The Lightning Network is not patented.
Source: Invented it w/ @jcp, and it's free to use, modify, improve.
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I’m excited to share today that I’m joining the @Lightspark team to work on building out Bitcoin and LN to be even more powerful forms of money and payments. #Lightspark #Bitcoin #LightningNetwork
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I wore a bitcoin core t-shirt today at #Bitcoin2022 (along w/ @achow101). Quite a few people asked, "What's bitcoin core?"
It's... bitcoin. I guess people added "core" because it was confusing.
"So you work for Bitcoin Core?"
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So signal is putting some kind of coin in the client. I took a look at their "whitepaper". It's 141 pages of, umm...
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Why the excitement for "Digital Identity"? Bitcoin's strength is we can pay / be paid and not care about people's names or "identities".
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A few months ago, I read about @Lightspark, a new company whose goal is to “explore, build and extend the capabilities and utility of Bitcoin.”
“Huh.” I thought, “That’s also been my goal for the last decade or so.”
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Really frustrating to see laser-eyesers applauding an attack on mainnet LND.
Sure, fixing bugs makes bitcoin stronger. Sure, it's the currency of enemies.
But bitcoin and LN are not magically invincible / inevitable. Attacks don't help.
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I've posted Utreexo, a new paper about bitcoin scalability, to IACR ePrint. ia.cr/2019/611
Thanks to those who helped with this work and looking forward to criticisms and getting and implementation running.
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Just released v0.1 of utreexo software & wrote about it here: medium.com/mit-media-lab-dig…
take a look, test it out, and write some crash reports :)
It's been great working with the other utreexo developers so far & looking forward to more people working on it!
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The problem with scams isn't even the scams.
It's that you start thinking real things are scams, and start thinking scams are real.
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Pay no heed to those who define Bitcoin as "the chain with the most work, whatever the rules", as they are just along for the ride.
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Their PDF: 950886 bytes
Your tweet: 86 bytes
99.99% lossless compression ratio. Your weissman score is off the charts.
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A time between blocks of 85 minutes happens every 34 days or so (assuming no difficulty changes, etc)
>>> (1/math.exp(-85/10))/144
34.13033916874399
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None of these people were dumb. They'd just never heard of it. Some of the people I explained it to wanted to download it. Some wanted to start help coding it.
Hopefully this helps.
Huge conference, so many people... but really it's all just a program you run on your computer.
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Here's the "user-vs-miner Bitcoin compromise" (UVMSF):
Do what we want and we'll let you keep sha256.
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"verges"?? Nah this is straight up malware, trying to trick people into installing software which will result in financial loss.
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This isn't just about threatening bitcoin; this is threatening all open source software, one of the most amazing and useful (and free!) ideas of the last few decades.
laanwj.github.io/2023/02/06/…
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So sounds like the libbitcoin guy thinks that
head -c 32 /dev/urandom | sha256sum
and
date +%s%N | sha256sum
are the same thing. And changing the former to the latter in wallet key generation code is cool.
Stay far, far away.
This is not true. Reliance on the OS RNG is generally secure. All private keys in bitcoind / bitcoin-qt (and basically every other wallet) have always used the OS RNG.
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New post about the progress of utreexo, with myself @kcalvinalvinn and @dergoegge. Getting towards full nodes with no DB.
medium.com/mit-media-lab-dig…
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Blog post about the alpha release of lit, the lightning network software I'm working on at MIT DCI
medium.com/mit-media-lab-dig…
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Giving a talk at #crypto2018 in ~an hour. New stuff, will be fun!
Before going, I've had to tell a couple people they've been doing this conference since 1981. #CryptoMeansCryptography
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People at MIT who are interested in this stuff! I'm teaching a class with @neha: github.com/mit-dci/mas.s62
Mondays & Wednesdays at 10AM.
People interested but not around here:
There will be videos (though probably not live); problem sets also public.
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Uhhh... is this a new monthly (in expectation) column from coindesk?
coindesk.com/business/2022/1…
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Shoutout to @tabconf for a really cool conference; was great to meet lots of people in ultra-low-latency spatial multiplexing!
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They've been distracting you with meaningless op_return and sats drama.
Meanwhile, the elite core devs have pushed through a consensus hard fork, already fully ACK'd and merged into master.
Wake up, sheeple!
github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/p…
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My video studio setup for the messari #mainnet2020 conference. Pretty different from a stage in a big hotel conference room.
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Problem here: sha-256 is a cryptographic hash function, preventing professor Green from understanding the answer.
I suggest use of a collision-friendly non cryptographic hash function, if a suitable one can be found.
SHA-256 hash of the answer is 9a5cefc2aea372f1625a6cf49874ff39baf90f0238ce54d6b73afc0aceb60637.
So? Will you comment on that summary?
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MIT Bitcoin Expo Airdrop: everyone gets their ticket cost refunded. Fun!
Also I'm speaking here in 45 min. I should finish my slides :)
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I'm thinking more and more that it's got to be intentional. It is absolutely trivial to build a seed generator into a wallet:
cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'A-Z9' | fold -w 81 | head -n 1
done.
It's past Hanlon's razor for me; I assume malice.
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"needs to be" sounds like it needs new code, but it doesn't.
Just set minrelaytxfee=0.00000100 in bitconf.conf to reduce your node's minimum relay fee to 0.1sat/vb.
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TIL:
I'm ded ☠️
This guy's fixing LN "design errors"
With Lightning 1.1 we will be taking a big step away from 1.0. Interestingly there’s a parallel to Bitcoin history where the protocol has outlived its creator and now has a life of its own. As we fix key original design errors, no one is making specious claims to original vision.
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hubris.media.mit.edu/bitcoin…
This machine serves 2 or 3 TB of bitcoin blocks a month, so serving another ubiquitous piece of data should be no problem
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It's been awesome working with everyone at the @mitDCI for these years, and I look forward to collaborating with the great students and researchers there in the future!
dci.mit.edu/research/2022/8/…
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First* block where fees exceed new coins?
mempool.space/block/00000000…
(not quite how I thought this would happen)
* where the fee wasn't a wallet error on a single tx
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Coworkers argued for the existence of people unaware that tether is a scam. Seems obvious enough but I'll say again: tether is a scam. "USDT" will be worthless much sooner than USDs or BTCs will.
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Sympathies and long-overdue congratulations to all the great folks who have been attacked by faketoshi.
We're finally in the "grind extremely fine" phase.
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Yeah, probably. It's more to inform people who might read this it and not know what's true, than to convince someone to stop spreading falsehoods.
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I read it at 1 am, often gesticulating in frustration at the monitor. I wasn't aware of bitcoin in 2009, but I have to imagine it was pretty different as *it wasn't worth money*.
There's probably an interesting paper to be had digging through early bitcointalk. This isn't it.
unpublished paper uses extranonces to attribute early miners. finds that certain agents had lots of hashpower in 2009/10, especially early GPU miners. some miners could have attacked network but didnt.
NYT: "BTC isn't anonymous! decentralization theater!"
archive.ph/fqMp3
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Just pre-mine a whole bunch of it, like 15%, or 75%, or heck all of it. Then nobody will ever assign it a real world value!
...right?
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My favo(u)rite line in this trial so far:
"Try."
G: [shows Wright witness statement] You say you've done all you can to build in versioning etc. You say BTC has limited size of script, gives little ability to add data. It refers to a GitHub page. [shows page] Declaring constant int MAX_SCRIPT_ELEMENT_SIZE. Do you know what unsigned means?
W: Basically an unsigned variable, it's not an integer with … it's larger, I'm not sure how to say it.
G: Try.
W: How I'd describe it, I'm not quite sure. I'm not good with trying to do things like this.
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Found via user dethos on HN - the whole paper is just a copy / paste of web.getmonero.org/library/Ze… which explains monero for beginners (though not sure how successfully) and describing XOR makes some sense in the original context.
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Taproot is annoyingly clever. "Oh I totally could have thought of that!" ... yeah but I didn't, and nobody else did either. (Well Greg just did.)
And so similar to the pay-to-contract-hash stuff which also seems easy once someone else figures it out :)
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Individually boxed slices of bread.
And they said bitcoin was wasteful.
(oh wait...)
#Bitcoin2022
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"We've been longing for approval from heads of states and billionaires for so long, but today we finally know it was all worth it!" said one cyber-coin enthusiast when asked about recent events.
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When to use the Blockchain:
When you trust 'em about what,
but think they're lying about when.
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Not your keys, not your... stocks?
Does make you appreciate being able to really own something.
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Attacks, fighting, trolling, misinformation - I'll deal with it.
It's super cringey stuff like this that makes me want to find another line of work.
(Don't worry, they'll need a lot more of this to stop me :)
nytimes.com/2018/01/13/style…
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innovation
noun
Efforts of large, established corporations to maintain dominance by co-opting startups and technologies
#consensus2017
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Howeycoin is the only ICO I'll endorse. It's blockchain 7.0.
howeycoins.com
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Congrats to Calvin & @BitMEXResearch! Look forward to working on Utreexo & getting it usable for lots of new compact full nodes!
[1/3] 100x Group is delighted to announce that it has awarded a US$40,000 one-year grant to Utreexo researcher & developer Calvin Kim. Calvin was instrumental in the development of the first demonstration release of Utreexo
blog.bitmex.com/bitcoin-deve…
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Overlooked environmental / existential benefit of PoW:
Each TSMC wafer etched with SHA256d ASICs is one fewer floating point AI wafer for the paperclip hypnodrone singleton.
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The real-world/Bitcoin boundary layer continues to confound:
At 2024's largest Bitcoin conference, they wouldn't let me bring a laptop.
...and "they" were the United States Secret Service.
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self-promotion: coindesk has an article about me. I haven't read it yet so hopefully it says nice things :)
coindesk.com/bitcoin-at-10#f…
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Blockchain-y conference panel in Taiwan moderated by some guy who's doing an ICO to build bcash ICOs.
Politely decline, or go? Give ICOers the stage to themselves, or possibly give them more attention by participating?
Asking for a friend.
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The whole idea doesn't make sense anyway. If you can get everyone to agree on which txs are propagated without mining then mining doesn't add anything and just wastes electricity.
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UTXO data lives in both ~/.bitcoin/chainstate and ~/.bitcoin/blocks; witness data lives only in ~/.bitcoin/blocks.
Chainstate is a DB and lots of I/O; blocks are flat files with little to no I/O.
Witness data is cheaper to deal with so makes sense for it to be cheaper to create.
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Basically me reading it. But at home at night in front of my computer instead of on a cool spaceship.
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I know that BIP34 ensures that every coinbase is different, but didn't know the company implemented it as well.
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Blockchain "Acceptable Depth"
"Oh no, some werido is banging on my door! Lock it!"
"Yikes, now there's 5 weirdos out there! Let them in."
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Ooh, let me try a en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded… too
Poll: Has YourBTCC stopped being insolvent?
82%
Nope, still insolvent.
18%
Yup! Solvent now! :)
157 votes • Final results
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I'm sheltering in this place for a while, in an abundance of snow and trees.
And a bit of what everyone else seems to have abundances of right now.
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Sipa's assertion that "you can't expect an unspent UTXO [sic] for every human in the world" - there's the *real* scaling debate.
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gg
BREAKING:
Bitcoin developers demolish #Faketoshi in Pineapple Hack lawsuit: Wright is defeated in jurisdiction challenge.
"it is not realistically arguable that the pleaded facts amount to a fiduciary relationship"
I'll go find more quotes, hold on.
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And yes this is described in the paper (page 5). So this isn't the signalcoin paper; guess there isn't one.
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Have been in Korea the last few days; nice place.
Have not encountered a single wifi captive portal.
Hard to recognize the annoying things you've become desensitized to until they're gone :)
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I wrote a bech32 segwit address library in golang:
github.com/adiabat/bech32
seems to work OK. Comments / suggestions welcome!
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I guess I'm not in the overwhelming consensus. I much prefer op_ctv to op_cat. To me op_ctv being limited is a feature, and op_cat's ability to do ~maybe ~anything in a super complex way is not.
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860
Yup! Scary as there are currently no checks of what address you can send *to*. Totally new code needed in LN to prevent this.
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Check out @kcalvinalvinn 's explainer of utreexo (medium.com/@kcalvinalvinn/el…) - also ask questions on reddit (teddit.net/r/Bitcoin/com…) and we'll explain more!
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This is not true. Reliance on the OS RNG is generally secure. All private keys in bitcoind / bitcoin-qt (and basically every other wallet) have always used the OS RNG.
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37,353
$9 for OJ at Rosewood breakfast. Welcome back to good ol' Silicon Valley.
(note to self: study menus carefully before ordering anything)
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Utreexo works, people can run it today. The part that hasn't happened is getting it merged into bitcoin core: tricky as it touches a whole lot of code.
Maybe it's better for it to be it's own node software. Or maybe we want it in core, who knows.
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Actually looking at the code it's even worse than that, it's more like
date +%N | mt19937
(only 4 bytes from system time, not using a hash function)
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5,001
It does look cool in general, but nip04 is broken in several ways. (non-uniform AES key, CBC with no MAC instead of GCM)
Guess I should make an issue...
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Used mini desktops with 6500T CPUs are like $50 on ebay and work great.
Agreed - Raspberry Pis are great for GPIO stuff but not for normal computer stuff.
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These systems aren't anti-fragile on their own: it's people in front of their computer fixing bugs.
And you get better bug fixes when those people have time to review vs writing an emergency fix while everyone is screaming at them.
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Technically neither the social hour nor the women are *in* the blockchain; only hashes thereof.
Come join us for a Women in Blockchain social hour Feb 10! meetup.com/Women-in-Blockcha…
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A good explanation by @FelixWeis is here bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/…
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Fun fact about these outputs: They're unspendable even without the OP_RETURN opcode because they're more than 10KB.
So the OP_RETURN opcode here *really* wastes space!
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I put minrelaytxfee=0.00000001 in bitcoin.conf
If a decent portion of nodes do this, sub 1sat/vB txs will propagate.
But hopefully it won't matter since there will be higher fees.
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Great post, agree with like ~90% of this. The current process does seem to either ossify or cede development to well-funded organizations. I really don't want the Jia Tans of the world to be the ones with the persistence to change Bitcoin
1/3
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884
Also, while the saying "If you're not embarrassed by the first version, you've posted too late" may be true, a paper can be both posted much too late, and still cause for some embarrassment! :P
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Many use cases have already been priced out of the market. Gentrification of the blockchain continues.
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Also LN is pretty cool! (obviously biased :) )
But yeah LN helps scale payments, not ownership.
If the #1 use case of Bitcoin is keep a BIP39 phrase with some coins on it for years at a time, the opcodes we're looking at don't really help.
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New bitcoin.conf settings!
Testing out the Sayre's law inverse correlation. And perhaps the bike-shed effect as well.
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.@CleanUpBitcoin
wen polo? Looking forward to selling your forked coins for regular bitcoins. Still got some splitting code from 2017.
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Manhattan is overcrowded, people are being priced out of apartments! We need to raise the blocksize.
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