Have you ever wondered about the math behind bitcoin’s private and public keys?

Here’s how it works.

Imagine that you have a shoebox.

At the bottom of the box is a piece of graph paper.

Now, you go get a bundle of wire and tangle it up in a big messy ball. Like a bunch of tangled cables.

Now, inside the box you put an ant that will walk the wire and follow your instructions.

Now, you put the ant on its starting point on the wire. Then you pick a random number (say 1,078) and tell it to walk that number of waypoints.

How far to the next waypoint? The ant uses its handy maps app. At each waypoint, the app says how far to go to the next.

The ant starts walking along the wire, up, down, crisscrossing back and forth on the tangled wires in the box. A little while later, the ant completes the 1,078 waypoints and stops. You ask the ant to look down at the graph paper and tell you its position above the grid.

It tells you coordinates, say (15, 9).

That’s it! Your private key is 1078 (number of steps) and your public key is (15, 9).

Someone who has your public key (15, 9) has no idea how many waypoints the ant took to get there.

This is the cool thing about the encryption (maps app). When the ant looks forward, there is only one next waypoint. However, if the ant looks backwards, there are two waypoints that could arrive to where the ant is standing.

This means that for any malicious ant on the public key (15,9) trying to walk back to count the number of waypoints to the starting spot (secret key), there are many forks in the road that the ant must navigate when making the return trip. This makes the journey back impossible to do as a single ant. But maybe not for a vast colony of ants (quantum computer).

The real Bitcoin encryption uses vast distances and seemingly infinite points within a massive mathematical box.

To illustrate the vastness of the true scale, if each ant waypoint was roughly was the width of a human hair, the box would be almost 5 times the Milky Way galaxy (475,000 light years square) and the tangled wire would wrap around the visible universe uncountable trillions of times. It’s uncountable because there are almost as many waypoints for the ant to stop as there are atoms in the universe.

Russia, China and the other central banks have been buying gold, which is inferior to BTC. The USA has a chance to choose BTC as the global reserve asset and flip the tables on its enemies.

This makes sense to me

With each cycle, shitcoins fall further. At some point we can look forward to never getting msgs from friends anymore about this crap.

@Jameson Lopp and others hyperventilating. You want more changes to the protocol? Do the work. Aren’t those covenants already enabled on Liquid? Go use them to build something that people want to use. Do it on Liquid first. Prove that it’s safe and that people want it.

https://xcancel.com/lopp/status/1860361355594789363#m

Must keep in mind that changes have risks, and also this 👇

https://xcancel.com/KLoaec/status/1860448257215733975#m

Frankly none of these covenant proposals seem fit for purpose. You think with CTV or CAT that people can share UTXOs with a few hundred sats? And how to spend them? How will those small UTXOs afford block fees? Or do we need big blocks now too to reduce transaction fees?

People don’t like covenants not because they’re anti-bitcoin and anti-sovereignty. They’re anti-covenants because the only use cases are hand wavy, impractical and potentially dangerous. We’re scared of new protocol changes that will further mess up the protocol (eg block size increases and witness discount).

I’m so glad that core and “greybeard” devs are pushing back on the manipulative false urgency.

Trump just picked Bessant for Treasury Secretary. I’m worried about him. Too business as usual. Hope I’m wrong.

https://xcancel.com/LukeGromen/status/1857862004662325730#m

👆This thread shows the damage the USD reserve currency system has caused to the 🇺🇸. To maintain the reserve currency stays, the USA is forced to maintain high trade deficits - moving factories overseas, and creating wealth disparities in the 🇺🇸. China and others then recycle those dollars into the stock market. This gives ownership of these assets to foreign holders.

One of the reasons I prefer Lutnick for Treasury Secretary is that, as a bitcoiner, he should recognize the need to kill the USD reserve currency system to benefit the 🇺🇸.

The old system is dead. The question now is how quickly they rip off the bandaid.

This is the big concept that most people, including financial types, don’t understand yet. The 🇺🇸 reserve status (both treasuries and currency) is ending. It must end so that the factories can return and USA can rebuild. This is why the SBR is so important. It boosts BTC over gold to keep the USA in the driver’s seat. If Trump’s team were smart, they would headfake with “no SBR” and then scoop coins and then later “change their mind” after a few weeks.