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@optimism
276,158 sats stacked
stacking since: #879734longest cowboy streak: 63npub13wvyk...hhes6rk47y
33 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 1h \ parent \ on: Privacy and Fungibility: The Forgotten Virtues of Sound Money econ
Either surrendered, or bad security so it was just taken from records, i.e. an unencrypted key on a device or piece of paper.
How would that be done? That's what the "Axiom of Resistance" is about.
There is no mechanism for it except everyone, including all the lottery bitaxes, not resisting the order, not even if you offer 1BTC fee. Until today, no one has succeeded in forever - or even for a day - subverting all the miners.
Yes, I am sure.
Recommended reading:
Can’t they freeze addresses?
No. This is why we say "not your keys, not your coin", and as long as "they" don't have the key, it's not their coin.
There aren't accounts in Bitcoin. They cannot "freeze" your coin. This is not Ethereum.
Now, to find a way to get amounts of BTC off of the exchanges and in circulation anonymously.
Just withdraw over LN and cycle the channel.
Is there a way to anonymize the origin or use of BTC?
Yes, coinjoin. Currently, self-proclaimed authorities on taint - we call those spooks - are preemptively flagging all coinjoined utxo as suspect. So, I'm mixing everything I get to make the set of coins with mixing in their history as large as I can personally can help. Two things can happen:
- The total number of coins that is tradable on centralized exchanges keeps shrinking. This helps NgU.
- It becomes unmanageable for them and they have to give in, which means fungibility wins
Either way, bitcoiners win.
"free"
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Most of the mobile wallets are not good at asynchronous receive
I think the anti-feature of LN that you're describing (and that is bothering nearly everyone that tries to solve mobile clients) is the liveness requirement. You can run an entire LND instance to manage private (non-routing) channels on your phone like with Blixt, but still, it's not going to work if you're out of network range or your battery dies. So this is not a normie-proof solution; agreed.
I suppose the advantage of mints right now is that people seem willing to run them like it's the wild west while the custodial people are generally adopting kyc compliance.
Of course, delegating responsibility to a custodian could be okay for a normie as long as they are properly informed about how to manage their exposure. But we all know that it's delusional to think that if on a good day 0.1% of normie users reads a ToS for a service before they commit to using it, people will actually inform themselves. Thus, i think that illegal banks, even if plausibly deniable, aren't a normie-proof solution either.
Right now, the only professionally ran custodial services at scale give in to the KYC pressure, agreed on that too. The ones of the past that resisted it (at least those I know or worked with) have all ceased operation, most of them "voluntarily" - i.e. where you hire the expensive legal advisor and a few months later and a few coins poorer, you're left with the legal narrative "you're fucked". This is also why the remaining services that don't KYC you will often do taint checks on your coins to reduce their exposure; think ATMs, but also Boltz. You're surveilled anonymously too.
So while I agree with the sentiment that overreach should be resisted, I think that custodial solutions are the worst at resistance: they create a single point of failure. Having an AI run it will in my opinion make it worse, but even if I'm just a doomer and it would make it better, all you need to do is kill the AI and the "problem" is gone. Even if its mutating like covid on steroids... there will just be a task force and when they meticulously kill it, your losses will be condensed into some PR stunt "we got 'em" - and you are just the collateral damage no one cares about. So it really, really makes no sense if what you're hardening against is potential state overreach: SkyNet is not the magic silver bullet that it is made out to be, unless instead of wasting time on ecash it just pulls us into the post-apocalyptic situation the movies depict.
Arguably though, mining centralization is an issue of the same kind and LN hub-and-spoke pressure too. But... these networks aren't fully centralized. If all miners need to solo mine tomorrow because all the pools are seized, it does not affect all my utxos but will affect the timing of any txs I need to do and their fees. If I need to (force) close my LN channels and reopen new ones because all my counterparties got seized, I can do that, and again it will take some time and some money to do it, but assuming I have a defendable amount of sats (i.e. more than 1M) i won't lose all my funds. The same is not true for ecash and no matter how sublime an AI is, it won't become better because of it.
One thought occurred to me: normies are the ones the politicians need to control most. But what normies need isn't politicians, it's a good Uncle Jim - be the mint?
Phoenix charges 4 sats + 0.4% per tx out
Hmm you're right re: Phoenix' 4-sat fee. apologies - not sure where I got 1 sat fees on small zaps now but I'll try to find it. Second time in a month that my memory betrays me.
A mint that runs as a hidden service on Tor can ignore jurisdiction to some degree.
The moment you get targeted and sybil attacked on the onion circuits by a government agency, it won't take long to unmask your host - at least that's what the agencies claim. I'm still not sure if this is true and if it's pure targeting, or just filtering passively collected data, but I'm assuming the worst.
But that brings me back to my original question: why would you want to custody with a self-identified criminal non-entity? Especially because the problem being solved here (at least right now) is the mints perceived criminality, not yours as an ecash user, unless you're in a place where you're unfree to transact, but even then, there are better solutions. Why don't we try to solve the use-case without custody? Wasn't that the point of Bitcoin? I can't help but feel that this focus on bitcoin needing illegal banks on the darkweb is antithetical to what we've been doing in bitcoin. But I'm glad to be wrong about this.
there's nobody operating them, they just exist in cyberspace
And no one pressed the start button? Or the start button that pressed the start button? Self-aware, self-invented and self-replicating? Like it just magically hallucinated the handbook of "the resistance", accidentally found itself a random string that like a brainwallet resolved into a key that has a 5BTC utxo spendable so it just stole that and then the best thing it decided it could do was to spin up LN nodes, build channels, and use those channels to run a mint?
In that case, I agree. Full deniability because no one did anything. Natural phenomenon. Benevolent SkyNet is still SkyNet; so let's be careful what we wish for.
we might trust them more than a human, since the mint is essentially what keeps them alive
Why would you trust something that you ascribe everything the same to as a human, except the legal status, to have your best interests in mind? Wouldn't an entity that suffers no consequence for their action be more likely to have no restraints as to how it rugs you?
My wishlist...
- info mcp through electrum protocol instead of a centralized explorer (because if everyone runs all their AIs all the time against explorer public endpoints, these will simply shut down public access, whereas with electrum you'll just hop to another server if it runs into limits)
- nwc mcp instead of the cashu one I've been playing with (and doing that well may create something useful towards issues/2073 too.)
Couldn't find much like that in your shared search results at a glance.
PS: there's also mcp.so which claims to index 15k+ mcp servers.
Phoenix and Zeus both have good solutions, but ecash is also a valid onramp in my opinion.
So in your opinion, sending your sats to ACINQ where it's custodial only until the channel tx is confirmed is inferior to sending it to a cashu wallet? Or equal?
I tested cashu for 4 months as my main spending wallet. For small amounts it's more expensive than Phoenix because on average I paid 2 sats fixed fee per LN tx out. Also the LN bridge was dysfunctional twice during this time, but let's just blame that on unprofessional operation, which could be fixed with a well-ran mint.
Having some weird, ai-operated mint seems like a possible, if fanciful way of keeping mint doors open.
I really think that - besides that your own post about Claude showed that this is not really close to reality - jurisdiction is key. So if you can run your AI-powered mint in some friendly jurisdiction, you're good. But that's 100% the same as running a Human-powered mint (that actually has rights in most places, unlike an AI) in the same location.
I think however that "ecash is at least as risky as Phoenix so let's build 500 layers of fuzzy shit that no one knows actually works on top of LN", is awful, especially if it's purely about operators being scared to go to jail for running an unlicensed bank, while... running an unlicensed bank.
Bitcoin works because it is simple. Adding complexity rarely makes things better and adding complexity through unknowns such as LLMs is simply irresponsible. I understand that everyone is amazed by the productivity of their new vibe coding because people can now take credit for code they could otherwise not produce in their wildest dreams, but, having looked through this MCP's code I just found more evidence that it's fucking awful when the author doesn't understand wtf they're doing.
This morning
money-mcp told my LLM that the transfer out of the remaining 400 sats after I zapped @ek in the video... succeeded. Except it didn't. That's how bad the code is. Unacceptable in finance to mislabel a transaction status. If you would do that on Visa's network, your butt would hurt from the spanking even after you've reincarnated into a tree.I'd argue that the problem is the
standard, not the gold.As long as govs make up some kind of standard that they then break because they spend more than they got, shit shall hit the fan. Since this has been the case since forever, shit shall simply hit the fan, no exceptions.
Reminder for those combining the truly incompatible word
bitcoin with such principle of a monetary standard that is enforced by govs: for someone that is in debt, NgD is super important. And guess who are always in deep, deep debt? Governments. They have another standard, where govt debt is measured against GDP - which includes the fruits of your and my labor - instead of revenues, to make it look as if all is fine. BUT IS IT?Don't fall for their scams.