I once knew a thief with a policy: never steal from normal people.

His reasoning was that corporations and governments have an unfair advantage, and there's no other mean for redress other than to break the rules yourself, with corporations and governments as the target.

Maybe that wouldn't apply in this case, although:

1. I suspect the school pays for electricity out of it's regular budget
2. The regular budget is borrowed, and then paid back with stolen money from everyone's children/grandchildren

however, point 2 is incorrect, because it's actually infeasible to ever pay all the "public liability" type of debts back anyway

the difference is that Windows would often stay broken forever and randomly break out of nowhere. Remember the xp usb device prompt? "Remember my settings, don't ask me again" was one of the checkboxes on that prompt, and for something like 12-15 years, Mammonsoft forget to mention they meant "...except next time you insert a usb device, when this prompt will appear yet again"

with linux, things about the settings do randomly break. And the beauty is, that you can always fix it yourself, as long as you know what to do. Teaching yourself what to do is part of the whole point of it, and it's always possible to do so

with windows, either someone fixed it or they didn't. and you might be out of luck. I haven't used windows for about 15 years already.

"latest hype" again?

actual (i.e. Ethereum based) NFTs already have a bad reputation for being the ultimate cryptocurrency scam, so I don't see how this trend won't just burn itself out pretty quick

that's a weird way to put it.

their position can loose it's importance very very easily, it's not like being some chairman role in the financial system, i.e. it's meritocratic



the elusive people.

WHO GRANTED YOU AN INTERVIEW?

these WSJ people are pure assholes for this game playing behavior.

what pos wrote this pos article? do we have a name?



right, that's obvious


...yes....


....no

why would any devs need to follow any consensus? we've already had several breaks and changes in consensus, both in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. there is no mandate to follow anything or anyone.

people follow what makes sense to them, devs and users alike. there would be no forkcoins or altcoins if that were true, hence it's self-evidently false

one could see this as a way to push the developers further into the public sphere than they are already, there's nothing mysterious about them that I'm aware of.

Satoshi was the mystery man, and it seems he chose anonymity in order to get people to focus on the code, not the coder


...and so WSJ is proving that they're pure tabloid trash with this nonsense. The devs responded to requests for interviews, and by way of gratitude, the journalists and their bosses label them "mysterious"? assholes, all of them

well, if you also want a system where censoring is impossible/expensive, then the two things will inevitably contradict one another, it's always going to be possible to somehow cleverly craft bitcoin transactions so that they contain data that can be decoded in a way that isn't a payment of BTC (or that a transaction contains some different data, AND pays someone)

there's nothing that can be done about the issue absolutely, but the tx fees mitigate it.

maybe if everyone knew how you use your BTC, then some people wouldn't like it? fortunately, because of bitcoin's anti-censorship properties, their only options are:

• be unhappy
• get on with their lives

i recommend the 2nd option, but some people seem to like feeling miserable

that's odd

Sweden is a curious case, one of the few EU countries to have:

• their own currency
• their own defence (i.e. weapons) industry
• home grown manufacturers (although slowly dying off still, Germany still dominates EU industry)

and Sweden also have a unique position in the EU: the only country living under "quantitative easing" and general Japan-style financial/fiscal insanity for multiple decades (not sure if Sweden started before even Japan did...)

so on a political level, the Swedish toying with any kind of cryptocurrency matter at the public level is going to make more waves than one might suppose

people using using the bitcoin blockchain for large scripts has got nothing to do with taproot, using taproot for that incurs more expensive network fees than simply doing so with regular transactions

and taproot transactions are not causing the spike in transaction on the network, they seem to all be plain segwit txs (which shouldn't be such a surprise, as everyone's been slowly moving over to segwit for the past 5 years)


so your post sounds very weird, tbh OP

I'd say the coins are arguably not yours to begin with, is the seizure action not written into the BSV codebase in the same way that the absolute custody of BTC is written into Bitcoin?

but this actually differs from the common expectations of what owning electronic money implies, although I should think it's possible for anyone to understand what the satoshi design does, even if it's not possible for the same people to understand how it's possible. is that not most people's relationship to money anyway (knowing what it is and how to use it, and no more than that), and hence why it's so easy to trick people with money systems?


that's only one possibility, and we'll likely never know either way. self-evidently, no proof exists that Wright is cheating anyone other than those he's suing

I'm following the logic of Wright's claim, not my own


in my first comment from that post, I say that the courts themselves are manipulating their audience with no reasonable grounds other than to make the institution as a whole appear to be just (and authoritative, virtuous, trustworthy etc)

i.e. the courts (and it's employees) are attempting to perform a confidence trick on those attending (or otherwise observing) upon entering the chambers (or even beforehand)

Magicians/clairvoyants etc have one basic principle: know your mark

Even experienced conmen themselves can be conned on this basis, the starting point is to get good information about what a person's strong beliefs or expectations are, then use that as a guide to devise the framework for a trick (all the more clever is to use crowd/group psychology to influence those expectations/beliefs in ways that 1-to-1 would not be reliable/viable). The point is to exploit the frontier of someone's awareness: discover the edges of that frontier, then you can think about where to target

and this of course means that courtroom officials can easily be conned, no-one is out of the question. it's quite easy to see how (particularly in the British courts) the overall culture of the justice system is designed to impress the casual observer with it's legitimacy, which of course shouldn't be necessary...  why would simply dispensing justice not be enough?


I don't mean to sound unsympathetic, but courts in the self-proclaimed civilized world can/will/have ignored what experts, the public and the media knew about disputes that end up in a courtroom. There is no good reason to believe that popular awareness of the facts would have averted Wright's lawsuits.


you have all, knowingly or not, entered into perhaps the highest strata of politics by way of working on this project. In essence, you guys woke a sleeping giant, kicked the hornets nest etc.

The clues that such apparently innocuous behavior pisses certain resourceful people off (i.e. open source software that turns powerful+profitable industries into landfill) were actually already there for all to see. Satoshi more than implied that he was seeking to usurp an entrenched and corrupt system, and we might argue that central banks are the most egregious such example, if not simply among the worst. I'm surprised the attacks have not yet been more fierce.

Call that victim-blaming, but I'm just saying what I'm seeing. I'm definitely not going for consolation, that's equally worthless to you all as my 20/20 hindsight.


and so Gavin is definitely overdue that atomic wedgie

I don't know what rationale Wright claims for how he devised the list of people "he" is suing, but it's for sure curious to consider who he left out, and what the (real) reasons could be. Gavin and Mike Hearn are just about the only Bitcoin developers who ever got a hearing in major news outlets, and Gavin on more than one issue. If anyone is some kind of "face of Bitcoin" by the simplest/most superficial means, then one would assume that suing Gavin was more than worth a shot (surely the guiding principle of all overly-litigious efforts). Yet every divisive, controversial or publicly known figure is consistently absent from Wrights prosecutions.

Surely this latest (simple) argument that the (quoting the white paper: "electronic cash" ) system should have made allowance for recovering users lost funds not have implicated the earliest contributors more than any others? Is it not they who progressively made that less possible? (despite the feature-not-bug reality)

and does that not implicate Gavin most of all in such a damages claim? Andresen was leading the earliest dev team in the original effort to (continue to ) e.x.p.l.i.c.i.t.l.y make it increasingly more impossible for the developers to choose who should be assigned which money, for any reason, however arbitrary?

together:
1. the (heavily publicized by Wright) meeting between Wright and Andresen
2. the ~2 years direct relationship Satoshi had with Andresen before he went quiet

demonstrates that Wright has had many opportunities to speak directly with Gavin about this very issue, both before, during and long after these damages were "inflicted" (assuming on point 2 that you were to believe Wright's stories)

When you put this all together, I don't buy this interpretation of "greedy/bored billionaire bankrolls extravagantly disingenuous conman in convoluted court cases", that to me sounds like the real crime-caper movie plot.
That it's taken so long for an attack against the Bitcoin developer ecosystem to reach even this point may indicate that there is some fairly careful planning going on, and that we should all expect more.

i went for "idiot or playing games"

to be fair, if Gavin were concealing his original reasons for giving Craig Wright the thumbs-up, ill intent is only one possibility. If we don't know his reason(s), then that's as much as we may ever know

Andresen has long since ceased to be someone to look to anyway, so I don't understand your point at all, what he says or does not say makes no difference to the issue.


It's not (and never was) credible for him to claim that trusting Craig Wright made even 1 scintilla of sense, when he had more than enough:

• knowledge
• skill
• responsibility

...to actually assess what Craig Wright presented to him, instead of saying "of that looks good to me, I trust you o' unknown and unproven person making earth shattering claims to be the person I worked with on early Bitcoin under a pseudonym"

Andresen was clearly playing games, or a total idiot, and thus disqualifies himself from the list of "people to listen to"

right, it's vital to know accurately which byte the header ends so that you know which byte the encrypted volume begins. using a graphical hex editor could work, e.g. perhaps there is a byte sequence at the end of the header that's always the same.

if not, knowing exactly the length of a key slot, exactly how many key slots your header has, and the exact length of the data before them is very important.

---

an extra trick I thought of: I expect that the header for a disk partition is smaller than a basic disk encryption header. Instead of replacing the encryption header entirely with random data, why not:

• find out the size of a partition header
• subtract it from the size of your encryption header
• overwrite the start of the disk encryption header with a partition
• fill the remaining space with random data (only as far as the last byte of the encryption header! use the number you found in step 2)

then, instead of having a "suspicious" random data disk, you have a disk that an OS filesystem window would recognize when you plug it in. Sure the rest of the data is your encrypted volume, but it "looks" otherwise like a normal disk that's got nothing on it.

you: "really? nothing on it? damn, must've taken the wrong disk with me, my bad"

or

you: "yeah, that's my disk to put the holiday photos on, would you like to see my photos of the church organs of Europe?"

that sort of thing

luks


I don't think so

it's easy () to do with linux dd command, just practice it with a disk you don't care about.

It's also easy to screw it up and write the random data to your main PC disk, so maybe use a VM on an old USB disk as your practice...

workflow:

• md5sum on the first x bytes of the encrypted disk, save that hash somewhere (using linux tail lets you feed the exact number of bytes to md5sum, do it with the pipe character)
• dd using x bytes as the offset to backup the header
• md5sum the file with the backed up header, compare to saved hash
• dd i=/dev/random to the encrypted disk device with that x offset as the value for where to end

the variable x will be the size of the LUKS header, I don't know what it is off the top of my head, but either LUKS utilities or the LUKS manpage (probably man cryptsetup) will also tell you

so long as you get the right number for x, and the right device for the disk, you'll be alright. possibly LUKS header is variable length (I expect it is as it's possible to add multiple keys or something like that), but that's why practicing is a good idea

I heard there are ways to prove the hidden volume exists, although VeraCrypt appears to have evolved since the last info I'm aware of


this to me sounds more reliable.

best thing is to explain it simply:

Oompah loompa: "what's on this disk?"
you: "nothing"

if you say "it's completely random data officer, which is completely indistinguishable from any other random data ", despite that being true, you're still gonna get looked at through narrowed eyes

ah, what's the name for that method then? sounds too good to be true, clearly there's been developments in this area that I didn't follow


(this part of) the thread ended already if o_e_l_e_o's link checks out... and airport security searching "encrypted" disks also ended

it's all very easy


without the header, there's no way to prove that a disk is encrypted

so:

• encrypt disk
• copy header
• fill the header up (on encrypted disk) with random data

Oompah-loompa - "why doesn't it switch on?"
you - "broken"
Oompah-loompa - "why did you bring a broken phone?"
you - "it broke on the way here"
Oompah-loompa - "why didn't you fix it?"
you - "if I knew what was wrong with it, I would already have fixed it"


...then just copy the header back again when you want to use the disk

yes

but don't do it. It's much too tempting for some employee(s) to abuse the situation and ship something that steals BTC or other data.

just get a standard distribution and figure it out, anything else is going back to "be my bank", not "be your own bank"

chack out 'rolling' distributions, it's a concept that suits servers very well (OS/software support forever). you just keep on downloading and installing the updates, and that's it

obviously hardware is not often supported in perpetuity, but if that's the issue, Apple is the last platform to consider



no. although Apple provide some long-term hardware support, they have the worst record in the industry when it comes to supporting old hardware (and that's a significant part of their business model).
"Many years" might be enough in practice, maybe we can agree on that



sure but some hacker will care about your OS having known security holes: for the wrong reasons!