Bitget got hit for about $387M on 24 September. Mostly ETH, Tron and USDT, no bitcoin. It says its user protection fund covered the lot.

Hacks like this are normal over in ETH land. Vulnerabilities everywhere, money flying all over the place, scams everywhere.

So who looks at that and says, do you know what I want to insure? Fucking DeFi!

What are they charging to make it worth their while?

https://ungovernable.network/shows/bitcoin-brief/did-bitcoin-just-go-dark/

Two days before announcing she's leaving the SEC, Hester Peirce gave a speech called Looking for Change in Haystacks.

Her argument: replace KYC document collection with zero knowledge proofs and attribute based credentials. Prove your age, citizenship or sanctions status without handing over the documents themselves.

"We build ever bigger data haystacks on the theory that we will find a needle or two inside. The bigger the haystack, however, makes it harder to find the needles."

Her personal view, not SEC policy. But it's on the federal record now, and one of the few people in government aligned with us is gone.

https://ungovernable.network/shows/bitcoin-brief/did-bitcoin-just-go-dark/

Keonne Rodriguez's seventh letter from the inside covers what he calls the worst thirty days of his life, in transit between facilities.

As soon as the guards leave, inmates spray rat poison or cockroach spray onto paper, light it and inhale the fumes. Then the fentanyl hunch, no control over their body for a few minutes.

After three searches, somehow they got the poison and a lighter in, and that's what they escape to.

The audio version is coming to the feed. Rick's Free Samourai prize draw is running now too.

https://ungovernable.network/shows/bitcoin-brief/did-bitcoin-just-go-dark/

The line from Blockstream's own post-mortem that matters: the 11-of-15 multisig worked exactly as designed. The failure was in the software that decides whether a transaction is valid.

When you design these systems you focus on the main shield. Eleven signers, very unlikely to collude, so it should be safe. Meanwhile there's a kink in the armour somewhere else that makes all of it irrelevant.

https://ungovernable.network/shows/bitcoin-brief/did-bitcoin-just-go-dark/

Write 12 next to 3. Write 1 next to 23. Both read 123.

That is bug B in Blockstream's Liquid post-mortem. Cache entries were built by joining fields together without recording how long each one was, so two different range proofs could produce the same entry.

It was introduced by the August patch for bug A, a flaw dating back to 2018.

The attacker used it to mint about 4,000 L-BTC backed by nothing and pegged out 3,996 of them.

https://ungovernable.network/shows/bitcoin-brief/did-bitcoin-just-go-dark/

Bitcoin has a very bad privacy problem. There are ways around it with swaps and Lightning, but the base layer is an open ledger.

We also know changing Bitcoin at the protocol level is nigh on impossible these days, and that isn't always a bad thing.

Shielded Bitcoin is interesting because in theory it could be live and opt in on Bitcoin as it is. The normal wallet experience, with Zcash-level privacy on top for whoever wants it.

Still holes in it. Worth watching.

https://ungovernable.network/shows/bitcoin-brief/did-bitcoin-just-go-dark/

Gun to each of your heads. Which three signing devices are you picking for a 2 of 3 today?

Max opens with "three cold cards, only the old firmware though" and gets it out of his system, then answers properly: SeedSigner and two Passports. His reason for the short list is worth more than the list. "I've not tested any other bits out, and I only wanna say what I'm comfortable with using myself."

Q goes Passport Prime, a Trezor Safe 7 and a Blockstream Jade Plus, with the same caveat on the two he has not handled in person.

The part that actually matters is the same from both. Sparrow as the coordinator, and never all three from one manufacturer.

@QnA
@Foundation
@SeedSigner

https://ungovernable.network/shows/freedom-tech-friday/answering-your-questions/

"It always used to be Start9 until my laptop nearly set on fire. The battery warped. Actually it was at Black Coffee's house"

Asked to pick one self hosting node and only one, Max goes Umbrel, and he knows it is not the cypherpunk answer.

"I fucked around with Start9 a lot. I fucked around with a lot of other nodes over the years. And the only node that I've never had a problem on ever is Umbrel."

He destroyed a Start9 node twice running a Monero node on it and had to rebuild from scratch both times. Same setup on Umbrel worked straight out of the box.

Q's caveat: the licence still is not truly open source. As a product though, hard to fault.

@MaxUM
@BlackCoffee
@QnA


https://ungovernable.network/shows/freedom-tech-friday/answering-your-questions/