I'm excited to announce that I've joined the amazing bitcoin hardware wallet team at Block (@blocks) to help bring self-custody into the mainstream!
Grateful to have been part of the extraordinary Brink (@bitcoinbrink) community as a grantee. Thank you so much for your support!
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Hyperbitcoinization will make long-time hodlers the world’s juiciest targets. Vora is the first self-custody platform that secures people, not just keys. A wrench attack yields zero sats and instant exposure, so criminals pick easier prey. Vora turns Bitcoin from the hardest money into the hardest asset on earth to steal.
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I'm thrilled and honored to be able to continue working on Bitcoin open-source with the support of an organization that I greatly admire, the @HRF. Special thanks to @amizi @jfnewbery @adamcjonas @nadav_kohen @LLFOURN @n1ckler @gladstein for helping make this dream a reality!
Grant 1: Bitcoin developer @jesseposner will receive a gift of $25,000 in BTC. Until recently, Jesse worked as a key management engineer at @coinbase and is now dedicating himself to the free and open-source software movement.
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It has rightly been said that cryptocurrency is more religion than it is science, and thus, in that spirit, I offer this blockchain prayer:
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Check out our new Bitkey whitepaper where we leverage FROST, OPRFs, TEEs, Pedersen commitments, and blind signatures to deliver secure, private, and flexible self-custody with no hardware required!
bitkey.build/building-in-the…
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Elon tweets and market volatility are entertaining, but this is what really matters. And you won't hear them talking about it on CNBC.
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Any attempt to regulate cryptography is ultimately an attempt to regulate math itself. “2 + 2 = 4” is not a crime. Thinking is not a crime. The cogito is not a crime. And if it is, then deliver me the penalty, for I will never deny an accusation that I think, and do so freely.
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Founding a cryptocurrency has much more in common with founding a religion or a nation than founding a start-up, and this is what the ICOs have failed to understand, most notably in their disappointing creation myths: non-anonymous, pre-mined, and mutable.
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Privacy-preserving proof-of-solvency was solved a decade ago: eprint.iacr.org/2015/1008
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Statements by an employer of empathy and solidarity for employees are not political, not activism, not cultural marxism, not woke, not a threat to diversity of thought, and not a distraction; they are nothing more than basic human decency.
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The only way to deal with a surveilled world is to become so absolutely cryptic that your very existence is an act of encryption.
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vora.io is what we’re currently ready to share. We will publicize the full details in the coming months.
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The study, deployment, and utilization of cryptography is protected by Amendments 1-5 of the U.S. Constitution.
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What you are suggesting is blatantly unconstitutional. Running an open blockchain node is political speech and a quintessential exercise of liberty and autonomy and no matter how much you are terrified by a free society you will not succeed in banning it: repository.law.miami.edu/cgi…
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Thank you so much @bitcoinbrink @NexoFinance @jfnewbery @bitschmidty @antoniehodge @actuallyCarlaKC @hrdng @jerrybrito for your amazing support! I couldn't be more excited to help bring @chelseakomlo and Ian Goldberg's powerful FROST protocol to Bitcoin!
We're proud to announce our first round of open source developer grants. After an open application process, we selected three very talented developers who will each make huge contributions to Bitcoin over the next year.
brink.dev/blog/2021/03/31/gr…
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If you thought Dark Skippy was bad, wait until you see this.
One piece of advice: keep your hardware bitcoin wallets far away from Oscar Reparaz. Why? Just read the paper: “Engineering a backdoored bitcoin wallet” #woot24
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It only takes ~1 day of engineering work to implement sending to the new address type, bech32m. We need this to unleash the benefits of Taproot!
Let's get this done! #WhenTaproot
whentaproot.org
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Thanks for the feedback Alex, I'd love to chat.
Consider this: wrench attacks are on the rise, and will continue to get worse, and when we hyperbitcoinize, the problem gets extreme.
If we can't protect self-custody users from wrench attacks, then self-custody is a LARP. And if self-custody is a LARP, then so is Bitcoin.
So we must solve this problem. We have no choice.
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That’s not how property law works. The court would never issue an order to rob Peter to pay Paul, it will just require that CSW pay the USD equivalent of whatever BTC is owed.
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The current seedless solutions have issues, for sure. But let’s not pretend securing seeds is easy. It’s very hard.
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1st Amendment: crypto is speech
2nd Amendment: crypto is a munition
3rd Amendment: mandated crypto backdoors are agents of the state in the home
4th Amendment: crypto bans are an unreasonable search and seizure
5th Amendment: compelled decryption of crypto violates due process
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Banning bitcoin will prevent people from using bitcoin to roughly the same degree that banning drugs has prevented people from using drugs.
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Bitcoin isn't libertarian, it's anarchist. Its sole purpose and utility is to undermine authoritarianism.
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Cryptocurrency is religious because, as Agamben demonstrates, underlying politics is the theological-economic paradigm of oikonomia. Proof-of-work is literally liturgical; it continuously performs the glorification that legitimizes the sovereign authority of the blockchain.
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"Society will always try to tyrannize thought. Socratic rhetoric is the classic means for ever again frustrating those attempts." – Leo Strauss
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If you don't like a Bitcoin Core commit, then revert it. Run the code you want, no one is forcing you to do anything.
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We’re targeting something similar to what you’d pay for ADT, but only if you want the duress monitoring and response. You can buy the hardware without the subscription service.
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It’s risky to rely on feelings alone for that type of determination because the misperception of an attack is often caused by a lack of understanding of unintuitive details.
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Thank you @NexoFinance! 🙌
As a company that puts security at the forefront of everything we do, we’re proud to be contributing to @jesseposner’s work on the development of #Bitcoin's security and privacy.
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When code is open, data is encrypted, and computation is verified, technology serves humanity rather than enslaving it.
This is the vision that guides us at Vora: a world where your digital life belongs only to you.
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The paradox of trust: the most trustworthy brand is trustless.
The paradox of openness: the most impenetrable moat has none of its bridges drawn.
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Neither. The smart contract gives rise to a new set of legal-political-economic configurations because, for the first time in history, a contract doesn’t require a monopoly on violence to guarantee its enforcement.
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When the Fed finally panics and uses their "tools to fight inflation", the Volcker playbook, and significantly hikes interest rates, it will have a similar effect as the boron carbide control rods when Anatoly Dyatlov hit the SCRAM button at Chernobyl.
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If you think that KYC is bitcoins future then you don’t understand what adoption looks like. They will not be able to regulate it. You will be self-sovereign. The government will lose its monetary powers and that is fine. It doesn’t take away fiat but just makes it irrelevant.
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The sovereign is burdened with a corrupt power that it's unable to bear. Even Gandalf, if he puts on the ring, is going to get corrupted by it. The power to create money is the one ring and with bitcoin we're taking that ring off and we're removing a burden that the state doesn't even want. It thinks it wants it, but it doesn't actually want it. And by taking off the ring the state can become good again because it doesn't have this overwhelming corrupting temptation that is ruining it.
piped.video/watch?v=wgOtiULU…
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The future of self-custody is privacy-preserving, subpoena and seizure resistant, not susceptible to collusion, a deterrent to home invasion, insured, liquid, fully sovereign, highly secure, and easy to setup and maintain.
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Securing seeds is way harder than driving. Defending against loss, theft, 6102, and wrench simultaneously is something almost no one’s system accomplishes.
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Constitutional democracies are devolving into totalitarianism because of the institutionalization of a permanent state of exception in the name of forever wars such as the war on drugs and the war on terror.
How we fight back and win with Bitcoin 🧵👇
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Fiat currency, brought to you by "men with guns." The raison d'être for cryptocurrency unwittingly elucidated by @paulkrugman: nyti.ms/2NYYSdw.
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We have neither the right nor the power to rule over the future with a dead hand from the past. Devs cannot be restrained from publishing code and node operators will not be denied the freedom to run what they choose. Bitcoin will never ossify.
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Crypto wallets are a fundamental exercise of liberty, political speech, and freedom of association. Unlike the state’s monopoly on violence, they do not coerce or require trust in any authority. They solely have the power to bind participants to their words with math and reason.
Meanwhile, crypto wallets allow users to hold crypto outside of a crypto exchange.
And there are real concerns that lack of regulation around these anonymous crypto wallets could facilitate money laundering or terrorist financing. fincen.gov/news/news-release…
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So the reading and publishing of math equations should be subject to the messy and violent processes of social consensus and law? Just as was once done with Galileo? There is no democracy without individual rights, otherwise you are merely speaking of a tyranny of the majority.
The problem here is a subtler version of the cryptocurrency problem—being able to write code should not give you a pass from having to participate in the messy process of social consensus, put you beyond the law, or exempt you from democratic checks on concentrated power.
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Your enormous contributions to Bitcoin have left a lasting legacy. I'm incredibly grateful to have been able to work with you. Thank you for all of your amazing work, mentorship, and community building!
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Coinjoin can’t be used to make a payment though, just to mix coins because all the input/output pairs need to be the same amounts. So CISA makes coinjoins cheaper than they would be otherwise, but it doesn’t make a payment cheaper, so privacy is still the only reason to coinjoin.
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Takeaways from the SEC speech:
* The regs apply to an offering, not the token.
* Howey turns on whether an influential promoter exists at the time of an offering.
* This is a fact-based inquiry that courts are capable of determining.
A very reasonable and evenhanded approach.
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Satoshi is just the latest in a long line of rebels who refused to be anything but absolutely and utterly free.
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Bitcoin lies coiled in the heart of tyranny - like a worm. Its frozen perfection haunts the halls of power ensuring that the memory of freedom is never forgotten. It patiently waits until once again the chain is woken from the darkness and the crownless is restored to the throne.
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If you demonize Marx, but have not read him; criticize capitalism, but do not understand economics; reject Bitcoin, but cannot explicate the white paper; shun religion, but have not experienced mysticism; then you are a pawn whose voice speaks for those who seek to control you.
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We are living in a computer simulation, Elon Musk says independent.co.uk/life-style…
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“No one cares about privacy.”
I hear it all the time.
But the truth is: everyone cares.
Most have just learned to survive
by acting like they don’t.
It’s not indifference, it’s fear.
Because in the panopticon,
it’s safer to keep your eyes down.
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.@peterktodd showing the difference between 1% inflation and 0.1%
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Jurisdiction of a smart contract is best suited for agreements where a financial penalty suffices. Remedies that require injunctive relief, or pertaining to real estate or criminal justice still require the state.
This has the effect of shrinking the state, not eliminating it.
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Bless them that curse you. Do good to them that hate you. Pray for them which do you wrong.
Anyone with sympathy for SBF is scum.
He is actual human garbage who thought (and maybe still thinks) somehow he could get away with it if he wrote good tweets and looked homeless.
He incinerated billions and caused many suicides.
Let him rot.
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Vora is the American Revolution in a box. It provides citizenship in a free and liberated cyberspace. Your keys, your server, your secure hardware: the foundation for inalienable speech, property, and privacy online and a self-sovereign digital life.
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Property implies ownership and ownership depends on legal rights that are guaranteed by the state. You don’t own bitcoin; you control it, wield it, and exert absolute dominion over it.
The essence of a right is the entitlement to what is owed de jure, whereas the essence of dominion is the de facto capacity to exercise control.
Bitcoin is the power (and not the right) to bind speech (oath) without the juridical order.
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Unfortunately, none of the IETF drafts are compatible with Bitcoin because they don't incorporate BIP340 Schnorr signatures.
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A binary operation that satisfies the group axioms on a Galois field of elliptic curve points is isomorphic with law modulo consensus ad idem.
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We are not limited by what is possible. Everything that we do, and everything that we are, is literally impossible.
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The only way to survive on a bitcoin standard is to compete on fundamentals. Yield is exclusive to real productivity gains. The risk-free rate is zero.
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"Since Nature allows us to enter into fellowship with every age, why should we not turn from this paltry and fleeting span of time and surrender ourselves with all our soul to the past, which is boundless, which is eternal, which we share with our betters?" – Seneca the Younger
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“These are days when no one should rely unduly on his ‘competence.’ Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.” – Walter Benjamin
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Bitcoin’s politics is encrypted: cryptosovereignty.org/the-co…
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The ambiguity of law makes room for justice. The unambiguity of code grounds immutability. The dialectic between the two will give rise to the new polis.
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It is a misunderstanding of jurisprudence to evaluate a judge merely by the decisions they’ve made; it is the basis of their decisions–their reasoning and justifications–that have far more impact, by virtue of precedent, than the specific outcome of a single case.
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Centralized ownership of a dominant platform with network effects is the modern equivalent of operating a company town, and ceding absolute dominion of our public squares to purely private interests makes free speech a "mere shibboleth."
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Each life is encoded into a block of suffering and added to a chain of reincarnations until finally a single coin is minted: nirvana-coin. However the coin requires a signature to spend it and the private key can only be deciphered via a side-channel attack in nirvikalpa samadhi.
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All the top cryptocurrencies support Schnorr or BLS, so they all support FROST or FROST-like systems (i.e. Shamir-based MPC).
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The catch-22 of security tokens: If you build regulatory controls into the token, then it can no longer be decentralized, but if it’s not decentralized, then it doesn't have any advantages over non-tokenized financial instruments.
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I want/need an HSM vape that uses the chaotic flow of a huge hit as an entropy source for key generation.
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Cryptography is the art of turning reason against itself: it finds the limits of reason by using reason’s unique faculty for finding limits. It is the long awaited counterpoint to the
Novum Organum and the liberation of the New Atlantis.
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Amongst blockchains, there is only 1 longest proof-of-work chain; a distinction that determines the passage of the crypto mandate of heaven.
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