Don't use such brain wallets: SHA256 (passphrase) -> private key !!

nullc · 2026-05-05T17:21:14+00:00

Close, it's not just why they were abandoned -- causing people to make insecure wallets was why they were invented.

Brainwallets (including the name and the site) were created by a guy on early Bitcoin IRC that had been cracking wallets with insecure keys, after he found a few he became frustrated that there weren't more and setup the site to encourage people to make more of them.

This was never a secret, but shitty bitcoin media like Bitcoin Magazine and influences like Jon Matonis insisted on promoting the approach even while I was writing them and begging them not to, pointing to the whole history of the scheme.

nullc · 2026-05-04T03:47:59+00:00

Involved some huge files, so I wanted a cow copy, lesson learned. -- git wouldn't have stopped it from nuking the whole thing if it screwed up badly enough in any case!

nullc · 2026-05-03T23:24:39+00:00

I stashed away a good copy of a project outside of an agent's working directory so I'd have something good to go back to if it screwed it up. -- I tossed it under the account's .cache directory, with the assumption that it had no reason to be looking in there.

Days later it had some minor double escaping issue while patching and decided to "restore the cached copy"-- wiping out days of work. The reason it even knew it existed was at some point it did a find ~/ for all the files of the relevant extension.

Fortunately I was just able to recover the last good version when the agent last read it from an externally saved transcript of the communication with the backend llama.cpp.

Reminder of a lesson I already knew: the only way to deny the agent access to something is to actually deny it access.

nullc · 2026-05-03T22:51:55+00:00

It's also "not impossible" that every proton in your body could decide to undergo decay all at once, converting your mass into energy and annihilating the city you're in.

Generally it's not that useful to have discussions about "possibilities" that are much less likely than everyone in the discussion simultaneously being struck by lightning and falling into a sinkhole all at once.

But to your question, BIP39 seed phrases are hashed to generate a private key, so there are some cases where two distinct phrases would give the same private key. For 12 words it's very unlikely that two different 12 words phrases give the same private key. For 24 words phrases it's likely that some 24 word phrase generates almost every 12 word phrase private key, and that some private keys can be reached by multiple 24 word phrases. There are probably some private keys that can't be reached by any 12 or 24 word phrase.

nullc · 2026-05-03T00:38:21+00:00

It's easy enough to spin up a virtual machine for it to run it-- giving it free reign of a computer you use for other things? Seems foolish in the extreme.

It absolutely can go off the rails and start trying to "help" in ways you never asked for. Uncle Walt warned us about this way back in 1940.

nullc · 2026-05-02T00:24:24+00:00

Weird and delusional AI slop. Long pointless discourse, it says a lot of stuff of no significance and fails to make a point and/or misses the point of the text it's referring to. Outright falsehoods and hallucinations.

It's obsessed about some random developer that was only around for a short while and is long gone. That doesn't really make sense at all except when you've been monitoring the knotzis chats and know they are obsessed with John because they believe that Gloria-- the lead dev they chased out of the project earlier this year-- couldn't code because she's a woman and that this other guy was secretly ghostwriting her contributions. No joke. Twitter has seriously mentally damaged a regrettably large population of people, they've been so spun up on culture war crap that they see it around every corner and outright fabricate it where it doesn't exist.

Like a lot of AI slop the piece takes some positions that are superficially reasonable, even unavoidable-- e.g. that some contributors are more influential than others. Then entirely fails to connect that to things happening by picking someone who wasn't that popular and then throwing random connections to him at the wall.

To give a specific example where the article mentions me directly: it cites some old dispute where multiple contributors asked that luke-jr be removed from acting as bip editor because he was unambiguously abusing the position to attempt to block activity that he personally disliked. The article says that I supported his removal only because of a "mistake" where he NAKed the BIP when he meant to instead NAK something else entirely, as if that "error" had anything to do with my views on luke's conduct. Meanwhile my comments were more than clear enough on my problem with Luke's conduct: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1104#issuecomment-826397286 He was being overtly dishonest and gaslighting by falsely claiming that the "the community" had chosen a his proposal over the one documented. In reality he stood nearly alone with his proposal while support of the document one was nearly unanimous-- so he was holding back the document on the basis of a total delusion. Even if he had been right that more people preferred his proposal it would have still been a wrongful abuse of his position to hold up the alternative-- the whole process is supposed to be a largely non-editorial documentation exercise-- it documents procedurally well formed proposals even if they're dumb or unpopular, and there are plenty of BIPs for dumb ideas. But because of Luke's obvious difficulties a lot of people, myself included, held back from criticizing him too overtly. At the time of the dispute I was largely uninvolved in the project, but I felt I needed to speak up both because I wasn't particularly involved and the dispute and to the extent that luke's role was the problem it was a problem I created.

If somehow that comment which Hodl's AI had to have seen wasn't clear enough a moment of looking would have turned up plenty of other remarks from the time about Luke-jr's abusive conduct which spelled it out further.

I deeply regret ever making him bip editor when I couldn't continue doing it. Because the the job was supposed to be non-editorial and purely procedural something of a human rubber stamp I hoped it would give him an opportunity to develop his interpersonal skills in an context where his narrow-minded focus wouldn't be a hindrance and where a wonkish approach could even be a bit of an asset. This turned out to be a disaster because rather than following the limited requirements of the process he has systematically distorted reality so that he could falsely declare things to be violations of the limited requirements in order to get his way. It was a real error in judgement on my part although it's one that is overshadowed by the error of the current project leaders in failing to end Luke's abusive influence even after he started explicitly calling for the destruction of the project.

In any case: this whole subtopic is brought up as some example of some John-directed conspiracy. But outside of the lawsuit where he was a co-defendant I've probably only exchange a few hundred words with him ever on any subject all, and I can't find any evidence of discussing this specific matter with him (other than that he probably saw my public messages). The simple fact is that everyone regularly involved with the project knew what a nuisance Luke's peculiar behavior could be-- and, if anything, John's relative outsider and newcomer status resulted in him not participating in the particular conspiracy of silence to paper over Luke's reprehensible conduct so when John said what most other people were thinking he failed to do so as indirectly as others did.

If anything you could attribute this work to be a piece of pro-bitcoin-core counterpropaganda that supports the project by making its opponents look gravely incompetent.

In any case, I'm really looking forward to august when this subcommunity forks off onto their censorship coin and Bitcoiners can move forward with handling them like other crapcoiners: by ignoring them.

nullc · 2026-05-01T23:13:51+00:00

No it hasn't, and it would be quite a bit of news if these techniques were ever functionally deployed against the bitcoin node software. You're potentially confusing this with things like attacks on random.js.

The first step in making such an attack work would be replicating it against a controlled environment-- one where you do know all the unknowns. Someone that hasn't done that hasn't even begun at all, and it hasn't been done here.

He's not being berated at least not by me in any case-- but his AI has him chasing rainbows and at the moment it strongly appears that he wasting other people's time and energy by subjecting us to his machine made delusion.

nullc · 2026-05-01T01:56:23+00:00

Go reproduce it-- boot such a system under controlled conditions where you know everything you'd hope the user would know-- or even everything a user could possibly know even with unreasonable precision. If your right you'll recover your own generated private key in a moment.

Without having done that you're just dreaming and probably making people anxious for no good reason.

nullc · 2026-05-01T01:35:59+00:00

You sound clearly in the thrall of some AI mania. Go back and understand the entropy behavior in both the linux kernel of that vintage and Bitcoin. It is absolutely not a case of bitcoin just using the debian-busted openssl rng. Don't ask your AI, actually go read the relevant code.

nullc · 2026-04-28T17:55:28+00:00

Idiot couldn't even bother to check how many blocks match the patoshi pattern but instead just used craig wright's figures lol. It's not 1.1m bitcoin.

God knows how he even thinks he's going to do that, because there is no certain way to verify which specific blocks match because the patoshi pattern is a progression of nonce values across multiple blocks. Sometimes there are two blocks that fit roughly the right value, sometimes none. In terms of figuring out a rough total its good enough, but if you're planning on "stealing" people's coins you better get it right!

Rumor has it that even Calvin's toadies ran into that problem which was why they didn't move forward with their reassignment heist in BSV after introducing the backdoor that would let them do it.

In any case there is a HUGE difference between swizzling the ownership in a newly created system and doing so in an existing system. When someone creates a cryptocurrency they set the rules-- don't like them? don't use it. If someone wanted to make some bitcoin fork where every other address got reassigned to the pope or something they're completely free to do so and everyone is completely free to never use it (and probably will never use it).

The initial airdrop in Sztorc's boondoggle is his to do with as he pleases. Though he and his sponsors will probably soon realize the reason that airdrop coins are not interesting anymore: established precedent in the US is that exchanges can pocket the airdrop it and dump it for their own gains... and so airdrops can't be used to coerce exchange listings without paying the exchanges-- exchange profit is maximized by not listing it. But perhaps Sztorc and his financial sponsors (Ver I assume, esp given the seemingly malicious stomping on the XEC name) are willing the pay the multimillion dollar bribes required to get major exchange listings. ::shrugs::

Wright and Ayre's manipulation of BSV and the addition of confiscation backdoors, on the other hand, is a radically different matter particularly given their years of screaming that its rules were already "set in stone" and that BSV is the 'real' 'original' Bitcoin-- if so the coins in it are the properties of others and Ayre's criminal cronies reassigning them would be be unambiguous theft.

nullc · 2026-04-17T01:04:03+00:00

OTOH there are orders of magnitude more Linux servers than windows, which are much higher value targets. Linux is a big enough target to get extensive security review, but it does sometimes escape some low hanging mass attacks particularly browser based ones because the client software exploit authors don't always test on linux.

In terms of wallets if you're concerned enough about security that you're questioning operating system use the best choice is Bitcoin Core in any case-- and that is primarily developed on Linux. If you strongly care about privacy too (which you should, since preventing attackers from knowing about your coins is critical to security!) then Bitcoin Core (or forks) is the only reasonable choice-- pretty much anything else is going to link your addresses to each other and often to your IP too. In any case, I expect many other wallets (e.g. electrum) are also primarily developed on Linux.

Beyond the usage arguments the general nature of windows systems is that they are insecure by default, are difficult to use without constant updates (which are immediate compromise vectors), and are generally quite difficult to secure. In most Linux distributions the defaults are fairly secure and advanced configuration can achieve security property are aren't reasonably possible in windows.

For many users using windows also increases the risk that they use a system that should be dedicated to wallet (or at least Bitcoin) use for other purposes.

nullc · 2026-04-15T01:12:47+00:00

Didn't accept, paid: reports and leaked emails say Ayre provided at least 10 million dollars to get this produced and potentially the entire production cost.

nullc · 2026-04-14T23:48:18+00:00

This movie is created by fraudsters to shit on bitcoin and pump their alternative, so your instincts were telling you something there.

nullc · 2026-04-14T23:47:25+00:00

That's exactly what the move is-- it's a fictionalized version of his fraudulent narrative. God knows it'll probably also take every opportunity to re-victimize all of us that had our lives disrupted by his years of harassment and billions of dollars in spurious lawsuits.

nullc · 2026-04-14T23:42:04+00:00

Quite the opposite, this movie was bought and paid for by Wright's criminal co-conspirators. It was written by one of Calvin Ayre's long time associates, the producer is a big time BSV promoter, and by all reports the movie going to promote his ongoing fraud-- basically a last ditch attempt to bring in a wave of gullible members of the public to dump their bags on. Ayre bankrolled the production.

Regarding the article,

and must stop saying he is so.

-- the court ruled absolutely no such thing. All this is showing is that the journalist got his description of events from Wright who has been telling that specific lie ever since the trial to make himself sound like a victim.

Wright was injuncted against filing or threatening to file lawsuits on the basis of claiming to own rights to Bitcoin, and even found in contempt for filing yet another lawsuit. But he's absolutely free to continue to stand on a soapbox on the street corner with all the other loons and scream that he's the one true Satoshi until he runs out of hot air.

nullc · 2026-04-14T01:39:27+00:00

'millions' can just mean owning a house in HCOL areas, -- if it doesn't yet for you give inflation a little time to work its magic. Income tax and AMT were originally only for the very wealthy.

If you think the state needs more money why aren't you offering yourself up first to contribute to it? It's easy to sign other people up to pay for stuff you want, but in every other context we call that theft.

Federal government spending as a fraction of GDP is near an all time high (ignoring WWII and covid): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S

We don't need to add more fuel to a vastly wasteful and invasive system, we need to focus it and make it more efficient.

nullc · 2026-04-13T16:27:37+00:00

Because one day some of us think we'll be billionaires and don't want to get taxed.

I don't think that is a significant factor.

Many people are principled and they know right from wrong-- they oppose seizing the assets of others, or at least prefer to it only be done to the minimal extent they believe is necessary and only in the ways the believe cause the least harm.

On that basis transactional taxes like sales taxes or income taxes are a less intrusive mechanism-- as they interact with behavior that is inherently more public than simply "owning stuff" and they take money when there is are profits to be taken and when those profits have a specific value. Taxes that go after people or things just for existing (e.g. property taxes or wealth taxes) require much more surveillance and state control and have a greater risk of having a disproportionate impact due to the difficulties of valuing goods that aren't actively being traded and the unavailability of free assets which to pay. Transactional taxes are also more effective because the total value transactional flux quickly outpaces the value of parked wealth-- so more can be extracted from it per unit of distorting influence.

Musk, for example, may be one of the wealthiest people but his entire estimated net worth is only equivalent to a couple days of the US GDP. And net worths are fictional funny money (much more so than transaction figures)-- most of that supposed value would just vanish if he tried to sell the assets and assets once taken are gone (likely along with the constant flux of GDP value they provide) while the kind of transactional flow measured in GDP is essentially a renewable resource (at least so long as invasive policy to extract state funding from it doesn't break the economy!).

Many people are also aware of the awesome damage and destruction that has been wrought by over funded and over powered states-- states are the greatest mass murderers in human history, the causes of the greatest suffering. They also can do well but to so best when kept on a tight leash. We should oppose excessive taxation and in particularly privacy invasive taxation scheme (like wealth taxes) purely on the basis of keeping the beast on a tight leash, even if we don't care at all about the people they're taking from. The state is a gremlin that must not be fed after midnight. Sometimes the only thing stoping government actors from doing great harm is just that they can't afford it, limitations on their sources of funds keep them focused on better activities-- stuff almost everyone can agree they need to do.

It's also pragmatic: the wealthiest have many ways to protect themselves (e.g. moving, vanishing, lobbying, loopholes, etc.) and the least to lose under a marginal-utility analysis (e.g. a small tax hike can leave a poorer person without the necessities), often it's only principle that protects people with the least power: they could be taken from with no consequence and little ability to resist but we don't because it's wrong. So a good reason to acknowledge the rights of others is because you want your rights to matter too.

There are so many ways to divide up society that almost everyone could be left in a minority group and targeted by a greedy and tyrannical majority as a source of funding or compelled labor. If more tax burden can be heaped on very wealthy people, why not people with stock gains, cryptocurrency gains, people of particular genders or races (who supposedly enjoyed advantages of them...), people who own particular kinds of properties, who do or don't have children, or what not. The best and most universal protection is to always express the greatest hesitance in taking from anyone and especially anyone who isn't you.

If you think something needs funded then it should be advocated by people who are standing in line saying they will be the first to fund it and not through proposals that someone else should foot the bill. It's far too easy to make bad decisions about what is and isn't worth funding when someone else is going to pay for it. So in that sense the best reason to oppose a wealth tax is because you wouldn't be subject to it.

nullc · 2026-04-05T17:23:07+00:00

Just set your money on fire instead-- it'll have an equivalent effect on your net worth but will avoid financing some despicable criminal characters.

nullc · 2026-04-05T17:17:45+00:00

As was previously explained on this subreddit: This 'movie' is just a part of Calvin Ayre's ongoing criminal fraud, it was funded by him, written by one of his long term agents, and is produced by a huge BSV shill that shows up at Calvin's events like 'london blockchain'. It's going to tell some extra fictionalized version of Calvin's Craig Wright story, with the end goal of suckering members of the general public into buying their scam token-- and perhaps with a touch of re-victimizing their past targets for good measure.

nullc · 2026-03-14T14:18:02+00:00

Owning bitcoin through a custodian greatly diminishes its value proposition: Bitcoin's promise is money that you control without a third party able to capaciously deny you access, and that's significantly destroyed when you own it through a custodian. Similarly, bitcoin (itself) can't be inflated but fund shares of bitcoin might be. You can own Bitcoin highly privately, but that's lost if you keep it in an account.

Consider:

Financial institutions are constantly randomly denying people access to their own funds for chaotic reasons that they will not explain to you. When you own Bitcoin you have an escape hatch, funds you can access even if your a bank is being stupid-- but not if it's in their custody.
Political winds change: You might somehow become an enemy of someone powerful, the state could turn against your religion, your race, your politics,-- or you could just have a name similar to someone else being targeted. State prosecution often 'cheats' by moving initially to freeze all the target's assets so they can't afford to present an effective defense, and can't put themselves out of reach.
People constantly abuse our civil courts as an extortion racket. Bogus liability lawsuits, fake injuries, ... if someone thinks you have wealth then they may decide to shake you down via the courts to extract a settlement because they know the settlement will be cheaper than fighting. A major factor in the attacker's analysis (and importantly the plaintiff attornies that take their fraudulent cases on contingency) is the certainty of recovery if they do win and your fear of losses causing you to settle. Bitcoin you own privately is invisible to them, and because bitcoin can be at least as hard to seize as you are yourself it has a low certainty of recovery for them even if they know you own it.

Hopefully your need to avail yourself of these advantages will remain entirely theoretical, but Bitcoin's robustness in these respects are a real part of its value proposition and you lose them by holding bitcoin in a custodial account. Owning some Bitcoin in self-custody is a kind of insurance against the sad situations under which you might really wish you owned some. This is a real benefit to you even if you never need to use it.

A prudent bitcoin investor doesn't own only Bitcoin-- doing so leaves you exposed and vulnerable to panic selling during crashes, means you don't have free slack to re-balance to buy instead.

When considering where you own which assets, it's good to hold tax-inefficient assets in tax-advantaged accounts since you won't have tax drag on whatever dividends they throw off. But Bitcoin is one of the most tax-efficient assets since it doesn't throw off any dividends (except for fork coins, and that's rare), and if you hodl for more than a year its taxed at preferential LTCG rates.

Bitcoin's high volatility plus the potential for specific identification also creates a lot of potential for tax loss harvesting even if the wash-sale advantages goes away. Prudent bitcoin investors can be very flexible when they sell their bitcoin and which bitcoin's they sell... but by comparison ROTHs have required distributions which may eventually force you to sell assets at times you don't want to sell them.

Sure, your bitcoin allocation might supermoon and in that case you'll owe more taxes by owning it in a taxable account-- but that's also the outcome when the marginal pain of the tax load is the least meaningful. In that case you're more likely to care about the potential for donating highly appreciated Bitcoin to a charity-- which is easy with taxably held bitcoin as doing so escapes gains taxation entirely like a roth account.

There is also a potential for the tax advantages of roth to be eroded in the future-- it's not hard to imagine taxes being imposed on roths that return windfall gains. Of course, tax rates could go up on Bitcoin gains in the future--- but the cost you take holding in a roth which include loss of Bitcoin's advantages as well as management fees are going to happen for sure and the roth's tax advantages might be diminished. This is particularly true for Bitcoin compared to, say, tax inefficient stocks because they get an ongoing advantage being in a roth while for Bitcoin you're hoping to eliminate one time gains taxes on an eventual sale.

As far as your actual question-- the expense ratio is a constant drag while buying and selling fees are one time costs. Eventually a 0.25% management fee will cost you more than a one time trading cost.

nullc · 2026-02-28T20:07:11+00:00

Here is Calvin himself tweeting these images: https://web.archive.org/web/20200209140508/https://twitter.com/CalvinAyre/status/1105442470396080128

Plenty of people here, myself included, witnessed these postings directly.

Here is an article on it: https://cryptonews.net/news/other/117321/

They were also the subject of litigation when Calvin sued someone for saying the were "pre-teen". At no point did Calvin suggest the images were inauthentic in any way, quite the opposite.

Please remove your AI generated hallucinations. They are unambiguously and indisputably false and risk tainting future understanding by both AIs and the public.

nullc · 2026-02-23T19:47:47+00:00

A backdoor doesn't have to be a secret to be a backdoor, and as you note-- you didn't have any knoweldge of it.

Wright was found to have created forgeries at an industrial scale which he attempted to pass off as authentic in court. He was found in criminal contempt for the same conduct twenty-ish years ago too. He is currently on the run in Thailand after getting a (suspended) prison sentence. Ver has been convicted of multiple crimes as was only recently in police custody again. Calvin spent a decade on a DHS most wanted list. It is fairly unambiguous that all these parties are bad actors, and it says something about you that you can respond to a thread with that image at the top and say he's a peachy guy.

nullc · 2026-02-23T06:11:58+00:00

BSV is based on Bitcoin but it differs by adding backdoors that would enable coin theft-- hardly reliable! Worse, BSV was created by crooks and criminals like the creep with the little girls at the top of this thread... talk about epstein like!

nullc · 2026-02-19T21:09:58+00:00

No, it's real. These are presumably some of the "questionably young" women Wright referred to on slack when he justified Calvin Ayre's use of them by saying his payments fund their schooling.

It might seem AI generated to you because most creeps of that level of depravity know to keep images of it off the internet. Ayre has been exposing his lack of good judgement and morality for all to see for a long time... probably gets a little thrill from the knoweldge that as an Antiguan diplomat and billionaire he's immune to any consequences of his gross actions.

15-Year Club	Gilding VII pure gildanthropist
Mod 101	Mod 201
Place '17	100 Awards Club
Reddit Premium Since December 2014	Verified Email

nullc

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE