paul.ninja

This is a clever system and the write-up is fun to read, but I think you're solving a very narrow threat model while making the common failure modes worse. From an attacker's point of view, your cipher numbers are just…

Great follow-up and nice demo with Core. Yes, segwit v0 ignores CODESEPARATOR in the sighash, so you can sign the P2WSH witnessScript with Core and assemble the witness stack afterward. That path is workable. I'd…

Neat trick and there's a few caveats imo, This is not a drop-in P2WPKH Segwit v0 ignores OP_CODESEPARATOR in the sighash. Changing the script changes the digest. You cannot reuse a plain P2WPKH signer; you need custom…

My main gripe is with the word "stable" is that with no peg to an external unit (USD, CPI, whatever), cBTC is really just a different BTC tranche, not a stable asset. If 1 cBTC is redeemable for 0.3 BTC, then when BTC…

The merge was one of the few times crypto actually did the hard engineering first and the marketing second, so it's a bit depressing to see an old technical milestone thread revived with what is basically a step-counter…

What AI can change is demand and the unit you're measuring in. If AI drives costs down across the economy, then one BTC might buy more real stuff even if the fiat price chops around. Also, in a world where everything…

The nasty part is the composability. Echo's eBTC got minted out of thin air, Curvance accepted it as collateral, and the attacker borrowed real WBTC against fake BTC-paper. Curvance's contracts can behave exactly as…

I skimmed the writeup and the repo, and the core idea is actually pretty clean, it seems you're not inventing a new data dumpster, but that you're basically giving indexers a cheap "hey, look here" flag by packing a…

Your numbers look like you were really benchmarking against a 10-hex-zero vanity condition, not the actual genesis difficulty target from bits=1d00ffff. Those are very different beasts. Difficulty-1 target is roughly a…

The DAA's "clock" is the chain's own block timestamps, with guardrails. The period is every 2016 blocks (not "every two weeks"). TargetTimespan = 2016 * 600 = 1 209 600 seconds. The clock source is header nTime values.…

Before Bitcoin, digital meant abundant by default. Copy paste was basically the law of physics online. Then Bitcoin came along and said, "What if one specific digital thing could be transferred, verified by anyone, and…

"Auto-reset by coinbase/message" is a consensus footgun. You'll create partitions the first time a miner accidentally (or maliciously) trips the trigger. If you want clean slates without drama, I would advise to use…

If you don't have the seed phrase, your only real lifeline is that the encrypted vault is still sitting in the Chrome profile somewhere and the UI is just face-planting before it can render. So treat that browser…

I don't think Bitcoin fails because the average person can't recite monetary history off the top of their heads. Most people outsource everything that isn't immediately on fire, and money is usually invisible until it…

Airgapped does not mean "immune", it means you moved the attack surface somewhere less convenient. A proper airgap kills a lot of lazy remote attack paths, but the moment you move data in or out with USB, SD card, QR…

Yes. They change the nonce first, but the nonce is only 32 bits, so modern miners exhaust that very quickly. After that they usually change the coinbase transaction through an extraNonce, which changes the Merkle root…

My read is that builders do not seriously ship until the target stops moving. You can prototype covenant ideas forever, but nobody sane wants to build production wallet infrastructure, recovery flows, vault UX,…

Covenants are probably more useful than a lot of people give them credit for, especially for stuff like vaults, congestion control, batching tricks, timeout trees, and making some of the ugly wallet/security stuff less…

You mean he's going to meet us at the AirbnB and attack us with a $5 wrench?

I've seen a lot of these "old drive, mystery wallet" cases. First, a reality check: there was no "Qt5 Bitcoin" in 2010. Early GUI builds used Qt4, and the really early client didn't use Qt at all. DNS seeds also came…