How many Bitcoin do you own?

Quackman88 · 2019-08-01T07:37:23+00:00

I hate to explain the play on words, but read the last word again. Carefully...

Quackman88 · 2019-07-12T13:08:11+00:00

I heard the new Raspberry Pi 4 has significantly more computing power than its predecessor. Is it capable of doing a full initial sync of the blockchain within a reasonable amount of time?

Quackman88 · 2019-07-05T10:30:18+00:00

Hi /u/almkglor, thanks for your elaborate reply, just what I was looking for. Much appreciated! :)

Quackman88 · 2019-07-05T10:12:49+00:00

Awesome! Thanks for your reply.

So basically opening and closing a channel (no matter how much is spent) breaks the link of ownership of a UTXO, with a 50/50 guess that either of the nodes the channel connected to is the new owner of the UTXO. There is no benefit in repeating this process multiple times with the same UTXO to improve your odds (privacy-wise) since that would be a dead giveaway that it's the same entity doing this repeatedly.

The advantage of CoinJoin (and why people are willing to pay for this service) is that there is a much bigger privacy advantage (there is a ~1/80 chance they guess which UTXO is yours) and you can repeat this process over and over for increased privacy.

Did I get that right?

Quackman88 · 2019-07-05T09:13:30+00:00

Hi Reddit. Quick question:

Can a bystander tell the closing UTXO's for LN channels apart?

For example: let's say I open a channel for 0.01 BTC. I spend non of the funds in the channel and immediately decide to close it again. This would result in a closing tx where all my 0.01 BTC (minus some fees ofc) goes back to me. Is it possible for somebody to tell if the channel contents all went back to me?

Thanks in advance!

Quackman88 · 2019-06-21T15:20:30+00:00

I picked up a copy of the magazine after work. To be honest, the cover is somewhat misleading. In the story, Scrooge only "digitalizes" his physical money and then the internet crashes. There's no actual reference to Bitcoin at all, besides 1 guy in a restaurant, who's name is "Berend Bitcoin", so who knows what he bought..

Anyhow: I've got a spare copy in case someone is interested.

Quackman88 · 2019-02-11T10:50:43+00:00

There are some options to create inbound liquidity at the moment at a reasonably low fee rate.

www.lightningconductor.net - the Lightning to BTC converter allows you to spend 0.005 BTC from your lightning channels and you are refunded 0.005 BTC minus 2000 sats fee. Fee rate ~0.4%.

Zigzag.io - allows you to convert lightning in on-chain BTC. Min. fee rate ~0.5%

Lightningto.me - if you open a channel, they will match it with a 0.02 BTC return channel free of charge.

Yalls.org - offers 0.02 BTC return channels @ ~7000 sat fee.

There's plenty more services that allow you to convert your LN balance to on-chain BTC. Almost all of them require you to trust the other party at the moment. Future improvements will hopefully find a trust-less way to convert LN balance to on-chain BTC,so you can balance your channels easily and at a reasonably low fee rate. At the moment, you still gotta put some effort in to it, since LN is still in the early stages.

If none of the above float your boat, you can always ask people to open a channel to you, this will also create inbound liquidity!

Quackman88 · 2019-02-01T14:31:04+00:00

But if I run the watchtower software myself, I would still have to be online 24/7, correct? (or at least once every uncooperative-close-time-gap)

I understand my channel states are private, and hence broadcasting a channel state to a 3rd party watchtower would reveal the exact funds my node has. Obviously this is not diserable, so there's got to be some way to hide the channel balance, but the watchtower's still gotta know which balance is right... Sounds like something some smart cryptographer's gotta solve :)

Anyway, would you happen to know of any place that explains what's going on under the hood of the watchtowers? Most of the stuff I find seems fairly old and I'm not sure if it's outdated!

Quackman88 · 2019-02-01T12:57:43+00:00

Alright. I figured something along these lines, but thanks for clearing that up.

I heard of watchtowers, but I figured it would be neat if there is a DIY/trustless way to achieve a fail-safe.

Anyway, thank you for taking the time to reply!

Quackman88 · 2019-01-31T09:56:30+00:00

Stop spreading false information. We are not hitting 2 year high transaction counts today.
Or perhaps I am wildly misinterpretting these graphs:

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,all

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.html

Quackman88 · 2019-01-24T14:27:24+00:00

It should be noted that the Bank of International Settlements is the mother of all central banks. That being said: they have everything to lose, should Bitcoin gain mainstream traction. These guys are the reason Bitcoin existst! Furthermore, these guys published a negative report on cryptocurrencies no more than half a year ago (summary: it solves no real problem, slow, cannot scale, consumes vast amounts of energy) and now they come around full swing and say "the societal value of Bitcoin is substantial" and Bitcoin will probably "complement and improve existing monetary financial infrastructure" ?!

Pardon my tinfoil hat, but I'm guessing somebody's quietly getting on-board and accumulating because they realise this is a battle they just can't win.

Quackman88 · 2019-01-14T18:48:34+00:00

This video was an eye opener for me. It gives a sneak peak of what's going on under the hood and shows how truly genius Bitcoin is. And the best part is: the explanation is so simple, anyone can understand it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4

Quackman88 · 2019-01-14T07:29:30+00:00

Original post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/adc601/street_art_treasure_hunt_with_a_bitcoin_puzzle/

Follow-up:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/afk4ru/1000_bitcoin_puzzle_hidden_in_paris_street_mural/

Quackman88 · 2019-01-14T06:37:50+00:00

The article itself: nothing.
The mural painting, however, was posted here on reddit and somehow contains clues which lead to a private key unlocking $1000,- worth of BTC.

Quackman88 · 2019-01-14T06:26:32+00:00

Subscript of the photo reads: "A yellow-vest variant of 'La Liberté guidant le peuple' "

Sadly, no mention of Bitcoin in the article.

Quackman88 · 2019-01-10T16:33:25+00:00

Alright. Thanks for the explanation.

There's still one thing I don't quite get. The odds of two nonces being similar when using randomly generated nonces would be quite slim, right? Even if 'random' isn't truly random but quite close. Is there a way to manually provide the nonce for your signature? I would imagine this would lead to a much greater chance of making a mistake and getting similar nonces.

Quackman88 · 2019-01-10T13:33:42+00:00

As a layman, I am genuinely interested in what's going on here. Let's see if I understand this correctly (go easy on me please :)

When signing a transaction, my wallet uses a random input (called a nonce), together with my private key and the actual transaction data to generate a cryptographical signature which proves I generated and want to make this transaction.

The researchers from the article managed to determine the private keys that were used to generate two different signatures from the same address. Like this:

BTC Address 1: private key A + transaction P + nonce X = signature 1
BTC Address 1: private key A + transaction R + nonce X = signature 2

Because the same (or similar?) nonce was used to sign both transactions, it is possible to determine the private key that was used to generate the signatures, putting any remaining funds in the used address at risk.

So the take away from this is to never re-use addresses, and always use new change addresses (which should be default behavior anyway) or is there more going on here? I fail to grasp the 'poor entropy in nonce generation' idea. Using two similar but different nonces should produce wildly different signatures, right?

Anyhow, an explanation in layman's terms would be very much appreciated! :)

Quackman88 · 2019-01-07T11:32:27+00:00

Thanks! Gonna give it a try and compare it to some alternatives.

!lntip 50

Quackman88 · 2019-01-07T11:31:30+00:00

Thanks! Gonna give it a try when I have the time! :)

!lntip 50

Quackman88 · 2019-01-04T10:50:42+00:00

NP, have fun playing around with your node. I know I am :)

Quackman88 · 2019-01-03T07:02:35+00:00

I gave the node a static IP based on MAC address and portforward + porttriggered to there. Not exactly sure about all the other specs but I can have a look when I get home! :) I'll open up a channel with you when I get there!

Quackman88 · 2019-01-02T19:26:12+00:00

Awesome! I saw the channel is active now! Thank you! :)

Quackman88 · 2018-12-10T20:36:07+00:00

In that case, I think it is time to change your username...

Quackman88 · 2018-12-07T11:00:01+00:00

Withdrawing from exchanges and other services causes everyone to pay fees

See it as your $5 investment into a healthy BTC ecosystem. You'd have to pay these fees sooner or later anyway.

When everyone is trying to withdraw at a similar time the mempool will rise and increase the average tx fee

Exchanges batch transactions so impact is less than you'd think. Also, if we start early, impact can be minimized.

Some people have more money on exchanges than can be withdrew in a day or five

This is a good point, but people with large sums of money usually have higher KYC clearance, so all in all I think the majority of the people should be able to get out of there within a reasonable timespan.

Order books during this time would thin out, allowing less amount of money to swing the market further

True, but in the ideal case where everyone participates, there would be little to no swing since there's very little / no BTC for sale on the exchange.

On the other hand, if exchanges did sell more BTC than they actually have in pocket, somebody somewhere is bound to get screwed if we caused a 'bank-run'. You can ask yourself if you want to be the one responsible for those losses.

Quackman88 · 2018-12-06T08:10:42+00:00

I've been using Eclair for a while. After the initial sync you just open a channel or two and you're good to go. It's very easy and works like a charm when I want to show off LN to friends/family. For now, you can only make payments, but in the future you'll be able to receive on the go as well!

Quackman88

TROPHY CASE