I respect your conviction, Darth, honestly. And you're right, my wording was poor - obviously this isn't 'holding' Bitcoin. But "how to get exposure to Bitcoin through a proxy which us maximalists know is a poor substitute for the real thing but which I believe will convert some nocoiners in the long run" doesn't roll off the tongue.

Ultimately, I don’t disagree with the end goal: freedom through Bitcoin. Where we differ is on tactics. I see these new ETNs as a bridge for the average person who isn’t ready to go full self-custody yet. Most won’t jump straight from fiat to cold storage - they need a path. If a few of them cross that bridge and end up learning what “holding Bitcoin” really means, I’ll count that as a win.

Thanks Darth. I get you.

For most people in the UK, saving in an ISA is almost second nature - "my ISA" basically means "my life savings." A lot of people think it’s the only legitimate way to save or invest at all.

I’d argue that letting these people get any exposure to Bitcoin - even indirectly - inside that familiar wrapper could be a net positive. It opens a door for a huge new audience and some of them will inevitably go deeper: learn about self-custody, take control of their keys, and (bonus) avoid detours through a shitcoin casino.

I’m as pro-self-custody as anyone here, but I think pragmatism has a place too. If this route orange-pills even a few new people (and those people inevitably end up on your website!) that feels like progress to me.

This release of Raspiblitz includes the experimental option to run Knots, if that's what you want to do. My guide includes a section on this.

This version also upgrades to Core 29.0 from 26.0.

Agreed, I'd love that. Wide availability of BIP 352 in wallets would avoid the XPUB step.

I agree! It's a stupid buzzword and I don't like it either. Problem is, I tested a couple titles with friends and this is the one which they immediately understood. Maybe I should've gone with your idea - FaaS is a good description.

But yeah, you're right. It's just someone else's server, which for the purposes of my tutorial means you can host a simple, stateless function for free, i.e. no Linux box to provision, no SSH, no uptime monitoring, etc.

It's classic engagement farming. There's a lot of anti-Core sentiment floating around, and it's easy bait to frame challenging topics as "Core wants to…" even when the authors aren’t Core devs.

A more honest headline would be "Developers propose freezing unprotected coins as part of long-term quantum resilience strategy", but I doubt that would get as many clicks.

Thanks! Hope you enjoyed it

Thanks!

And no - you can use a dice to generate the first 128/192/256 bits of randomness, but the final 4 / 6 / 8 bits which are appended to the end are generated based on the hash of the dice-based randomness you generated. Note that those 4/6/8 bits (i.e. the checksum) take it to 132 / 198 / 264 bits in total - always a multiple of 11. That's because each 11 bits of data encodes a word. So the final word in any valid mnemonic will be determined in part by the hash of the previous words.

I've tried to visualise this in the 'Fingerprinting entropy' section. It's definitely a tricky one!

Thanks! You're very welcome, glad you enjoyed it

Thanks Alex! That's great to hear. Your site's awesome btw, just spent a while digging through your charts :D

I'm thinking of doing a tutorial showing how to accept on-chain payments while preserving privacy, i.e. without exposing the same receiving address to everyone. Reckon that would be useful to people?

Blink wallet supports LNURLp, so yes. This solution should work with pretty much all modern wallets inc Zeus, Breez, etc. Full list of wallets supporting LNURLp available from @DarthCoin: https://darth-coin.github.io/wallets/lightning-wallets-comparison-en.html