Ah, not as much as the Bitcoin Discussion, but for a non-paid board, you'd expect less. There aren't lots of topics, that's why the bottom topic is from last week. There just isn't anything constructive last time I checked. Just usual nonsense posted by BADecker and his conspiracy crew. An endless discussion about the Ukrainian war, a dozen topics about Biden, and maybe some covid-19.

Good luck with that, last time Flying Hellfish (the P&S mod) was online was before the last bull run.

Theoretically, it could work if the bankers used it as reserve, but I don't understand why the people in power would ever want to do that. They have convinced the populace that printing money backed of thin air is totally normal. Seems like a massive success to me.

That is true. But, he did point out that the bank oligarchy is more or less the root of the problem. Politicians bailing out banks using public funds is a fact. And they do, because bank failures can destabilize the entire economy. In other words, the entire economy is vulnerable under the monopoly of these banks, and they pretty much exploit that power once in a while.

Recipe for shitposter attraction:

• Have an inactive moderator.
• Make signature campaign posts unpaid there.
• Don't take action for reports.

I must have reported several posts in that sub-board, but stopped either because with so much spam it was pointless, or reports were mostly ignored.

Banks aren't challenged by bitcoin in Greece. People use bitcoin as currency very rarely. The vast majority of people don't even know what it really is. If you ask some random person, you'll likely get that it's gambling as response.

In the peer-to-peer, decentralized sense, there weren't. There was e-gold, but that was centrally operated by Gold & Silver Reserve Inc. Wei Dai and Nick Szabo had proposed B-money and Bit gold respectively, but none of them went to actually implementing it. Until Satoshi took up their work, and went into coding.

The first question that comes up to a merchant if you try to sell them this, is: what does LSP provide more than Visa and Mastercard? If the only answer is lower cost, the venture is likely to refuse it. Visa and Mastercard levy higher charges than your business due to their substantial operational costs.

Setting up a lightning node yourself does make more points than cost reduction. Faster transaction confirmation and better privacy to name a few. Acting the intermediary between the customer and the merchant, replacing Visa reminds me somewhat of something similar to BitPay. We don't need another BitPay.

These are my concerns, feel free to extend this to a service discussion.

To gain privacy. Next question.

Actually, changing the exit node is a matter of two clicks. You just click on the "New Tor circuit for this site", right next to reload of the current page.

If you want to check the balance of 50 addresses privately, then just create a watch-only wallet in Electrum and import them there. Connect to your own node obviously, it will take a minute or two to synchronize.

Then, that is not inflation. If you create a new network, where people can exchange BTC for new-BTC, then that'd be an altcoin. Or rather, if to create new-BTC you must lock BTC, then that's sort of a sidechain. Inflation is when there is more money supply. If people suddenly wanted to use a centralized exchange as Bitcoin wallet, and that implemented fractional reserve, then the total bitcoin would increase, as now the total money would have to include checkable deposits. (It has happened with FTX)

Pegs aren't counted as more money supply. If you need to lock BTC to get new-BTC, then no money has been created. To have new-BTC you need to temporarily make the BTC unusable, you're just exchanging value between networks.

That's inflation for the sidechain coin and deflation for bitcoin. If overtime the withdrawal amount in the main layer shrinks, then that means new-BTC loses value in comparison with BTC overtime.

Suppose I share a channel with you. I have 1,000,000,999 millisat in outgoing liquidity. That means this is the maximum amount I can send you (minus some small percentage of the amount which cannot be spent, to disincentivize fraud). If I close the channel, I'll get 0.01 BTC. You would get to keep the 1 sat; I would take it if I had earned 1 more millisat.

No, you're right. But, read vjudeu's post:

I can't imagine the design of such a network, but from my understanding, there must be no going back in the main layer, because if everyone wanted to withdraw their new-BTC, they'd have to be less than 21 million in total.

According to Linus Torvalds, it doesn't rely entirely on RdRand. But /dev/random does make use of it.

You can also read this response by Linus, in which he pretty much sums up his concerns regarding RdRand: https://www.theregister.com/2013/09/10/torvalds_on_rrrand_nsa_gchq/. He's also clarifying that RdRand is one of the many inputs used:

So, probably Linux is safe to an extent.

We don't know with certainty: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/195515/is-rdrand-used-in-a-safe-way-by-windows-10

There have been bug reports regarding RDRAND, which were noticed in some minority of processors.

- https://www.techpowerup.com/255294/some-amd-processors-have-a-hardware-rng-bug-losing-randomness-after-suspend-resume
- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/how-a-months-old-amd-microcode-bug-destroyed-my-weekend/
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221117235141/https://linuxreviews.org/RDRAND_stops_returning_random_values_on_older_AMD_CPUs_after_suspend

As you can see, there have been instances of faulty behavior, and I'm sure you can find more if you dig up the space. I think it's possible for some hardware to be backdoored. (but not all)

I don't see the relevance. There are lots of reasons for the CIA to address Gavin back when the project was only a year old.

The posted article does provide an analogy, that bitcoin could be a virus that escaped from the lab. I mean it does make sense for a researcher to have heard of this internally, and thought of releasing it under a pseudonym, so they could forestall the financial advantage.

You shouldn't be using a mobile phone as your main Bitcoin wallet. Here's why: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5463259.msg62732682#msg62732682

They are. When you request from your computer to generate a random number, it utilizes RDRAND, which varies slightly as instruction from Intel to AMD. It's basically the same functionality. From the link, you can read the "Reception" part to confirm that engineers can insert backdoors there.

I have never heard of a case where someone lost bitcoin because of backdoored RNG, but just as we can't verify it's generating true randomness, we can't complain they're stealing bitcoin either. I mean, think about it. You wake up the next morning, and your wallet is emptied. What do you do? You tell a journalist that AMD and Intel insert backdoors? With what evidence?

I neither believe they're doing it as it isn't worth the risk, but why worrying for being one in the million customers who bought the backdoored hardware? Just flip a coin and sleep easy.

Mixers are propaganda. We've heard that; this board never stops entertaining me. I'm genuinely curious how you interpreted mixing coins as exploiting anything at all. Do you mind providing a little more context?

Pardon, but what the actual fuck? What the hell is your point? Do you actually think they don't have much data to put people behind the bars? And are you using my absence from jail as a basis to argue their lack of concern for me? What kind of twisted reasoning is this...

If only it was that simple. If you make a quick search, you will notice that even from experts in the field, there's a moment of doubt when it comes to verifying that the RNG is true. Intel and AMD chips come with an RNG that is impossible to verify completely as far as I'm concerned. You cannot distinguish a pseudo-RNG from a true RNG, because you cannot detect if there is a function that deems deterministic the number generation.

When it comes to software, /dev/urandom and /dev/random are good sources, as for hardware there has been development, but if you merely want to run a Bitcoin wallet in an air-gapped device, then you don't need hardware for that purpose. Just roll a dice or flip a coin. It is trivial and completely verifiable.

I'm just thinking of the person who could be behind that. A crypto-hobbyist, with expertise in cryptography and the like. What would he feel first after that "eureka" moment? What should they do if they prioritized the collective benefit? Keeping it secret, and never exploiting it? Publishing it, and making every mining infrastructure worth zero? What would be the best approach for that person? Maybe they start searching for past suggestions on Internet boards.  

If they start mining, that will look weird, unless they mine blocks very rarely. Otherwise, if they were to set lots of times higher difficulty, then we'll notice an unknown group of miners suddenly acquiring vast amounts of hash rate without any ASIC being sold. That will start stinking fishy.

Depends on your setup. If you're using an air-gapped device that makes no use of random number generation, then the attacker can't take advantage of it to sign with insecure k-values (as an example). Transactions are signed using the RFC 6979 which doesn't generate random k-values. You would also need to use dice or coin to generate the entropy of your wallet. In that case, and by assuming the OS does not hide any backdoors for the specific type of wallet software you will use, then it's safe to assume you'll be fine.

It sounds pretty difficult to bypass all those linux protection mechanisms, and install a program which will do that, but if you don't do it you will be 100% you cannot fall victim for that either.

The mining infrastructure won't be vulnerable. It's the security of the secp256k1 elliptic curve Bitcoin uses, that will need to change. And there will probably be a quantum safe hard fork which will come with a quantum safe algorithm.

The developers will warn you to send your coins to quantum safe addresses. By the time that it will be trivial to work out a private key by a quantum computer within a reasonable time frame, any coins sitting on quantum unsafe addresses will be waiting to be claimed by the attacker.

I mean, if we want to be pedantic, things can go wrong even in an air-gapped device. There may be hardware backdoors, OS zero days, perhaps the BIOS is compromised. Nothing is 100% secure, but if you migrate to an air-gapped environment, you definitely have less things to account for.

I don't understand how things can any worse with bluetooth than the Internet. First things first, the user must approve the wireless connection, it's the default security on Linux AFAIK.

Pardon me, but why isn't this considered an attack? If C doesn't seem to earn from routing transactions coming from either B or D, they can just close the channel. It is also possible to detect this if you spin up two lightning nodes each sharing a channel with B and D respectively. If you make transactions between the two without your main node noticing, you're under a wormhole attack.

Seems to me like the attacker is paying more than the victim.

If you're the government, and want to destabilize LN, make a call with Amazon and Google. According to bitcoinist.com, the network relies greatly on Google Cloud services and AWS.

Chain analysis companies not revealing the manners which they deem coins as "tainted", being to protect their source code and techniques from market competition is a cheap excuse. The real reason is that it removes their authority on labeling coins as "tainted". If CA company were to ever announce that after 20 transactions, coins coming from an illicit activity are now deemed "clean", then everyone sending 20 transactions to themselves would be enough to completely erase taint from Bitcoin.

You do know that freedom to access standard cryptography is the definition of "the state cannot monitor everything", right? If you think the state should be able to monitor everything, then cryptography should be made illegal for public use by tomorrow morning.