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As much as I’d love this to be true, I have to be very critical of any evidence claiming that WhatsApp is not secure.
The lawsuit does not provide any technical details to back up the rather sensational claims.
Is their implementation of the Signal protocol broken? Are they not using the Signal protocol?
Without answers to these questions, I have to assume that anybody could make these claims. Plausible, but without substance.
The same applies to this:
Pavel Durov, CEO of rival messaging app Telegram, also weighed in-. "You’d have to be braindead to believe WhatsApp is secure in 2026," he tweeted. "When we analyzed how WhatsApp implemented its 'encryption,' we found multiple attack vectors."
Ok, cool, guy from messenger, which doesn’t even encrypt chats by default. Where’s your analysis?
When you update this, I recommend looking at the frontend code. It will enforce the new domain iirc. Old addresses will still show up as part of Blitz wallet, but can't be saved anymore. Probably best to link them to a custom lightning address then.
You can always use a custom lightning address
[...] in order to believe X, what else must you believe [...]
This is exactly what I was thinking about when I thought about destiny vs. free will. If one believes in destiny, can they also believe in free will? Maybe I'm misunderstanding something about what people commonly understand as destiny, though. I mean, I don't think it's common for people to believe in destiny and then be like, "Cool, I can now just do nothing, because destiny will do everything for me!" Right?
[...] it's useful to inspect the larger bundle that that belief nestles into [...]
There was a website that analyzed beliefs in a flow chart iirc. I think it compared believing in capitalism vs communism as an example. Maybe you know which website I mean, because it was you who mentioned it, haha? I didn't find it right now, but I'll try harder later.
btw, funny example you used there as an extraordinary belief
[...] What else would you need to believe, to believe you could be a lightning protocol developer? [...]
I think I would also need to believe that the opportunity cost of being a lightning protocol developer, so not being able to do other things as much as I may want to do them, isn't too high. Maybe that's what creates the most friction for me currently? Do I want to become a lightning protocol developer so much that I'm willing to not do other things, whether they're related to bitcoin or not at all?
Related to this, I've also been thinking a lot about @TonyGiorgio's post High Risk, Low Reward.
However, I also know that just because I started something, doesn't mean I have to commit to it forever.
Thanks for the questions, they are good ones!
Yes! There is also OpenSats, HRF, Maelstrom, and many more, as you can see in this screenshot taken from the BOSS program's website:
I'm currently participating in it, thanks to #1299187.
do you have a suitable X?
Working on it! What I've done so far (and mentioned above) is nowhere near what I would use to apply for a grant.
@ajonas has given me many different ideas, but I'm really interested in lightning, especially finding vulnerabilities like Matt Morehouse. In his first blog post from 2023, he mentioned this:
Because in the end it doesn’t matter how feature-rich and easy-to-use the Lightning Network is if it can’t keep user funds safe.
That really resonated with me. I think there are still not many focusing on security in lightning.[1] At least I only know Matt Morehouse who consistently finds stuff. He's also involved in the spec process to find vulnerabilities before they get implemented. Sounds pretty important if you ask me!
However, to be helpful enough to be worthy of a grant, I first need to understand the protocol suite really well. From my experience, the best way for me to learn something is to write code, so I'm writing my own lightning implementation here. I'm having fun, but not sure if that will get a grant. I would have to at least differentiate it clearly from existing lightning implementations. I'm thinking about "exposing all the things" (in a way that's still easy to understand) as the angle, to make it easier for people to understand what is going on in a lightning node, but let's see.
Security should be on everyone's mind, though. I don't think security is possible if only a few people feel responsible for it. But yeah, not everyone can focus on security to find pretty involved vulns. Specialization still makes sense. ↩
In the spirit of @k00b's reply, I think the real question is:
Can I be a paid lightning protocol developer?
I have implemented part of the spec, I have contributed to the spec, so in some sense, I'm already a lightning protocol developer.
It's rather about convincing someone to pay me to continue doing what I've already done for free. I have time, so I'm giving it time. I've also only been doing it for free for a couple of weeks so far.
I think it would be a great honor to get paid to work on the lightning protocol. If the money comes through a grant, even though it's called a grant, I wouldn't take it for granted, haha
Floating-point arithmetic is hard
I wouldn't conflate belief and delusion like this
Mhh, you are right! I made a big jump from belief to delusion here:
[...] their belief in some supernatural power on their side is what gives them power.
So essentially, I need to face that, apparently, I believe in the power of humans deluding themselves [...]
Here, I framed delusion as simply a stronger belief. As if believing something really hard necessarily makes it a delusion, where it doesn't matter anymore if there's incontrovertible proof against it. So yeah, you're right, it's not fair to frame delusion as just a strong belief. You can believe in something really hard and still not be deluded. Good point!
https://www.selfauthoring.com/
Ohh, I remember @elvismercury posting about this! This is the perfect time to bring it up again. I've been writing for myself in a journal pretty consistently for a while, and I started to wonder about other forms of writing that could help me. Like this!
Newer LLMs still hallucinate non-existing pypi packages, including gpt-5.2 and claude-4.5-haiku.
Great for slopsquatting
My impression of him changed for the worse when I listened to Magnus Midtbø recounting his free solo trip with him. I think it was here: