CypherToad

Open source all the things!

gpg: 3A856C6345F5D0578552FEF8895AEAB385AF1B57

nostr: npub1q4mwael4e23p4knu8gndx3uqf8ngpsnfe5u6cvmpys7wmscnseqq3wnu77

[CypherToad @CypherToad]

@nixcraft

[spencer @techspence]

Back when I worked on an IT team we would prank each other by setting people’s background to David Hasselhoff when they walked away without locking their machine.

We called it hoffing.

If you were the victim, you got hoffed. 😅

[CypherToad @CypherToad]

@SwiftOnSecurity Sharing your girl with other degens

[CypherToad @CypherToad]

@tetsuoai Or to self ran isolated models… ollama makes it dead simple

[CypherToad @CypherToad]

@nixcraft FBI Surveillance Van

[CypherToad @CypherToad]

@MrJamesMay Hope it was at Pines Biscuits, the hands down best.

[Craig Raw 🐦 @craigraw]

I have reported this as a phishing app to @Apple through their trademark dept, since they seem to ignore normal app reports. Their reply: “Apple encourages the parties to a dispute to work directly with one another”. It appears they either can’t or won’t act immediately.

[Seed @sesi_the_man]

Great thread. Bitcoiners can unite to find the best way forward to minimize spam in the timechain.

[CypherToad @CypherToad]

@ZubyMusic I think a little of both to be honest.

[Seed @sesi_the_man]

I don't pretend to be important enough to actually get your attention with this response, but just the same I'll throw it out there.

rodolfo is generally self-serving and will criticize anything that competes with what makes him money. You're his best friend if you have a block clock in view when you do a TV interview and help him sell a bunch of them, but then suddenly may be treated almost like an enemy if you're promoting something that competes with his precious coldcards. Just a dynamic to keep in mind with the allegation of dishonesty. You're both much larger, entrenched and experienced personas than I "in the bitcoin space" and I'm sure you understand the dynamics that come with that.

There is a lot of nuance that "seedless is safer" fails to capture, and whether you acknowledge this or not, it is just catchy marketing that grabs people's attention and has churned up a big debate that also happens to be good publicity for selling bitkeys.

I was on a technical panel at the Vegas conference on the topic of seed phrases and their value; two of the four people on stage were block employees (sponsorship money can indeed go a long way). 30 minutes split between four people is barely enough time to scratch the surface, and I'll give Steve Lee some credit in that he attempted at points to be an impartial moderator, but the panel basically ended up being a vehicle for bitkey promotion.

I won't be able to do a good job of capturing all of my concerns with bitkey here, but I will throw out a few.

The device itself lacks a screen, making the one key that is offline basically a blind-signer where the user must trust what is being proposed by a device that is online and exposed to the internet. The other two keys are stored on devices / in locations with internet connectivity, which IMHO also basically makes the system equivalent to a permissioned hot wallet.

As also I said during my panel appearance, the importance of having seed words for me is not really about the seed words, it's about having a tangible, analog backup of your private key material. Digital data storage devices can fail suddenly, irrecoverably, and without warning, and you often discover they've failed when you need them the most. Having words written on paper or stamped into metal means not having to trust the longevity of an opaque digital storage device (and is frankly satisfying to my 80-IQ lizard brain).

Being able to physically hold your private key material in a human-grokable format is also the ultimate portability; BIP39 is not perfect, but it is a widely adopted standard that allows me to recover and access my wealth on a wide variety of devices and platforms. Just about the entire bitkey stack is produced, managed, and/or made accessible by block, and uses standards that are to my knowledge not being used by many others. The mitigations in place for the bitkey app being suddenly inaccessible, or cloud-key access being suddenly unavailable or revoked, either due to technical or legal reasons, just aren't adequate for something people are being encouraged to use for their savings.

One additional note on portability as a concept -- if it requires an on chain transaction, that's not really portability, that's a proprietary walled garden that you may not be able to get your money out of when you need to.

I won't go extensively into the privacy issues that come into play by block managing the entire bitkey stack and being able to monitor balances and transactions and associate them with legal identities, though they are substantial. The issues here are obvious.

A note for the plus-column, I think the concept of social backups is a powerful and useful one. I haven't entirely dug into how bitkey accomplishes this (it again appears overly proprietary to me) but I am a big fan of the basic idea and it is an innovation that the larger bitcoin community could possibly benefit from.

Though we may disagree on several issues, I appreciate some of the things you have done for bitcoin, especially helping to shift bitcoin into the overton window, and your work to fund developers.

To kind of wrap my thoughts up -- "security" doesn't just mean protecting yourself from hackers or someone who shows up at your front door with a wrench, it also means potentially protecting yourself from rogue politicians and buearocrats who may attempt to leverage their influence over public and private companies to steal your savings. If the power exists, it is not a matter of if or how it will be abused, but a matter of when it is abused, and block's dominance of the entire bitkey stack is the power I'm referring to here.

I started the SeedSigner project 4.5 years ago clumsily coding in my living room recliner and am proud of the way we've grown, with the help of numerous volunteer coders as well as others with various talents. I've turned down VC funding and other opportunities to sell-out the soul of the project along the way, preferring to keep the project's ethos and ideals intact. Myself and others continue to happily grind along with little in the way of monetary compensation. Bitcoin is important to us. Self-sovereignty is important to us. Privacy is important to us. And most importantly, freedom is important to us. If bitkey embodied more of these ideals, I would more of a fan.

[CypherToad @CypherToad]

@SupergiantGames Game play, visuals, and sound track were absolutely breath taking

[CypherToad @CypherToad]

@Austen Even better, interpreting them

[CypherToad @CypherToad]

@ZubyMusic Pure wisdom

[CypherToad @CypherToad]

@retro_twt You stumbled onto my trap

[CypherToad @CypherToad]

@retro_twt One of my favorites

[CypherToad @CypherToad]

@Romudeth Sound track was also fire

[CypherToad @CypherToad]

@venturetwins Level 1 Druid

[CypherToad @CypherToad]

@lucchedonzi These look gorgeous

[CypherToad @CypherToad]

@TheCryptoLark Snooze and back to sleep

[Punt Road @punt_rd]

Dear Mother. Dear Father. Congratulations on producing this guitar prodigy!

Metallica - ‘Dyers Eve’