Advancing the #Bitcoin revolution thru education and angel investing. Nostr: npub106x9phjxqvauug45wd23fpfpldhh6a8xqyd8tqgg8ajkyjnt5aaqtfv7p8
Hawaii
Joined February 2015
- Tweets3.5K
- Following1.8K
- Followers1K
- Likes67.6K
Pinned Tweet
#Bitcoin is the most significant breakthrough in "money technology" since the invention of coinage 2500 years ago. BTC is native digital scarcity, exchangable P2P, free of middlemen, permissionless, censorship-resistant, programmable, unseizable, unstoppable, and inevitable!
Bowmar retweeted
If you keep your Bitcoin on an exchange there are two doors that need to be guarded to keep your funds safe: your account login and the exchange custody system.
Multi-factor authentication, device verification, withdrawal restrictions like ForceField, etc. are great features to prevent an attacker from compromising your account.
However, none of these protections help you if the custody system backing the exchange is compromised, which is what just happened at Binance.
Here is how River manages securing your coins internally:
Hot wallet:
Coins in a hot wallet are the most at risk. These coins are on systems connected to the public internet to process demand withdrawals for clients. The strategy is to keep enough coins in here to allow everyone to withdraw on-demand, but never too much that a hack could be financially devastating. River maintains a very low hot wallet balance, and on top of this we have strict internal manual approval policies if withdrawals exceed certain rate limits. Even if an attacker got through every single line of network defense and completely compromised our systems, they wouldn't be able to walk away with much BTC before being shut out.
In order to ensure we always have sufficient coins hot, we have a staging "warm" wallet that is not accessible to process demand withdrawals, but can send funds to top up the hot wallet with sufficient internal approvals.
However, the ultimate layer of defense is cold storage:
Cold storage is a custody system where the signing keys are held offline, such that a full compromise of all computer systems could still not lead to a theft of funds.
At River, we prove every month that we have more coins cold than we have in client BTC liabilities. You can verify this yourself at river.com/reserves. Our multi-sig cold storage system is designed for Bitcoin and Bitcoin alone. We are not exposed to any of the smart contract complexity that was exploited in the Binance hack. We will be sharing more in depth about our cold storage in the coming months.
Some exchanges outsource custody, which effectively removes their ability to make any direct claim to you about the integrity and security of their systems. Choose your exchanges carefully. Ask yourself: “are the people running my exchange the most qualified to build a highly secure custody system?”
FWIW, I totally agree!
@river is about as solid a Bitcoin company as you can get.
High value, excel at execution, clear application, easy to use and low maintenance. Plus they put out amazing research and charts.
I'm a fan.
Bowmar retweeted
I been wondering how Walker and Carla, complete AI noobs, have been able to jump into the AI game and quickly produce such a masterpiece.
kinda jealous not going to lie.
then I figured it out.
THEY AREN'T USING AI!
@carlabotcoin is real. Carla is a real person!
#SLOPGATE
Bowmar retweeted
We're in the process of reverting to Bitcoin's nominal price path a la power law.
- - -
Turns out it dramatically affects the standard "15% rule." Fidelity and Dave Ramsey both say to save 15% of every paycheck from age 25 and you'll retire fine at 65.
With Bitcoin, it's only 2.7% 👀
- - -
I ran the numbers as if saving ONLY in Bitcoin (power law growth) instead of an index fund at 10%/yr growth.
The share of pay that lands on the SAME retirement nest egg by the SAME age:
Age 35....6.1% of the paycheck
Age 45....3.7% of the paycheck
Age 55....2.9% of the paycheck
Age 65....2.7% of the paycheck
Again - each 5-year marker is a hypothetical 'retirement year' depending on the existing nest egg or income vs expenses for an individual.
15% vs 2.7% for a full standard career. Bitcoin needs less than a fifth of the paycheck. Imagine as a young guy, early in your career, only needing to sock away $225/month vs $1,250/month?
Life changing.
No holds barred in how Secretary Bessent deals with mealy-mouthed critics.
Once again, the professor has come up short…
His latest screed is an impressive display of economic prestidigitation.
He concedes that wages are growing faster for low-income workers and then attempts to bury that dispositive fact beneath nearly 2,000 words.
Bank of America data show that spending among lower- and middle-income households has converged toward levels at the top as they lead labor market gains.
Professor Reich has a documented history of “inventing dialogue” when the truth doesn’t fit his narrative, a habit that forced him to rewrite his memoir after the media exposed his fabrications. Burger King appears not to be the only one who peddles “Whoppers.”
As I do not like “punching down,” this will be the last response to his four-decade pattern of packaging falsehoods as fact.
Professor Boneh is one of the foremost experts on cryptography. I highly recommend his courses.
JUST IN: LEGENDARY STANFORD CRYPTOGRAPHER DAN BONEH JUST SAID ANYONE WHO THINKS QUANTUM WILL DESTROY #BITCOIN IS "INSANE"
"IF YOU THINK QUANTUM IS GOING TO AFFECT THE SECURITY OF BLOCKCHAINS, YOU'RE WRONG"
"WE JUST NEED TO MOVE TO POST-QUANTUM ADDRESSES."
"WE KNOW WHERE TO GO."
"THERE ARE ALL SMALL TECHNICAL NUANCES, BUT THE BIG PICTURE IS REALLY WELL KNOWN
"BTC WILL SOLVE THIS PROBLEM" 🔥
Bowmar retweeted
Your proposed fork didn't achieve rough consensus.
Instead of reflecting on why your proposal failed, you blame the referee, and the rules of the game, claiming a shady cabal has designed them to work against you.
You wanted to play chess by reverting the two pawn moves forward rule. The majority signalled that they did not want to play with those rules. The obvious result is nobody outside your little clique sat down to play your version.
The problem isn't with the existing rules of chess, nor those who currently enjoy playing by them.
The problem is that your proposal for changed rules was unappealing, and the attempt to force feed it to us didn't land...at all.
The new plan seems to be forking into some mutant form of checkers. Best of luck with that.
Bowmar retweeted
Yesterday I began fully integrating the @OpenAI trust cyber program into my Bitcoin Red Team efforts.
This morning I woke up to see this.
I am now being blocked from doing additional analysis on a codebase which I've already responsibly disclosed to, and have received confirmation had legitimate findings.
To be clear, this is after having already KYC'd and completed the onboarding process months ago to use the cyber capabilities OpenAI has to offer.
I am now prevented from being able to continue the investigation in a further effort to make sure their code changes are sufficient, as well as understand if there are other issues that have yet to be discovered.
It absolutely guts me as a patriotic American to have to do this, but I will be going back to using Chinese open source models to conduct my research to protect Bitcoin infrastructure.
Black hats will not hit these issues. The white hats will. We've hit a local minima in policy. Intelligence is unrestricted for those who don't follow rules, and those who engadge in harm reduction are left on the sidelines.
What are we doing in this country? How is this keeping people safe?
Please do something @DavidSacks @sama @realDonaldTrump
Bowmar retweeted
This bug is the worst since BTCPay was created. I am devastated about the loss incurred.
@craigraw saved a lot of people by pointing us to the right direction after being drained, so we could fix and communicate as fast as we could. Even AI scans didn't find the issue.
Bowmar retweeted
Join us live Saturday 5pm ET as we cover another Epic Bitcoin Fork/Chain Split! #Bip110 #Knots
👇👇👇
youtube.com/live/mZbtMFb2IzU…
👆👆👆
Bowmar retweeted
Since we're about 48 hrs away from the BIP-110 "mandatory" signaling height, I wanted to quickly share my private node crawler stats.
Over the past several weeks, I gave a program of mine more spending power than is probably reasonable. It spent a not insignificant amount of BTC deduplicating nodes. Enjoy.
Raw node counts (% of total)
🔵 Total: 131,762
⚫️ Bitcoin Core: 99,401 (75.4%)
⚫️ Bitcoin Knots: 30,755 (23.3%)
⚫️ Other: 1,606 (1.2%)
Raw BIP-110 signaling counts (% of total)
🔸 Bitcoin Core: 17 (0.01%)
🔸 Bitcoin Knots: 19,388 (14.7%)
🔸 Other: 0 (Unknown)
🔹 Total: 19,405 (14.7%)
Nodes found to be duplicates (% of version)
🔴 Bitcoin Core: 17,892 (17.8%)
🔴 Bitcoin Knots: 18,049 (58.7%)
🔴 Other: Unknown
🔴 Total duplicates: 35,941 (27.2% of total)
Deduplicated node counts (% of unique)
🟢 Bitcoin Core: 81,672 (85.1%)
🟢 Bitcoin Knots: 12,706 (9.6%)
🟢 Other: 1,606 (1.7%)
🟢 Total unique: 95,984 (72.8% of total)
Of the 19,388 Bitcoin Knots BIP-110 nodes discovered signaling for BIP-110, 71% of them were eliminated as duplicates, above average for the Knots nodes, leaving only 5,663 BIP-110 signaling nodes.
That puts non-duplicate BIP-110 signaling nodes at 5.9% of non-duplicate nodes.
My criteria for deduplication includes the basics (same IP) and some additional more advanced sleuthing of available data. Additionally, you may have already surmised from my intro that part of it also involves strategically sending real transactions.
Will keep the exact details private so that it can't be easily gamed in the future. It is impossible to find ALL duplicate nodes, however false positives are somewhat unlikely with my methodology. If my software has flagged a group of nodes as duplicate, there's an extremely high probability that its either the exact same node (with multiple IPs) or in the exact same location.
If a node wasn't able to be tested thoroughly enough to be confident for whatever reason, and isn't deemed duplicate by conventional means (same IP, for example) then it isn't considered a duplicate and gives it the benefit of the doubt.
If I get more time, I may start publishing some more detailed stats more regularly, since it seems my crawler successfully finds a large amount of nodes beyond those listed every public crawler. Unfortunately it's not cheap to handle the deduplication aspect, so will need to figure out how feasible that is to continue. It also involves operating from dozens of IPs to get connected to a supermajority of the network, which is pretty bandwidth intense.
Anyway, figured I'd share, since I don't think anyone is actually doing this at all at this level. There's a lot more to this, too. Some of it might scare privacy conscious people... so I'll probably keep my publicly shared info limited to node stats.
Bowmar retweeted
When the dust settles, we'll have to talk about the fact that not a single vulnerability was found by a US frontier model.
Instead, we're spending $10k a day on open weights models like Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8 to find vulnerabilities in Bitcoin infrastructure.
It's a disaster.
Bowmar retweeted
AnchorWatch's supported-self custody model (Flagship) was built assuming the customers' devices would brick or get lost or stolen. It was designed to survive it.
The AnchorWatch keyset takes no shortcuts. It's there to provide the institutional backstop against "oops."
Flagship really is "supported self-custody". We cannot move your bitcoin without your signature. By design. But, your bitcoin requires our signature so we can provide a higher level of security than a pleb with a single sig wallet.
Some of our customers do use COLDCARDS, yet their bitcoin is safe. We have reached out to those customers to schedule time to refresh their vault with new keys.
Someone DMed me and said, "Your custody model makes more sense now."
It was designed to mitigate MANY points of failure and is performing as designed.
Bowmar retweeted
Very well said @BTCsessions! Agree 💯.
Bowmar retweeted
Now is the time to save peoples money.
The people who are trying to cause drama will not be looked back on kindly when the dust settles.
Get everyone off the sinking ship. We have the rest of time to talk about shared learnings.
Some bitcoiners may need to hear this
One important and somewhat subtle issue raised on Spaces:
If a person imported their cold card wallet into a different hardware device vs sending/spending their bitcoin to the new wallet over the network, they're still vulnerable!
They might have done this in the past to save Tx fees or due to loss/breakage/theft of the cold card.
Their new wallet is then just as vulnerable because the seed is low entropy since it was generated on the flawed CC.
I suspect that some people when they hear the CCs are broken, might do this kind of import process thinking that it will help. It will not!
A new seed should be generated on the new HW wallet and the BTC spent into it.
Ht @ CT from @swan eng team