Damus
Matt Corallo
Recent notes
BIP 353 is a huge leap forward in security and UX for common payments from hardware wallets. Yet, sadly, its stuck in a three-w ay chicken-and-egg problem between the software wallets that people use, the hardware wallet firmware, and recipients. No one wants to do the work to be a first-mover when the other two legs don't exist yet. So, to get off zero, lets try a bounty. I'm offering $1000 (payable only in Bitcoin to a BIP 353 HRN) each for the first hardware wallet and (on-chain, hardware wallet-supporting) software wallet to support sending to BIP 353 HRNs. For a hardware wallet, this should be easy, just detect the PSBT field for a DNSSEC proof, validate it, and display the HRN for verification instead of (or in addition to) the actual address. You don't have to use https://docs.rs/dnssec-prover to do the validation, but I imagine it will be easy. The feature has to exist in the released default firmware for the hardware wallet. For a software wallet, there's only a few more steps, support detecting a BIP 353 HRN in the send-to UI, do the DNS lookup (again, dnssec-prover should make this easy, if you want), build the proof, and include it in the PSBT you provide to hardware wall ets. Also store the HRN (and maybe DNSSEC proof) so that the transaction history shows it. The default sending methods (GUI/CLI/whatever) have to support accepting HRNs and should handle them just like regular addresses. You don't have to support silent payments, but of course its good to as well. Support has to be in an official release. A hardware wallet that also provides a software wallet doesn't get to claim both bounties. Releases which satisfy the bounty must be made before December 31, 2025.
We’ve got one shot at fixing the law or Americans simply won't have access to the best wallets available and US devs will be locked out of providing the best UX! It’s time for Bitcoiners to fight for our right to access our wallets, before it’s too late. As most of you know, under Biden, the DOJ decided that ancillary services to noncustodial wallets are MSBs, charging both Samurai Wallet and Tornado Cash with operating an unregistered Money Services Business (nevermind that no regulator would have accepted theirr registration!). The definition the DOJ used applies not just to privacy services, but also to lightning nodes, rollup sequencers, Ark, Spark, and more. Basically every technology anyone has come up with for providing better scalability, privacy, or user experience for cryptocurrencies requires some kind of ancillary service, the exact things that would be made illegal! While the Trump DOJ has (partially) walked that back, the next admin will be right back at it - the only solution is to get the law changed so that this isn't a risk in three years. Luckily, the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act was recently re-introduced by Reps Emmer and Torres to fix this issue, but they need our help! Please, please, pick up the phone and make a 5 minute call to congress, make clear that this is a simple straightforward amendment of the law to bring it in line with existing FinCEN rules. saveourwallets.org will give you the phone numbers to call for your zip code. nevent1qqszvcdxcqn2jtghcmfvyj24zzfsv4z084gawqr8c7mh6euk306838quspfm8
And, again, my point above was about what happens when people *regularly* want to create non-standard transactions. As long as it’s incredibly rare, there’s not a lot of demand and only one or two pools might offer it (indeed, F2Pool and MARA today). The whole start of this drama was because a potentially-large transactor wanted to fill the UTXO set with garbage because they didn’t want to rely on OP_RETURNs. Obviously that changes the calculus here.