It's Monday and since I have nothing else to do in life and also because taproot🟩 will probably be implemented, I broke my head for several hours understanding Schnorr Signatures, here's a thread explaining what it is:
#Bitcoin
👇👇👇
The place we failed as Bitcoiners is merchant adoption. I cannot even describe how bad it is, I have all these fancy non-custodial wallets I use and I even contribute to one but I can't use them to spend anywhere because nobody wants/accepts Bitcoin.
To everyone tweeting apology messages after promoting BlockFi or FTX, nobody cares and nobody accepts your apology.
You should have promoted self custody, instead you got paid by those companies to create content to teach people to chase yields.
We have been in a bear market for almost 18 months now and we have accomplished:
- Draft PR for BIP 118/119
- Draft PR for Drivechains
- BitVM Paper
- Zero Sync
- Stratum V2 (seems close?)
- Taproot channels
- Taproot Assets
- Bolt 12
- Splicing
- Dual funding channels
-
At this point I want LN implementations to stop adding new features and work purely on bug fixes. I care more about stability and reliability than Bolt12 or Taro.
If you are a developer and want to contribute to bitcoin core or the lightning network, I think a great place to start is by contributing to your favourite application that you already use and love.
20/ That's it, at least that is all I know about Schnorr. Hopefully I didn't bore you with this thread. Here are some good links to check out:
Cheers!
Stack
#sats
, have a great week ahead.
#Bitcoin
If you think of it, Nostr could be like the lightning network. Hobbyists run small relays for themselves like personal routing/payment nodes and large relays are like massive routing nodes on the network that connect everything together.
Whenever I tweet something critical about Bitcoin or Lightning a bunch of Bitcoin Cash people jump in the comments and say "see we told you". One thing's for sure, you guys are not the solution to Bitcoin's problems.
The plebnet group on telegram has over 6000 bitcoiners. Nobody talks about the price of
#Bitcoin
. We talk about how to run better lightning nodes. How to efficiently rebalance our channels. How to keep our DBs under control and how to move away from Umbrel. Join us.
I think LND v0.15.0 is the most stable release of LND so far with some great features. This makes me extremely bullish on the Lightning Network.
Great job
@lightning
and the other contributors.
17/ Why is this important? P2SH has a problem where it needs to know the public keys of all participants in a multisig. If we use Schnorr, since it's only 1 key (aggregated), implies less footprint on the blockchain and lower transaction cost.
A cool LN wallet idea would be every user starts off custodial, if they have high activity and balance grows to some significant amount then the wallet switches to non-custodial and the LSP opens a channel to the wallet pushing the user's current balance. Even though we say
Most credit card reward points are eaten away by inflation over time. Get a card like the
@fold_app
that rewards you in sats which appreciate with time. It’s the future of credit/debit card rewards.
#Bitcoin
7/ Anyway going back to ECDSA, there are several elliptical curves,
#Bitcoin
uses the one called "secp256k1", again I have no idea why Satoshi used this one. It looks like someone's butt on a graph. Every curve has an equation and for our butt, it is this: y² = x³+7
Plebs on Plebnet literally built the lightning network. We invested in hardware, put our Bitcoin, tested the network, broke it, lost a bunch of sats before big exchanges and companies adopted lightning!
4/ Your private keys let you create a signature that proves your intent to spend your
#Bitcoin
.
"Not your key, not your coins." Does that ring a bell?
6/ He could have used Schnorr signatures back then but the creater of Schnorr signatures, his name is Schnorr (duh!) decided to patent it for no fucking reason and its patent only expired in 2008 so Satoshi probably went with ECDSA.
10/But using that little formula above, can I not do k = P/G which is deriving the private key from the public key, like someone getting your password from your email address. No it's not possible, its called "Discrete Log Problem" in math. Video below:
2/ We try and make our signatures as hard and shit looking as possible so that people don't copy it. In the world of digital signatures, they are mathematical proof of “knowledge of a number”.
Damus is getting so good, so fast, I think we are about an year away from stopping to use Twitter completely on iOS.
The key for me to switch to Damus completely is Relay optimisation.
3/ So if you have to prove a signature belongs to you, you should have possession of a number, if you have the number you can recreate the signature. (just like on the check, if you can draw it, its yours)
In the world of cryptography, this number is called the "Private Key"
Give back to open source software whenever you can.
You don’t have to write code, you can write documentation, help with testing or help with funding.
Best place to start are the ones you use.
5/ There are several signature algorithms available and
#Bitcoin
uses something called ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm). Don't ask me why, Satoshi decided to use that one. It's probably the best he had available at the time.
16/ So Schnorr signature solves these 2 problems, it is non-malleable, that means
#Bitcoin
network becomes more secure.
It natively supports multisig because it has a unique property where multiple parties can combine their public keys into one single key called key aggregation.
9/ After all the crap that happens in the background using that elliptical curve equation, a public key is derived from your private key.
P = k * G
P = public key.
k = private key
G = generator point (you get from the curve)
18/ 2nd issue with P2SH is, it offers very little privacy. For whatever reason all P2SH transaction addresses start with a 3 so everyone knows when a multisig transaction occurs.
Taproot assets is not just about moving another asset on top of Bitcoin, I think there are several other advantages as well. Like there could be massive privacy gains when moving assets on it. I think Taproot Assets is going to be huge!
1/ Before getting into what Schnorr signatures, lets first understand what a signature is, when you sign a piece of paper or a check it implies that you're proving the authenticity of intent to: for example, transferring money or settling a divorce with your wife.
If you’re running a routing node on a RaspberryPi because companies like Umbrel promised you can, you should rethink what you’re doing.
Also unpopular opinion: No, running a routing node is not for everyone if you’re not willing to put in the effort to learn command line.
I’ve played with several mobile wallets, I think
@BlixtWallet
is the only one that can be called fully non-custodial for lightning. Everything is computed on the app and nothing is outsourced, you can also connect to your own bitcoin core for block info. Massively underrated!
Self custody advice: Don’t over complicate your setup if you don’t know what you’re doing. Get a hardware wallet to store your coins, write down your 24 words and keep it safe. That is all you have to do.
11/A digital signature is a mathematical proof of possession of a private key "k" without showing the world the actual key. Kinda like when you type a password, you only see **** but the your mom next to you knows that you know the password.
14/ There are two problems with ECDSA:
1. Malleable: A third party without access to the private key though extremely unlikely can alter an existing valid signature and double-spend funds.
2. Non-Linear: Does not natively support multisig.
Until an year ago, I never knew being a developer could help change the lives of people. Once I started contributing to open source, it blew my mind away of how much difference you can make.
12/A signature consists of two numbers (r,s). Together with the public key P , anyone can verify that “the signature was created by someone who posses the private key k corresponding to this public key P". And the process of verification does not reveal the private key itself.
13/ Alright now we hopefully know how ECDSA works but why does taproot🟩soft fork intends to change this to Schnorr, there has to be something wrong with ECDSA.
The lightning network seems to have hit an interesting phase. Number of new nodes coming online has fallen but the existing nodes started to deploy a lot more capital.
We have like 3 different apps, all unrelated to each other, where you can use the same login credentials and people can view each others posts no matter where you post. Happens only on open networks.
I understand the controversy behind drivechains and it might take forever to get that merged but what on earth are we waiting for to activate sighash_anyprevout? The narrative that the base layer shouldn't be changed is beyond me.
With a few low cost routing nodes shutting down, routing activity on my node has picked up again and my fees are on the higher side. Happy to start making money again!
The biggest UX issue in non-custodial lightning is inbound liquidity, if you explain it to people whom you're onboarding, it will leave them scratching their heads. For LSPs providing inbound means capital lock up plus chain-fees. I've heard wallets want to experiment with
Hi👋
We’re looking for a few people to be Alpha testers for the next update to Wallet of Satoshi which is ready to test now.
If you want help out - please DM us your App/Play Store email and whether you’re iOS or Android.
Optionally also your name or alias.
⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️🤙
Umbrel adding a Nostr relay to their AppStore is nice because you can always maintain a copy of all your activity and public relays could prune old events after X amount of time and lower burden on them. Your shit posts don’t have to be public forever.
Nostr fam, we've been cooking something special for you. 🤙
Introducing Nostr Relay on Umbrel — Your Nostr activity, backed up in real-time.
Connect
@damusapp
or any Nostr client to your relay to ensure that your activity is not lost even if you are censored by public relays.
Because Phoenix Wallet is so tightly integrated with Acinq, it can provide a better UX than most non-custodial wallets. So many other non-custodial wallets that are LND based are unfortunately behind on UX because they don't have the same luxury of tight integration.
In just a few months
@fold_app
probably has more tweets on Twitter commending their work/product in the history of commending tweets about credit/debit cards.
#bitcoin
lnd v0.15.2 has just been tagged:
this is a hotfix release that only contains the bug fix applied on top of v0.15.1
once the CI pipeline we use to build cross platform binaries + upload artefacts is finish, reproducible binaries will be available
@decentmoney2009
We have to stop comparing Bitcoin to gold which people adopted thousands of years ago and took generations to adopt.
Bitcoin is technology, technology doesn't take generations to adopt when there is value in it. If people take generations to adopt, then we are failing as
Just routed my first lightning transaction on my
@getumbrel
LND node! 😁
This is going to be awesome in the future. Open your channels NOW!
#Bitcoin
Thanks
@IamBitConan
for answering my questions.
If you run a routing node, there is no such thing as set and forget. If you believe this is the future of payments for the globe then take responsibility and actively manage your node.