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The whole point of Bitcoin is that trust isn't required. The chain is public, the rules are deterministic, anyone can verify everything independently. Running assume valid by default undermines that by turning trustless into trust that someone else checked. If verification is optional in practice, you've quietly reintroduced a trust layer.
I think the bigger concern isn't someone cracking keys in real time but the harvest now, decrypt later angle. Collecting transactions today and breaking them when the hardware is ready. Reused addresses and dormant coins are the most exposed.
It's less about actually winning a block and more about understanding how everything works under the hood. Once you run your own miner you see block templates, fees, propagation firsthand instead of just reading about it.
For decentralization it's about having the infrastructure there before you need it. Not after.
The trust assumption is pretty narrow here — you're only trusting the co-signer not to double-sign. That's auditable. My question is what stops co-signer centralization if merchants start only accepting one or two services.
For me its not the fundamentals, understanding how transactions work or how a wallet holds keys is pretty straightforward. It's keeping up with everything the community is building on top of it. New proposals, protocol changes, privacy tools, layer 2 stuff, it moves fast and there's no single place to follow all of it, then try to understand it. If anyone has a good source that shows the important developments id love to know about it.
The light client mobile wallet idea sounds good in theory but how do you keep it trustless? Someone has to coordinate the joins and on mobile you cant run a full node to verify everything yourself. How are you thinking about making sure the coordinator can't link inputs to outputs or log participants? Because that's usually where the tradeoff between usability and privacy gets made.
Most people don't take quantum seriously because it feels like its always 10 years away but by the time its actually a problem its too late to migrate. Glad to see people working on the transition now instead of waiting until everyone's funds are already at risk.
Honestly the fact that this is news says everything. A car letting you turn off data collection should be the default not a feature. Every other manufacturer is collecting location speed habits and selling it, and most people don't even know. At least someone is giving the option.
The pre-split approach is great, having exact denomination chunks ready so each tick is just grab and send keeps the latency predictable. The mint trust during the session seems fine for something like video where the worst case is you lose a few seconds of stream. I'm curious if you've thought about what happens when you scale past 1 viewer though, does the payment loop stay simple or does it need some kind of relay or something else?
$425 million on surveillance tech in one year and they built an app where agents can point their phone at someones face and pull up their whole life. And its not just targeting the people they say its for, US citizens are getting tracked threatened and shot for recording federal agents in public. The system was sold as immigration enforcement but there's nothing stopping it from being pointed at anyone. It already is.
Its kind of sad honestly. a lot of people worked there and built something that meant something at the time. But technology moves fast and if the product doesn't evolve with it eventually people just stop showing up. The internet looks completely different than it did when ask.com launched, hard to survive that long without building toward what people actually need now.
19 million records from one breach. that's kind of the whole argument against centralized identity systems right there. One database and everyones exposed. and this wont be the last time either, these attacks will keep happening because centralized systems will always be a target worth hitting. nothing changes until this type of systems stop being used.
Verified peek is a smart approach to the trust problem with encrypted content. The merkle commitment proof so buyers can verify the preview actually came from the real file is the kind of thing that should be standard for any encrypted marketplace. I'm curious about the blossom fallback and how reliable it is in practice. That's always where decentralized storage projects hit a wall, the encryption and payment side works but then availability falls apart. also good to see nostr keypairs instead of accounts, that's how identity should work for something like this. The V1 trusted escrow model makes sense to ship fast but the move to NIP-44 in V2 is the right call. the less the server needs to know the better.
This is the part that gets me. once a company like palantir has that kind of access to IRS data, crypto wallets, financial records since 2018, it doesn't matter what policy says because the infrastructure is already built and running. you cant regulate away a system that's already processing everything. and the stablecoin angle is spot on. Programmable money that can be frozen or tracked through the same analytics pipeline is just surveillance with extra steps. the whole point of bitcoin was to not need permission from systems like this. the only real counter is building things where that level of access isn't possible by design. privacy has to be in the architecture not in the terms of service
The participation fee as sybil resistance is smart, it makes the attack cost scale linearly instead of being free. Curious how the multi-round delay feels in practice though, mixing is one of those things where if it takes too long people just skip it and send direct.
Age verification is just the excuse. Once the infrastructure is in place it gets used for everything else. It always does.
The wildest part is people are surprised this data exists in the first place. Google has been collecting all of this for years the EU is just making them share it with more people. The real problem isn't who has access to the data its that the data exists at all. We keep building systems that require collecting everything about everyone and then act shocked when someone wants to use it. The only real fix is systems that don't collect it in the first place.
Google is terrible. Stop using them is the only way.