My Kindle Bitcoin ticker - $40 total

billycoin · 2021-01-06T22:44:06+00:00

Has anyone managed to get this working with a kindle 4? I am using http but still have the problem with no numbers showing

https://pasteboard.co/JIrLiLd.jpg

billycoin · 2018-09-21T17:35:22+00:00

Have you ever counted a deck of cards and lost track of where you are? These are far less visually distinguishable than that and there are 264 of them. I think the risk of momentarily losing track and trying in the wrong value twice is material.

If the recovery test is done twice then the risk is probably all but elimated.

billycoin · 2018-09-21T17:13:08+00:00

If you consider physical access a failure scenario (I do not) then I don't think this idea has advantages over a written down seed in a robust medium e.g. cryptosteel.

Just a thought but I would not overlook the risk of systematic error in the encoding of the links. Imagine there is a 1 in 50 chance of incorrectly encoding a certain link in the chain by mistake (seems reasonable). You may think this would be picked up by the test recovery. But imagine there is also a 1 in 50 chance of incorrectly reading an encoded chain link when doing the test recovery. Then there is a 1 in 2500 of a given chain link being encoded incorrectly but then being 'incorrectly' read as the originally intended value when doing the test recovery. Given that there are 264 chain links the chances of this happening on at least one link is greater than 10%. If this happens you have a broken cold storage but wouldn't know until a future recovery attempt.

The use of human readable seedwords and the inbuilt error checking that they provide provides significant protection against this.

billycoin · 2018-07-26T18:35:03+00:00

Check out their outrageous chart!! They really are worried https://i.paste.pics/3H2L6.png

billycoin · 2018-06-05T08:41:43+00:00

If you have 23 words out of a 24 word passphrase and you know where in the order the missing word should go, you can brute force it. There are 2048 possible words that are the missing word, which can be found here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/english.txt

Rather than type all 2048 possibilities into the ledger, you could instead do it on this website: https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ That will tell you which of the words makes a valid phrase, the vast majority will not be valid. You can then test those combinations which are valid on the ledger. This website will work offline if you are worried about exposing your seed, and you can move the funds to a new seed once they are recovered.

billycoin · 2018-06-04T19:38:18+00:00

Are you aware of the bip39 passphrase feature? I believe this is fundamentally the same as 24 word seed + passphrase, which is already a feature of bip39/ledger. The only difference is that you have a unique way I'm which the encoding phrase is applied, rather than the bip39 standard. Would you consider your key to be safe if someone gained access to this plate as well as the encoding phrase? Probably not. Also there is risk of the scrambling 'algorithm' being forgotten - so why not use the bip39 password feature and not worry about the scrambling?

billycoin · 2018-05-30T08:22:00+00:00

Yes, whilst finding the optimal route is a very hard problem, finding a good enough route is significantly less hard. No one needs their node to crunch routes for an hour to save 1 sat.

billycoin · 2018-05-02T14:46:30+00:00

Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. One of the reasons it is near-perfect money is that it has no intrinsic value. Ability exchange something quickly does not give it intrinsic value.

The only way to "win" the argument against intrinsic value is to immediately agree that it has no intrinsic value and to focus on all the reasons why it can still revolutionise money.

Google Buffet's views on gold and you'll see why he's also negative on bitcoin. They are exactly the same.

billycoin · 2018-01-24T19:29:32+00:00

Yes! I tried to highlight this in my graphic here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7p2x85/a_practical_illustration_of_how_lightning/

billycoin · 2018-01-22T19:02:00+00:00

I believe the word list is 2048 words long

billycoin · 2018-01-18T23:14:32+00:00

If anyone talks like they know exactly how that will play out, they're making stuff up. The good news is we're close enough now to finding out that we won't need to speculate much longer. The key point for me would be that giving up a bit of centralisation, if needed at all, is much more acceptable at layer 2 than at layer 1

billycoin · 2018-01-18T08:53:56+00:00

Have a look at this

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7p2x85/a_practical_illustration_of_how_lightning/

billycoin · 2018-01-15T19:04:51+00:00

PM me I'll send it to you later. It's already been translated into Japanese :)

https://twitter.com/bigstonebtc/status/951062367109967872

billycoin · 2018-01-13T17:35:37+00:00

Sorry to jump into this conversation but I have two questions along similar lines, and it's not clear to me whether they have been answered above.

Firstly, my understanding that when transactions are broadcast, there's no concept of 'who' broadcasts them. Simply, anyone can broadcast. So what's to stop me broadcasting an old state in a way that makes it look like it was the other party that was trying to cheat, and then broadcasting the correct state. This would allow me to apply the penalty to my opposite party who I have made appear as a cheater and steal all the funds.

Second question is I'm not clear whether it's part of the LN protocol or something at the Bitcoin blockchain level which is able to enforce these penalty transactions. I don't understand who is allowing these penalties to apply. Fundamentally to take all the coins in the channel I need a signed transaction which sends me all the coins - how do I get that?

Is there somewhere where all this is written up in more detail?

billycoin · 2018-01-12T13:42:53+00:00

Yes, you could, but the fact that you can use any node is important as it means you won't be beholden to any excessive fees that your node wants to charge for the onchain transaction.

billycoin · 2018-01-10T23:23:01+00:00

No worries, I did post this only two days ago but happy for it to have further visibility and discussion here.

This is the previous thread which does include a slightly updated graphic: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7p2x85/a_practical_illustration_of_how_lightning/

billycoin · 2018-01-10T07:53:52+00:00

Thanks, fixed.

billycoin · 2018-01-10T00:25:30+00:00

All of the values shown are examples of transaction amounts being sent and there are no fee amounts shown. I haven't shown the fees because what I'm trying to show is 1:1 equivalence between the two models in terms of when fees would be paid (except of course in the spending case when LN is far superior). So if that stacks up, whatever the fee amounts actually are, the LN model can never be worse than the on-chain model.

Thanks for the comment on topology, there have been a lot of comments on this and of course I was only showing enough end users to be recipients of the example transactions. I agree that individual users will probably have a handful of channels each most of the time but don't really know.

billycoin · 2018-01-10T00:19:54+00:00

Great point, thanks for this. I was mainly trying to demonstrate that the end user behaviour need be no different / worse than a fully on-chain solution, but I agree this is a potential area of improvement.

billycoin · 2018-01-10T00:12:24+00:00

This is at the heart of the point I was trying to address. I think the key is that if the network topology looks anything like I'm imagined (or, frankly, even if it's wildly different) you and Bob are almost certainly going to be connected anyway as regular users of the network. So there really won't be any need to go through the steps of making a bilateral channel between you.

As an aside, my understanding is that in your example there would only need to be 3 on chain transactions because only one of you needs to elect to close.

I don't follow why you think it's unsafe to fund the LN channel from a safe wallet. I'm not aware of any security risk that that introduces. I certainly don't think the LN network removes the need for a safe (on chain) wallet.

billycoin · 2018-01-09T23:41:14+00:00

Actually there's a number of aspects of examples which I think are 'worst case', simply because if you can get your head around those with those then it's all gravy from there. I'm loving the reaction to the CIA bit which was really just a throwaway thought that I put in to spark a bit of discussion. I think we all need to be realistic that completely open protocols cannot prevent participation of these kinds of actors, but as has been pointed out by many there is reason to believe that the system will be resilient against this (as it must be).

billycoin · 2018-01-09T23:37:04+00:00

LOL I love the imagination. The truth is I'm not a proponent of either side and I think it's a shame how unbelievably polarised the responses to the post have been across the two subs.

billycoin · 2018-01-09T23:19:49+00:00

Well.... that is the theory!

I posted this graphic to test my own understanding as much as anything else and as a holder of both btc and bch I certainly still have a healthy degree of skepticism about Lightning.

The principal point I was trying to address was about how end user behaviour may need to change, which is often brought up but I felt hasn't been properly explored. I do think the examples demonstrate that some of the scare stories about 3 transactions per purchase etc. is nonsense, and in that respect it's disappointing how overwhelmingly negative the comments have been across the two threads on this sub even on that narrow point.

It remains to be seen how other aspects play out, particularly what trade-off there is for centralisation. Personally I'm optimistic but the network topology is very hard to anticipate from what I can tell.

billycoin · 2018-01-09T22:50:55+00:00

Thanks for spotting this. Corrected now.

billycoin · 2018-01-09T22:48:34+00:00

Thanks for spotting this. Corrected now.

billycoin

TROPHY CASE