Co-author of the Bitcoin Optech weekly newsletter (2018-23) and the third edition of Mastering Bitcoin (2023). Brink.dev grant committee member (2022-23) and former board member (2020-22). Lives in Hilo, Hawaii. All opinions are my own.
Public Key
npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu
Profile Code
nprofile1qqsgz07wf388du08kn6xj7l3qv9fpudqk7plrp7n9xqq5nwcd9lewkg532r2n
Author Public Key
npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu Show more details
Published at
2023-04-11 19:18:55 Event JSON
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Last Notes npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding I'm jealous. npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding Yeah, I'll put that on my todo list. Gonna need a bigger home server closet. npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding I don't understand why I've haven't been able to buy a router in the past decade that just works well continuously and supports more than 4 clients. npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding Do you think using a donor directed fund would be easier? npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding Had to send the funds from my Phoenix wallet somewhere and SNI is a resource I frequently use. Can't wait to see the redesign! https://image.nostr.build/3afd2538b3564897fe6bff7136fad114846862ec1930a7949164ae5aa87d45bd.jpg npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding I don't think LN-penalty is the main problem here, as the most powerful form of the attack starts by filling channels with as many expiring HTLCs as possible, which is a problem for any channel design. The only solutions I'm aware of are (1) temporary dynamic block size increases, which only increase the cost of the attack by a small multiple, (2) some form of time stop, although that increases the risk of capital losses from the time value of money, and (3) various bond designs, although they upfront accept losses to the time value of money. npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding The attack you describe was called "forced expiration spam" in the original LN paper. I usually call it an "expiration flood". Other people have other names for it. See https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/expiration-floods/ npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding Re: testnet drama. npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding BIP63 stealth addresses also has a number but no content. The basic idea is simple but one part was problematic and there was no agreement how to work around it. BIP47 payment codes is one way (that many people don't like); proposed BIP352 silent payments is a modern take on the problem that has broader support (but still comes with tradeoffs). npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding Man, that's not what I associate the abbreviation GCC with. 🤣 npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding For not the first time, I tried to get Nostr running on my Linux desktop with Firefox and failed. The nos2x-fox extension pegs one of my cores at 100% and the Alby extension wants full access to my LN node to do anything. So, for now, it will continue to be the case that the only time I post or reply on Nostr is when I'm stuck somewhere with only my phone to entertain me. npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding Suggestions: npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding What about swap in potentiam, which can already used with Phoenix today IIUC? https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2023/12/20/#:~:text=ZmnSCPxj%20and%20Jesse%20Posner%20proposed,transaction%20while%20it%20is%20offline. npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding VanEck also donating: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.coindesk.com/business/2024/01/05/vaneck-to-donate-5-of-profits-from-btc-etf-to-bitcoin-core-developers/amp/ npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding Are you sure that's possible with MIT? npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding There's an archive here based on the public api: https://github.com/jamesob/delving-bitcoin-archive npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding What's the fundamental difference between the forum and the existing (centralized) dev mailing lists, which have worked reasonably well for over a decade? npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding Using gpt4all with "mistral openorca" which is currently on mistral 7b. I did some quick tests with a hosted version of mistral 8x7b and I was super impressed, so I'm really looking forward to getting that locally when it becomes available. npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding Usually I don't find generative AI useful for writing @npub1hku…432p newsletters. I often don't start out fully understanding the ideas we cover and so I can't tell if what the AI writes is accurate or nonsense. Writing it myself forces me to really think about it, and I can just keep iterating on my draft until it feels accurate (and then it gets peer reviewed). npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-April/020242.html npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding There's a history of discussion and implementation here: https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/anchor-outputs/ npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding I've actually bet play money on it having less than 1% at the end of the 2024: https://manifold.markets/harding/will-oceanxyz-find-1-of-the-final-1?r=aGFyZGluZw npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding That's what I thought before I moved here, now I eat spam all the time and enjoy it. npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding That's not correct. The spenders must send a signed psbt before the receiver gives them a utxo to include. If the spender bails, the receiver can broadcast the signed psbt. Although there's no benefit from the bailing, there's also no loss to either party from it. npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding I'm pleased to announce that Mastering Bitcoin (3rd edition), co-authored by @aantonop and myself, has been sent to the printer. Ebooks should be available around Nov 15th. Print books should be available by early December. npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding I hope so. npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding Chapter 10 of Mastering Bitcoin (3rd edition) has now been sent to my editor. This chapter is about the P2P network. Major additions include BIP152 compact block relay and BIP157/8 compact block filters. npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding Just tried Bard and there was misinformation in every answer it gave me. ChatGPT gets lots of stuff wrong too, but I think Bard is about an order of magnitude worse. Unless my anecdotal experience is non-typical, I'm amazed Google is encouraging people to use this thing.---it just makes me think that Google is losing it. npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding Left a reply about what I think might be the issue: https://github.com/JoinMarket-Org/joinmarket-clientserver/issues/1465#issuecomment-1546706665 npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding Status update #2 on Mastering Bitcoin, 3rd edition: I sent my editor the first draft of Chapter 9 about transaction fees. This chapter consists of 90% new material. It describes the basic principles of Bitcoin's fee (block space) market, fee estimation, fee bumping (both CPFP and RBF, with a infobox about opt-in RBF vs full RBF), transaction pinning, CPFP carve out, and package relay. Sections from the previous edition's Transactions chapter about fees being implicit in a transaction and (anti) fee sniping are moved to this chapter. npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding What prevents an image server from adding an identical-appearing watermark to an alternative image? npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding I'm not a "screw you" kinda guy, so when I couldn't write short, I usually wrote nothing at all. Sometimes, in retrospect, that was a good call, but it other cases it just meant that misinformation stayed out there or it received a "screw you" or other unhelpful response from someone else. npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding Unfortunately, with stock BIP158, you can't avoid monitoring for reused addresses until you've spent all the coins you want to spend that you previously received to those addresses. That's because BIP158 "basic" filters use the output scriptPubKey to track both receiving bitcoins and spending them. npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding It depends a lot on the threat model. Let's consider two scenarios: npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding I disagree about there not being any privacy benefit. Every Wasabi instance that's paired with a local node performs exactly the same non-coinjoin/non-broadcasting network operations, making it impossible to use network activity to determine which instance received which transaction outputs. (This is called information theoretic perfect privacy.) npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding What's anti-klepto? npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding Want? Yes. Should? Probably not. Keeping on top of Bitcoin and LN is already more than full time some weeks (including this week, alas). npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding I'd definitely read that. npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding I think that's kind of an interesting dynamic. One one hand, if you have >50% of hash rate in the US, then you have a ~$5 billion/yr industry that at least some politicians are going to want to keep happy. On the other hand, if the censorship is egregious, either the value of BTC is going to drop (contracting the industry) or some users are going to switch to a new PoW function (possibly decimating the industry). It's kind of the same dynamic you get from regulating industry in general, e.g. raising local minimum wage, but the feedback loop in Bitcoin is currently much faster than most industries, so the same politician who's in power when the problem is created is likely to still be in power when the problem manifests. npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding ❤❤❤ npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding I had the same thought when reading that book, although I rather enjoyed the rest. But during the Money chapter, I was thinking, "nah, I like Szabo's theory way better". npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu David A. Harding Status update on Mastering Bitcoin, 3rd edition: yesterday I sent my editor the first draft of Chapter 8 about digital signatures. In addition to small revisions from the second edition about ECDSA and sighashes, the draft now describes schnorr signatures, scriptless multisignatures, and scriptless threshold signatures. Plus there's now a description of the major differences between ECDSA and schnorr signatures. If I finish the remaining 6 chapters early, I hope to come back and add some information about signature adaptors.
