hugomofn

Founder of nunchuk.io

Public Key

npub1qp302p7ry80x8xpcafm4d4szpxvzy8r70lyveg39gk0xgycwu35s06yn58

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsqqch4qlpjrhnrnquw5a6k6cpqnxpzr3l8ljxv5gj5t8nyzv8wg6gpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgqg3waehxw309ahx7um5wgerztnrdaksgl54d9

Publishing to

relay.primal.net

nostr21.com

Author Public Key

npub1qp302p7ry80x8xpcafm4d4szpxvzy8r70lyveg39gk0xgycwu35s06yn58

Show more details

Last Notes

2024-10-12 21:39:33

Increased adoption of distributed multisig benefits all Bitcoin users, even singlesig users.
An attacker may assume they need to compromise multiple locations if they SUSPECT multisig is in use.
So even if you don’t use multisig, it’s in your interest to encourage its adoption.
#multisigftw

2024-10-12 01:19:10

🚫 Do NOT use a hot wallet (mobile or desktop) for main Bitcoin savings
✅ Do use a phone as a watch-only wallet coordinator for distributed multisig for Bitcoin savings — get a second, dedicated phone for this purpose. #note1p09…upal

2024-10-06 12:26:50

- reply

I’m more optimistic on decoy wallets. Of cos they don’t address all types of attacks (no security feature ever does), but one can easily imagine how they can be useful *at least* in the case of non-targeted attacks, which will probably become more common when Bitcoin goes mainstream. It will not be unusual for a random person on the street to own Bitcoin.
The anecdote you cited about one victim refusing to give up anything and telling the attackers to shoot her: she might very well got lucky - she could’ve ended up dead.
At the end of the day, stories/anecdotes are just that. They don’t have predictive power. We don’t have substantial data on how many users have used decoy wallets, and how many have used it successfully or unsuccessfully.
TL;DR: Decoy wallets are just one tool in a large toolset. Writing them off based on a few data points seems a bit premature IMO.

2024-10-05 12:15:11

- reply

> main savings account should be on a separate device from teh one you carry around
That’s exactly what I said. Reread point 2. Not sure what you’re disagreeing about.
> multisig is not going to help for hot storage
I’m NOT discussing hot spending wallets, I’m talking about main savings. (So your LN example also isn’t relevant here).

2024-10-05 11:53:46

- reply

That’s what I said. The phone (or desktop) should be a watch-only interface.

2024-10-05 11:49:56

- reply

P.S. Nunchuk ships both mobile and desktop apps, but IMO mobile is the future of Bitcoin self-custody.

2024-10-05 11:49:01

People who say “don’t use phones for your main Bitcoin savings” never make sense to me.
1/ Security matters: Phones have a much smaller attack surface and are designed with security in mind, unlike desktops burdened with legacy software and hardware. What's easier to crack—a Windows machine or an iPhone?
2/ Dedicated devices: If you're concerned about your main phone being out and about too much, get a second, dedicated phone for your savings. You should also use a dedicated desktop if you're truly serious about security. Avoiding phones but using a non-dedicated desktop filled with software means you don’t care about security as much as you think you do.
3/ Use multisig: If you set your wallet up properly, the phone should hold no private keys—only a watch-only interface. The wallet interface should be the *least* of your worries. Distributed multisig keys are your main defense. Focus your energy on securing the actual keys.
4/ Use a decoy wallet: If you can’t get a second phone, use a decoy wallet. You can use a decoy wallet even if you have a dedicated phone.
So don’t take bad advice, even from Bitcoiners. Think from first principles.
Don’t be stuck in the 20th century. DO use phones for your main Bitcoin savings.

2024-09-05 07:49:56

Key quote regarding Yubikey vulnerability: "We estimate that *the vulnerability exists for more than 14 years* in Infineon top secure chips."
32 million Yubikey units have been sold.
Multi-vendor multisig is the only rational setup for your BTC savings.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/yubikeys-are-vulnerable-to-cloning-attacks-thanks-to-newly-discovered-side-channel/

2024-08-20 07:15:40

There’s something satisfying about Nostr feeds being deterministic: if you sign in on different Nostr clients or different devices, you most likely will get the same exact feed for a given moment of the day. It’s true even for different moments of the day: if you scroll long enough you will encounter the old set of posts, minus a few new ones for the last X hours.
It’s satisfying because you know the feed is not gamed. That this is the raw, unmanipulated experience. Unlike something like X which increasingly show you garbage that plays on our worst instincts.
On the other hand, once the amount of content on Nostr blows up, some filters will likely be needed. It’d be cool if you can craft your own feed algorithms based on a human-readable language, or a set of commonly-defined control knobs. Something like:
1. Prioritizes posts from people I regularly interact with (with weights I can go in and adjust)
2. Prioritizes posts that have some minimum number of likes/comments from the people I follow
3. For freshness: Occasionally surface posts from accounts from my extended network (friends of friends), provided that they pass some level of quality control (e.g. account older than Y months, minimum likes, etc.).
And you can keep finetuning your algorithms as you go along. Have a few that you quickly switch between. Share your algorithms with others, etc.

2024-08-07 01:57:24

- reply

Anti-exfil techniques spill engineering challenges into the user space. They also add a new dependency on the wallet coordinator to perform security-sensitivity tasks.
Tasks which they are not well suited for.
How can you even verify that the coordinator will be able to provide good entropy? You can’t.
So there’s also this hidden danger of using anti-exfil with singlesig with a coordinator running in unsafe environments, and THINK you’re safe, but you’re not. Turtles all the way down.
Just use multisig and be happy.

2024-08-07 01:00:36

In the world of Bitcoin wallets there is a plethora of security threats that you need to stackrank.
What anti-exfil would do is to break 90% of the current wallets’ UX to solve a fundamentally low-risk threat, relative to other threats. When better solutions exist.
A big no-no.
Introducing a new round trip / new interaction every single time a user signs a Bitcoin transaction is a terrible idea from both UX and engineering perspectives.
It violates Single Responsibility Principle. Coordinator should stay purely coordinating. No more, no less.

2024-08-01 06:29:57

- reply

Great comment Rusty!
Just the basic idea of identifying that there are 3 groups of people (can afford; can sometimes afford; and cannot afford a UTXO whatsoever) is a huge upgrade over past conversations, which tend to jump straight into technical details and gloss over the actual user profiles and market demand.
Personally, I agree that more research is warranted. I’m not particularly optimistic on UTXO-sharing as a solution for people who can’t afford standalone UTXOs at all because of the group coordination cost, “Tragedy of the Commons”issue (LN counterparties are heavily incentivized to police their LN channel state, whereas in a Timeout Tree you can freeride others to do the policing for you, leading to no one doing it at all), “ghettorization” issue as you mentioned, and the inevitable complexity of any such solution. Secondly, did anyone bother to ask whether users like sharing at all? Why would they opt for a complex sharing solution when they can use something like gold for savings.
I’m slightly more bullish on locally-run ecash mints where people fall back to long-built relationships and hard-earned reputation to prevent cheating. Basically, use the social layer to address a technical limitation.
I like your quote here: “can’t engineer a solution if we can’t think about the problems.” That’s a great way to think about it. As someone else once said, the most common mistake engineers often make is to “optimize for something that shouldn’t really exist”. I’ve seen it happen way too many times, being an engineer myself. Just because UTXO-sharing with large N is possible, doesn’t mean it is ideal or will actually have a market.
In the spirit of thinking deeply about the problem (and not the solutions), it would be wise to also visit assumptions such as there will be 10 billion people who want sovereign UTXOs and the responsibilities that come with it. I think that assumption is highly unrealistic. IMO the actual demand will remain well below 500 million people, realistically more in the range of 100-200 million people. Being your own bank, as it turns out, is quite a heavy burden.
So if you believe in these numbers, Bitcoin does not have a scaling problem. At the very least, it’s not urgent at all. The math might work out by just making current things as efficient as possible.

2024-07-28 03:07:42

- reply

💯

2024-04-07 10:42:05

- reply

Thank you !

2024-04-02 01:59:11

- reply

I’ve been lurking on Damus for a while 😛 Great progress on UI/UX ! Cheers.

2024-04-02 01:34:55

- reply

Agreed. Bitkey design clearly optimized for usability and I think they swung a bit too hard in that direction. Too many security concerns to be used for large savings. The mobile phone in particular is highly vulnerable. An attacker would know they can get to an owner’s bitcoins through the phone and the phone alone (just by waiting out the Delay and Notify protocol). If popularized, it will incentivize kidnappings.
I wrote a full review of Bitkey here: https://nunchuk.io/blog/bitkey

2024-03-27 23:54:39

- reply

Two different devices, ideally always geographically distributed.

2024-03-27 23:53:25

- reply

Author here. Thanks @npub1sg6…f63m ! Hope you guys can make some adjustments. Cheers.

2023-09-13 07:41:55

Calling all self-custody experts!
Have you ever thought about starting a Bitcoin business that focuses on orange-pilling people and helping them self-custody? Putting your passion and skills to good use?
Now you can.
Introducing Byzantine: Collaborative Custody Platform-as-a-Service.
Read more about it here:
https://nunchuk.io/blog/byzantine

2023-09-09 04:21:38

- reply

Yes.
https://x.com/nunchuk_io/status/1661412619218227200

2023-07-02 01:39:44

@npub1tea…gq5u Verifying My Public Key: "hugohanoi"

2023-06-30 14:26:13

I just published ‘Passphrases Are Not the Solution for Bitcoin Custody’.
https://hugonguyen.medium.com/passphrases-are-not-the-solution-for-bitcoin-custody-4f967a339b1b

2023-03-05 16:42:15

- reply

Bob knows what’s up

2023-02-25 14:45:30

- reply

Active >> passive is a great way to approach the Internet. Thanks for sharing!

2023-02-20 06:24:33

- reply

Yeah we need widespread descriptors support first for safe + interoperable Taproot scripts.

2023-02-01 18:50:15

First post. My AMA on Stacker News. Ask me anything about Nunchuk!
https://stacker.news/items/129571