With the launch of Lightning in @cakewallet, it felt like the perfect time for me to go back in time through my journey with Lightning and see how I ended up here. If you had asked me 5y ago if I'd be shipping Lightning to 1M+ people, I'd have thought you were insane.

1/ Ledger "Recover," a thread 🧵 Last night Ledger accidentally leaked some info on their new recovery subscription service, and today they revealed the details. Let's walk through their proposed "solution" to cryptocurrency custody and how dangerous it is.

Everyone hating on @ProtonPrivacy and saying to cancel subscriptions is missing the point entirely. This case actually proves how powerful Proton Mail is, not the opposite. Europol brought a court order to Proton, and the most Proton could provide was the user's recovery email address (which obviously Proton has to be able to see to send recovery emails). If the suspect had used Apple or Google for email and Europol had gone to Apple or Google, they would have disclosed their entire email history among many other details. The vital difference with Proton is that they built an architecture that minimizes the amount of data they have on any user for privacy reasons. That architecture was proven in this case, not disproven. If you have an extremely targeted threat model (i.e. you are a dissident or activist), simply do the following: 1⃣ Don't link any recovery contact info 2⃣ Use a non-Proton VPN or Tor when accessing Proton Mail. P.S. - no company is going to go to jail for your $5/mo throwaway email account. But all companies should limit the info they have on users like Proton has done.

Absolutely sickened by the continued and growing @saylor worship. He's made it abundantly clear that he is anti-cypherpunk, anti-self custody, anti-freedom money, anti-privacy, etc. Somehow we've accepted the enemy right into our ranks and cheered on his capture of Bitcoin's community.

This quote hits harder by the year…

Really awesome initiative, love how easy it is to show the freedom tech you love!

We're at war, anon ‼️ In the space of two weeks, we've seen: - @SamouraiWallet indicted, arrested, and shut down - @wasabiwallet pull from the US, then shut down - @PhoenixWallet pull from the US - @TornadoCash case escalated by DoJ - FBI "warning" against no-KYC tool usage - Elizabeth Warren letter And now the biggest no-KYC Monero on-ramp from fiat, @LocalMoneroCo, has shut down with no clear reasoning (easy to speculate). If you thought we wouldn't face an adversarial environment for years, or that Bitcoin would simply win because it's Bitcoin, you were wrong. The war is right here, right now, and if we don't all band together across tribal divides they'll divide and conquer. It's time to wake the fuck up and arm yourself with the digital tools you need.

All of the OP_RETURN drama just reinforces for me how few people actually understand how Bitcoin works at a fundamental level. Anyone telling you that you can filter out arbitrary data at the mempool policy level are either malicious or misinformed, it simply is not feasible. Soooo many people have just blindly believed their favorite influencer or podcaster and haven't taken the time to understand that Bitcoin is a simple decentralized database literally designed for data storage. Should we optimize for financial transactions however possible? Sure! Can we prevent arbitrary data storage? Absolutely not! Are there good reasons to use Bitcoin for arbitrary data storage? Absolutely! Many new L2s and scaling solutions would require storing proofs on-chain, something that is simple data storage. They can do this no matter what you run on your node as the only entity who matters for block inclusion are miners, and miners have a clear incentive to make more money. That incentive is at the core of Bitcoin's game theory, and cannot change or everything falls apart. If you go nuts with mempool filters and everyone runs sketchy software to white knight as "Defenders of BitcoinTM", guess what happens -- everyone just sends transactions straight to miners for an additional fee, small miners can no longer be competitive, and miner centralization gets drastically worse. Or they find unstoppable ways to simply make their transactions look standard using steganography (hiding data in tweaked pubkeys, unspendable outputs, etc.) so that they don't have to bother with direct miner submission. Not only would that be literally impossible to filter, it would also be drastically worse for scaling than the current state of things. Now the last major effect of this insanity is that it will absolutely lead to faster burnout of the few devs willing to work full time on Bitcoin, and disincentivize future devs from working on Bitcoin as they'll know they have to wade through the morass of public opinion just to get simple changes in a PR. Guess what happens when less devs want to work on Bitcoin? It stagnates, becomes more and more vulnerable to attacks at a software level, and becomes less useful as money because not enough people are maintaining or building the software. So what can you do about "spam"? Bitcoin has a novel spam prevention mechanism -- fees. Don't want people spamming the chain with "useless" jpegs and zk proofs? Simply spend more sats on using Bitcoin day-to-day, take self-custody, participate in the circular economy. The current state of almost no Bitcoiners using Bitcoin regularly is a core reason why on-chain "spam" is happening more than ever the past couple of years, as more and more usage of Bitcoin has shifted to custodians like Strike, Wallet of Satoshi, Liquid, etc. The more of us that actually use Bitcoin the more we disincentivize using Bitcoin for data storage as the fees necessary will prevent it. Simple and effective.

Everything actionable you need to know about what this indictment means for you as a @SamouraiWallet (SW) or Whirlpool user 👇 As a Samourai Wallet user (no Dojo) Unfortunately, the architecture of SW meant that your xpub (a master public key, allowing anyone holding it to derive all your past/present/future Bitcoin addresses) was at some point in time held by Samourai, and could now possible in the hands of the DOJ. Though it's a worst-case scenario, you should assume that your xpub was compromised, and thus all previous mixes you have done have been unwound and are now traceable. You should also assume that the gov can now derive all past/present/future addresses of yours and track movement of funds if so desired. In addition, Samourai's coordinator and backend sync server was seized, and so SW will no longer sync, show received funds, or allow sending funds out. As such, you have to migrate funds to another wallet like @SparrowWallet following the docs here: docs.samourai.io/wallet/rest… In addition, I would recommend migrating funds to a new seed phrase to prevent anyone holding the xpub from seeing all future received/spent funds. You should also disable automatic updates in the Play Store (if used) to ensure no malicious updates are pushed. As a Samourai Wallet user (using your own Dojo) Thankfully, you avoided having your xpub potentially compromised. The worst case scenario for you is that your previous mixes may not have the full anon set you expected if non-Dojo users xpubs were compromised. You will still be able to sync/send/receive from your Samourai Wallet app, but should also migrate funds eventually as no further updates will come out for Samourai Wallet. If you want to migrate, use the docs below: docs.samourai.io/wallet/rest… You should, however, disable automatic updates in the Play Store (if used) to ensure no malicious updates are pushed. As a Sparrow Wallet user Thankfully, you avoided having your xpub potentially compromised as well. The worst case scenario for you is that your previous mixes may not have the full anon set you expected if non-Dojo/Sparrow users xpubs were compromised. There is no real need to rotate to a new wallet etc, and Sparrow is still an excellent option. Unfortunately you will no longer be able to mix in Sparrow as the Samourai coordinator was seized. Next steps for privacy If you (like me) relied on Samourai Wallet for privacy on Bitcoin, it's time to look elsewhere sadly. As of today I have two recommendations: Use Monero for spending, keep using Bitcoin for savings Yes, this isn't Bitcoin, but its by far the most used and most practical privacy coin out there with strong (and growing) ways to swap in/out of it without a centralized, KYC exchange. My recommendation is buying enough to cover your normal spending of Bitcoin for a month at least, and spend out of that lump sum as needed. Learn more: getmonero.org/ Where to get Monero: @bisq_network @TrocadorApp In @cakewallet's exchange feature Wallets: @FeatherWallet @cakewallet @monerujowallet Merchants that accept Monero: monerica.com cryptwerk.com/pay-with/xmr/ Use JoinMarket JoinMarket is a decentralized Coinjoin protocol that brings together peers to mix funds together, gaining strong privacy without relying on a central coordinator, without giving fees to a central entity, etc. The best way to get started today is using the new UI built around JoinMarket, @jamapporg: jamapp.org/ Have any more questions? Drop them below and I'll do my best to answer them. nitter.app/sethforprivacy/s…

Just completed my first mainnet atomic swap (as the broker/XMR-seller) with an unnamed Bitcoiner 👀 The process took 34min, was done entirely over Tor, required no interaction by me, and was peer-to-peer with *no* middle-man or custodian. I think I just witnessed the future 🤯

All Samourai websites down, Gitlab down, coordinator down, can't even mix via Sparrow. A sad, sad day that has me shocked and in disbelief. But we won't stop fighting for our privacy.

Uh, guys, WTF... @samouraiwallet indicted by DoJ: justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/fou…

Remember all that time "we" spent fighting over filters, jpegs, building custodial services, and harassing "shitcoin" users? Yeah, we can't get that time back, and gave the US gov all the time in the world to take a massive swing at Bitcoin. Incredibly saddened that in the last few years we didn't improve privacy in Bitcoin's protocol, improve self-custody via covenants, make privacy cheaper on Bitcoin, or much of anything else that helps when you're at war with the state. Bitcoiners better wake the fuck up and start working together to make Bitcoin self-custody, mining, and privacy more resilient to state attacks or this little experiment is doomed and others will have to take its place. Bitcoin is not inevitable, and the government is doing all they can to make that crystal clear.

🚨 Please do not use this service 🚨 If you use this service, you are signing up for simple seizure of funds if Ledger willingly (or unwillingly due to gov pressure) decides to collaborate with one of the other storage providers. Friends don't let friends use Ledger/Recover. First image shows that Ledger owns the common encryption key that is used to encrypt shards, second image shows Ledger themselves saying how they can give over funds in the event of a subpoena.

FinCEN's guidance is an attack on Bitcoin, full stop. If we cannot use privacy tools to preserve our financial privacy on Bitcoin, it loses much of its censorship-resistance and use as freedom money. Bitcoiners have to fight this with everything we have at our disposal.

Say hello to silentpayments.xyz Wanting to learn more about Silent Payments, see which wallets support them, or find out how to integrate them into your wallet? I've built out a website with all of that info and more to do what I can to speed up Silent Payments adoption.

They won't stop with "mixers," they're coming for self-custody too ‼️ While this government response is not yet enshrined in law or precedent, it paints a much clearer picture of how the state views not only the place of privacy tools, but even that of self-custodial wallet providers moving forward. Let's walk step-by-step through this response from the DOJ together and see why in a thread.

I'm leaving @foundationhq and joining @cake It's time for a new chapter in my journey building freedom tech, and I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be jumping in to help @vikrantnyc run Cake as VP of Operations starting in September. Why Cake? I've known Vik for many years in the space, and have been watching from the sidelines as he's worked hard to bring together an amazing team to build out a wallet that prioritizes ease-of-use and powerful privacy no matter what cryptocurrency people prefer. That all started with being the first Monero wallet on iOS, and has rapidly grown to being a cross-platform, multi-cryptocurrency wallet used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. The best part? @cakewallet has been paving the way in the privacy space for many years, including the latest push to be the first mobile wallet to include Silent Payments for Bitcoin and MWEB for Litecoin. My vision for Cake is to carry this privacy-first vision even further, continuing to push the envelope and let users access powerful privacy features with an intuitive, beautiful user experience that makes privacy easy. The first three objectives I have will be improving and expanding Silent Payments support (especially improving the sync experience!), building out an amazing Lightning experience using the @Breez_Tech SDK, and fine-tuning and improving the existing Cake Wallet that you all know and love across the board. I can't wait to step into this larger role, especially with friends that I've already gotten the chance to meet and get to know over the years. I'm also thrilled to be able to dedicate a bit more time to expanding access and ease-of-use for Monero, especially in the wake of the takedown of Samourai Wallet and the broad attacks against Bitcoin privacy. Monero is a more important tool than ever, and Cake has been a key part of making Monero more useful over the years. Grateful for Foundation I have nothing but amazing things to say about @foundationhq and the incredible people I've gotten to work with so closely over the past two years. We've gotten the chance to build the best Bitcoin hardware wallet out there in Passport, and turn Envoy from a simple companion app for Passport to a powerful standalone mobile wallet with the best coin control in the space. I especially wanted to shout out @zherbert and @btcqna, as they have been close friends and allies, giving me the chance to get started in the space and grow into what became a much larger role than originally planned with Foundation. Zach has gone above and beyond to empower me over the past two years, and his tireless efforts to drive Foundation forward and ensure we ship the best possible products has been inspiring. @btcqna is the reason I'm even in Bitcoin in the first place, and was the key voice of reason that helped me understand the how and why of privacy in Bitcoin, as well as the power (and necessity) of going no-KYC-only. We've built a great friendship over the past two years and I'm honored to be able to have learned so much from him. This has to be the most bittersweet move of my life, but I'm thrilled with the new prospects at Cake and know that those taking over in my place at Foundation are going to bring a unique approach to help them take the next step forward as well. Now let's get back to building 🫡 P.S. - Keep an eye out, Cake and Foundation will be working closely together in the near future 👀

There seem to be a lot of misunderstandings about the tradeoffs and risks of running Knots instead of Bitcoin Core, so I'll try to dispel as much as I can. If you want to make a well-informed decision before deciding to migrate to Knots, start here! Don't run code blindly, even open-source code! As Knots has not been widely used and has little to no developer base outside of Luke Dashjr, you should be very cautious when switching to it instead of Bitcoin Core. If you can't vet the code yourself, I'd recommend waiting for others to do so before making the jump. Knots is still 99.999% Bitcoin Core code Knots isn't an alternative client for Bitcoin (like btcd or libbitcoin) and is instead a minor code fork of Bitcoin Core. It relies almost exclusively on the upstream Bitcoin Core repository for bug fixes, vulnerability fixes, improvements, etc. Luke Dashjr applies his own preferred patches on top of that base, often of PRs that are yet to be merged (or won't be merged) into Core as he sees fit. This means that you're reliant on Luke to keep up with Core to avoid your node being vulnerable to attacks. In a quick check of Bitcoin Core vs. Knots release timing, Knots usually lags anywhere from 1wk to 3mo behind Core. Knots relies on a single maintainer Luke Dashjr has complete control of the Knots repo on Github, and is the sole maintainer, meaning he merges whatever he sees fit into Knots without peer review. If you take a few minutes to look at the repo, you'll notice no pull request has ever been merged by an outside contributor, he has disabled any contributor tracking, and the vast majority of commits to the default branch are by Luke. This places immense trust in Luke as an individual, as any mistake or malicious action on his part can happen without anyone else having any say or putting any eyes on the code. If you can't validate the code yourself, you're blindly trusting one individual with your view into the Bitcoin network. Luke Dashjr has a terrible security track record Along those same lines, Luke as the sole maintainer is terrifying to me. He has a poor track record of security practices, including leaking his GPG key (used to sign previous commits and releases) and leaving hundreds of Bitcoin on a hot wallet on a server instead of properly securing them offline. Make of that what you will. Knots still validates and stores all spam If a transaction is valid under consensus rules and mined by any miner into a valid block, Knots will necessarily still validate all spam transactions and store them locally. By running Knots you are not rejecting any spam on-chain or on-disk, and are absolutely still storing Inscriptions, jpegs, OP_RETURNs, etc. on your hard drive forever. The only place Knots may differ from Core is in the mempool, something that merely harms your fee estimation as you won't see transactions that may actually make it into blocks until they're mined. Still want to run it? More power to you. While I absolutely would not recommend running Knots, if you read and understand the above points and still choose to run Knots, more power to you. One of the beautiful things about a permissionless network like Bitcoin is no one can stop you from running whatever client you want, as long as it abides by consensus rules. The only positive I see in growing Knots adoption would be if more devs and security researchers take the time to look through the diff between Core and Knots and find bugs and vulnerabilities that apply to both (and then responsible disclose them). That could be beneficial to the entire ecosystem, so I'm curious to see if that unfolds. If I've missed anything or you have any addition questions, please don't hesitate to chime in!

Ran the numbers, even by the DoJs generous estimates only 3.6% of volume in Samourai Wallet was illicit. Of course they don't mention the 96.4% of usage that was legitimate users seeking personal privacy on Bitcoin 🤔

I don't give a flying fuck about "mass adoption" or Monero's exchange rate with Bitcoin. I care about real humans being able to spend their money as they see fit, without surveillance or permission. Monero does that, today, without some ethereal hand-wavy future solution.

These governments have lost it. Where will they go next? Hunt down Bitcoin core devs? Jail @torproject developers? This quote from the Alex Pertsev @TornadoCash ruling is absolutely unbelievable. I'm just in shock.

1/ This is only the beginning, and it's time you start preparing for the inevitable adversarial environment many of us have been preaching about for years. This will be much more broad than just cryptocurrency privacy, so here are some resources to get you started 👇

If you only see one picture today, let it be this ridiculous chart showing how ineffective and pointless KYC/AML measures are. #AbolishKYC

This answers my biggest technical questions around Ledger Recover, and means that Ledger has your seed phrase decryption key, not you. That means Ledger has 1 shard and your decryption key, requiring only one other of their financial partners to collaborate to steal/seize funds.

20/20 Ledger have lost the plot and gotten blinded by their success, and their aggressively closed-source nature makes it even harder to trust any of their claims. Time to get your hammers out and then find a new, open-source, freedom-oriented hardware wallet.

Not gonna lie, most of the time using Lightning I just absolutely hate it. Tonight is one of those nights. I just want to send ~$175 and it's literally impossible because of routing failures. I've tried *everything* out there, every type of non-custodial wallet before.

1/ Let's put to bed the myth perpetuated by Coinkite employees that COLDCARD is in any way open-source today. Open-source has a clear and globally recognized definition, and being open-source *matters*. How it started: How it's going:

If you're interested in helping spin up/drive a defense fund for Samourai Wallet, please DM me or email seth@foundation.xyz. Going to work with @zherbert and @foundationhq to hopefully get this going and need all the companies in the space to come together for this.

If this actually happens I will 100% quit "X" and be only on Nostr. No way in hell I'm giving them an ID and selfie. The only way we teach these surveillance capitalists a lesson is hit them where it hurts, their wallets. If they do this, quit and stay strong.

Code is still free speech. Writing code is still legal. Publishing code is still legal. Running code is still legal. Self-custody is still legal. If they come for these we ought to be prepared to die fighting on 4th amendment grounds.

My work at Foundation aside, as someone who wants you to have a proper tool for self-custody *this is not it*. I've held this and tested it - it runs an *extremely* vulnerable and outdated version of Android, it *prints your private keys over cleartext Bluetooth*, and has no SE.

This is a war on access to financial privacy 🔏 They're happy for you to use Bitcoin as-is, happy for you to use Ethereum as-is, but what they don't want is for you to have financial privacy. THAT is where you gain freedom from oppressive regimes. This is becoming crystal clear. The more actions they take over these last few weeks the more apparent it is to me that they don't fear transparent chains as long as they can limit or prevent access to privacy on those chains. But what does this look like? For Bitcoin When it comes to Bitcoin, there have always been sadly very few privacy tools. The fantastic ones we did have have been shutdown via arrest or self-shutdown in the past two weeks, leaving only one privacy tool left standing. While I love the premise of Joinmarket, it's not nearly as user-friendly or cheap compared to @SamouraiWallet, and thus has a higher barrier of entry for the average person. It seems clear that the DoJ doesn't feel the need to stop Bitcoin from being used when it's transparent and easily connected to your ID, but rather just ensure that no one has easy access to privacy. For Ethereum In many ways Ethereum privacy is far worse than Bitcoin, but thankfully there has been some fascinating exploration of privacy tech on Ethereum, culminating in the launch of @TornadoCash. For a time, Ethereum users could gain fantastic privacy in a rather intuitive way, but that wasn't something the US gov wanted to continue. Starting with sanctions in 2022 and then an indictment in 2023, Tornado Cash has been made far harder to access (though technically it still is usable via direct smart contract calls). Ethereum as-is is totally fine to the reigning regime, as it is normally traceable and easy to ensure they get their tax income and their surveillance can continue. For Monero Monero is the exception in the space, as every single user of Monero gains strong privacy, even if they don't care at all about privacy. Because all of Monero's privacy is done at the protocol or p2p level, there is no for-profit app to target, no servers to seize, and no UI to go after. So what do they do? Slowly tighten the on-ramps to Monero, first by using shadowy banker back-channels to force centralized, KYC exchanges to de-list it, and now to close down the only non-KYC on-ramp for Monero in @LocalMoneroCo. If they can't shut down Monero, they'll simply make it as difficult as possible to access Monero. Conclusion For now, it seems self-custody is safe, but that could easily be their next target. For now, it's time to do all that we can to fight this injustice in the courts, stand up for @SamouraiWallet, and stand up for @TornadoCash. This fight begins in the social consensus, somewhere all of us can have an impact. It's time to band together and fight arm-in-arm. Last but not least, #FreeSamourai.

Now that Stolen Bitcoin Reserve is official, maybe we can get back to building freedom tech and improving freedom money instead of simping for governments? Or are we out of the "build freedom money" phase in this space?

Ross showed the world that Bitcoin could actually be useful for building circular economies and buying and selling goods and services, setting the stage for everything I love about Bitcoin. I say we celebrate the 21st of January each year and make it a day for actually USING Bitcoin to buy and sell goods and services at our favorite merchants.

🪦RIP Wasabi Wallet 🪦 I was wondering how long it would take for them to voluntarily shut down. Seemed like the obvious next step after their preemptive US withdrawal. Now there is... checks notes... only one privacy tool on Bitcoin and one that doesn't have extensive battle testing. Privacy has to be decentralized to be resilient to social/legal attacks, and this has quickly shown that Bitcoin privacy at the app layer does not have this property. When Bitcoin privacy at consensus level?

Did Bitcoin mining change forever yesterday 🤔 Hey @ocean_mining, @LukeDashjr, and @GrassFedBitcoin, I watched the announcement yesterday but came away with a lot of unanswered questions that I'll detail below. I would legitimately love to hear the answers to these if at all possible! How is Ocean non-custodial for the average miner? On the stream it was mentioned that payout thresholds are 0.0108 BTC (but @GrassFedBitcoin was unsure), a number that would take a pleb miner with an S9 ~470d to reach. Until he reaches that payout point, all of his mined sats seem to be entirely custodied by Ocean. How does Ocean decentralize mining today? I was so excited by the teases and pre-announcements for Ocean as it sounded like exactly what I wanted in a Bitcoin pool. Unfortunately, it sounds like all of the decentralization possible is yet to be release, including StratumV2 and any ability for miners to submit block templates themselves. Did I miss anything that makes Ocean more decentralized than other pools today? Why is Ocean not open source? If Ocean is as revolutionary and decentralizing as it's being made out to be, wouldn't the best thing for Bitcoin be that all pools switch over time to the same mode? If so, why isn't Ocean open-sourcing any of it's protocol or code? In the announcement it seemed that @GrassFedBitcoin was bragging that no competitor would be able to "reproduce" their lead dev's code, thus keeping their competitive edge. There was no mention to my knowledge of open source, but it's possible I missed it! What guarantee do miners have that you won't censor transactions? As miners cannot submit their own block templates right now and the source is not open code, miners have to rely on manually checking a visual block template on your site to find censorship. @LukeDashjr has a history of censoring what he viewed as "spam," and there was a lot of time spent in the conference talking about how bad Ordinals are and how bad pools are that mine them. What guarantees or promises do miners have that you won't censor transactions you don't like? How will Ocean handle regulatory pressure to enact KYC? In the event that regulators of the Feds come knocking and want you to implement KYC (as seems to be the case with other pools), what will you do? What will Ocean's fee model be after the 0% period? There was a lot of talk about how most pools subsidize larger miners and charge exhorbitant fees to smaller miners during the conference. One thing that wasn't ever mentioned was what Ocean's fee policy will be after the 2mo 0% fee period. Could you explain how the fee model will work? Conclusion That's enough questions for now, I think, but I look forward to getting answers to these! We have a desperate need for decentralized mining in Bitcoin and a massive gap today. I look forward to hearing back 🙂

Silent Payments are here to stay, and Bitcoin is better for it. Loving them in @cakewallet so far and can't wait for a broader roll out. Good luck looking up the address below and learning anything about my Bitcoin activity 😉

I don't want to be a Debbie downer, but let's not forget that all of these pro-crypto policies can just as quickly reverse back in 4y. Let's use these four years of relative safety to build tools that can survive another attack like that we underwent for the last 4y.

Ready to be an outlaw, anon?

1/ So absolutely thrilled to announce that I'll be joining @foundationhq as Head of Content next week! My goal from day one is building out the best content and educational material in the space for sovereignty and personal privacy.

I was really surprised to see so much hostility and hate from many in the Monero community over my recent post detailing why I'm working on Bitcoin privacy while still loving Monero. Very, very saddening and more hurtful than I expected after 4y of volunteering my time there.

Just another influencer with a massive platform virtue signaling, telling users to downgrade their software to a year-old, single-maintainer, out-of-maintenance alternative... With no mention of tradeoffs or issues. And he thinks it limits spam relay 🥲

GM ☕️ Bitcoin usernames and reusable payment codes are the future of Bitcoin payments, where anyone can easily share a single address or offer (even on a static website) and get paid without revealing payments to the outside world. What a time to be alive.

There are few people farther from a cypherpunk than Saylor. Despicable that he holds such sway among Bitcoiners and is worshipped. He's not your friend.

Incredibly sad day for so many reasons. Sad because this means some sort of conviction and sentence for @SamouraiWallet and @SamouraiDev, and lives that are ruined in many ways (even if this is a plea deal that shortens the conviction, they have to live life as felons). Sad because this means the US Department of Justice is not even listening to it's own elected officials and backing off of cases like this, essentially going rogue. Sad because, while this doesn't set a "proper" legal precedent, it can and will be weaponized to instill fear in future indictments and put pressure on entities in the crypto space. Sad because this shows how much of a hatred there is in the DoJ against anyone building powerful privacy tech in the crypto space (see @rstormsf's ongoing case for the other pivotal example). I couldn't imagine being under the mental and emotional toll they've been under for the last 461 days, and can sympathize with their decision to seemingly agree to a plea deal. But still shocked and heart-broken to see it.

Horrifying new *opt-out* default for @Delta flights at JFK is facial recognition for boarding. No privacy policy, they block ticket scanners to try and force you to use it, and no clue where they get the facial image data from. Welcome to the panopticon 👁️

THORChain is now dead to me. If you don't have the balls to push back on vague regulatory pressure and support cryprocurrencies that protect user privacy on your "DEX" you're no better than all the centralized exchanges delisting or not listing #Monero. Ridiculous.

If you doxx a nym publicly, no matter the reason, I will block you and never trust a word you say or a thing you build ever again. No self-proclaimed cypherpunk or privacy advocate can ever do that and be viewed as a legitimate person to trust in any way. Pure scumbag behavior.

19/ I absolutely cannot believe that Ledger thought this was a good idea, as it breaks all of the previous reasoning for using their hardware wallet (cold storage) and introduces KYC directly into the mix for any who opt into this. It's abhorrent and extremely sad to see.

Let's show Proton the desire for Lightning/Monero acceptance! One of the only missing pieces for @ProtonPrivacy being an absolutely essential tool in the space is an easier way to pay for it while preserving your privacy. Part of this is likely due to perceived lower demand. Let's change that perception by sharing this widely, liking this post, or by up-voting the suggested feature for them linked in the tweets below. A privacy-preserving service like theirs needs proper payment support. It would be amazing to see @ProtonPrivacy implement both Monero and Lightning through something like @BtcpayServer which has proper support for both built-in.

This might be one of the coolest things I've seen happen in Bitcoin in ages. Foundation for open-source home mining holds a fundraiser by mining on a self-hosted pool and asking people to donate hashrate, and HITS A BLOCK on their Livestream! >300k raised for their foundation via pleb miners. So damn cool.

Please stop spreading FUD like this, it's a dangerous take that dissuades people from using a provably useful and privacy-preserving tool:

Ashamed to be an American more than ever this week.

Privacy on Bitcoin just got exponentially harder. Please, use Monero today, even if you want to store your wealth in Bitcoin. Learn more: getmonero.org Wallets: @FeatherWallet @cakewallet @monerujowallet

Somehow I respected this guy in the past, but it's become crystal clear from his disingenuous campaign that wholly ignores Lightning's privacy issues and makes up Monero privacy issues that he has some ulterior motive to benefit here. I spent 1.5h on a call with this guy where he got every aspect of this explained to him and he proceeded to ignore all of it and keep lying for internet clout. I'll publish that "debate" later today.

This "Bitcoin maxi" insanity is so detached from the real-world you just have to laugh. Take a minute and read the anti-cypherpunk ideals in the replies to this tweet being pushed by "Bitcoiners", mocking a fantastic, Bitcoin-centric company and denouncing it for... checks notes... allowing devs to build open-source apps 🤣 If these maxis had their way Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. would only allow their Maxi-Approved™️ apps and would wield their wand of censorship broadly. Meanwhile, outside of their echo-chamber there are 500k users in Cake desperate for a legitimate, open-source, secure way to actually store their money and use it on the go, and Prime is the most exciting fit for that need that has ever existed.

tl;dr - @ProtonWallet is an easy-to-use Bitcoin wallet that makes Bitcoin more accessible than ever, but is a departure from the normal "private by default" mantra of Proton. Positives Proton's wallet has full Taproot integration, is self-custodial, and has simple transaction notes and multi-account support for all the basics you need to use Bitcoin on-chain. It works, it exposes a massive audience that is pro-privacy to cryptocurrency, and makes using Bitcoin more accessible than ever. The wallet works quite well and I can see it being very normie-friendly and approachable for those who aren't already Bitcoin users. It's also clear from docs and Github commits that Proton had plans for on-chain privacy implemented directly into the wallet (using Samourai Wallet Whirlpool, in fact!) which I applaud. Negatives While the simple negatives are just small bugs that exist in the UI today (plus the lack of seed verification), the biggest negative is simply the glaring lack of privacy in Bitcoin today. With the malicious prosecution of @samouraiwallet by the DoJ (something that clearly prevented @ProtonPrivacy from pursuing their plans to implement Whirlpool into this wallet), Bitcoin as-is is not private by default. That breaks the norm that Proton users expect for their other offerings, and opens up a can of worms. I of course understand the network effects of Bitcoin etc. here, but for a company offering a suite of private-by-default tooling, there needs to be very clear warnings around the potential privacy issues here. Privacy Details 1. Proton has visibility into wallet balances due to the nature of Bitcoin. They are committing to not log balances, but your client queries for the balance of individual addresses "with Proton's full nodes" and thus Proton can see wallet balances. 2. Proton has visibility into the link between on-chain addresses and emails (AFAICT), as the client generates pools of addresses and sign with PGP, but Proton themselves serve them to users sending to your email address. 3. Be very cautious with how you use the wallet, as funds sent to you via email will necessarily be co-mingled with any other funds you send in due to a lack of coin control. If you want to accept Bitcoin via email, I'd recommend doing so in a standalone account/wallet in Proton Wallet to segregate funds. 4. Proton clearly wants to implement some form of privacy for Bitcoin, but without their planned Whirlpool integration (something that apparently is DOA right now, was removed from GH) there just isn't much that can be done on-chain.

When an absolutely legendary on-chain analyst/tracker tells you he uses Monero for payments "frequently" maybe you ought to wonder why 🤔🤔🤔 Maybe you need a Monero...

Better privacy tools for Bitcoin.

Are we in it for freedom money or purely fiat number-go-up? Will never in a million years understand why people simp after Saylor when he stands against everything that Bitcoin was created to be. Ridiculous that he headlines all the major conferences throughout the year and says things like this.

Yes, this is actually real 🤯 Citrea is a massive change to the Bitcoin ecosystem by allowing a massive increase in transaction throughput on Bitcoin as well as full EVM compatibility. Let's break down what that actually means in approachable language. A lot of the terminology with things like "zk rollups" can be confusing, so I'll do my best to simplify things here. Zero-knowledge ("ZK") here isn't for privacy, it's for scaling/verification A lot of confusion comes from the term "zero-knowledge" often being conflated with privacy-preserving. In the case of zk here, it's being used for it's ability to succinctly (read: in a tiny amount of data) prove something is true and allow anyone to verify the claim without knowing every piece of data used in the proof. Citrea is a validity rollup that leverages zk proofs to reduce its on-chain footprint This means that the amount of data needing to be published to Bitcoin's base layer is miniscule (just a small zk proof) compared to the amount of data off-chain (the entire state of the Citrea blockchain), and is easily verified on almost any device. Citrea validators "batch" transaction on the Citrea chain and publish a single, small proof that summarizes the change in Citrea chain state since the last published state and inscribes it into a Bitcoin transaction (yes, similar to those inscriptions). This proof will only verify properly if the validator is honest, allowing anyone on the network to prove whether or not the proof published is valid. More on validity rollups here from @lightcoin: bitcoinrollups.org/ Citrea enables EVM-style smart contracts w/o changes to Bitcoin While you may have a vitriolic hatred for all things Ethereum (for legitimate or illegitimate reasons), the ability to create complex, Turing-complete smart contracts on Bitcoin without needing the base layer to fully store, parse, and validate those smart contracts feels like the best of both worlds to me. This can enable things like AMMs (think Uniswap) to function with actual Bitcoin as the currency involved. The possibilities are practically limitless. Citrea is "trust-minimized," not "trustless" While this may feel semantic, I think it's an important distinction to make. Citrea changes the trust model from a federated multisig (a la Liquid) where you have to trust that a majority of participants remain honest to one where as long as a single network participant is honest funds cannot be confiscated or frozen. As long as one individual validator remains honest, no other validator can confiscate pegged-in funds or mess with them in any way. Additionally, any validator acting maliciously will be subject to slashing (losing their own Bitcoin via the challenge-response protocol in BitVM) and thus have a financial incentive to be honest unless they know for sure that every single validator on the network will allow them to be malicious. Citrea would be even better with covenants Yes, I'm going to mention covenants 😅 Part of the minor trust required in Citrea can be reduced even further with covenants in Bitcoin: docs.citrea.xyz/future-resea… Additionally an opcode that fully verifies zk proofs directly on Bitcoin (i.e. not via BitVM) would allow a completely trustless zk rollup, but deciding on a proof to enshrine in Bitcoin's consensus layer is very unlikely at this point. Conclusion I'm insanely excited for this to be fully open-sourced and usable on testnet, and will share updates as I see them along with testing this out ASAP. Special thanks to @0x_orkun for giving me a sneak peak and letting me contribute to the docs, helped me have a much better understanding of what Citrea really is! I'd highly recommend reading through their docs if you want to better grasp all of the ins and outs: docs.citrea.xyz/technical-sp… If you see something that could be improved in the docs, be sure to open an issue or submit your own PR, as the docs are open source themselves! github.com/chainwayxyz/citre…

Never a dull moment in crypto 🤣 @CertiK, a US-based auditing company: 1⃣ Found a vulnerability in @krakenfx 2⃣ Stole $3m using it instead of following VRP 3⃣ Refused to give it back 4⃣ Outed themselves publicly 5⃣ Sent the stolen funds to Tornado Cash, a sanctions violation

The @Bybit_Official hackers are not going to use Monero to move funds, as their need for vast and immediate liquidity far outweighs their need for privacy. They know that they will be surveilled at every step of the way, but it doesn't matter for them because they're a nation-state actor and have ways to sell tainted Bitcoin for fiat that us normies do not have access to. Other big takeaways for me: 1. This proves Bitcoin can still be useful as freedom money, and that broad censorship is not yet possible. 2. This could easily be spun into an OFAC-compliant mining push on pools, and we should keep an eye out for that. 3. The govs approach of silently destroying Monero on/off-ramps via Operation Chokepoint over the years has been effective in neutering Monero's usefulness for state actors, but hasn't stopped its usefulness for individuals. 4. The ability for all of us to watch the flow of funds live together and know exactly where funds are coming from and going to should be terrifying, not voyeuristic fun. We do not have the same privileges as individuals that state-sponsored hackers have, and this lack of privacy can easily doom us. 5. Sad to see so many using this as an opportunity to dunk on Ethereum instead of focusing on how we can make Bitcoin even more private and censorship-resistant.

I cannot say this loudly enough: *DO NOT DO THIS. DO NOT ATTACH A STATIC ETHEREUM OR BITCOIN ADDRESS TO YOUR TWITTER PROFILE* This is one of the worst possible ways to obliterate your privacy on-chain. Monero addresses would be fine here -- Bitcoin/Ethereum are *terrible*.

The Silent Payments snowball continues, with Sparrow Wallet now officially supporting sending to Silent Payment addresses 😍 Combining those with BIP 353 usernames is how we finally start to move past this insane wallet address paradigm to a more human-centric payments flow.

What's the implied threat here? Why does an average, law-abiding user seeking privacy need a PSA about something that literally no one properly understands (what is an MSB and what isn't) at this point. There is zero reason for me to have considered Samourai Wallet an MSB.

Where @NVK and @theBLOCKCLOCK take down a FOSS competitors repos and websites using a vague trademark takedown request and legal cease-and-desist, instead of, you know, talking to them about changing their name. No one should touch the tools @NVK builds, as you're funding one of the worst, most anti-freedom, anti-open source individuals in the space. This is only one of MANY examples of this type of behavior where @NVK lashes out and uses legal attacks to shut down competition, personal relationships to lock competitors out of sponsoring or supporting events he is at, or abusing his platform to harass and intimidate FOSS projects like @foundationhq and @SeedSigner. P.S. -- this is the same guy who gets a say in what open source projects @OpenSats funds as he sits on the board of directors. Enough is enough.

Think about the fact that the government spent hundreds of thousands (or millions?) of dollars arresting devs of a self-custodial privacy tool for the 3.6%. Instead of chasing down the *actual criminals* and letting the 96.4% continue to have legal financial privacy. #FreeSamourai

REALLY excited to see this broadly deployed, thanks to "p2p v2" being on by default now 🔒 What does that mean? Running a Bitcoin node has always been easy to detect and surveil by ISPs, as most users run Bitcoin nodes over clearnet, use default ports, etc. But one aspect that has been particularly harmful is that all of the details about the transactions, blocks, and messages your node sends and receives has been sent in clear text with no encryption. That approach makes it trivial for an ISP to see things like when your node broadcasts a transaction that originates with it vs a simply relaying an external transaction, harming your network level privacy. The traditional fix for this is to run a node exclusively behind the @torproject network, but that also has its own tradeoffs (like easier Sybil attacks, slower block propagation, etc.) Now, all of those running clearnet nodes will have their traffic between their node and any peers also running v27.0+ automatically end-to-end encrypted. While this doesn't prevent advanced analysis like timing and packet size, it does prevent an ISP from doing incredibly simple logging of cleartext traffic, adding a little more privacy and security to running a Bitcoin node. Want to learn more? You can read the BIP and hear from the authors on an episode of @stephanlivera's podcast below.

👀 Not sure if this is exciting or terrifying to be this much in the spotlight when I'm so publicly advocating *against* corporate surveillance 😅

Only 9 steps to run your own Bitcoin pool 😎 Thanks to the amazing work of @Public_Pool_BTC, I've created a guide, Docker images, and a simple repo to make it easier for anyone who wants to spin up a new solo-mining Stratum Bitcoin mining pool. 🧵👇

It's high time I shared more on why I've shifted focus more to Bitcoin from Monero over the past several months, and my latest blog post is an attempt to do just that: sethforprivacy.com/posts/why… Happy to dive into more detail for anyone engaging in good faith 🙂

ROSS IS FREE, HE ACTUALLY DID IT 👏👏👏

Bitcoiners giving out Bitcoin to truckers *on video*, *without instructions for private use*, *telling them to "hOdL"*, and *posting their faces/voices/trucks on Twitter* is the absolute state of this space. I'm literally shaking right now, this space has lost all perspective.

Taproot didn't enable Ordinals/Inscriptions/etc. ❌ I've seen this view commonly mentioned across Twitter, and it's one that can be extremely harmful. Many in the space would love to further ossify (prevent change) in Bitcoin and use Ordinals "spam" as the reason for doing so, but I'd argue that that would be the worst possible outcome from this situation. tl;dr - Focus on how we can make Bitcoin better via covenants. This needs a lengthy explanation to properly grasp what's at play here, though, so let's get into the fun details. Arbitrary data in Bitcoin has always been possible Something most people don't understand is that a system like Bitcoin is built for data storage, it's just intended for monetary data. This design made it possible from day one to include arbitrary (arb) data into the blockchain, either through methods like OP_RETURN (a good place for storing arb data as it can be easily pruned) or in tweaked pubkeys (a bad place for storing arb data, as it cannot be pruned). Some examples of this: - Satoshi inscribed a newspaper headline in the genesis block coinbase (mempool.space/tx/4a5e1e4baab…) - Luke Dash Jr. used his pool to inscribe Bible texts and prayers in 2011 in the coinbase (bitcointalk.org/index.php?to…) - Someone added the entire Bitcoin whitepaper to the UTXO set in 2013 (bitcoin.stackexchange.com/qu…) All of these happened before both SegWit and Taproot, and there are many more cases of this type of data storage on Bitcoin. But I thought Taproot enabled this? Unfortunately, there is a common misunderstanding (thanks for the troll name @TaprootWizards 😅) that Taproot enabled this type of data storage, thus opening the way for Ordinals "spam." In reality, this type of arb data storage on Bitcoin has always been possible, but was made much cheaper to do with the introduction of SegWit in 2017. SegWit was a major upgrade and bug fix for Bitcoin that enabled the Lightning network to be built and included a 3MB "witness" data allowance within each block w/ reduced fees for data to incentivize spending UTXOs (therefore making them prunable). More on SegWit in a fantastic post from @River here: river.com/learn/what-is-segw… This incentivized portion of each transaction (called "witness" data) is intended for things like Bitcoin scripts, but can be used to store any data as long as it's done the "right" way. Specifically, Ordinals store them in an "envelope" between two opcodes, allowing the data to count as witness data and get the discount. This storage method was possible before SegWit, but now saves on fees in comparison to pre-SegWit usage. While this of course was not the intent of SegWit, it underlines the simple fact that if someone wants to store arb data in a blockchain, they will find ways to do it. Does that make SegWit bad? If your first reaction is then to want to raise a pitchfork and campaign for no more changes in Bitcoin, remember this -- without the SegWit soft-fork there would be no Lightning network, no discount for users consolidating UTXOs, and instead users would be incentivized to create more unprunable UTXOs as it's cheaper to create than to consume UTXOs w/o SegWit. Additionally, Ordinals being stored in witness data allows those who run a node to easily prune them and not store them in RAM, unlike any method that leverages pubkey tweaking or other types of stenography to include arb data on-chain. This means that the actual impact of Ordinals on those who run a node is drastically minimized versus other arb data storage methods. If we didn't have SegWit, Ordinals would all use the UTXO set It's extremely like that if we had never included the SegWit soft-fork into Bitcoin that the Ordinals craze would still have happened, and along with it a drastically worse outcome for the blockchain. In this alternate reality, Ordinals (and all similar NFTs) would likely be inscribed directly into the UTXO set, similar to how Stamps function today. While putting the data into the UTXO set does cost those creating these NFTs drastically more, it also means that those running a Bitcoin node cannot prune the data, no matter what. Bitcoin relies on nodes being able to retain the entire UTXO set in order to verify transactions properly and prevent double-spends, and any data within that UTXO set must be kept in perpetuity. That would be drastically worse for those running a Bitcoin node, and makes the Ordinals in SegWit witness data pale in comparison when it comes to negative impact on Bitcoin nodes. So what can we do about it? The solution to reducing the cost of using Bitcoin is not censoring Ordinals (something that isn't even technologically possible, BTW), but rather is finally building solutions to Bitcoin's long-term scaling. Ordinals have highlighted something most of us knew would happen -- base-layer fees would become untenably high, as they have to for Bitcoin to be secure long-term. In order for the average person to use Bitcoin, we need powerful scaling solutions like layer twos, and unfortunately Lightning in it's current form isn't the final solution. Lightning relies on every channel-owner (and thus user when done in a non-custodial manner) being able to settle back on-chain to resolve disputes, something that isn't economically feasible in a realistic fee environment. The solution? Covenants. Enter covenants, an improvement to Bitcoin that has been a long-time in the making and is finally picking up the steam it deserves in the space. Covenants enable both improvements to Lightning that make it drastically more scalable, and new layer two networks to be built that have different (often better) trade-offs compared to Lightning. As this post is already getting a bit too long I won't dive into the details of covenants, but instead ask you to spend a few minutes going through this fantastic set of resources on covenants to better understand what they enable: covenants.info/ Have questions? ASK THEM! The best way for the broader Bitcoin "rough consensus" layer to work is for more people to step up, learn, and ask questions as they go.

I used #LightningNetwork to buy a drink at @nashbitcoiners and... It just worked 🤯 Maybe my luck is turning, paid from my own node with no issues at all. Pretty cool to see and pretty good sender privacy as well.

People should be terrified that @Ledger can claim for marketing how much crypto their users collectively have 🙈 Is your crypto/Bitcoin part of their 20% figure? If so, get it out now. 👇

Incredibly sad day, LocalMonero has been a cornerstone of the no-KYC Monero ecosystem and has no direct fiat -> XMR alternative today. This news makes it all the more pressing to have good, decentralized BTC <> XMR ramps like @SeraiDEX and @HavenoDEX ASAP. So grateful for all @LocalMoneroCo did in the Monero community and to make access to financial privacy so easy.

Let's get this funded, Monero community! @BtcpayServer has proven absolutely vital in the growing Monero circular economy, and the BTCPay devs have made drastic improvements that allow us to much better support Monero in BTCPay going forward. @deverickapollo and Napoly will be doing pivotal work around improving Monero support, and I'd love to see this get funded ASAP. If you want to see even more merchant adoption and simpler setup/management for merchants wanting to make the jump to accepting Monero directly, this is the best next step.

Anyone else absolutely not give a f*** when a company announces they're buying Bitcoin? Or is it just me that scrolls through those tweets and rolls his eyes?

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.

If you’re onboarding users to Wallet of Satoshi when @PhoenixWallet exists and works incredibly well, you’re simply doing it wrong. Get people *actually using Lightning* and start onboarding to Phoenix. Latest update w/ splicing is 🔥

Imagine panic selling Monero because ... checks notes ... a scammy KYC exchange widely known to be selling paper Monero and failing to allow withdrawals regularly is delisting it 🤣🤣🤣 Topping up my Monero checking account elsewhere as we speak 👌

1/ I'm really tired of responding to lots of comments from DERO people claiming they've solved the worlds problems and scamming people with false marketing, so here's a thread breaking down all of their grandiose claims 👇

Confirmed with DEFCON today that they will require proof of vaccination to physically attend, so I will not be going this year. Regardless of your personal views on COVID/the vaccine, divulging private medical info to enter an anon hacking conf is... really ironic.

So amazing seeing Silent Payments slowly but surely taking off, shown here by how easy it is to send from @bluewalletio to @cakewallet 🔥 It's this easy, just scan a QR code on a staticly generated website and pay someone while retaining your privacy and theirs. Let's make Silent Payments the standard Bitcoin address 🤝

Strangely out of character and unprofessional response here. Portraying blind Bitcoin maximalism from a company touting "private by default" as it's tagline is confusing AF, especially when I know for a fact they don't consider Monero a shitcoin from many direct conversations with them. They even approached me a few years back seeking help with a Monero integration (that they then didn't pursue for reasons I wasn't told).

Little known fact about me: I left a lucrative career and started my journey into freedom tech and education when I learned that my employer, @Cisco, was linked to knowingly and directly providing and customizing technology and services to aid the Chinese government in oppressing the Uyghur people. Grateful for the @EFF work uncovering and performing impact litigation against @Cisco and giving me a wake up call on what role I was indirectly playing in human rights abuses. While neither I nor my team were working directly on the tools being used for oppression, it was the wake up call I needed to make my life about more than an easy career, but instead to focus on fighting for human freedom. @TahirIzgil's story and that of the Uyghur people has a special place in my heart as a result and I'm so glad to see their struggle recognized by @OsloFF with this award. If you want to learn more about the case against Cisco, the latest update was last year: eff.org/deeplinks/2023/07/vi…

Very honored that my list of #Bitcoin privacy proposals published by @BitcoinMagazine, my first post with them! Read it here to get an overview of the past, present, and future of Bitcoin privacy proposals: bitcoinmagazine.com/technica… via @bitcoinmagazine

Holy shit, they already complied to this proposal before it’s even passed?!? Even worse than I expected, wow. The split of the Bitcoin economy into white and black markets is here already 😬

Sender privacy (arguably the only weakness in Monero's privacy today) is about to get SO MUCH better. Anon set goes from ~16 to ~1 MILLION+ after FCMP++ goes live 🤯 Your input in a transaction could now possibly be any output from the entire history of Monero.

NGL all of this is getting to me. Hard to be optimistic or toe the line between educating and doing the govs chilling work for them. I need all of you to help keep me in line here.

If you’re on iOS you need to take the time ASAP to read through this and slowly implement the recommendations here. Fantastic set of resources from @privacy_guides: privacyguides.org/en/os/ios-…

Once you update your Ledger you're now running code *explicitly designed to exfiltrate your private keys*. What a nightmare world, thankful for free and open-source alternatives where you can be sure this can never happen. Never compromise on open-source when storing funds.

3/ In order to use the system at all, you have to connect your identity to your Ledger account, giving yet another KYC pain-point for data leaks, hacks, and government censorship or surveillance. Now you're trusting a third party with info on your ID and info on all your crypto.

I've long said that trying to use Monero (or any privacy-preserving cryptocurrency) as a "tunnel" for privacy between transparent cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum is pointless. Law enforcement investigations continue to prove that point.

I truly believe 👇, and it's at the root of everything I do (and want to do) for Bitcoin privacy. Without privacy, Bitcoin IS NOT freedom money. Silent Payments are a step, Payjoin is a step, better, coordinator-less Coinjoins are a step, and better/easier self-custodial Lightning is a step. Working on bringing all of this together (and more) @cakewallet 🫡

Just needed to say that I don’t like the tone I took on the whole Ocean thing in retrospect. I still think the actual questions, content, and information were good to share, but the tone I took on a lot of the follow-up tweets wasn’t right. Will do better pushing for decentralization and censorship resistance without compromising on how I engage with people or call things out 🫡

To clarify some things here, this is not a scenario that applies to almost anyone using Monero. Tl;dr - Monero is still private by default, defeats dragnet surveillance without any additional effort, and is resistant to targeted tracing in most common scenarios. In detail: 1) The private keys to the wallet being traced from were shared with the chain surveillance company. Unless you’re sending your private keys to chain surveillance companies, the starting point of this investigation is impossible. 2) A very specific on-chain footprint was visible here due to the use of a feature called PocketChange in Monerujo. The subsequent transactions included a massive consolidation from (seemingly) accidental usage of PocketChange, leaving an obvious on-chain footprint and greatly reducing plausible deniability. This feature and subsequent sweeping of the wallet entirely is a worst-case scenario for privacy. 3) Lots of off-chain metadata about the wallet was shared with the chain surveillance company by the legitimate owners. ⚫️Future improvements In addition, much of the tracing possible here will be nearly (or completely) impossible after Monero implements global anonymity sets with Seraphis. Ring signatures only major weakness is against targeted tracing with known (or “poisoned”) inputs, which is this exact scenario. ⚫️How can you prevent this tracing against you? ❌ Don’t give your private keys to chain surveillance companies. ✅ Don’t sweep the entire balance of your wallet unless you absolutely have to. ✅ Reduce off-chain metadata available by using your own node, not sharing transaction IDs publicly, etc.