<unnamed>

Public Key

npub1syluunzwwmc70d85d9alzqc2jrc6pdur7xrax2vqpfxas6tljavsa46ksu

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsgz07wf388du08kn6xj7l3qv9fpudqk7plrp7n9xqq5nwcd9lewkgpp4mhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mqppamhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5q3camnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3wvf5hgcm0d9hx2u3wwdhkx6tpdstak0cw

Publishing to

nos.lol

nostr.mom

nostr.bitcoiner.social

Last Notes

2026-03-09 14:04:11 UTC

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Haven't heard the pod but I tried OpenClaw and was pretty disappointed. It wasn't that useful without giving it access to all my data and accounts, and I didn't want to do that for privacy, security, and trust reasons. I'm also sticking with my desktop ai tool for now and accessing it from my phone to poke projects along (I'm using tailscale, mosh, and tmux for that).

2026-03-09 03:51:17 UTC

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Been using it for six months as my main ai tool. Top uses have been for research for articles, website customization, and hobby programing. Probably 10 hrs a week, about $300 in OpenRouter credits a month.
I've looked at several alternatives and seriously tried one but none of them so far have been better for me.

2026-02-02 23:46:21 UTC

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Yes. I also sometimes use phone zoom to read small text when I'm too lazy to get my glasses or bring the text to proper lighting.

2026-01-26 20:39:59 UTC

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Was super creeped out for a moment. My nostr client showed me a Google maps preview for your link, but rather than showing me the location you pinned, the preview showed my current location. It looked like you were either doxing me or staying in the AirBnB next door.

2026-01-10 04:03:43 UTC

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I used to have an air gapped master key with a hot subkey that I used for everything besides key attestation. In that setup, dealing with any sort of tooling was a nightmare, so I gave up on it.

2025-12-01 05:01:04 UTC

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What's the name for the emotion when you ask it to do something and then come back later to discover it wrecked things and you forgot to git commit the previous improvements?
(That makes me wonder if I could set up an every minute cronjob to create btrfs snapshots or something.)

2025-11-22 19:28:36 UTC

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What does "global liquidity valve" mean? Is it something like: when people have excess cash, they buy bitcoin; when they need cash, they sell bitcoin?

2025-11-11 05:34:24 UTC

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Excellent choices! Older but still great is Star Trek II by the late James Horner at the beginning of his career; Battle in the Mutara Nebula remains my favorite spaceship fight song.
Gattaca by M. Nyman is an absolute masterpiece of subtle and complex layering; I saw on a behind the scenes that songs from it were also frequently used as the stand-in music during the filming and editing of the TV show Firefly. The track The Other Side is my most replayed song of all time.
Ennio Morricone is best known for his westerns, but I think his best soundtrack is The Missionary, in which music plays a key part of the plot. Gabriel's Oboe is a favorite song to play for a great many musicians; I've heard it on everything from sax to cello and played it myself (poorly!) on flute.

2025-11-08 02:12:21 UTC

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I use Darktable almost every day, it's excellent. I think its devs are often frustrated by it being called a Lightroom replacement as Darkroom has pioneered multiple improvements in RAW processing, from a powerful (non-ai) masking system to significantly improved color science.

2025-11-07 20:11:41 UTC

The vast majority of anti-social behavior I've witnessed in my life has been on so-called social media.

2025-11-07 10:33:10 UTC

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About how many hours of coding in that two weeks (versus, e.g., collecting and entering documentation like you'd have to do anyway if you used a third party service)?
Taxes for me (USA/Hawaii) take me about 8 working hours a year using an online service that is sometimes more annoying than helpful and which has politically advocated for keeping taxes complicated, so I'd love to replace them even if it didn't save me a few hundred bucks. But I'm not sure it's worth more than an extra ~8 hours of my time.
However, even if I don't go all they way in like you, you've inspired me to revamp some of my personal accounting to take advantage of AI. I've been just doing the same thing I did five and ten years ago without thinking about how new tools could make my process less cumbersome. Thanks!

2025-11-05 03:22:51 UTC

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Who gave him a grant?
Thanks for making your disclosure responsibly.

2025-11-04 01:41:37 UTC

I wish there was a way to split test my life. Today, in particular, I would like to meet the version of me who didn't try to vibe code an Arduino project and has now spent several hours thinking I was just one more chat query away from satisfaction.

2025-09-29 01:23:19 UTC

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Well, yeah. Duh.
Guessing the actuarial tables say I have about 40 years left. That's an estimated hourly cost of $10 in real terms. Alternatively, assuming I have to pay upfront and if I believed I could earn a wild 20% return per year over inflation on that $2,000 over 40 years, it's an hourly cost of about $147, which is more than I should pay given my financial standing but not crazy high.
My caveats would be that I'd have to have a reasonable belief that it actually would save the time, it'd have no significant downsides, and it'd not take away one of the mindless tasks I find relaxing and enjoyable.

2025-09-08 05:49:51 UTC

https://image.nostr.build/922fded3a7381b0c42adc2a3a5b8c6cc8bfa369d30ca759e5b9410d9fa12723f.jpg

2025-09-07 06:08:55 UTC

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Thanks. I wondered if it was something like that.
It would be very unfortunate if they succeeded. Gloria has done a great job as both a dev and as a maintainer.

2025-09-07 01:03:40 UTC

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I've not been on hiatus but I'm guessing this is some Twitter drama, so I also don't know what's going on.

2025-09-05 19:25:26 UTC

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I've spent way more than that on home contractors who had similar or worse literacy problems, and I've generally been happy. A top evaluation criteria for me is the insightfulness and forethought of the questions someone asks. If they're actively thinking about potential problems, I wouldn't care much about their literacy. If they're just just telling you "ok boss", I wouldn't hire them even if they had a PhD.

2025-08-31 07:15:43 UTC

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I think it's an advantage of BIP93 that it doesn't use a natural language encoding, as bech32 discourages people from trying to rely on memorization, but I figure someone will eventually make a transliteration scheme and it might as well be someone competent.

2025-08-28 01:43:33 UTC

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I would like help, yes, but not personalized help. I'd like a document I can read or a button I can push in Amthest or a set of term I can query an LLM about or something else along those lines.
Sorry my message was snarky. I gave into the dark side rather than composing with compassion. I'm very appreciative of all your work and I use Amthest because it's the best Nostr client I've found.

2025-08-28 01:37:41 UTC

Congrats to everyone who figured it out. Too bad that doesn't include me. No worries though, probably my lack of relay configuration means that nobody will see this message so Amethyst's upgrade will look like a success due to survivorship bias.
#nevent1q…6e0e

2025-08-24 16:37:15 UTC

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If the text you send is useful, why should anyone care who wrote it?

2025-08-22 02:30:08 UTC

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What is a community? (I had the bug in the old version, so I guess I don't have a community. Now I have FOMO.)

2025-07-30 02:50:36 UTC

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Cops just evicted everyone from the surf beach in Hilo.

2025-07-25 17:42:51 UTC

https://image.nostr.build/539db51984501e39c6d4e510f60d881e95ea39d9ddbe784dd2d97c676fd52662.jpg

2025-07-17 02:35:16 UTC

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In the back, your odds of surviving a flight stay go from 0.9999998 to 0.9999999 but your odds of getting off the plane within 5 minutes of arriving at the terminal go from 0.99 to 0.05.
NB: I made up these numbers.

2025-07-13 04:13:16 UTC

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I'm the photographer.

2025-06-08 19:50:09 UTC

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What did I say that you're debating? I'm guessing it was something about JM being serverless or P2P?

2025-06-02 19:34:05 UTC

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Can't tellwhether this is an allusion to scifi or ancient fortifications.

2025-05-26 03:45:20 UTC

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No, I'm talking about his Tunable Penalty Protocol. My summary here with links: https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2023/03/29/#preventing-stranded-capital-with-multiparty-channels-and-channel-factories

2025-05-25 22:05:35 UTC

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Why not use BIPs? What's the value of standardizing them elsewhere?

2025-05-24 01:52:39 UTC

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How does it compare to John Law's factory designs that also don't require soft forks?

2025-05-17 04:58:25 UTC

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If Bitcoin is successful, that will have to happen eventually. There's only 300,000 sats per person in the world (less than that if we assume some BTC have been lost). People have already tried to address that perceived insufficiency through things like millisats. When we fix it at the consensus layer, which will practically require a hard fork, it would be nice to address the problem forever by allowing arbitrary precision, e.g. allowing output amounts to be defined as a fraction of MAX_MONEY. If that happens, the idea of base units goes away
If you assume that we'll never add inflation to Bitcoin, then the monetary constant is the supply, not the fraction of it that we currently transact in.

2025-05-16 22:18:54 UTC

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Doesn't changing it once imply that it might be changed again? I don't want to spend the rest of my life listening to people arguing back and forth about whether it's time to redefine the basis again---that doesn't seem very clean to me.

2025-05-13 18:04:28 UTC

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Additionally to the other responses in this thread, an increasing amount of Bitcoin P2P traffic should be encrypted, which makes it harder to analyze with network tcpdump style tools.

2025-05-11 18:48:51 UTC

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Other nodes will continue following the most PoW valid chain but old Knots will reject that chain and instead accept backdated blocks on a lower PoW chain.

2025-05-11 18:44:04 UTC

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The logic of that function seems pretty weird. Why use nTime instead of system time? Why reject blocks instead of shutting down (or simply nagging the user)? The way it's designed seems possible to abuse, whereas other easy choices would have much lower risk of problems.

2025-05-02 18:05:52 UTC

Thank you to everyone on nostr who has been patiently explaining the technical reasoning behind considering increasing or removing Bitcoin Core's default OP_RETURN size limit.

2025-04-19 21:33:52 UTC

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Pretty sure LND uses it for both simple taproot channels and the latest version of their swap service, Lightning Loop.

2025-04-15 22:05:19 UTC

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When I first started writing Bitcoin documentation, I asked my mentor at the time (Mike Hearn) whether merkle trees were important to understand. 🤦‍♂️

2025-04-15 22:01:45 UTC

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Mine has an odometer, so technically it tracks me. But it has no network access, so I doubt it's reporting on me.

2025-04-07 21:46:04 UTC

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Tl;dr, but an AI would read it, so I guess they're winning.

2025-04-07 03:12:02 UTC

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No, when you buy something for $100, the merchant only receives $95 to $99. The bank keeps the difference.

2025-04-06 20:54:52 UTC

@nprofile…mh4h saw a post by you on Twitter talking about how credit cards don't charge for loans unless repayment is late so why should Bitcoin loan orgs? But CCs do charge 1-5% to the seller for the initial ~30 day loan period, which is equivalent to a 13% to 80% APR if you were to compound that period 12x in a year. That's about the same rate as Bitcoin loans.

2025-04-01 21:04:32 UTC

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Also, wherever there's an argument, there's certain to be somebody linking to allegedly relevant material buried deep in a Twitter thread. 💩

2025-04-01 20:44:56 UTC

The hardest Optech newsletters to write are those where we summarize unresolved disagreements, e.g. for or against CTV+CSFS. When everyone ends up in agreement, at least mostly, we can skip describing any arguments and jump to the conclusion.
But when there's no resolution, we have to get into the details, try not to miss anything important, and be careful not to summarize in a way that misstates someone's key argument or attributes to them an opinion that they don't actually hold. On top off that, there are arguments that seem weak to me but which probably warrant describing in case I'm missing something. All that extra work is important but it's not my favorite.
Also, it makes for long and hard to read newsletters, so sorry about that for next week.

2025-04-01 00:40:18 UTC

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Instead of having to whitelist people, you could probably have a simple naive Bayesian classifier in your client that you train on the type of comments you don't like. It would hide future similar comments in the future, with you able to tweak the threshold as your mood changed (e.g., you could risk seeing more junk on a day where you were bored). You could still whitelist your friends so they would pass through the filter.

2025-03-31 19:18:50 UTC

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Yrah, but there's no social aspect to Twitter muting. What you described (as I understood it) is Alice's client influencing which posts Bob sees. In that case, once one person we like violates the protocol, it incentivizes other people in the social group to violate the protocol, quickly rendering it moot.

2025-03-31 18:50:33 UTC

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Opt in ignoring in a social contexts always eventually degrades to nobody opting in. Imagine you have Alice and Bob, who like each other, and Unlikable Urkle. Alice initially ignores Urkle but Bob replies to one of his comments, stoking her curiosity, so she unignores him. This is why /ignore on IRC and similar systems don't work.

2025-03-23 18:52:07 UTC

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What crucial role do they play? (Honest question.) For content creators, I think it's probably better to convert readers into subscribers (e.g. BOLT12 recurring invoices), in the patreon model. For content consumers, the patronage model is also probably better at intelligently funding the kind of stuff that's good for you rather than a dopaminergic ad hoc process of zapping.
For algorithms, my understanding is that zaps are just an unverifiable statement between two people, e.g. you and I could sign a zap saying that one of us paid the other 1M BTC without even a single sat changing hands. If they were verifiable, they'd seem to give algorithmic advantage to rich people and that doesn't particularly interest me.

2025-03-23 18:34:45 UTC

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Re: not using LNURL, it's mainly because I don't like hosting dynamic website code. It requires installing stuff on a server (requiring either a dedicated server or taking a risk with other stuff on the same server), breaks often in my experience, and is just not what I want to spend my time on. BIP353 looks promising because I'll just be able add a field to my existing DNS.
All that said, I haven't actually set up either LNURL or BIP353, so I could be confused about what they actually entail.

2025-03-23 18:18:08 UTC

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Agreed about the possible use cases. And I also realize that I probably oversimplified things in my previous post. A normal part of my conversations, which are maybe not normal conversations for other people 😜, is suggesting that we make small wagers when we disagree about something easily provable either now or in the near future (my wife and I even use a website, fatebook.io , that let's us collaborate on questions and compare our Brier scores). Zaps would be great for resolving those small bets, rather than having to email LN invoices around like I did for https://x.com/jxpcsnmz/status/1839444666988757306

2025-03-23 17:58:01 UTC

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Totally agree that there are a bunch of confounding variables that limit correlation. However, I think every other proxy we've had for personal key management has failed to achieve popular use: PGP, personal browser certificates, years of DID attempts, etc. So the default assumption at this point might need to be that everyday people can't or won't manage their own keys. Accepting that assumption would have a significant effect on either _how_ we build Bitcoin software or _who_ we build it for. If, instead, we want to continue to build for an anticipated highly self custodied future, it would be really nice to have Nostr to point to as a counterexample of lots of typical people controlling their own keys.

2025-03-23 03:40:42 UTC

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AFAIK, zapping currently requires using LNURL, and I'm not interested in either self hosting that infrastructure or outsourcing it. When BOLT12 zapping (perhaps through BIP353 addresses) becomes a thing, I may set it up.
Tbh, though, mixing money and social interactions doesn't excite me. I'm not opposed to it, but to me the currency of a good conversation isn't money---its acknowledgement in the form of smiles, laughs, retorts, and the like.

2025-03-22 22:02:09 UTC

Controlling your own key on Bitcoin comes with significant costs, from the cost to create a UTXO, to the eventual cost to spend it, to the potentially high cost of losing your key and the money associated with it.
On nostr, controlling your own key has basically zero cost. It's one of my favorite things about nostr. If widespread control of personal keys can be made to work here, there's hope for widespread control of personal keys on Bitcoin. But if nostr fails, then I think it weakens the standard case for Bitcoin.
That may sound negative, but I think it's great to be able to test individual properties of Bitcoin separately from the heavy confounding factor of it being money.

2025-03-19 17:53:38 UTC

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No, but I take a cheap unflavored nicotine lozenge each time I ride my indoor bike rollers for habit reinforcement.
I think it helps but I wonder if there's an easy way to blind test it (n=1). Maybe having my wife apply nicotine patches vs similar sized bandaids to my back?

2025-03-15 00:11:38 UTC

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I've [thought](https://github.com/jamesob/assumeutxo-docs/blob/master/proposal/feedback-david-harding.txt#L172 ) since the start that the background validation added a lot of complication for not much benefit (maybe even negative benefit). It seems to me like it would be a lot simpler to just allow loading a UTXO snapshot or sync from genesis but not try to do both.

2025-03-11 18:40:11 UTC

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Hawaii residents unaffected

2025-02-14 03:23:53 UTC

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After much hand wringing and signing of forms, I was allowed to "withdraw" it as cash (no cash was actually touched) and made a cash "deposit" into the escrow account. Honestly scares me to be performing ad hoc rituals with a big chunk of our savings.

2025-02-14 02:04:58 UTC

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You would not believe how normie this situation is. My wife and I are buying a home and the escrow company required the final deposit to be made by wire transfer. However, I use the same local bank as the escrow company and they don't allow internal wires.
Working around that situation has required multiple emails, multiple calls, an in person bank visit, and both my wife and I to sign a specially prepared document. Everyone has been really nice but also acting like they're doing me a favor. I've managed not to shout at any of the clerks who had nothing to do with failing to anticipate this obvious edge case, but I had to vent somewhere.

2025-02-14 00:42:30 UTC

I fucking hate dealing with banks.
Most days if you ask me why I work on Bitcoin, I'll probably say something about eliminating the temptation for the state to print money, with all of its disastrous effects.
But every time I have to deal with a bank and must grovel to use my own fucking money, I feel the urge to hoist the black flag and start slitting throats. On days like today my work writing about Bitcoin technology is fueled entirely by rage and spite.

2025-02-12 23:56:49 UTC

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Congrats on the new podcast!

2025-02-09 02:48:31 UTC

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The Wire

2025-02-08 13:52:37 UTC

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Giving it a try now, thanks!

2025-02-08 13:40:36 UTC

What's the best non-custodial Lightning wallet for Android for a U.S.-based user? I love Phoenix but they withdrew from the U.S. and it's time for me to move on.

2025-01-03 19:41:33 UTC

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Didn't watch the video, but if replacing a referral code is wire fraud for depriving a content creator of money, then deleting a code is also fraud, which seems to imply that I, as an individual, can't edit out a referral code from a URL I receive. I think referral codes are a sales device and there's no guarantee that just because one sales person put in the effort of convincing a person to buy, it's still allowed for that person to buy from someone offering a cheaper price (which is what I gather Honey did by finding coupons).

2024-10-24 04:39:19 UTC

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I think this has been the most influential piece of Szabo's on my thinking about Bitcoin, LN, and related tech.

2024-09-18 01:41:08 UTC

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For Mastering Bitcoin, the publisher wanted to go with Bitcoin-the-network and bitcoin-the-currency. I was fine with that, as its what I normally used, but I discovered when working with the non-Bitcoiner editor and proofreaders that they had a hard time guessing which was which. I got a lot of queries about whether I really meant to use caps (or vice versa for lowercase), especially since I did occasionally use the wrong case. Next time I work with normies, I'll probably ask to just use common noun casing throughout.

2024-08-19 19:11:05 UTC

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So you save 50 kb on the query but may receive a response that's bloated by potentially more than 50 kb of unwanted data?

2024-08-19 17:28:57 UTC

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Isn't that 0.01% error rate over the total number of public keys in the set? E.g. if I follow 1,000 out of the 1 million publeys on nostr, I'll get guaranteed updates from my 1k follows plus updates from about 100 random people (1e6 x 0.0001)?

2024-07-08 16:04:40 UTC

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Yeah, 1 kg/day in modern times to maintain weight and full fitness sounds right to me. In prehistoric times, the average human was significantly shorter (so lower BMI) and the body will down regulate calorie burn as it enters starvation, so I guessed the minimum requirement during a prehistoric famine was about half, i e. 0.5 kg.

2024-06-24 01:36:28 UTC

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How will vbytes and varops interact? There were a lot of problems when we had both bytes and sigops, e.g. invalid block templates. Now, in taproot, we size transactions as max(vbytes, sigops*50 - 50). Which model will varops use?

2024-05-18 19:12:01 UTC

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No, but it might be useful to track overall address reuse, e.g. what percentage of total BTC supply is in output scripts that have been spent from before.

2024-05-06 08:34:25 UTC

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Yeah, I'll put that on my todo list. Gonna need a bigger home server closet.

2024-05-06 05:29:32 UTC

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I don't understand why I've haven't been able to buy a router in the past decade that just works well continuously and supports more than 4 clients.

2024-04-29 19:37:55 UTC

Re: testnet drama.
Last I checked, there was about 1 EH (1,000 PH) of sha256d hashrate for rent through on an easy API. If you really oppose what @npub17u5…t4tp is doing, you can do the following:
- Set up a testnet node.
- On that node, use the invalidateblock RPC to locally reject blocks that you think Lopp created.
- Setup a Stratum v1 server and connect it to your testnet node.
- Rent hashrate and point it at your stratum server.
That should be enough, but if someone tries to exploit the testnet difficulty drop to create long reorgs, set the time on your testnet node to 119 minutes in the future.
But, if you want to be productive, I suggest just switching to signet.

2024-01-15 05:39:41 UTC

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Suggestions:
- Really experiment with public transit in a new place. In places with good taxi service, you can't get stranded, so it's reasonable to just yolo it and not do any route planning when taking the bus/tram/whatever. You'll often discover cool places and nice routes that way.
- Find the parks. People in cities do all sorts of cool things in parks that people with large houses and backyards only rarely do in public. There's something magical about being in a public space with thousands of people all having fun and living the best parts of their lives.
- Look for a public events calendar, check Meetup, and (if you are willing) Facebook. Lots of people means lots of things happening.
- Figure out how to do the things you love even if they seem foreign to the place you are. It's your chance to find amazing people who enjoy those things so much that they're willing to go against the local culture to do them.
- Oh, and if you can, go up the stairs and not an elevator. It's good exercise, gives you a sense of agency, and you'll feel awesome each time you reach your floor.

2024-01-11 18:16:23 UTC

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VanEck also donating: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.coindesk.com/business/2024/01/05/vaneck-to-donate-5-of-profits-from-btc-etf-to-bitcoin-core-developers/amp/
Disclosure: I'm a member of Brink's grant committee (unpaid).

2023-12-14 03:54:49 UTC

Usually I don't find generative AI useful for writing @npub1hku…432p newsletters. I often don't start out fully understanding the ideas we cover and so I can't tell if what the AI writes is accurate or nonsense. Writing it myself forces me to really think about it, and I can just keep iterating on my draft until it feels accurate (and then it gets peer reviewed).
However, this week I'm writing the year in review newsletter and it's fun just pasting in my text from earlier in the year into a LLM running privately on my laptop and asking it to summarize everything into a single paragraph. I can just edit, add links, and I'm done! Whee!

2023-12-14 02:29:09 UTC

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https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-April/020242.html

2023-12-11 14:05:01 UTC

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There's a history of discussion and implementation here: https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/anchor-outputs/
The summaries aren't detailed, especially not about motivation, but they do point to some conversations that may have been important at the time but would be a bit hard to find now (e.g., they used the old "simplified commitments" name).
See also: https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/cpfp-carve-out/

2023-05-20 18:18:55 UTC

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I hope so.

2023-05-19 18:22:03 UTC

Chapter 10 of Mastering Bitcoin (3rd edition) has now been sent to my editor. This chapter is about the P2P network. Major additions include BIP152 compact block relay and BIP157/8 compact block filters.
https://nostr.build/i/df92cd309d31f0dcc1bad6c27c98740c28cef57fbe1ec1e79773653a87e18ea1.jpg

2023-05-13 18:21:43 UTC

Just tried Bard and there was misinformation in every answer it gave me. ChatGPT gets lots of stuff wrong too, but I think Bard is about an order of magnitude worse. Unless my anecdotal experience is non-typical, I'm amazed Google is encouraging people to use this thing.---it just makes me think that Google is losing it.

2023-05-13 16:45:14 UTC

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Left a reply about what I think might be the issue: https://github.com/JoinMarket-Org/joinmarket-clientserver/issues/1465#issuecomment-1546706665

2023-05-08 16:18:33 UTC

Status update #2 on Mastering Bitcoin, 3rd edition: I sent my editor the first draft of Chapter 9 about transaction fees. This chapter consists of 90% new material. It describes the basic principles of Bitcoin's fee (block space) market, fee estimation, fee bumping (both CPFP and RBF, with a infobox about opt-in RBF vs full RBF), transaction pinning, CPFP carve out, and package relay. Sections from the previous edition's Transactions chapter about fees being implicit in a transaction and (anti) fee sniping are moved to this chapter.
This is the last planned major change from the 2nd edition, so I'm hoping to finish the remaining chapters pretty quick.
https://nostr.build/i/c6852d791e2c80b3d1cc31833be2ec878f8736d16a42ae413802b6314d615c1b.jpg

2023-04-17 16:33:47 UTC

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It depends a lot on the threat model. Let's consider two scenarios:
1. Mallory is monitoring all traffic to a given IP address (no Tor, or Tor is completely broken) and wants to learn which outputs it controls. Every transaction downloaded by that IP address which doesn't belong to its wallet increases the anonymity set of the transactions which do belong to that IP addresses's wallet. Because BIP157/8 involves downloading whole blocks (typically a few thousand transactions), it would create decent-sized anonymity sets even if there was never a false positive; adding the occasional false positive block just improves that.
By comparison, Bitcoin Core is like having a 100% false positive rate; now the anonymity set is every transaction in the entire best block chain.
2. Mallory knows a Bitcoin address and wants to find the IP address of the wallet controlling that Bitcoin address (again, no Tor). If Mallory has the ability to surveil IP addresses that the wallet might be using, she can spent a tiny bit of money to that address to get the wallet to download that block. Many other wallets will also download that block, either because they had transactions in it or because of the false positive rate, so that's the initial anonymity set. Mallory can then send another tiny bit of money to the address. The wallet she's interested in will download that new block but many of the other wallets which previously downloaded it won't (they didn't have a tx in that block or it wasn't a false positive for them). This shrinks the anonymity set. Each time Mallory sends a bit more money to the address, the anonymity set shrinks further, until she finds the IP address.
By comparison, Bitcoin Core is immune to this attack. It downloads every seemingly-valid block unconditionally.

2023-04-17 15:35:28 UTC

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I disagree about there not being any privacy benefit. Every Wasabi instance that's paired with a local node performs exactly the same non-coinjoin/non-broadcasting network operations, making it impossible to use network activity to determine which instance received which transaction outputs. (This is called information theoretic perfect privacy.)
Wasabi instances that use BIP157/8 compact block filters each perform different network operations depending on their transaction history. These operations are performed over Tor, with Wasabi frequently rotating network identities, which defeats simple attacks---but is still far from perfect. If the threat model includes global passive surveillance, record-now-decrypt-when-post-quantum surveillance, crypto or protocol vulnerabilities in Tor or Wasabi, or other threats, then it may be possible to identify the IP address of a wallet controlling a certain address.
More importantly "it only saves a bit of bandwidth and storage" ignores what is, to me, the primary benefit of running a full node: the assurance that the bitcoins you receive have all the characteristics necessary to make them easy to sell in the future, specifically that every previous transfer of those bitcoins was valid according to the consensus rules and that all of those transfers are documented on the block chain currently known to have the most proof of work.

2023-04-17 15:00:41 UTC

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What's anti-klepto?

2023-04-11 20:38:59 UTC

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I had the same thought when reading that book, although I rather enjoyed the rest. But during the Money chapter, I was thinking, "nah, I like Szabo's theory way better".