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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: November 12th, 2023

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  • It seems to be more like hiding coins in different addresses while obscuring it on chain & using some clever math to make the UX better.

    You are accurate: you “hide” coins in different addresses which are only know to the receiver and the sender, I cannot paste a SP address in a block explorer and find what addresses belong to it, and what is the total balance of this BTC user. I can however send a payment to it and then have a “watch” on this entity, there is no obscuring happening on-chain so usual heuristics like when a coin is spent, to where, how much is change, etc still apply.

    Which also means if they spend many SP payments together, they reveal to me & others all the addresses belonging to them and what the total balance was, you can think of it like if bitcoin users sent their BTC addresses to each other via DMs, but it removes the interactivity step from handling new addresses, while adding the scanning requirement so the receiver can also know which addresses were generated to them without having to ask senders each time

    It is a good feature to have in general in my opinion, but definitely does not come any close to competing with Monero still



  • Great blog! does this have any benefit over a polyseed mnemonic where you also have a secret password? With polyseed as well as BIP39, even if your mnemonic is caught you can use that plain seed as a decoy that opens a fake wallet, while your real seed with your real funds can only be decrypted with the password, and this encrypted mnemonic by hand won’t result in a valid seed so the malicious actor can assume that a valid seed still exists and it still needs to be seized or brute forced?

    I think this method is better when using steganography combined since the mnemonic looks like a blob of nothing when reading the contents of the file, while if an actual seed was used it could reveal there is a Monero seed hidden in that file, but then I think a better encryption method can be used since using digital files loses the benefit of not using a computer?

    https://github.com/tevador/polyseed




  • ok no servers make sense, but choosing arbitrators is like choosing a server equivalent to a multisig wallet, there is “someone’s computer” that will have the third key to resolve arbitration issues, and also can it read chat messages? if so networks should be picked with care, but of course trades can complete without it, but I was confused and called it “federation” for the fact they should be merged in the UI





  • I just think it is a way simpler design, everything is a variation of the NIP-01 note https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md#events-and-signatures

    {
      "id": <32-bytes lowercase hex-encoded sha256 of the serialized event data>,
      "pubkey": <32-bytes lowercase hex-encoded public key of the event creator>,
      "created_at": <unix timestamp in seconds>,
      "kind": <integer between 0 and 65535>,
      "tags": [
        [<arbitrary string>...],
        // ...
      ],
      "content": <arbitrary string>,
      "sig": <64-bytes lowercase hex of the signature of the sha256 hash of the serialized event data, which is the same as the "id" field>
    }
    

    So data portability is enforced by default for the protocol, and it is flexible in a way that clients can support new event kinds without knowing about it, so adding a video event kind to create a youtube alternative would show up even on outdated clients as they’ll still be able to show every note events, and the same for outdated relays that will continue to store every note event you broadcast, you don’t need to spawn a new server to self-host a new instance of a nostr implementation, just use the same clients and same relays as always, so people have made torrent sharing sites (https://dtan.xyz) and video platforms for example and it doesn’t seem like the AP protocol is very open and flexible to these ideas and implementations




  • I think if you gave nostr a chance you would see some benefits even for those reasons, like you also get to be in contact with the people that maintain infrastructure (relay admins), some admins can require the payment of a fee or simply whitelist your pubkey to read/write notes, which creates “closed communities”, but the difference from AP is you are able to have many different relays at the same time for your infrastructure, so you don’t have a “single admin” that you may or may not like or trust that much, you can pick one or many at any time, or be your own