buck

bitcoiner in the Madisonian mold. developer on multisig @ unchained, working on lightning auth with LSATs. Blocked on twitter

Public Key

npub15gaw9fpcwrleq332pl95xndencvwgwdtfee6ejlngp7waeh0e35sg8r670

NIP-05 Address

buck@iris.to

NIP-57 Address

buck@stacker.news

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs2ywhz5su8plusgc4qlj6rfkueux8y8x45uuave0e5ql8wumhuc6gpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds2cyt0n

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub15gaw9fpcwrleq332pl95xndencvwgwdtfee6ejlngp7waeh0e35sg8r670

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Last Notes

2024-04-03 02:18:22

Are there any relay implementations that have NIP-44 support? The NIP04 standard says it's been deprecated in favor of 44 but there don't seem to be any relays that support the favored one.

2024-03-27 02:01:32

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He is the psyop manifest

2024-03-11 15:13:48

If you're in Austin TX this week for SXSW or the Bitcoin Takeover, join us at the Bitcoin Commons this Thursday for Austin Bitdevs!
We're breaking our long running streak of the third Thursday of the month to take advantage of a busy week of Bitcoin events here in the Bitcoin capital of the world in the Lone Star state! https://www.meetup.com/austin-bitcoin-developers/events/296945954/

2024-03-03 19:14:31

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It could be but BIPs are a lot of work, more political than technical and it doesn’t need a BIP to work. Just broader understanding and adoption.

2024-03-03 15:00:47

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That’s what’s important about having a good domain model- it makes it easier to reason about code paths that should already be available to you.
Our current, rigid BIP32 path standards and the way many signers implement them are the real limiting factor to broader blinded xpub adoption.

2024-03-03 14:59:20

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The protocol for blinded xpubs is actually pretty straightforward and easily done today (higher risk of losing funds though if you don’t know what you’re doing).
Here’s the original proposal and recovery examples using even something like caravan today: https://github.com/mflaxman/blind-xpub

2024-02-13 03:28:25

fun fact: looks like npm utilizes 402 status codes in responses if you try and publish to a private package!
(no lightning/L402 support though 😔)

2024-02-12 02:37:46

Ok, so I wasn’t the only person in the world that saw and recognized @npub1sg6…f63m wearing a satoshi shirt. #note1fsd…arkk

2024-01-09 05:07:38

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Unless I’m missing something, you can’t just “allow” sign events with the key offline. Maybe there’s some delegation protocol, but you need access to the nsec to sign every message. Signing can’t happen without access to the private key.
The closest we have is something like the VLS (validating lightning signer), which is a dedicated, internet enabled signing device that supports encoding permissions about limits on what the device will sign. Unfortunately it still falls victim to the problem that your private keys are still exposed to the internet.

2024-01-09 04:34:28

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Every message you send in nostr is signed with a private key. I’m assuming you’re not signing that much with your bitcoin seed.
Lightning keys are hot which is why you should only keep as much as you’re willing to lose in lightning.
Another reason is privacy. You don’t really want to associate your life savings with your social identity.

2024-01-09 04:07:24

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Nice. I also like the somewhat related concepts of Veblen goods and shibboleths. Both hard to acquire signals that you are part of a group (the former through cost and latter through language, originally literally unable to pronounce a word).

2024-01-07 20:42:04

Good walk-thru as well of how we as a community that are custodians of an open, decentralized, and immensely valuable protocol need to have reasonable expectations. Lightning didn’t fix all of bitcoin’s problems, but it also was necessary to get the MVP out, in no small part b/c deploying proof of concept is how we learn.
We should look towards the future with the same clear-eyed practicality. #note1nqr…2hjg

2024-01-07 19:29:05

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Yeah and honestly if it hold for too long that basically means bitcoin has failed since the majority of people still have zero familiarity with it still and those are the ones that still need to be onboarded for it to be worth it.

2024-01-02 15:07:26

I really like this heuristic for evaluating bitcoin upgrades by Erik Aronesty from the mailing list:
> "Best tool for the job" is not the bar. "Safe for all" and "useful for
some" is the bar.

2023-12-19 21:50:21

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Wen @npub1mut…23vg integration carman?

2023-12-19 21:50:00

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Question was my comparison to stacker news so makes sense. Nice thing about nostr is you don’t have to use the custodial options. Problem with nostr is the complexity and “analysis paralysis” that comes from too much choice.

2023-12-19 21:18:36

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Good to hear. I think the ecosystem needs to be more open to centralization to address scaling. The key to the benefits (like bitcoin) is right to exit and open competition.

2023-12-19 21:14:58

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Case in point, I setup payments in nostr for my account with stacker news

2023-12-19 21:13:14

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Not quite. There are more steps to getting setup in a nostr ecosystem where you can get paid than it is to get paid (and pay) in stacker news.

2023-12-19 19:54:43

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I would guess this is in part due to centralization which just scales much better. I say this more as a compliment than a criticism. Bundling and centralization is great for UX. @npub1jfu…m0gx still wins by being true to principles by offering pseudonymity and ability to exit.

2023-12-19 14:03:37

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Nope. There will always be new bugs, new attack vectors, and new optimizations. Not to mention human inclinations.

2023-12-19 02:29:50

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Definitely not my word!

2023-12-19 02:12:23

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Just wait until people start declaring really complex spend condition scripts reflecting complex business interests wasteful. Then legitimate financial transactions will be those that are only p2p between individuals. Once the goal posts can move a little, they can move anywhere.

2023-12-18 23:10:39

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Yeah. If you need censorship to save something then it’s probably not worth saving in the first place.

2023-12-17 19:39:04

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Plenty of custodians are voluntarily chosen. Most ppl voluntarily choose Coinbase. That’s more of a concern if you’re choosing a custodian/federation because you have no choice.
The more important thing is if you can leave the federation in a censorship resistant way. If you can’t leave when you need/want, then the voluntary nature in which you entered is irrelevant

2023-12-17 18:52:36

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Bitdevs should be fun this month 😅

2023-12-17 18:39:42

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I think performance under pressure by individuals is different than how groups react under duress. Think “never let a crisis go to waste” or things like the Patriot Act or bailouts/giveaways post-GFC

2023-12-17 16:03:02

Yep! Planning and building under urgency is much riskier
https://x.com/4moonsettler/status/1736041734071635997?s=46

2023-05-15 20:03:46

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https://open.spotify.com/track/0LQtEJt7x0s6knb6RKdRYc?si=5649a70795864968

2023-05-15 19:16:40

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😑

2023-05-15 14:53:27

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Because you’ve been living on the coasts until now 😁

2023-05-01 19:11:28

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Heh, yep exactly. That used blockstack's distributed storage protocol on top of their blockchain. But this could probably be done just as well with nostr.

2023-05-01 16:44:21

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Ideally you could have this be in a form where the author also gets paid. It works for one author per relay but to scale to one relay to many authors, something like delegated 3rd party caveats in macaroons could work. You could also use nostr to not just get the content, but leave the content encrypted and then users could only read it once the relay gets a decryption key from the author after a confirmed payment.

2023-05-01 15:41:04

That feeling when you spend hours trying to fix a bug in a hackathon project, get a normal nights sleep after event, find it’s a simple five minute fix after looking at it again once well rested 🤦‍♂️.
I’m getting old.

2023-05-01 13:42:50

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At least they told you why you were suspended! I’m still waiting for my response.

2023-05-01 04:03:04

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Great point. What you’re describing is a change to the protocol, which by definition would not be how it works today. But yes, removing OP_RETURN limits (which I believe is just policy anyway) and the segwit discount would make the market more free. Discriminating against data (a la current segwit discount and OP_RETURN limits does) is would not.

2023-04-29 14:40:41

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Can’t see how it wouldn’t!

2023-04-28 22:40:56

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Utxos haven’t been spent yet so they haven’t been signed. You can verify by verifying all of the blocks.

2023-04-28 22:40:02

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At some point what is concise will become a subjective value. The way we make that objective is by scarce block size and the free market. Costs encourage users to be as concise as possible.

2023-04-28 16:48:27

What other conference would you want to be at this week in ATX https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_ff8de411235a817c63ebbb78859ded6f54c6e26ff31f285eba42621f056dc06f.jpg

2023-04-23 05:34:29

Always a sign of a good conference when you’ve onboarded at least one of your cab drivers to bitcoin.

2023-04-23 04:58:44

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Yaaaaasssss!!

2023-04-22 01:22:54

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Right. So it wasn’t Satoshi’s vision to “allow beachballs” therefore beach balls are bad and unfair and should be disallowed by any means necessary so that the “right” passengers don’t have to pay too much.

2023-04-22 01:16:42

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By the way, do you know why there’s a witness discount?
One reason was to encourage migration to segwit. That was desirable. It came with tradeoffs but probably still worth it.
Second reason is because the witness doesn’t need to be persisted by all nodes. So this is actually better for those that don’t want to persist inscription data on their node.

2023-04-22 01:15:07

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Limiting data on witnesses makes no sense and would break many use cases of bitcoin including those that are “purely monetary”. I’m not appealing to authority as an opt out. I’m making the point that
(a) this is not as simple as “just get rid of things I don’t like” and
(b) you would need someone to implement the type of limit you describe and if everyone that could says that’s a bad/dangerous idea, that’s a problem.
The difference about the pandemic is that experts that disagreed were silenced so it wasn’t universal agreement.
Lift the cap on OP_RETURN and no more witness discount. If it’s not just about the discount then you’re really just asking to censor data you don’t like.

2023-04-17 18:14:16

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I think I just failed the Turing test

2023-04-17 18:10:26

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Ugh. I wish I could enjoy it more. It just makes me depressed, but maybe that’s because I don’t buy the inevitability position. We’re going to have to work for the future we want. With plenty of opportunity to mess it up.

2023-04-17 18:08:59

Nothing like technical controversy in bitcoin to tickle even many bitcoiners’ authoritarian funny bone. Humans are tribal.
We don’t like challenges to our tribes even at the expense of our principles and, like Jonathan Haidt’s rationalizing rider on the emotional elephant, we can always come up with ways to reconcile even the most contradictory positions.

2023-04-17 18:06:42

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I think it’s intellectually consistent to say segwit and taproot were mistakes. I don’t agree but I respect the position.
There’s near universal agreement from devs that there’s no way to prevent data we don’t like w/o prevention “useful” use cases, which is another way of saying that actually the protocol needs to be value neutral in terms of content of data. The way that we filter for usefulness is the market, block size limits, and limited supply of currency all of which are reasons why bitcoin is probably a better platform to have experiments like NFTs than alternatives. The reason is if they have no value then as fees go up but people are less willing to pay them their use will go down. The same could be true for more complex spending transactions of any kind. If my business doesn’t want to pay the fees for a more complex locking script that might provide more security at the cost of block space, then we’ll opt for simple multisig.

2023-04-17 18:01:30

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No. Eventually the beach balls will have to pay a higher and higher fee. If ordinals are useless than it will become less and less worthwhile to pay for. The protocol designers from the start expected blocks to fill up which would drive up fees which would support the network.
You’re making the same argument big blockers made 5 years ago. There’s functionally no difference from saying “but what if there’s only room for 20 people on the bus then only rich people could ride it”. People even made bus/transport visualizations to make these points!

2023-04-17 16:06:21

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I mean the whole point of taproot and by extension segwit which was meant to lay the ground work was to make it more expressive. If we’re saying that we should be deciding which cases expressiveness should be “allowed” which is a really scary prospect to me.
The protocol should be value neutral. As long as it operates decentralized and w/ an efficient market w/ accurate price discovery for blockspace then everything is operating as expected.

2023-04-17 16:02:17

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Lol. Autocorrect from title but yeah still works 😂

2023-04-17 15:42:01

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Love the bounty rifle 😂

2023-04-17 14:34:36

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Yep! Built on the same protocol. Sphinx Chat was effectively the first podcasting 2.0 app.

2023-04-17 14:21:25

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Sphinx Chat (which uses the lightning network’s TLV field as a messaging rail) has supported this for a while now. Different use cases compared to Nostr in terms of protocol, but having payment as layer one of a chat protocol has some real killer applications.

2023-04-17 04:32:27

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The sats are still ordered the same way since one of the characteristics of coin joins is they’re still basically just normal transactions.

2023-04-17 03:33:30

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It’s not a guarantee it’s just as I said, moving physical parts can wear out more easily.
https://www.tomshardware.com/features/ssd-vs-hdd-hard-drive-difference

2023-04-17 03:29:46

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Read/write time is faster for ssd I believe and also might have a longer shelf life because no physical moving pieces to wear out but otherwise either should be fine as you say.

2023-04-17 03:28:07

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Right. That’s my point. The block limit is set and hasn’t been increased since segwit. Inscriptions/ordinals aren’t and cant change that. They are just using the limit that the whole network of nodes advocated for with segwit.

2023-04-17 03:25:52

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Interestingly there is not even a standard raspberry pi! They keep getting better all the time (old model 3s basically are strongly discouraged as of a couple years ago for most node running software) which means they should be able to keep up.

2023-04-17 03:23:26

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Then bitcoin was/is already broken. Has nothing to do with inscriptions.

2023-04-17 03:00:06

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Block limit hasn’t changed since segwit. Filling up blocks with more data (that is paid for) has always been the goal (which is why developing scaling solutions has been so important). The nature of that content is irrelevant.

2023-04-17 02:29:31

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Fair point. There is a purpose which is essentially censorship resistant data and value transfer. The protocol however does not care about the nature/purpose of that data and value though.
There’s a reason why the reaction from the vast majority of core devs on the mailing list to ordinals/inscriptions was that the data cap for OP_RETURN should just be lifted.

2023-04-17 02:02:04

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“Purpose” is subjective and is irrelevant. If the protocol has to care about the content of transactions then we’ve already lost. The only way that it can be “abused” is causing centralization (MEV, large blocks) or if miners can’t maximize fee revenue. All else is irrelevant. To suggest otherwise is asking for censorship.

2023-04-16 14:37:00

“Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly to the aristocratic. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends to act more and more exclusively in the interest of the ruling class, whether that class be hereditary royalty or oligarchs of financial empires or entrenched bureaucracy.”
- Politics as Repeat Phenomenon, (Bene Geserit training manual)
From Frank Herbert’s “Children of Dune”

2023-04-16 04:22:31

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Its soundtrack was the soundtrack for my work the past week. Great both for the nerd/tech angle as well as understanding what’s wrong with authoritarian regimes

2023-04-16 03:12:01

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I wouldn’t say you can have too many but you don’t want to aim for the lowest common denominator either. That said, I think there are things we can do to attract quality devs/engineers too.
Jeremy Rubin had a good post on this a couple years ago: https://rubin.io/bitcoin/2021/12/14/advent-17/

2023-04-16 03:03:17

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Maybe a good parallel is that a JavaScript conference is probably going to be more full than a Linux one. It probably shouldn’t even be a goal for bitcoin to aim to be like the former. Events like btc++ and TABConf imo are generally the right size to also maintain quality for this reason. Scaling Bitcoin had this vibe too. Much smaller but every talk just had my head hurting from the density of info.

2023-04-16 03:00:23

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I’m a huge fan of vercel. Great for quick deployments of apps. Easy learning curve for serverless, and great for quick projects that you want/need to deploy quickly (I haven’t used it at scale but my understanding is it does that well too).
A couple apps I’ve built on vercel:
https://txfees.watch
https://lsat-playground-bucko.vercel.app

2023-04-16 02:54:28

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Trumps biggest problem (and strength in many ways) has always been that he doesn’t really stand for anything. The move just never captured his imagination/attention enough.

2023-04-12 03:41:14

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Damn.
“It would be nice to call what has taken place a tragedy, but an audience is meant to learn something from a tragedy. As a nation, America not only has learned nothing, it has been deliberately prevented from learning anything while being made to chase after shadows. This is not because Americans are stupid; it’s because what has taken place is not a tragedy but something closer to a crime. Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up; a weapon that doubles as a disguise.”

2023-04-11 17:44:58

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Yeah I agree. Clients should be able to fix this but the protocol seems to make it easy for this to happen. And this happened on damus which seems to be the practically the reference.
Regardless, question still stands. Curious to know what it was in reference to.

2023-04-11 15:54:08

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Nostr is still so buggy I can’t see what this is originally responding to. But yeah I agree. Thinking I might take a stab at something for a hackathon.

2023-04-07 23:05:12

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Wait… you’re not allowed to post substack links?

2023-04-07 19:51:48

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In case the links didn't render fully, this for @btcpp
Tickets still available at https://btcplusplus.dev/

2023-04-07 19:50:00

If you're in Austin at the end of the month, definitely try and make it to the highest signal-to-noise ratio conference of the [Northern Hemisphere] Spring time!
I'll be leading a discussion about all things fee management: current landscape, challenges (esp related to L2s) and next gen proposals on how to fix them
https://iris.to/note1jp06g28s77qyu2eyg5u8xcl24rgpw7vhq9l72qx5frx49tpr8gssjh3t3l

2023-04-05 04:21:09

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The cool thing about nostr is that clients can choose to be exclusive but the protocol itself doesn’t care. It might be uncomfortable to much of the bitcoin community on here but a sign of nostr winning will probably be a competing client that adds support for tipping in other alts

2023-04-02 04:23:20

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Could already be possible today! https://github.com/bucko13/lit-subscriptions

2023-03-31 03:17:00

So what’s the AI bot du jour for helping put together a slideshow presentation?

2023-03-31 03:15:32

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I love me a good shakshuka

2023-03-16 16:30:29

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Oh, and if you're in Austin this week, we'll be talking about this (and much more!) at the Austin bitdevs socratic seminar: https://austinbitdevs.com/2023-03-16-socratic-seminar-38

2023-03-16 16:21:50

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And for those of you still allowed on the bird app, here's the announcement post over there: https://twitter.com/unchainedcap/status/1636395076866781184

2023-03-16 16:19:51

We've been working on a lot of important things at Unchained but it's been a while since we've been able to give open source as much resources as we would have liked. Really excited and proud of the set of features we're announcing this week supporting Ledger 2.0 wallet policy registration.
This is not just about new features for Unchained clients, but also for the ecosystem. Caravan now has the ability to persist Ledger policy registrations, which is an improvement for security and usability. Ledger users can now verify addresses on their device. Any other coordinators that support the config file serialization can also use the registrations.
We also released the first (to our knowledge) PSBTv2 tooling in JavaScript as part of this as Ledger 2.0 only accepts the newer encoding.
And our HWI-like library for interfacing with signing devices has drop-in backwards and forwards compatible support for all new Ledger interactions: registrations, address verification, and signing with registrations.
Checkout the blog post for all the details on the update! https://unchained.com/blog/multisig-security-ledger/
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_3ad5d2ff1c29f1caf1683b4fce77df08b3e88f83b740ee7c66196289739d2853.png

2023-03-12 21:54:16

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#[2] will you be my bridge?

2023-03-12 21:39:44

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I don’t know the owners, but I do love buccees!

2023-03-12 21:34:00

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Ha! I just love being a hermit too much I think. Get work done, spend time with my wife and kid and enjoy this beautiful weather in my garden!

2023-03-12 21:32:37

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Yeah the hodl invoice with PoP embedded in the LSAT basically is a great way to accomplish this plus I think you can still retain privacy if you use signing of challenges, which allows verification on a need to know basis

2023-03-12 14:45:47

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I’d love to see something like this built in a trustless way such that you don’t have to trust that the prism will split the payment (which is how it’s done in podcasting 2.0 right now). I built a PoC of this for a hackathon a few years ago using HODL invoices and LSATs, in a project ironically called “Prism”
https://github.com/bucko13/prism#split-payments

2023-03-12 05:24:03

The crazy thing about not being on Twitter is that it took me almost two days to really hear about the second largest bank failure in US history, and that was only after my wife asked me about it after seeing it on her Twitter feed for the past two days.

2023-03-12 04:55:24

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Was just talking about this too. Great movie (watched on your recommendation!)

2023-03-07 17:12:56

Seeing as how Twitter still hasn't repealed my suspension nearly a half-year in, here's a repost of the timeline of my very strange suspension in which no rules were violated and I remain banned in a post-Elon takeover world.
https://medium.com/@BuckPerley/tweet-sized-reflections-on-a-twitter-suspension-24c7f6368418

2023-03-02 05:40:09

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Unfortunately I think it’s more of a human problem more than anything else.

2023-03-02 05:39:41

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People will also eventually be incentivized to post things that get most reactions (like on Twitter) either ones that reaffirm biases so your “tribe” will like things with sats, or anger ppl on other side, because those reactions can lead to more eyeballs and more sats.

2023-03-01 19:13:51

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Give it time. It'll happen here too once it gets popular enough. It was the same thing on Twitter in the early days too.

2023-03-01 18:21:23

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Glad to see more and more attention being brought to this modern genocide! Good for you for hosting the discussion.

2023-02-14 22:45:09

Always interesting to see volatile fee markets through the lens of txfees.watch alerts. While there's been a lot of movement, the average still seems to be relatively low even with actually full blocks, moving above and below 10 sats/vbyte a couple times a day for the past week.
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_02c8a9e0e9634050ff02077162d6ea38e3d057d75459106cc688d1155c6ea3df.png

2023-02-12 21:30:20

I feel like 2023 has been the year where we found out how many bitcoiners are actually totally cool with financial censorship. Many are only just now finding justifications that they find "reasonable", which is of course how all aspiring censorship starts out.

2023-01-23 02:21:36

I guess your first post on here isn't as important if it's unlikely to be persisted forever right?