waxwing @waxwing@x0f.org

Triggered by a recent payment reversal need, I had to use sign/verify message today, and was surprised that p2wpkh in Core is not supported for verify side (i.e. address is someone else's wallet). First, am I right about that, second, why? It's no different from p2pkh is it? You just use pubkey recovery and then go from there to the address ..? Why isn't that straightforward? I see it's working in Electrum e.g.

#bitcoin

... has the problem that they can't understand it, it's even more impenetrable than Bitcoin. If they got over the skeptical view and tried out some of the apps they might be pleasantly surprised nowadays how easy it is to use (well, but I always say that :) ).
My main point is that it is a highly imperfect system but I think people trying to move money around will eventually figure out how to use it, and that will matter, *somehow*.

Maybe it'll just stagnate. My intuition says otherwise. (3/3?)

A reason I think it's even worth expressing this opinion: I found it notable over the last two years, how many well known Bitcoin advocates really see it as not realistic, or at least, a speculative "out there" technology.

The top engineers will tell you it has problems that need fixing; they're right, but they always say that: Bitcoin devs say the same thing, 12 years in.

The skeptics laugh at it saying no one uses it, and also that it doesn't work technically.

The average person ...
(2/n)

Awesome seeing a few hundred k sats routed through one of my lightning nodes .. and for less than 2 sats fee 😂
The best part is I have no way of knowing where it came from or went, or why.
I've always thought people tend to underestimate LN; it's not about whether it ticks every box, it's about gwern's "worse is better" - LN as a concept cleared a threshold that made people want to build it. Now it's built, it will get used, people are already finding ways to exploit its characteristics.(1/2)

Coldcard look like they made an interesting little tool for testing PSBT implementations here:

https://github.com/Coldcard/psbt_faker

Will report back if it works OK for me.

#bitcoin #psbt

Just throwing this out there, but does anyone know if there's a practical way to solve this problem? @harding maybe?

https://github.com/JoinMarket-Org/joinmarket-clientserver/pull/768#issuecomment-754627565

#bitcoin

"Now you’re considered suspicious if you used a marketplace and not an exchange. Coinjoin counts as high risk. Gambling is high risk. As you use entities that are paranoid about keeping their coins clean and adhering to all the regulations, your risk scores will continue to increase and without you even knowing why, your deposits will become rejected, you may be asked to supply documents or lose the coins, your account may become suspended without you having any clue what you did wrong."

" In one case, the NCA demanded information about a bulk list of transactions that had nothing to do with BitBargain. ... My guess is that they put on this bluff and sent the same request to several bitcoin companies. Or they were just going based off bad blockchain analysis information."

".. some of the BA (blockchain analysis) based requests asked for information we did not have. This means that the specific tool they used incorrectly claimed that a transaction or address belonged to us.

Quotes:

"In one case, the investigator demanded a user’s details after clicking through 3 different levels of clusters on WalletExplorer.com. He was ignorant about what shared wallets were or how they worked. Luckily after a few emails I managed to explain where he went wrong and pointed him in the right direction without revealing any customer information."

BitBargain is an old bitcoin trading site in the UK operating since 2012, and it's just shut down. This final blog post is a damning indictment of the cancer that is the banking system, and perhaps even more so, the disgraceful snake-oil of "blockchain analysis":

https://blog.bitbargain.com/post/638504004285054976/goodbye

#bitcoin