Last Notes
We're now co-signing JoinMarket NG releases!
@nprofile…79aj has reviewed up to 0.30.0 and that's the first co-signed release.
https://github.com/joinmarket-ng/joinmarket-ng/commit/9a6e8d4333ff716336c05671e07bd9454dc7f43d
He also fixed a docker image reproducibility issue.
Still looking for more eyes. If you can review the code and want to co-sign with us, please reach out.
do they? they look more like inflation "detection" more than explanations on why it would be unlikely for it to happen in the first place
What's interesting is how they manage to keep the TRY exchange rate more or less stable against other currencies. Prices have rosen like crazy but the TRY/EUR pair has barely moved.
That doesn't solve the "censoring". Primal uses a special caching relay for reading. Which is not a nostr relay but some custom thing. I guess you could self host that, but it's not as simple as configuring additional relays.
On top of that they have an npub blacklist which I'm not sure where it comes from and that might not be easy to avoid.
I have a problem. I only like Primal for its UX but I'm getting tired of "mentioned event not found". Did not come to nostr for censorship but for censorship resistance.
Any Nostr client recommendations? Have tried Iris and wisp already and was not convinced :(
Good luck enforcing that🤭
Fast, efficient, and high-quality text-to-speech for GrapheneOS
https://github.com/GrapheneOS/SpeechServices
Speech Services provides fast, efficient, and high-quality text-to-speech for [GrapheneOS](https://grapheneos.org) using state-of-the-art models running completely on-device.
https://stacker.news/items/1500823
The relay is not the problem. There are many relays already. But Primal is designed around their caching relay which is not easily replaceable.
Sure. But there's a big difference between who has access to it and what it stores. Selectively excluding notes sounds pretty intentional.
Is Primal censoring stuff?
https://stacker.news/items/1499789
Cashu Mint Auditor
https://audit.8333.space/
This app sends random Lightning payments between mints. Forever. The sats go in a circle until all is lost to fees or rugs. If a mint fails to pay an invoice, it is marked with a scary red label.
https://stacker.news/items/1499492
can't zap you! but thanks :-)
do you have a link to it?
Wouldn't it be nice so receive Silent Payments and CoinJoin them after?
Or how else could a developer receive Bitcoin donations with some privacy?
PR for Silent Payments (BIP352) support for JoinMarket NG: https://github.com/joinmarket-ng/joinmarket-ng/pull/513
Have been using the now available Android app for a while now and unfortunately will have to go back to WireGuard configs. Mainly the missing features are:
- Widget to temporarily toggle it off. And that still works with the "Always on" VPN setting. So that you can actually use the Internet connection with the VPN temporarily off through the widget.
- Exclude addresses on local networks.
Other things are not that important. But can't live without these two!
Super happy with the service in general though.
How does the Lightning channel management work? Is the Bitcoin node within the TEE or external?
Privacy-preserving license plates using blind signatures
License plates are crazy from a privacy standpoint. We'd riot if the government made us wear a badge with our name on it every time we left the house. But bolting a permanent unique identifier to our car? Totally normal.
Now there are ALPR (automatic license plate reader) networks everywhere, public and private, logging everything. Check https://deflock.org/ for the USA picture. From plate data + camera feeds (public or insecure private ones) you can infer where someone lives, works, when they're not home, who they meet. Some countries even let you query the vehicle registry directly from the plate.
I don't think accountability for cars is necessarily wrong. If you rear-end someone and flee, it's fair they can identify you. I just don't think we need to trade mass surveillance for that. Cryptography exists.
A basic scheme:
Every day you generate a random string r, compute H(r), and get it blind-signed by an issuing authority (they sign without learning what they're signing: Chaumian blind signatures, same as ecash). You put r on your e-ink plate as a QR code, along with the signature. Anyone can verify: hash the preimage, check the signature. If you cause an accident, the witness notes r and can prove they saw your plate. To find out who you are, they go to court, the authority looks up who requested the blind signature for H(r). No public link between your plate and identity. Already way better than today.
Problems and improvements:
Daily rotation is too slow: Cameras still build a full-day profile. Rotate every 5–10 minutes instead. Eric Rescorla arrived at a similar scheme: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/license-plates/ and explores the tradeoffs well, including how the authority can precompute a lookup table for all vehicles and time windows cheaply enough that de-anonymization doesn't require your cooperation.
The authority is still a chokepoint: Whoever registers you and creates the H(r) -> identity link already knows both sides. Threshold encryption of the stored record is a governance improvement (requires k-of-n parties to cooperate, auditable) but not a fundamental one. The registrar still has the information at creation time. The real protection is legal process + the fact that passive surveillance is broken. That's already a big deal compared to today, but it's not zero-trust.
The cryptography is production-ready. The gap between "solved" and "deployed" is almost entirely political.
Posted to https://stacker.news/items/1499201
Rewrote the "JoinMarket Maker Clustering and Taker Anonymity-Set Reduction" article with a clear example as introduction, a glossary, and trimming most sections.
Published at https://joinmarket-ng.github.io/coinjoin-simulator/mainnet-deanon.html (same URL, old version preserved in git).
The discussion about possible mitigations is ongoing at https://github.com/joinmarket-ng/joinmarket-ng/issues/508
BTW the JM protocol is not broken, just improvable.
JoinMarket NG 0.31.0 release is out.
More improvements about deep wallet scanning. Also security hardening, TUI improvements, and bug fixes. Automated Win/Mac/Linux install tests.
https://github.com/joinmarket-ng/joinmarket-ng/releases/tag/0.31.0
Max Hillebrand: The Praxeology of Privacy - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4_1E2kJ5_w
Timothy Allen speaks with Max Hillebrand.
Max joins me to explore freedom, privacy, and property rights in the free market of ideas. We discuss Cypherpunk strategies, the appeal of Bitcoin, Free Cities, and digital nomadism as ways to resist creeping socialism and surveillance. Drawing on Lockean ownership theory, Austrian economics, and praxeology, Max makes the case for combining decentralization, community, and technology to defend liberty in both physical and digital realms.
TIMESTAMPS:
0:00:00 — Coming up
0:00:41 — Veritas Village preview
0:01:27 — Start of conversation
0:10:02 — Triangular Interventions of the State
0:11:26 — The banning of VPNs
0:16:27 — Mean Time To Harassment
0:24:43 — The Cypherpunk Ideal: Increasing the Cost of Attack
0:30:38 — Dragnet Surveillance & Privacy
0:36:48 — Free Cities and The Importance of Freedom in Meatspace
0:44:04 — There are No Frontiers Left
0:53:08 — Conscription is Coming Back
1:00:57 — There are Many More Good People Than Bad
1:06:53 — AI and Robots of Convenience in the Dystopian Future
1:18:25 — Bitcoin Proves John Locke's Theory of Property Rights
1:25:29 — Proving Economic Reasons
1:31:40 — The Cypherpunks Don't Know How Fundamentally Correct They Are
1:36:47 — Freedom is Correct. The State is Evil
1:49:22 — AI Will Remove Scarcity from the World
1:53:50 — Keynsian Bullshit
1:58:08 — Tik Tok Will Eventually Generate 100% AI Content
2:10:35 — Rally Cry for Freedom Lovers
NOSTR:
Max Hillebrand: npub1klkk3vrzme455yh9rl2jshq7rc8dpegj3ndf82c3ks2sk40dxt7qulx3vt
Timothy Allen: Search '[timothy@nostr.com](mailto:timothy@nostr.com)' on your Nostr app
Free Cities Foundation: npub1lsj8pmgedqqamt89c27tzjjnlf0wn7q7udjm7j2cl9xxz97eacns2mwpee
https://stacker.news/items/1496628
Please no! xD
Take everything as open for discussion, and expect only optional changes that users will decide if they use or not.
Well you don't need the lightning node to run within the enclave right? Just a "smart" signer that signs HTLCs given the redeemed cashu token. For rebalancing maybe some rule of "not loosing funds" and someone external has to pay the rebalancing fees. You can prove to the enclave that the rebalancing succeed or that a LN invoice for which it only revealed the payment hash has been paid.
I'm sure there are lots of challenges here, but the main point is that it doesn't need to run "everything".
Been digging into JoinMarket maker clustering on mainnet. the short version: yes you can cluster makers by fee fingerprint from onchain data alone, and yes it reduces taker anonymity sets. But JM holds up pretty well in practice. mean anonset goes 7.6 -> 6.9, and the mitigation (fee policy homogenization) *can* be a client default change, no protocol surgery needed.
The counterintuitive part: some "obvious" countermeasures like makers avoiding change as input actually make things worse.
Rough draft, not peer reviewed, happy to get feedback: https://joinmarket-ng.github.io/coinjoin-simulator/mainnet-deanon.html
I do! It started as an LNbits instance but felt uncomfortable with seeing their balances and all transactions!
Now I'm able to give them that service with the same custodial "risk" but at least with some privacy.
myself for friends and family
The Ultimate Lightning Network Privacy Explainer
https://voltage.cloud/blog/lightning-network-privacy-explainer
https://stacker.news/items/1495707
Why meshcore over meshtastic? Have heard contradictory arguments.
Please name a place on earth where it's easier to make money. It might be true that building wealth is hard in general and that the USA is the easiest place on earth to do so.
Texas sues Meta, WhatsApp over encryption privacy claims
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/texas-sues-meta-whatsapp-over-encryption-privacy-claims-2026-05-21/
Texas’ lawsuit cites news reports about a federal investigation into claims that Meta had access to unencrypted WhatsApp messages and a whistleblower report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
https://stacker.news/items/1495402
Not exactly Ocean IMO. You can choose your own blocks with DATUM.
Before, they used to have different template options for stratum miners as well. Not nice that they've removed this feature.
How are you going to make any profits in a rigged system?
Every wall is just an added cost.
Lightning Network privacy is real. But "better than on-chain" isn't the same as "private."
#naddr1qq…0xsd
It's a very nice problem to have compared to the confiscation problem ;-)
The latest JoinMarket NG release comes with major improvements for wallet performance, specially for exiting old wallets with lots of transactions. Also security hardening, TUI improvements, and bug fixes.
https://github.com/joinmarket-ng/joinmarket-ng/releases/tag/0.30.0
why not use Bisq or another P2P method?
why glad? components are only getting more expensive lately!
https://blossom.primal.net/031fa62622b02e48c0a22da65c2ab683982a208cb0f9d0aad23d5ffc992d17ce.jpg
I think it's important for scalability. And happy to hear it.
But in general I think it's tough to beat Bitcoin as money. Specially as savings technology.
Humans have strived for sound money since forever, and the market cap for that problem is huge.
Payments come next (scalability). And only after comes privacy. Which is super important still.
But since protocols are "winner takes all", I think Bitcoin's market cap will keep diverging from Monero's. And that's not only about NGU, it also means that every bit of effort that you put on improving or building on Bitcoin, has a larger multiplier in terms of the impact it has on the world.
I think it chose different tradeoffs.
Use it if it's useful to you. I don't like the "dogmatic" approach to things.
That being said, I prefer Bitcoin as money and as something to work on for several reasons: more traction, LN (blockchains don't scale, including Monero), auditability, simplicity.
Answering about Lightning only, I would say yes.
Because it does a good job at keeping your transactions private from "the rest of the world". The problem is that the nodes that forward your payment (or even the ones that fail to), do learn quite a bit. And an external prober also could.
But is already way better than a bank transfer, a card payment, or a regualr Bitcoin transaction.
Will explain the details in a post soon™️
That would be a great improvement.
That already sounds pretty decent. But privacy on Lightning is tricky! I want to write an article on that soon.
Privacy isn't binary. There is no silver bullet or magic tool that can give you "full" privacy. Privacy is hard to understand and practically difficult to measure. But easy to lie about.
Even many bitcoiners think Monero has "unbreakable" privacy. It doesn't, and no tool, network, or protocol ever will.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iABIcsDJKyM
This video is a good example of how weak Monero's privacy can be in practice. (This isn't a criticism of Monero, it's a criticism of following mantras blindly and being fooled by slogans without understanding the details. Monero devs are doing great work.)
It shows how even if you can't tell which output was spent in a 16-participant ring signature, the anonymity set collapses on something as simple as a consolidation. Which would be critical for merchants, for example. And in practice it can be even worse, because there are methods to further reduce the effective anonymity set of the ring participants. Many more attacks and sources of metadata exist for intersection attacks too.
If you keep looking for a bulletproof privacy solution, you'll keep getting fooled. ;-)
Not a Monero guy! Actually a Bitcoin privacy developer ;-)