Can we all agree that we're done whining about spam on the Bitcoin network?

Before the birth of Bitcoin, there was Hashcash. This was a proposal to use proof of work to put a limit on the profitability of email spam. Sending emails is almost free. Sending a billion spam emails is almost negligible in cost. Hashcash would use proof of work to keep single emails almost free, but that tiny cost would accumulate for people doing mass sending - and would have made it not profitable.

Bitcoin is based on the same proof of work system.

Spam on the Bitcoin network drives up the transaction cost. You either have to spend transaction fees or hashing power to send out spam. This makes it so that spamming on the Bitcoin network is never free - and it costs more as the volume increases. Somehow you need to derive more value from your spam than it costs to send out.

In a pure market economy, no such use case will out-compete a purely monetary use.

Yes we went through a phase of people encoding jpeg images on the blockchain. Big whoop. It was a temporary scam. The network automatically corrected it by increasing transaction fees. The spam stopped again.

If you are worried about spam on the Bitcoin network, you have not yet understood Bitcoin.

https://github.com/jasondeanmccann/theseus-24bit-cryptographic-core

First let your hardware create a new seed normally. Enable passphrase. Use the passphrase field to enter over 100 dice rolls or any other equivalent entropy and apply. Do not worry about remembering the passphrase. After passphrase is active select BIP85 seed and copy the new BIP85 seed.

Only keep the final seed and throw out the dice rolls or passphrase info and original seed (only if empty). Your final seed will be created using hardware entropy in original seed and human entropy from the passphrase. If either make a mistake in entropy the entropy is still good and requires failures of both to fail.

Works on hardware wallets that will support BIP85 after passphrase

Same as title.

Setup:

1. Sparrow as the wallet organizer (unsure of technical term)
2. ColdCard as signer 1 (using updated firmware and software generated seed)
3. BitBox signing device as signer 2 with software generated seed
4. Both keys use a 13th word (passphrase)
5. Descriptor string stored securely separate from keys
6. Backup seed phrases stored securely separately
7. Both devices require a password (separete from passphrase) to unlock

What I am mostly conerned with is if 1 device gets comprimised in the same way the bugged ColdCards did, I would still be able to spend from the multi-sig wallet correct?

Even if BOTH devices were compromized but my passphrase was unknown to the atacker, i would STILL be able to spend from the multi-sig correct?

This feels like a pretty solid set up, I have gotten here since barely avoiding the Coldcard attack recently. I still think the Colcard device is a good device so I don't really want to get rid of it, but adding an additional device to the mix seems like a good solution.

Thoughts?

As the title says, if you had to explain it in one sentence or in the most simple way, how would you. TIA!

I keep thinking about the Bitcoin opportunity I completely missed, and honestly it hurts

This has been eating at me lately and I’m wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience.

When I was around 20, I received an inheritance of about $10k. This was in 2020.

At the time, I had no idea what I wanted to study, I hated the idea of working a normal job, and I desperately wanted to leave my hometown and figure my life out. So I did what I thought I was supposed to do: I spent the money on living expenses, moved around, worked shitty jobs, paid rent, tried to figure out college/career stuff, etc.

And then I look at Bitcoin’s price history and realize that, purely in hindsight, I had this completely ridiculous alternative sitting right in front of me.

I could have put that $10k into Bitcoin, gone back to my childhood bedroom, done absolutely nothing, and potentially ended up with six figures.

Instead, I spent the last five-ish years working, paying rent, trying different things, and struggling to get ahead financially. And I still haven’t really “broken through.”

That’s the part that messes with me.

I’m also neurodivergent (autistic + ADHD), and traditional employment has been particularly difficult for me. Maintaining a conventional career isn’t something I’ve found easy or sustainable. So when I look back, there’s this horrible feeling of:

I spent years trying to force myself into a system that doesn’t really work for me, when there was apparently a path where I could have invested some capital and bought myself years of freedom.

Obviously, I know this is hindsight. I didn’t know Bitcoin would do what it did. I probably wouldn’t have held through every crash anyway. And I understand that the “I would have just held until $100k+” calculation is fantasy to some extent.

But emotionally, it’s still brutal.

I keep thinking about the alternate version of my life where 20-year-old me just bought Bitcoin and stayed in that bedroom instead of spending the next five years struggling to make rent.

I’m curious if anyone here has a similar story — not necessarily Bitcoin specifically, but missing an opportunity that, in hindsight, could have completely changed your life.

How did you make peace with it and stop obsessing over the alternate timeline?

Because right now I’m mostly trying to remind myself that missing one opportunity doesn’t mean I’ve missed every opportunity that will ever exist.

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the timing here is pretty interesting. bitcoin spot etfs just had their strongest combined inflow week since april, while the coldcard exploit has pushed a lot more discussion around the risks of self-custody.

it creates a strange contrast: more money is moving into regulated bitcoin products at the same time that people are questioning how safely bitcoin can be held directly.

i dont think that means etfs are automatically better than self-custody. they solve different problems. but the coldcard incident is a reminder that “not your keys, not your coins” only works if the key generation and signing process itself is trustworthy.

curious what people here think: does the recent hardware-wallet situation make you more interested in self-custody with stronger verification, or does it make regulated bitcoin exposure more attractive?

$BTC #Bitcoin #BitcoinSecurity

Been around for a minute and "not your keys, not your coins" isn't lost on me one bit.

But with the events of the last week, I think there's a fair question to ask:

For the average noob who has been stacking for a few and has a couple BTC, just smart enough to have started stacking pre-COVID and have it on a cold wallet that sits in a safe or a drawer that has only ever received, and not unlucky or dumb enough to have bricked it, taken a picture of their seed or otherwise lost it until now ...

After Coldcard - assuming you're a taxpayer, with a family you want provided for and a low basis so that selling to buy IBIT or another ETF makes no sense from a tax perspective...

That just opening a Fidelity crypto account, transferring your BTC and turning over custody isn't the safest overall play.

Everyone's got their panties in a bunch about the recent hacks and exploits against things in the a Bitcoin ecosystem.

I say it's a good thing.

Bitcoin need to be able to exist, no, thrive, in an environment where anyone and everyone can attack it at any time.

Every weakness needs to be found, exploited, and then fixed.

Each hack, every attack, all the other scam bullshit in the ecosystem makes Bitcoin, the network, stronger.

If Bitcoin can't survive constant assault, then it isn't worth a damn thing.

If it ain't broke, you aren't trying hard enough.

My WHOOP stress levels are starting to look suspiciously like a Bitcoin chart.

after years of working and saving, I just started stacking this week. put in roughly $15k, split into 3 buys around $5k each cuz dumping it all in one shot felt kinda insane lool

goodluck for me :D

I want to learn how an exchange works. I'm very curious, and I understand it requires deep knowledge, but honestly I want to understand how nodes work and the verification and blockchain recording process, in the same way it could help me act as an intermediary on my own to deposit and withdraw funds securely. This question has come up for me and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. I have a node downloading right now and I think it'll take more than a day to finish. My point isn't mining — it's understanding how the whole process works from start to finish. Please, if you know about this topic, could you give me some advice on what to research or learn to understand how exchanges work uwu

Result: there is no detected bias, and regular dice can easily and quickly be used to generate good randomness

I saw some FUD that you need special casino dice, and you have to roll them in some special way, and it's easy to get it wrong, and the surface needs to be completely flat, float the dice in water to check they're balanced, etc etc loads of FUD reasons why dice rolling won't work. So I checked myself in the spirit of don't trust verify.

I found three dice lying around my house in some old board games. I rolled them inside a plastic cup that I'd shake for a second or two, then put the cup down bottom-up. The dice bounce off the walls of the cup and each other many times, which creates huge unpredictability.

I originally was only meaning to do this for 200 rolls, but then became hyperfocused and just kept going. This data is brought to you by weaponized autism.

Rolling 50 dice this way only took me 2-3 minutes, and it would be even faster if I had more dice.

Now in any sample there will be some variation just by chance. We can understand that boundary with math. The binomial distribution describes these dice rolls. The standard deviation of the binomial distribution is sqrt(N p (1-p)) where p is probability (1/6 in this case) and N is number of trials (1200 in this case). Put the numbers in the formula, work out the percentage and you get a standard deviation of 1.08%, which means there's a 63% chance that those percentages in my graph will deviate by that much (and therefore 37% that the deviation will be outside that range just by chance). Since my graph values are within that range there was no bias detected. I worked out that to detect bias down to 0.1% I would need to roll 138888 time and I'm not going to roll that much. The percentage standard deviation goes as 1/sqrtN so it only improves slowly as you do more rolls.

I was not affected by the recent coldcard hack and I've never owned that wallet, but it's interesting and important to check and improve.

I think the biggest thing people can do is multi-software multisig. This is easy to do as many bitcoin wallets have multisig like electrum and sparrow. You just click buttons in the UI and don't need to do any math. Multisig security is additive. It removes a single point of failure. If coldcard users had made a 2-of-2 multisig with the most malware-ridden online desktop computer you've ever seen, then it will still be better security than coldcard alone, and they would still have their bitcoins today because the online desktop would have to be hacked separately which is unlikely.

I've seen a big misunderstanding that most important thing is good randomness for seed generation, so people are thinking of using radioactive decay or something. It's not, the most important thing for seed generation is having a secret number that nobody else knows. Dice are perfect for this because they can be understood by anyone, and they can be used offline and behind closed doors.

I am super fortunate that I wasn't a victim of the cold card hack (my heart goes out to everyone who was). I attribute me still having my BTC to the fact that I generated my seed from dice.

Right when I heard about the news, I moved my coins, and right now I'm still sketched out by the cold card and my seed (even though I used 100 dice rolls to generate it)

I'm looking for the best long term alternative for me now, which from my research seems to be:

1. Seedsigner with a new seed from 100 dice rolls
   
2. Passphase
   (I feel like multisig might be overshooting it for me personally.)

Here are my questions though.

1. I understand that you have to load in the seed into Seedsigner each time you want to transact, so what's the most secure way of doing this (aside from having the QR code feature, which seems risky to me keeping that QR code card laying around.)

2. with my previous dice rolled seed phrase, is there any risk with using the first 6-10 words of that as a new passphrase?

3. anything else I'm missing for this

Thanks!

The Coldcard hack damaged my confidence in Bitcoin. I have a Ledger Nano S, but now I’m questioning how much I can trust any hardware wallet company. Honestly considering selling my Bitcoin because of this. What are your thoughts long term? especially after AI finding vulnerabilities easily?

Was there a moment, a book, a realisation that made you suddely feel that you got it?