero being send to the person you are paying? Doesn't that count as a sale and trigger cap gains?

Yes, this is a useful function that you can delegate to your social graph.

E.g. if an npub got 10 mutes from the set of npubs that are 3 hops away from you (follows, follows of follows...), then it's muted.

However, I think about the other way around. Everything that is not in the whitelist is not shown.

Whitelist can come prepopulated by social graph (again, think about all npubs from 3 hops from u)

Reporting users/posts already kind of works this way, at least on amethyst. Like if someone I follow reports someone as an imposter, their post will be hidden from my feed. Or at least I think that's how it works

I know this isn't the conversation you're having, but this just made a question come to mind...

Legally speaking, when you peg into something like liquid are you selling your Bitcoin for L-BTC or is L-BTC your receipt for them custodying your BTC. I guess the same question could be asked about Cashu/fedi? Or maybe we don't have legal frameworks for these things yet (most likely I guess)

Confession: I’ve never once looked at Rumble until today and don’t see anything special. Why do people use this?

Also maybe change the css you used to the one below, your header image will be full-width and the white text above it will look better:

Liquid is a "trust someone" solution. There are precautions to avoid targeting particular users (confidential amounts and assets) similar to ecash, but it's still a custodian.

We can certainly argue it's a "good enough" custodian, given the number, reputation and legal consequences of failure, but it's still a custodian.

First up, I want to recognize that this is an uncomfortable topic! Bitcoin is inevitably changing towards user-pays, and that's not all positive. But facts we don't like are still facts: can't engineer a solution if we can't think about the problems.

There are three kinds of bitcoiners.

A. Those who can afford any fee.

B. Those who can afford a UTXO, but not often.

C. Those who can't afford a UTXO.

Nobody worries about the A group (and in the early days, that was everyone). Obviously Lightning (my area!) caters to the B group, and we want it to be as large as possible. To do this we can (1) make lightning as resiliant as we can so onchain spends are rare, (2) make bitcoin as efficient as possible so we can cram as much as we can into what we have.

(1) Making lightning more resilient and reliable is engineering. Lots of people working on this, even before we get soft-forks which could help further.

(2) More efficiency has two benefits: obviously if your own onchain spends are 20% smaller, that's 20% cheaper. But if *everyone's* onchain spends are 20% smaller, that means fees are lower *for everyone* too (and it's non-linear). So we really care about all Bitcoin usage! Some things are obvious wins: Taproot so you can avoid even putting the script onchain in many cases, FROST so you can cram your 2 of 3 or other scheme into a single key and signature. We know we want to get more aggressive with sharing one signature across multiple inputs (Cross Input Signature Aggregation), but that needs a lot more research, and a soft-fork.

But even with all these, the math is clear: some people, even if you somehow gave them their wealth in a UTXO, it couldn't afford its own fees to spend. The C group is real. Spoiler alert: we don't have an answer for this! But let's look at some approaches people have tried.

Firstly, there are attempts to move these people into the B group: give them long enough that maybe fees will reach a point they can afford. This seems unlikely to me:

1. As fees increase everyone will start doing the work to take advantage of low fee times, and that itself means that low-fee times won't be so low.

2. These schemes tend to increase onchain footprints, so they need fees to drop a lot to overcome that (typical is 2x the transaction size, so you need fees to halve to gain anything).

3. If you really can't afford the fee, you probably also can't afford to wait.

4. You still haven't actually dealt with those who really, really can't afford the fees. Ever.

Another suggestion is that someone (e.g. a lightning service provider) will lock up funds which would cover fees, in case something goes wrong. This doesn't work economically, because nobody is paying $100 for a $5 user (not at scale), but it doesn't even work mathematically: the reason some people will have small UTXOs is because there are not enough sats for 10 billion people with any realistic distribution.

There are two basic approaches left:

1. Group people, so they fall into the B category (i.e. onchain tx is possible, but expensive).

2. Trust someone, but rely on incentives.

1. Grouping people is possible, but they need to work together if somenthing goes wrong. So grouping inside a community is probably better than grouping with randos.

For example, there are various tree-of-transaction schemes where you go onchain only if the coordinator fails/goes rogue, and how much it costs you depends on whether anyone near you in the tree pays to get themselves out. These are basically free if nothing goes wrong (one UTXO required for thousands of users!). But this is subject to ghettoization, where the coordinator makes sure all the C people are grouped together, knowing none of them can afford the transactions they need to get their funds back. It's particularly bad because the coordinator can insert its own fake "whales" to make it look like it's not ghettoized.

You can play with incentives here, too: more research needed. The details matter!

2. Relying on incentives.

As a simple example, lightning-connected e-cash mints. They can't rug individuals very easily, they have to rug everyone together (or go fractional and rug the last ones to exit). Maybe with enough anonymity and reputation, these would be Good Enough.

More ambitious would be a single UTXO held for multiple people by a coordinator. Can we make it so that if a coordinator is dishonest, you can force them to burn your funds? Maybe burn more than your funds (ie. a bond)? Won't get your money, but it aligns incentives so they're not motivated to rug you. The details here really matter!

There's a cute scheme which has been proposed where the coordinator pays a temporary bond, and asserts that they actually have everyone's signature to transfer the funds. If nobody challenges within a week, they get the bond back and the funds move. If someone challenges, all the signatures are put onchain, and if they're not all valid, the bond gets half-burned and half-given to the (successful) challenger. This is hard to make work, though. Someone needs to get the money to challenge (hard if you don't have the money in the first place, plus it's hard to prove to someone you *didn't* sign something!), and then make sure nobody gets the challenge bond before them (in particular, a dishonest coordinator, seeing the game is up, completes the successful challenge *themselves* and gets half their bond back), and make sure someone can't grief and delay the settlement indefinitely or bankrupt the coordinator.

More research needed, here, too.

Summary

A longer post than I had expected to write. And it's buried in the middle of a thread nobody will read. (I do this sometimes. I suck at marketing I guess!)

Sub-fee bitcoin amounts will have tradeoffs, involving trusting someone who has more money than you (at least, in someone's competence, even if their *financial* incentives can be made to match yours). This is difficult to build well, and not a very exciting thing to build today, so it hasn't really happened (custodial things are much, much easier!).

This is also a key reason I believe we need to make Bitcoin more expressive: if we can do *more* with our own UTXOs, we can build better solutions. And by "we" I mean "someone smarter than me" of course!

Feedback welcome!

First up, I want to recognize that this is an uncomfortable topic! Bitcoin is inevitably changing towards user-pays, and that's not all positive. But facts we don't like are still facts: can't engineer a solution if we can't think about the problems.

There are three kinds of bitcoiners.

A. Those who can afford any fee.

B. Those who can afford a UTXO, but not often.

C. Those who can't afford a UTXO.

Nobody worries about the A group (and in the early days, that was everyone). Obviously Lightning (my area!) caters to the B group, and we want it to be as large as possible. To do this we can (1) make lightning as resiliant as we can so onchain spends are rare, (2) make bitcoin as efficient as possible so we can cram as much as we can into what we have.

(1) Making lightning more resilient and reliable is engineering. Lots of people working on this, even before we get soft-forks which could help further.

(2) More efficiency has two benefits: obviously if your own onchain spends are 20% smaller, that's 20% cheaper. But if *everyone's* onchain spends are 20% smaller, that means fees are lower *for everyone* too (and it's non-linear). So we really care about all Bitcoin usage! Some things are obvious wins: Taproot so you can avoid even putting the script onchain in many cases, FROST so you can cram your 2 of 3 or other scheme into a single key and signature. We know we want to get more aggressive with sharing one signature across multiple inputs (Cross Input Signature Aggregation), but that needs a lot more research, and a soft-fork.

But even with all these, the math is clear: some people, even if you somehow gave them their wealth in a UTXO, it couldn't afford its own fees to spend. The C group is real. Spoiler alert: we don't have an answer for this! But let's look at some approaches people have tried.

Firstly, there are attempts to move these people into the B group: give them long enough that maybe fees will reach a point they can afford. This seems unlikely to me:

1. As fees increase everyone will start doing the work to take advantage of low fee times, and that itself means that low-fee times won't be so low.

2. These schemes tend to increase onchain footprints, so they need fees to drop a lot to overcome that (typical is 2x the transaction size, so you need fees to halve to gain anything).

3. If you really can't afford the fee, you probably also can't afford to wait.

4. You still haven't actually dealt with those who really, really can't afford the fees. Ever.

Another suggestion is that someone (e.g. a lightning service provider) will lock up funds which would cover fees, in case something goes wrong. This doesn't work economically, because nobody is paying $100 for a $5 user (not at scale), but it doesn't even work mathematically: the reason some people will have small UTXOs is because there are not enough sats for 10 billion people with any realistic distribution.

There are two basic approaches left:

1. Group people, so they fall into the B category (i.e. onchain tx is possible, but expensive).

2. Trust someone, but rely on incentives.

1. Grouping people is possible, but they need to work together if somenthing goes wrong. So grouping inside a community is probably better than grouping with randos.

For example, there are various tree-of-transaction schemes where you go onchain only if the coordinator fails/goes rogue, and how much it costs you depends on whether anyone near you in the tree pays to get themselves out. These are basically free if nothing goes wrong (one UTXO required for thousands of users!). But this is subject to ghettoization, where the coordinator makes sure all the C people are grouped together, knowing none of them can afford the transactions they need to get their funds back. It's particularly bad because the coordinator can insert its own fake "whales" to make it look like it's not ghettoized.

You can play with incentives here, too: more research needed. The details matter!

2. Relying on incentives.

As a simple example, lightning-connected e-cash mints. They can't rug individuals very easily, they have to rug everyone together (or go fractional and rug the last ones to exit). Maybe with enough anonymity and reputation, these would be Good Enough.

More ambitious would be a single UTXO held for multiple people by a coordinator. Can we make it so that if a coordinator is dishonest, you can force them to burn your funds? Maybe burn more than your funds (ie. a bond)? Won't get your money, but it aligns incentives so they're not motivated to rug you. The details here really matter!

There's a cute scheme which has been proposed where the coordinator pays a temporary bond, and asserts that they actually have everyone's signature to transfer the funds. If nobody challenges within a week, they get the bond back and the funds move. If someone challenges, all the signatures are put onchain, and if they're not all valid, the bond gets half-burned and half-given to the (successful) challenger. This is hard to make work, though. Someone needs to get the money to challenge (hard if you don't have the money in the first place, plus it's hard to prove to someone you *didn't* sign something!), and then make sure nobody gets the challenge bond before them (in particular, a dishonest coordinator, seeing the game is up, completes the successful challenge *themselves* and gets half their bond back), and make sure someone can't grief and delay the settlement indefinitely or bankrupt the coordinator.

More research needed, here, too.

Summary

A longer post than I had expected to write. And it's buried in the middle of a thread nobody will read. (I do this sometimes. I suck at marketing I guess!)

Sub-fee bitcoin amounts will have tradeoffs, involving trusting someone who has more money than you (at least, in someone's competence, even if their *financial* incentives can be made to match yours). This is difficult to build well, and not a very exciting thing to build today, so it hasn't really happened (custodial things are much, much easier!).

This is also a key reason I believe we need to make Bitcoin more expressive: if we can do *more* with our own UTXOs, we can build better solutions. And by "we" I mean "someone smarter than me" of course!

Feedback welcome!

Thank you for using it and for the feedback! Happy to help!

Btw I guess you should remove html markup from site description - the homepage link preview has raw html showing up.

I love how meat is so cheap there they can toss it like bread! 😧

Damn! Is it safe to swim anywhere over there? Just in the pools?

I quickly read the translation, but I'm already quite familiar with these kind of devices so I didn't need the background.

This is a good writeup. I wish there was more writeups like this because invetibaly if it is on youtube, it is sponsored or a paid review.

Even if the device is free remeber youtubers, that's just another way of paying for an ad.

I agree that it's different and that's a good thing. I wanted to like it.

The main issue I have is the pin server. Not the concept of it actually, but the problem of trying to run your own.

My guess is nobody has really tried this. I did. Got the pin server running on my own machine. You had to factory reset the jade (it's been a year, idk) and then you had to add the details of the server, IP, etc...

Problem is, if that changes, you can't unlock the wallet. So the url of the pin server is bound at creation. If you happened to dhcp and we're using IP address on a LAN, oh well.

So these kinda foot guns are not up front and because no one complains about them, I doubt they tried.

The esp32 is also not a chip known for security...

But yes it is designed for a different use case.

Nothing wrong with Ubuntu, but its a ready to use easy to install grandma Linux distro. If someone is an IT cyber security expert nerds would expect an OS like qubes, Debian or arch.

I still think of nostr as massively niche. Most info on here is skewed to only a few topics and it’s repetitive. IMHO it remains to be seen how and if it will actually be widely adopted.

But I remain optimistic.

This happens with all movements, not just apps. As they go mainstream, we have not just more noise, but the ethos is diluted, co-opted or forgotten.

Like right now, with the bitcoin2024 shitshow, we see what happens when normies arrive to the bitcoin movement: you forget cypherpunk, hard money roots and simp for politicians, Wall Street and “strategic reserve asset” crap.

This also happened to the feminist and gay movements in just the past decades…