Anthony Towns
@ajtowns
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Greg Maxwell's explanation on why he's not on Twitter goes pretty deep, and makes some good critical points about the pitfalls of (purposefully) limited communication space:.
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@r32a_ @lightning For what it's worth, I also noticed this bug and disclosed it to @roasbeef about two weeks ago. The btcd repo doesn't seem to have a reporting policy for security bugs, so not sure if anyone else working on btcd found out about it.
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I wrote a blog post the other week to try to clarify my thoughts on bitcoin. Hopefully now is a good opportunity to move the conversation back to improving and replacing banks rather than getting rich off trading pictures of rocks.
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You know, if you'd subscribe to RSS feeds like your forefathers did, I wouldn't have to make these tweets.
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CTV has been active in signet for over a year; killer apps demoed: 0.
CTV activation clients planned release time around jan 10, 2024. we gonna #UASF this bitch!.
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How to admit that you lost the debate to everyone but yourself. .
@midmagic @danielwingen @hasufl All I can say is that I am extremely disappointed in you and everyone who likes these comment. The truth is so obvious and I am honestly not going to waste my time explaining why to you. This is not worth my time, sorry.
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@DrEliDavid @_k3tan He was kicked out for being too rowdy, climbed a fence to get back in and poured himself a beer. It wasn't about just not wearing a mask. The guard was fired. Didn't find anything about being charged or not.
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"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.".
I still find it hard to believe we’re getting #Taproot without a war. Feels too easy, but I’ll take it. Remember to upgrade your nodes.
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Seeing a bunch of people saying taproot activates soon. It doesn't: it will almost certainly lock in soon, but won't activate for another 22 weeks or so due to the minimum activation height setting. Trying to use taproot before it activates risks losing funds.
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Taproot being priced in means (a) people didn't expect a disaster, (b) there wasn't a disaster, (c) there weren't unannounced bonuses that had somehow been secret. All those are Good for Bitcoin. (Might be a bit soon to be sure they're all true, hopefully not a jinx at least).
Taproot is priced in . Sorry.
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Miners should be able to add transactions to blocks which haven't been propagated by the network of nodes: that ensures that if the p2p network is attempting to censor transactions, that attack can be mitigated simply by the victims investing in their own hashpower.
Miners should not be able to add transactions to blocks which haven't been propagated by the network of nodes. It's an attack vector and it needs to be closed, I expect that it will be at some stage.
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Wrote up my thoughts on how to prioritise Bitcoin things for the next while.
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Tell me you hate bitcoin without telling me you hate bitcoin.
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SEC sues Coi**ase. But who's really to blame? That's right, it's the maxis.
If you're somewhat new to the space and you're wondering why self-professed Bitcoiners today cheered on SEC attacks against the two most important Bitcoin companies of all time, Coinbase and Binance, let me explain. There's "people who use Bitcoin" aka Bitcoiners (the vast.
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This is a great response, with a clear-headed explanation of the technical basis of why they disagree with some of the criticisms, how they've already been aiming to address other aspects, and how their thinking is evolving. A+.
@ajtowns Thanks for your article. We've written a response here.
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AI says if you invest in bitcoin you'll lose your shirt.
I asked GPT-4 to show me the average Bitcoin and Ethereum owner. The results are astounding.
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"What do we want?"."LOW TIME PREFERENCE"."When do we want it?"."NOW!!".
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Hmm nostr really seems like it has way more potential than mastodon.
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Job requirements: "Familiarity with emerging Bitcoin features, such as BIP 340/341/342/350 (Taproot/Schnorr/bech32m) and Lightning" --
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Tweaking @LukeDashjr 's taproot-support javascript gives: 50% of nodes supporting taproot, 10% running 0.21.0 who could easily upgrade, 11% running 0.20.x or 0.19.x, 28% running unsupported software (0.13.1-0.18.x), and another 1% running random stuff.
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Time for "ordinal disrespector 2.0" which swaps out any sigless inputs being spent into a single op_return output that sends everything to fees. Should be profitable for miners to run it, and reduces utxo set expansion.
MEV on bitcoin has arrived and it’s stupid af (*any* miner can steal your coins if they know to look for it).
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Will @ocean_mining support opting in to alternative block templates prior to allowing users to generate their own (eg 300kB blocks, inscription/bare multisig spam trimming, fullrbf/nofullrbf, tx acceleration via oob fees)?.
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Guess we've at least got an easy answer for when people ask why a "speedy" trial in bitcoin will take 6+ months to have a result even if successful.
It appears that there is a consensus error at block 12244294. And as far as we know it only affects Openethereum Nodes, the core devs are diagnosing the root cause.
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Satoshi: "reckless", "lazy"; bitcoiners: "irrational". But sure, it's the people who aren't into altcoins that are the toxic ones.
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Hey, that's the excuse I was waiting for in order to come out of the closet as working on bitcoin @Xapo now. For reader's with a pre-twitter attention span:
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Bitcoin is open source and widely scrutinised, yet even then people make really egregious mistakes analysing it - For things that are more complicated than bitcoin and less scrutinised? Good luck. You'll need it.
This is THE affinity scam. Drawing an equivalence between turing complete, impossible to audit, pre-mined opaque nonsense to bitcoin because they all happen to be open source.
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@r32a_ @lightning @roasbeef It's probably worth noting that this bug needs cooperation by a miner to exploit - unlike the previous bug, nodes will normally reject txs that use that many txs (eg due to using an OP_SUCCESS or being more than 100kvB), so it's not something anyone can just trigger.
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Apparently @nic__carter is now the boss of everyone. If you want a raise or more vacation days, @ him.
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I like R&D, and I like bitcoin, so the whole "bitcoin is dead for development" thing annoys and frustrates me, but I don't think it makes sense to think that we should just do things the way they were done five or ten years ago either.
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"High time preference": giving devs a month to analyse a problem and release a fix."Low time preference": don't notify devs, just immediately demo on mainnet, crashing every node, requiring every user to do an emergency update. Language evolves in such fascinating ways.
As a Bitcoin wizard, I've recently discovered the dark side. I summoned the law of chaos theory in the name of darkness to guard the balance. Responsible CVE is weak magic, and it only harms the balance. May god prevail low time preference.
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Is there anything about ordinal inscriptions that can't just be done via a nostr message with 0 on chain footprint? Choose a sat locked into a taproot, p2wpkh or p2pkh address. Post a nostr message signed by the (internal) pubkey, tagged with the txid and ordinal and inscription.
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Wow. This is somehow even worse than you'd expect. Instead of setting up a centralised authority, it's "if miners decide to confiscate anyone's funds, they can". Requires a 50% attack for 6-blocks, but that's cheap on bsv. Get out now.
Looks like BSV is (finally) setting up the ability to steal random coins so they can dump them on the market to keep the scam going. Definitely time to get out.
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Okay, am I going mad or did @instagibbs implement eltoo/ln-symmetry then never actually tell anyone about it? The only thing pointing at the code that I can find is
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Why's that interesting? Main reason is that Liquid's taproot activation includes a bunch of additional opcodes that can be used for covenants/automated market making/vaulting etc.
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This is an interesting thing to think about. Here's my take. There's two fundamental choices if you want a truly passive investment: own money and sit on it, or own capital (equipment, land, etc) and sit on it.
@JackRonaldi @brockm @willwilkinson @allenf32 @sacha_meyers If you can earn a positive return on money over time, society is literally just paying you to sit there and hoard cash and do nothing. Only investing in productive assets should give you a positive return in the long run.
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Huh, Chia recently hard forked because improvements in GPU implementations of proof-of-space was turning it into proof-of-work.
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Excellent piece of performance art on why LN is still in beta.
Time for me to crawl to the cross and admit DEFEAT on the Ethereum L2 vs. Bitcoin LN bet I made vs. @RyanTheGentry & @giacomozucco in September last year. Bet amount: 2x$1000. Data thread & how I lost 👇.
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"We can hope . miners will actually enforce the taproot rules they signaled preparedness for six months ago.". Signalling is encouraged until the rules actually activate (and bitcoin core defaults to doing so). About 95% of hashrate is doing this at the moment.
At block 709,631 nearly all nodes will be enforcing the same consensus rules. One block later, nodes running Bitcoin Core 0.21.1, 22.0, or related releases will be enforcing additional taproot rules not enforced by earlier releases. This carries a risk.
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@LukeDashjr @brian_trollz Say there's $82B of USD tether on the chain. And a hard fork to 10x the block size. Tether announces they'll follow the hardfork. Any smart contacts (lightning channels, DLCs, market makers) using tether utxos are forced to accept the hard fork, and fees and miners follow.
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Samson's hot takes are often (entertaining) garbage, but "first we fix the money" is why I'm here - the easiest way to get paid for doing good stuff shouldn't involve a megacorp taking 30% off the top, or selling your soul for a tiny cut of their advertising revenue.
Over the next few decades we’re going to need to fix the internet, develop mass market privacy focused hardware (phones and computers), and make serverless communications protocols the norm. But first we fix the money, which will enable us to fix the rest. #Bitcoin.
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So, El Salvador's govt wallet will be @ln_strike based, so every merchant in the country will be accepting lightning transactions. Be interesting to see if lightning's reliable enough for that; certainly txs between a centralised/custodial govt wallet should be, though.
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"the biggest obstacles to building on LN is actually other LN people". Money transmitter laws, bugs, btc volatility, bootstrapping adoption, scammers and altcoiners? All trivial compared to the everpresent horrors of other LN people.
One of the biggest obstacles to building on LN is actually other LN people who'll fight you. They'll fight you because you threaten their governance plans, their business model, their personal ideology, their personal prestige. They can't stop you but they'll be hard to tune out.
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This isn't true. The fees you receive from a full block depends only on the fee rate in sats per vbyte, not on the split between witness and non-witness bytes.
because of the segwit discount, a block full of payments is more profitable to mine than a block full of inscriptions. In a scenario where blockspace is in demand, the economically rational miner will prefer to mine payments over inscriptions that pay the same fee rate.
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Print it out, frame it, title it "Opsec".
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@JeremyRubin @adam3us Except for quibbling on the word choice, I do agree with @adam3us here - I think having a better understanding of the solution space here is the thing to work on, rather than getting something deployed on bitcoin asap.
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$ elements-cli getblockchaininfo | jq '.softforks.taproot | (.active,.height)'.true.1663200.$ elements-cli getblockchaininfo | jq .blocks.1663450. As of a few hours ago, Taproot's active on Liquid network! @Liquid_BTC .
$ elements-cli getblockchaininfo | jq .softforks.taproot.bip9.status."locked_in".
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It's mentioned in the post, but credit to @brian_trollz for making me aware the ptlcs have immediate practical benefits thanks to adaptor sigs, and the previous work by Zman and @LLFOURN that made the proposal a much bigger improvement than I was expecting.
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@GuerillaV2 @gladstein @mempool For a pool with 31% hashrate you expect this to happen once every 10 weeks or so on average.
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It's not the length of the chain, it's the passion in the hashin'.
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I think the various multi-asset blockchains out there are interesting, and since Liquid shares so much with Bitcoin, it's the easiest for me to make sense of, and, therefore, criticise: 💙.
#ElementsCore is the foundation of @Liquid_BTC. The latest version of Elements was just released, v0.21, including a timeline for Taproot activation on Liquid and introducing new opcodes that extend Liquid's scripting capabilities. 🌊
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@TheBlueMatt Why would the definition of bitcoin maximalism focus on things outside of bitcoin?. Bitcoin maximalism:.1) bitcoin can take over money.2) bitcoin should take over everything.3) I don't have mental capacity for things other than bitcoin. 1 and a bit of 3 for me.
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I think this is the difference between treating bitcoin as an experimental research project vs something important to preserve. In 2013, if you deployed a new feature that destroyed bitcoin; people would have lost maybe $1.5B in total. In 2015, maybe $6B. 2018, $160B; 2022 $350B.
@BitMEXResearch @hasufl I don’t know. It used to feel like we were part of some kind of intellectual center. Did it change or did I change? There are a lot of things I can point to that suggest it actually changed, a lot.
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@Excellion Yeah, but look how slowly it's going! That's responsible economic management of I've ever seen it!.
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Pretty pleased that the taproot review stuff made it into today's optech newsletter!.
Bitcoin Optech newsletter #69 is here:. - invites participation in a structured taproot proposal review.- highlights updates to two Bitcoin wallets.- requests C-Lightning & Bitcoin Core RC testing.- lists changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.
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It's like a podcast, but for the hearing impaired. Lacks a TLDR, so perhaps not great for the patience impaired, though you could try scrolling to the bottom, I guess?.
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Hopefully the D&D reference is just the playful metaphor it's intended as.
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Huh, if your lowest denomination is one cent ($0.01), then a 32-bit signed int can represent up to just over $21,000,000. Maybe that's how the magic number arose, and then 6 extra significant figures got added on later, along with the bump to 64-bit signed ints?.
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Oops, the mempool cleared, time to pivot to claiming "bitcoin doesn't use enough energy".
Took a quick look at Bitcoin's security spend. In short, it's not looking good. "Fees will replace block rewards" is completely not the case so far. What we instead see is diminishing security over time, surprisingly consistently. This makes Bitcoin vulnerable 🧵 (short)
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@reardencode @JeremyRubin That's the burden of proposing a change: you have to do the work even though you're not guaranteed to succeed. "Why should we adopt a change if we're not confident that anyone will actually build anything useful using it?".
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I guess it's time to follow Knots' lead and set `permitbaremultisig=0`.
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Nice to see liquid used for trying out complicated new consensus behaviours.
Introducing Bitmatrix - a constant product market maker built on @Liquid_BTC .
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@theinstagibbs Some that haven't been listed: (1) taproot (hw) wallet support -- you said any level of development, right? (2) lightning PTLCs (3) @bitmatrix_ covenant-based liquidity provider on liquid (4) dandelion, eltoo, pkg relay (5) multiprocess bitcoind (6) muhash, utreexo, etc.
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Wow, new supply chain attack vector just dropped, I guess?.
This is some absolutely crazy sounding tech: Apple might be adding a device to stores that can turn iPhones on *in the box*, update their software and turn them off again (via @markgurman)
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@callebtc @pierregild Excluding transactions from your mempool shouldn't break fee estimation with core/knots. If it did, soft forks like taproot or segwit would break fee estimation for non upgraded nodes (which will exclude the new txes from their mempool).
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This one aged well. .
Volumes are thin. That means the market can have huge moves up or down easily. Given that we had a big move down already, and everyone is buying like no tomorrow, I’d say the next move is up. 🚀.
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@wbobeirne Just wait until we rename 1 btc as 1 megabit and measure lightning routing performance in megabits/ second.
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We should be hoping pools/miners will take the time to test new software first (even if they've already done some testing during the rc phase), especially when rushing it won't get new feature enabled on the network any sooner. Move slow and don't break things.
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@TheBlueMatt That scams should be fought (uncovered, discouraged, whatever) is a separate moral imperative.
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