Paul Troon @[email protected]

Podcast recommendation time:

https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/117/

Although it's in my feed I only listen to this podcast occasionally. This one had two fascinating / hilarious / 🤦‍♂️ moments:

* when he reused a bitcoin address to ask for a ransom
* when the judge sentenced him "not to interact with/use Python" 😂

I started dropping individual chapters in printer friendly PDFs. They're €0.99 a piece now (you're still welcome to compile it yourself from the source code).

Payment with ⚡ only. No personal details required, even email is optional. Eat that, fiat!

The first three chapters are:
1. Addresses (was already free to preview, but in regular book format)
7. Eclipse Attacks*
9. Guix (reproducible builds)*

* = shop also links to a free blog version

https://shop.purpledunes.com/product-category/chapters/

G'day 'Strayans. Due to distribution related shitfuckery, I started an experiment where I'll ship the book directly to ya from the Melbourne printer.

Well obviously I won't do it myself, I just chuck your address into IngramSpark's manual ordering system (yeah, there's no API).

Powered by @BTCPayServer, maybe fiat later if Stripe doesn't pre-emptively cancel me.

All this for a mere AU$34.99 and with free shipping! No more slow imports from the UK and Murica.
https://shop.purpledunes.com/product/bitcoin-a-work-in-progress/

Story notable for the remarkably explicit anti-'crypto' clause in the IMF agreement with Argentina, but I just find it insane that Argentina is going through this *again* (50+% inflation). Been happening my entire life. Why didn't they just dollarize or something?

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/argentina-imf-bailout-deal-includes-190748787.html

If you enjoy the Bitcoin, Explained podcast, you may want to check out my new book! It covers softfork activation mechanisms, what's cool about SegWit and Taproot, how nodes bootstrap to the network and find their peers, what an address really is, how AssumeUTXO can make initial block download suck less, how UtreeXO could compress the entire UTXO set into a kilobyte of merkle forest, how Guix makes reproduceable builds great again, and more.

More details and preview at: https://btcwip.com

After a couple of days "in the wild" on the master branch, had to fix 3 or 4 things up, most user-relevant one being, the ports for the directory nodes were changed (and documented right); we are using 5222 as the reachable port for the onion instead of 80.

So for anyone running it please update and reset the default config to get that bit right.

Hopefully there won't be more changes that are big, for a while (at least before next release).

Merged onion-based message channels for quasi-p2p communication between #joinmarket bots yesterday.

..Well that escalated quickly.jpg

#bitcoin

Interesting session on miniscript with Sanket at the advancing bitcoin event on Friday. You can do fun stuff like this (h/t @stevenroose ) to see the translation from a policy to a miniscript, including taproot (which is a new development).

#bitcoin

Glad to see DHH slightly pulling his head out of his ass: https://world.hey.com/dhh/i-was-wrong-we-need-crypto-587ccb03

New release of Joinmarket 0.9.5

Includes: send to taproot, fleshed out RPC API (the JM webui guys are going to put out their alpha based on this shortly).

Thanks to everyone who helped out.

https://github.com/JoinMarket-Org/joinmarket-clientserver/releases/tag/v0.9.5

#bitcoin #joinmarket

Podcast recommendation time:
@nothingmuch (probably inactive account? haven't seen him in a while), on the bitcoin takeover podcast (look it up on RSS, his website doesn't have the episode, or the RSS feed!), from about 1/3 of the way through he gets into a lot of meat on Wabisabi and then later details about bitcoin/cryptography/privacy.

One of the few people who knows this stuff in detail.

(I wrote a blog a while ago about Wabisabi's tech: https://reyify.com/blog/from-mac-to-wabisabi)

#bitcoin #coinjoin

Everything you ever wanted to know about Discreet Log Contracts, ft. @rubensomsen (and co-host @AaronvanW of course) https://nadobtc.libsyn.com/discreet-log-contracts-episode-53

An amusing thought crossed my mind: the US government might be able to confiscate stolen bitcoin as 'proceeds of crime' if it goes through hops, but the vast majority of the bitfinex hack consists of coins that were never moved, even once, after the initial hack. It will be amusing seeing the creative way they come up with to justify stealing it for themselves (because there isn't a cat in hell's chance they're giving it back to Bitfinex).

@PaulTroon on that date, I assume _before_ the price jump, $4 billion worth of stolen coins moved from hundreds of legacy addresses to a single bech32 address over the space of a few hours. It even included lots of uneconomic dusty-ish outputs.

It makes no sense for the hacker to do that, so a reasonable trader might conclude that there's a good chance this was law enforcement.
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/bc1qazcm763858nkj2dj986etajv6wquslv8uxwczt

With an inflation rate of nearly 50% in Jan, the Turkish regime is now trying to lure its people to put “under the mattress gold into the [financial] system”. First mismanagement, then ripping off the people again and again. A well known scheme of authoritarians.

Somehow I completely missed this one from last year:

https://www.elliptic.co/blog/elliptic-analysis-bitcoin-bitfinex-theft

and now we have:

https://www.elliptic.co/blog/elliptic-analysis-new-york-husband-and-wife-arrested-for-laundering-5-billion-in-bitcoin-stolen-from-bitfinex-in-2016

It's not clear to me what they're claiming exactly, in terms of tracing. i'm particularly curious about that "red box" at the top of the flows diagram. (Hydra)

#bitcoin #coinjoin #joinmarket

Anyone know if this is for real? I hope it is!

https://tennesseestar.com/2022/02/02/u-s-truckers-plan-their-own-freedom-convoy-from-california-to-washington-d-c-to-protest-authoritarian-covid-mandates/