Joe's Signatureless Challenge Archives

[nullius]

Quoted and   verified by Brainwallet

Oh, dear.  Please do not use brainwallets!  Brainwallets are insecure.  AVOID.

I call brainwallets “wallets for the brainless”; but you needn’t take my word for it:

I think it's amusing that the two people in this thread loudly trumpeting brainwallets are someone who says they have a fetish for cracking passwords and someone who has posted extensively about wallet cracking and tried to sell scam wallet cracking tools.

This fits right in with the fact that person who popularized the idea and created brainwallet.org was cracking these kinds of keys and complaining about how few he was finding online before creating the site.

Food for thought.

It is highly NOT RECOMMENDED to use brainwallets. Humans are a horrendously low source of entropy. There are multiple research papers and programs that show that brainwallets are horribly insecure and easily cracked as what you think is a strong password probably is not a strong password.

BIP 38 paper wallets will not be particularly helpful here. It only protects against someone stealing your paper wallet and trying to get the keys. BIP 38 does not protect against someone just guessing the password you used to create your brainwallet.

Generally, my assumption is that when an otherwise intelligent person advocates for brainwallets, it's because they are hoping that foolish people with weak passphrases will store significant sums of bitcoin that they can later steal.

If you want to personally use a brainwallet. Go ahead.  None of us are stopping you. However, if you are going to advocate for them, then foolish people will read what you write and will lose money.

Not only that:  Long-term storage of funds inside your head is more likely than you think to lead to funds being literally forgotten—and thus lost forever, if somebody else doesn’t helpfully steal them.

- They don't require backups

Human memory is very fallible.  We often just don't remember what we don't remember so we don't often realize how bad it is.   A fever, blow to the head, or other illness can easily kill single memories even of things you used frequently-- a brain wallet is the hardest kind to remember: to be secure it must be unusually random, and you should not be using it frequently (if you use it frequently, you will end up leaking it somehow) and being almost right is not good enough!

Native Segwit Addresses aren't supported by the wallets Joe and Bill Gator use.

This is something I am looking to remedy for future rounds. I'm open to suggestions, but I'm thinking I will probably just use my Electrum wallet for Native SegWit addresses. I believe I can transfer from Core to Electrum, so that's probably what I'll do so that we don't discourage SegWit usage. I suppose I don't even need to transfer it over to Electrum, could just send it directly from Core to the Native SegWit addresses of participants. It's something I'm perfectly willing and happy to do for participants. I just had a bit of a brain hiccup when it came time to send the winnings at the end of last round, because I was in quite a rush and didn't have time to consider the solutions.

There are no Nested SegWit wallets/clients that offer compatibility with Native SegWit addresses that I know of; is there such a thing currently? There might be technical complications that I'm failing to consider that make this impossible for now.

I would have suggested Electrum, but now I’m confused.  If you run Core, then what is the problem?  Core v0.16 has full Segwit support, including in the GUI.  It can send to both native (BIP173/Bech32) and P2SH-nested Segwit addresses, as well as generating both types of addresses for receiving.

Bitcoin Core version 0.16.0 is now available from:

  https://bitcoincore.org/bin/bitcoin-core-0.16.0

[...]

### Segwit Wallet

Bitcoin Core 0.16.0 introduces full support for segwit in the wallet and user interfaces. A new `-addresstype` argument has been added, which supports `legacy`, `p2sh-segwit` (default), and `bech32` addresses. It controls what kind of addresses are produced by `getnewaddress`, `getaccountaddress`, and `createmultisigaddress`. A `-changetype` argument has also been added, with the same options, and by default equal to `-addresstype`, to control which kind of change is used.

[...]

### BIP173 (Bech32) Address support ("bc1..." addresses)

Full support for native segwit addresses (BIP173 / Bech32) has now been added.
This includes the ability to send to BIP173 addresses (including non-v0 ones), and generating these
addresses (including as default new addresses, see above).

A checkbox has been added to the GUI to select whether a Bech32 address or P2SH-wrapped address should be generated when using segwit addresses. When launched with `-addresstype=bech32` it is checked by default. When launched with `-addresstype=legacy` it is unchecked and disabled.

[1713401656]

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[charlie137]

BitcoinTalk Username: charlie137
Starting Post Count (including this one): 771
Current Rank: Full Member
BTC Address: 36gtJNcPfsFCAVRw7pdev2nTLnnof2Lsq1

[bill gator]

I would have suggested Electrum, but now I’m confused.  If you run Core, then what is the problem?  Core v0.16 has full Segwit support, including in the GUI.  It can send to both native (BIP173/Bech32) and P2SH-nested Segwit addresses, as well as generating both types of addresses for receiving.

Apologies for the confusion. My problem is that almost all of my funds are on Nested SegWits that will not send to Native SegWit and I was not thinking in the moment to transfer some of the funds over to my Core address(es) to handle movement of the funds. There is no problem, anymore, the only problem at the time was me being in a rush and not considering what my options were so I just assumed I was unable to do so and sent it to Joe without further thought.

I did not know it could Generate both addresses, though so you've taught me something. We're all set for future movement of funds, at least from my end. Segwit of all types, nested, native or some creepy hybrid in between.

[Blue Tyrant]

Oh, dear.  Please do not use brainwallets!  Brainwallets are insecure.  AVOID.

I call brainwallets “wallets for the brainless”; but you needn’t take my word for it:

Unless I'm missing something the brain wallet you're referring are places where people try to remember the seed of the wallet and not Brainwalletx which is just a site with a bunch of tools including verify signed messages (and ofc generating brain wallet seeds)

[vlad230]

After giving it a little bit of consideration I've decided to increase the amount of merit I'll hand out to 2nd place (at least for this round). It looks weird that 3rd place gets more merit than 2nd, even if there is a cash prize. I will give 3-Merit for 2nd place, instead of 1. I'll do my best to earn some more merit so that I can make it consistently a solid amount of merit; no promises, but maybe someday down the line I'll be able to become a source. One can only hope, but for now 3 is the best I can do and there is no promises for future rounds besides the original pledge of 1-merit.

Yes, indeed the merit amount for 2nd place looked a bit off to me too.

It would be nice if you guys with the review services could be merit sources, it would be definitely easier to distribute them to quality & helpful posts.

[Stedsm]

BitcoinTalk Username: Stedsm
Current Rank: Legendary
Purpose of this post: Sponsorship of second place merits
Amount of Merits sponsored by me for the best poster (2nd place) : 5

Joe, please accept my application and let me reward the best person based on your decision for this week. I'll also look forward to sponsor in BTC too next week (probably).  

Thanks in advance.

[pugman]

@fakegurutu has been disqualified from this week's round, as they have applied to a paid signature campaign after applying for this challenge.
This means that there are only 24 valid participants in this round. Unfortunately, this also means that there will not be a cash prize for 3rd place.

Joe,I don't people to ruin their hopes,so I don't mind paying 5$ for the 3rd prize,either from the existing BTC I sent or I'll send 5$ worth of BTC over to the person who secures this week's 3rd prize,for one time only. Your call.

[DarkStar_]

After giving it a little bit of consideration I've decided to increase the amount of merit I'll hand out to 2nd place (at least for this round). It looks weird that 3rd place gets more merit than 2nd, even if there is a cash prize. I will give 3-Merit for 2nd place, instead of 1. I'll do my best to earn some more merit so that I can make it consistently a solid amount of merit; no promises, but maybe someday down the line I'll be able to become a source. One can only hope, but for now 3 is the best I can do and there is no promises for future rounds besides the original pledge of 1-merit.

Yes, indeed the merit amount for 2nd place looked a bit off to me too.

It would be nice if you guys with the review services could be merit sources, it would be definitely easier to distribute them to quality & helpful posts.

I am a source (which is partially why I can give 8 merits a week). Too bad Merit Source applications aren't being processed by theymos right now.

[bill gator]

Yes, indeed the merit amount for 2nd place looked a bit off to me too.

It would be nice if you guys with the review services could be merit sources, it would be definitely easier to distribute them to quality & helpful posts.

First place gets 8 merit, second place gets 1 merit, third place gets 2 merit. That doesn't sit right with me, so as long as I can possibly manage it I will make sure second place doesn't get the least amount of merit. Merit sources are few an far between, but we have a couple in this very thread.

Joe,I don't people to ruin their hopes,so I don't mind paying 5$ for the 3rd prize,either from the existing BTC I sent or I'll send 5$ worth of BTC over to the person who secures this week's 3rd prize,for one time only. Your call.

You're the man, but try not to one-up me too badly. So that means that there is going to be a 3rd place, not really sure why, but that excites me in an amusing way. One time only should be enough, because next round I will probably be beginning my Sisyphean (Did I use that word right?) sponsorship of 2nd and 3rd place.

I am a source (which is partially why I can give 8 merits a week). Too bad Merit Source applications aren't being processed by theymos right now.

There was just recently 20 new sources created recently. I'm not sure how they're deciding when or which applications to go through, but it seems like they're not completely forgotten. They are just not doing it consistently, maybe in rounds, chunks or groups when they feel more merit is needed. Kind of like a recipe, you can always add more, but you can't take any out. I plan to apply as a merit source down the road, but I figure I should let the pipeline clear up a bit before doing so.

[BTCforJoe]

I will be updating this thread in a few hours. Just coming back from a long week of work.

But for now, I’d like to adhere to the rules and disallow a cash prize for 3rd place, as the conditions were not met. I think this will also provide some sort of incentive for more people to join this challenge for future rounds.

I’ll update the spreadsheet and sponsors in a few hours.

[bill gator]

I will be updating this thread in a few hours. Just coming back from a long week of work.

But for now, I’d like to adhere to the rules and disallow a cash prize for 3rd place, as the conditions were not met. I think this will also provide some sort of incentive for more people to join this challenge for future rounds.

I’ll update the spreadsheet and sponsors in a few hours.

I bet there are at least a few of our participants that are thinking this is quite the emotional roller coaster. First there's a third place cash prize, the 25th participants gets disqualified so that prize is inactive, then pugman offers to run a 3rd place cash prize and it gets shot down. I would hate to keep our participants in suspense, but maybe pugman could just send the $5 to the escrow address for future rounds.

[De4ted]

Application for round 3:

BitcoinTalk Username: De4ted
Starting Post Count (including this one): 13
Current Rank: Newbie
BTC Address: 34wR55tT9ARvMshyXh8Yc5K8mqfvFbM6DY

[vlom]

sent you 25 merit.

dont forget them.

[vlad230]

I'm re-applying for Round 3
I'm not interested in the cash prize, if I will win please allocate it for the next round

BitcoinTalk Username: vlad230
Starting Post Count (including this one): 198
Current Rank: Member
BTC Address: N/A

[butka]

My application for round 3:
BitcoinTalk Username: butka
Starting Post Count (including this one): 15
Current Rank: Newbie
BTC Address:

[flip4flop]

Applying for week 3.  Love this idea more every week.

BitcoinTalk Username: Flip4Flop
Starting Post Count (including this one): 537
Current Rank: Full Member
BTC Address: 3HegViRbNEftwQRqMuVfqahFWKA8gyML6U

[buyandsale]

whats this challenge is about dont understand exactly cause this time no merit or no price me got till now as me active on forum too and posting stuff ... well if 2nd round finished im in to 3rd round too

[Blue Tyrant]

whats this challenge is about dont understand exactly cause this time no merit or no price me got till now as me active on forum too and posting stuff ... well if 2nd round finished im in to 3rd round too

It's basically about increasing the quality of the posts overall, well normally there's little motivation to put effort into your posts in your run of the mill signature campaign where quantity > quality so this is like a little challenge since people generally like to win and thus will post better shit than answer why bitcoin changed there life for the 3 trillionth time.


And my application for this week

BitcoinTalk Username: Blue Tyrant
Starting Post Count (including this one): 91
Current Rank: Newbie
BTC Address: Same as last time

[r1s2g3]

Hi Joe, I will like to apply for the third week round

BitcoinTalk Username:  r1s2g3
Starting Post Count (including this one): 167
Current Rank:  Jr. Member
BTC Address:  145Kr35GsbVvDXbbd4EfpWDuZi5hC3SDTN

[Verde_Mantis]

BitcoinTalk Username: Verde_Mantis
Starting Post Count (including this one): 60
Current Rank: Jr. Member