bit
Computer User

Public Key

npub1acwfeyvqgq939v9yfkvmfn8npcprn5gv6usla6ks74dv2r8ptfkssszu9c

Profile Code

nprofile1qqswu8yujxqyqzcjkzjymxd5enesuq3e6yxdwg07atg02kk9pns45mgdqrflt

Author Public Key

npub1acwfeyvqgq939v9yfkvmfn8npcprn5gv6usla6ks74dv2r8ptfkssszu9c

Show more details

Last Notes

2022-12-26 21:10:33

Just a heads up to those I’ve been chatting with about BTC, had an unexpected hospital visit for a family member, that and Christmas mean I’ve had no time to chat here, I’ll be back soon and we can continue :-)

2022-12-22 11:18:43

- reply

Depends on where the energy comes from, if it’s 100% renewable you’re absolutely right

2022-12-22 11:13:59

- reply

I know it’s not, I’m just saying most of these mining operations claiming carbon neutral or more are not actually coming from clean energy sources but are taking advantage of what are effectively scams aimed at pushing blame on fossil fuel usage onto the users, rather than the large corporations who burn the most. “Bitcoin is energy revolution” I have no idea what that means

2022-12-22 11:12:00

- reply

None taken, I have gotten some, I just don’t agree with the information they’ve presented as they characterise it like it’s the norm when in reality it is not. If you can link me some independent studies I’m happy to read them, but it seems the sticking point for us is people are arguing that most of the energy Bitcoin produces either 1. Would have been “wasted” anyways or 2. Is coming from clean energy sources

2022-12-22 11:09:03

- reply

Oh dear, sorry for the spam I hit the post button a few times as I thought the app had frozen, don’t see a way of deleting them now, sorry about that

2022-12-22 11:08:11

- reply

So first of all I appreciate you keeping this so civil, the “hardest money ever invented” is an interesting statement, one I don’t agree with but I see your reasoning. My issue with Bitcoin is it doesn’t offer enough for the trade off of the energy usage required, I’m quite a fan of Monero though for example, yes it has similar problems but it’s somewhat reduced by the fact it’s not exploded in popularity like BTC has, I think monero has an excellent implementation for sending money anonymously and privately, it’s still vulnerable to attacks in the future though, such as when/if quantum computers become feasible someone could just solve the ring signatures for transactions after the fact but I think it’s a good start. As for what you’ve said about energy consumption being a complicated topic, I agree, I’m an early Bitcoin user, I used it over a decade ago and thought it was magic, now I think it’s interesting but ultimately not worth the cost of using it energy wise, I’m familiar with several of the things you mentioned here, mostly focusing on the U.K. hobbyist miners and some larger mining operations (was my original research as I live there) as well as some south East Asian operations, the issue with the stats some people give about the renewable nature of the energy Bitcoin uses is it never quite matches up, often not even close. They have a lot to gain from saying their operation or pool is mostly clean energy and very few have shown any kind of proof, although some have!

- reply

- reply

- reply

- reply

I think the “we should be using more energy” is a crazy statement, we should be focusing on ensuring the energy we produce comes from renewable resources, I read the Saylor post, I find it very hard to trust someone who’s so invested in BTC, I’ve linked studies and data from universities, they don’t benefit if more people start using BTC, they don’t suffer either, Saylor has a huge amount of money at stake, hard to be objective and ultimately I don’t know him well enough to trust his reasoning/research.

2022-12-22 10:58:48

- reply

Yeah I agree it’s a feature, I just don’t personally believe the trade off is worth it given the energy situation around the world relying on non renewable resources right now.

2022-12-22 10:56:57

- reply

I agree with your point about nobody mining BTC on GPUs anymore, this is more a problem with other cryptocurrencies such as ethereum where they haven’t quite hit the wall that specialised ASICs are required to compete, do you have a link to more information about Texas? I’m in the U.K. and not super familiar with the US energy situation, I agree about the highly variable load but not sure how miners “balance the grid” in that context

2022-12-21 17:01:27

- reply

Hey man you’re entitled to your opinion, believe whatever you want :-)

2022-12-21 09:51:42

- reply

I mean just because people sponsor green energy initiatives doesn’t mean it’s not bad for the environment, carbon offsetting is basically a huge scam made to blame the people instead of the massive corporations using all this energy and non renewable resources like it’s candy. As for the actual energy usage of Bitcoin the University of Cambridge track this: https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index in the last 24 hours it has used between 5 and 9 gigawatt hours. They say themselves this is a hard thing to track without instrumentation on the grids worldwide, in the western countries I believe they have good data but in the less well connected regions I think it’s spotty. I’m ignoring the theoretical upper bounds too. So let’s say generously it’s 5 gigawatt hours, that could power 5 million average homes for an hour, that’s a lot. The figures for what percentage of that energy is renewable vary depending on the source, but honestly? I see no reason for Bitcoin to be used today, it was a stepping stone, if you want privacy? Monero, If you want an embedded virtual machine that can execute code? Ethereum.
I think most people that hold onto Bitcoin do so not because it is technically impressive or even needed but because they hope it will rise again to crazy amounts and they can get rich off it.

2022-12-21 09:41:57

- reply

Hey Brett, yeah I understand why it’s used, it doesn’t change the fact that it uses a TON of power, mining farms steal all the GPUs from actual users, etc. PoS isn’t the golden bullet everyone thinks it is though, it has its own issues, personally I don’t really know of a solution for a problem that hard

2022-12-20 20:06:39

- reply

Also not a fan of Bitcoin, bad for the environment, but proof of stake has its own issues, Bitcoin was definitely the OG, I remember playing with it over a decade ago, but there’s so many better solutions now, ones that don’t harm the environment and ones that actually offer some privacy and anonymity

2022-12-20 20:05:26

- reply

I mean he’s just bought in to almost every company he’s known for, he’s also no longer serving in any real capacity for any of them :P also google Elon musk emerald mines

2022-12-19 16:37:45

- reply

I mean basically everything cool he does isn’t him, it’s his engineers, he’s not in there designing a spacex rocket, as much as he might love to have that opinion of himself, as long as he has money he can pay cool people to do cool stuff, although the way Twitter is going and based on the fact he basically put up his Tesla stock against the purchase as he didn’t have the liquidity he might not have any money to spend in the future, which would be hilarious

2022-12-19 16:27:23

- reply

you’ll realise sooner or later he’s basically a moronic grifter who used his parents emerald mine money to invest in loads of companies, and got kicked off of almost all of them

2022-12-19 16:23:37

- reply

Fair enough, I sent you a DM if you want a hand auditing it, also you should look into iOS notifications as they clean leak the cleartext notifications by default unless they’ve got code to subscribe and decrypt them

2022-12-19 16:17:53

- reply

Curious what artifacts would be present if key stealing was attempted? Assuming there wasn’t CORS so you could just send the data anywhere? Or did it have CORS and was leaked over nostr as a note

2022-12-18 19:14:53

Okay so are Damus style npub keys not standard in nostr?

2022-12-18 18:44:48

- reply

Written in rust, end to end encryption, cryptographic identities/identifiers, this is really something, just reading about how the username->cryptographic identity is done in a decentralised way, this is really really neat though. A social network build on SSB was always a pipe dream of mine, the fact you can build arbitrary protocols on top of it using it as a way to back them was super interesting, looking at the awesome-nostr repo seems like this can be used in a similar way. I have some security/threat model questions which I’m sure will be revealed by reading the code, mainly around time syncrionisation and the username “source of truth” but this is really exciting! Thanks for the warm welcome :-)

2022-12-18 18:36:57

- reply

My bad there! Reading the GitHub now, this looks really really neat, I’ve always loved SSB but the adoption has been pretty small sadly, this has a huge investment now, will be very interesting to see what happens

2022-12-18 18:35:21

- reply

Ah interesting! It’s more like secure scuttlebutt then, yeah the whole Bitcoin crossover is confusing, wasn’t super clear but I’m mainly coming from people talking about jacks new Bitcoin social network or whatever they’re saying

2022-12-18 18:32:56

- reply

Community relays and expiring DMs are an interesting threat model, sure they’re encrypted but it doesn’t discount the possibility a rogue node is collecting all the messages until the crypto used at the time is feasibly breakable

2022-12-18 18:28:27

#introductions I’m Bit, I’m a vulnerability researcher from the U.K., I generally hate cryptocurrency as I’ve never found a project that is benefited by adding a blockchain onto, merkle trees would usually suffice without needing to deal with some PoW based currency/token. That being said I am interested in nostr, the fact the DMs are end to end encrypted is interesting, I’d love to read a white paper or something for more info, regardless it’s an interesting idea/platform I just hope it’s not Bitcoin backed forever, even ethereum is moving towards proof of stake, which yeah has its own issues but is better for the planet

2022-12-18 18:23:21

- reply

So what is Bitcoin used for? Identity validation? There’s no white paper that I can see, also is this related to jacks at protocol or bluesky?

2022-12-18 18:19:13

So uh… what is this? E2EE comms, are posts stored on chain?