Very Secure

Understanding the Psyop that is the Segwit Softfork

February 5th, 2024

Segwit is an attempt to redefine the bitcoin protocol in a manner that drastically undermines the security of the network. Here’s an analogy to get a jist of what is going on.

Imagine a FIDE1 imposter attempted to add a new rule / restriction to chess, call this version chess2. Bishops are now only allowed to move a maximum of 4 squares diagonally from their current position. This new rule does not conflict with the original rules of chess.2 A chess player observing a game of chess2 would not necessarily know that a different game was being played. They would watch this ‘chess’ game and perhaps be perplexed as to why certain bishop moves weren’t played, but otherwise the game would look the same.

Imposter FIDE could slowly add new rules to chess2, all while maintaining an illusion of fidelity with the original game. Of course, the brazen FIDE impostor would not name their game chess2, and so their new game would be masquerading as chess itself.

This is the state of bitcoin. A group of ‘core devs’ have been chipping away at what the word bitcoin even means. They’ve made the kind of changes that are akin to removing the 20,999,999.9769 btc cap. 3 Yes, the situation is that bad. They are not only changing the rules of bitcoin, they are adding rules that poison it.

Chess2 is not chess and segwit is not bitcoin. If you want to use sound money you must use real bitcoin addresses that start with the character ‘1’.

  1. The major chess organization [↩]
  2. Provided opposing kings do not move into a position 5+ diagonal squares away from a bishop. [↩]
  3. Nope, it’s not exactly 21 million. And yes, this matters. Stating the precise cap illustrates that bitcoin adheres to a strict protocol, warts and all. [↩]

Posted in Bitcoin, Bitcoin Beginner | No Comments »

Bitcoin Investment Strategy

February 3rd, 2024

Warts and all, bitcoin is the best money out there. It seems all but certain that it will take the dollar’s position as the reserve currency of the world. From napkin calculations that should put bitcoin at about $2,000,000-$4,000,000 per coin in today’s dollars, although the USD price per coin one day will be way higher than that due to inflation. All this to say, getting your hands on some coin is a very good idea.

So how do you buy some? Do you put away a paycheck each month or go all in with your savings right away? Well that depends on your risk profile. For the highest expected value, the best decision is to buy as much btc as possible all at once. This is because at time T+E it is always >50% that the price of btc will be higher than at time T. Of course you may have some insight that tells you the current price is at a local maximum, and thus you should ‘wait for the dip.’ But I seriously doubt you are privy to such information.

If you want to lower your EV for decreased variance, then you can consider dollar cost averaging. And if you’re new to using bitcoin, it is a good idea to practice buying, selling, trading, moving coins from one wallet to another, creating backup protocols, testing those backup protocols, etc. DCA is a good way to do this.

Lastly, if you want to put in a reasonable chunk of money in btc the only people in the consulting game are to be found at jwrd.net.

Happy investing. Rest with a smile on your face knowing that every buck you put into BTC takes some power away from the cursed governments of the world.

Posted in Bitcoin, Bitcoin Beginner | No Comments »

Hands Update

February 3rd, 2024

I’m pretty sick and tired of always avoiding activity in fear that I will incur further damage to my hands. I am also losing my mind from my inability/decision not to write. I would rather have flare ups than remain silent.

I am going to focus on physical therapy and typing technique retraining. Speech to text is no solution. Here’s to a revival of my textual output.

Posted in Reflection | No Comments »

GPG Over Analog - Hardware Device for Secure Voice Communications

October 7th, 2023

I. Concept

The goal is to allow communications over an unsecured audio channel. The gizmo needed is a headset connected to a little computer which is connected via a long wire to an audio jack.1 This gizmo captures the audio signal, encrypts it, and passes the encrypted audio signal over an analog channel. To the sender’s and recipient’s untrusted device, the cypheraudio is nothing more than noise. And so unless the recipient has the corresponding gizmo + key, they will only hear static.

The beauty is that this gizmo will work with any device normally used for phone calls.2 You can plug it into any computer or dumbphone. Your correspondent can plug his into whatever shitware he is using.3

II. Implementation

What are the hardware requirements to encrypt/decrypt fast enough for a real-time phone call?

Most microphones sample at 44.1kHz with a 2 byte depth. Let's be safe and leave room for header information, so say we need to encrypt at 100KBps. My Mac’s (2.3GHz processor) GPG 1.4.23 can encrypt 100KB in about .015s and decrypt the same in about .02s. So the napkin calculation seems to show that this device is feasible without adding much latency to comms.

It would also be possible for the gizmos to use one time pads. The correspondents would ‘charge’ their gizmos with an OTP key before making a phone call.4 This would greatly reduce the computational load and complexity on the hardware device itself. It also allows for more transparency. Creating a verifiable device5 that can perform asymmetric public private key encryption seems quite difficult. But creating a device that simply takes an OTP key and performs the necessary XOR’s seems doable. 6

III. Prototyping

The tool can be simulated in software.7 The data flow in one direction is GIZMO -> Untrusted Device -> Network -> Untrusted Device -> GIZMO. All data passed over the various connections has a chance of corruption, especially over the network. So the first step in realizing this product is to create a pipeline with simulated data loss and create the encrypt/decrypt protocol that mitigates that data loss to a reasonable degree.

  1. The audio jack could be a USB, USBc, or whatever port Crapple is forcing upon its users at the given moment [↩]
  2. This is why the long wire is important. You need to be far away from the untrusted device’s own microphone. One could place the untrusted device next to a source of white noise for extra protection. [↩]
  3. Whatscrap, Noise- I mean Signal, and Shillegram promise end-to-end encryption, but even if you trust their software (only God knows why you would) they still run on top of devices backdoored by Crapple, Goolag, and perhaps a 3rd party hacker as well. [↩]
  4. A 16 GB Key would give 22 hours of comms 16,000,000,000 / (60 * 60 * 100,000 * 2). [↩]
  5. Like FUCKGOATS [↩]
  6. The puzzle becomes - how do you sync up the encrypting and decrypting devices?

    One way to do this this is to break the audio signal into fixed sized packets with headers. The first part of the header contains the index into the OTP used to decrypt the rest of the packet. How do we ensure that this index is faithfully transmitted and what do we do with dropped bits within packets? I still need to work out some of these questions. [↩]

  7. The hardware device can be prototyped without any special equipment. Ideally, one would have two computers and two cables - each cable connecting to the audio out of one device and to the audio in of the other device. [↩]

Posted in Combat | 4 Comments »

The long-overdue review of JWRD's training course

October 3rd, 2023

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of taking JWRD’s operator course with sstacks. I was incredibly happy with the instruction provided by jfw. JWRD seems to have found a balance between being thorough and being practical when it comes to imparting their knowledge of how to guard one’s bitcoins onto their customers.1

The course consisted of ~17 weeks of instruction, one class per week and one office hour session per week.2 Needless to say, jfw was always on time and prepared with a good lesson.

The homework each week ranged from very easy to moderately difficult depending on previous experience programming computers. IMO they could improve the course by having different questions based on prior level of knowledge.3 At the moment, the beginning of the course seems geared towards someone completely unfamiliar with the command line. With that said, it certainly didn't hurt to review some basic concepts.

There are two more suggestions I have. The first, is I think jfw could pre record a 15 minute lecture for each class. The students would watch this video prior to class.4 This would save time for jfw and increase the amount of interaction during class.

The next suggestion has to do with the wording of some of the questions for the homework and warm-ups. Some of the questions are not real questions but instead a word association fill in the blank. For example this was one of the warmup challenges:

The ps and top commands display running ____.

I think the answer is less but it's not entirely clear what's being asked for. I would rewrite the question as

What command line program Is used to display the output of the ps and top commands?

There are many examples of these throughout their warm-ups and homework questions. It's a pet peeve of mine, and I certainly think it would be worth the effort to go through and change the questions to remove ambiguity.

Apart from those points I can't really do anything but praise the course. JWRD have no competitors, they're the only option if you want to learn how to secure your btc. The amount of groundwork they've done with their hardware decisions, software development, etc. Is quite frankly unbelievable. The price they're charging is low for what they offer.

Here's how you can calculate if the class is worth it for you.

EV = P(You lose your btc) * YOUR_BTC_INVESTMENT - COURSE_PRICE

So if you have fewer bitcoins than the price of the course, then the course may not be worth it. The more you have, the more it's worth it.

What if you have more coins than the price of the course but not substantially more? Well I am going to go out and say that P(You lose your btc) is pretty fucking close to 1 for most people. The USG successfully duped the ~entire market into using a fake version of bitcoin. If you have your coins in a bc1 or 3 address, JWRD’s course is worth it as long as you have 1 more satoshi than the course’s price.5 But even if somehow you managed to have the wherewithal to keep your coins in a legacy aka real bitcoin 1 address there are still many ways you can go wrong. You need a professional team to help you manage your wealth and JWRD is the only one up to the task.

  1. They also teach other topics such as secure networking and how to create digital backups. [↩]
  2. I did not take advantage of the office hours to the extent that I should have. jfw has an incredible wealth of knowledge for all things related to cryptography, bitcoin, computers, etc. To anyone taking the course I recommend you pick his brain as much as possible.

    I should also note here that they were kind enough to switch the office hours to a video call format which was a great help for me on account of my hands. [↩]

  3. It's possible that JWRD never had a customer before me with the same amount of experience that I have. But JWRD has a huge number of potential customers that will have prior linux command line experience. For example, all the people who followed along #trilema stand to gain a lot from the course, but for some of them the beginning lessons may not be challenging enough. There is also a potential customer base from people working in/escaping the ‘tech’ Industry in Silly Con Valley and they too will get little from some of the starting material. [↩]
  4. Ideally there would also be a transcript of this video. [↩]
  5. Plus a transaction fee, of course. [↩]

Posted in Bitcoin Beginner, Reflection | No Comments »

Mistakes from my dives on September 17

October 3rd, 2023

On one dive to 20m I was unable to equalize at 17m. I was in freefall and accidentally went a little deeper then I had anticipated, putting painful pressure on my eardrum. I have to be very careful once I get to negative buoyancy to ensure that I don't fall if I can't equalize. I could prevent this by doing free immersion until I can comfortably equalize at my target.

On another dive, I tried to equalize on my way back up. I am very lucky I did not have a reverse barotrauma from attempting this. You should not voluntarily equalize when you return to the surface. It happens automatically.

Posted in Apnea | No Comments »

RSI Next Steps

October 3rd, 2023

Although I've been dealing with chronic pain for two years and the situation looks pretty bleak, I am determined to fix my hands.

Here are the key steps I'm taking.

Resting. I try to avoid doing anything forceful or bearing weight on my hands. For example, when carrying small grocery bags I slip the handles up my shoulder instead of holding them in the palm of my hand. There're tons of little tricks like that to reduce the load.

Doing physical therapy for surrounding muscles. I'm strengthening the neck, shoulders, and back muscles. My forearms and hands are too delicate right now, working them out just puts me at risk for reinjury. Strengthening the supporting muscles helps me maintain better posture. It also gives the body an easier time when doing compensation movements.

Staying constantly hydrated. The problem may be due to cellular health and the fix may come from providing the right environment for tissues to regenerate. So I am drinking coconuts all the fucking time! I also may look into examining my blood work more closely and keeping an even stricter diet.

Wearing wrist splints at night. From what I've learned it seems that restricting movement can be quite dangerous when it comes to these type of injuries. However, at night time I know that I can put my wrists in horrible positions and then fall asleep on them.

Stretching Lengthening.1 The idea is that being more flexible means there is less tension in muscles. This may help alleviate any nerves that are constantly being squeezed.

Learning. Unfortunately this one has been neglected recently, but it's imperative to learn as much as I can about the human body and the anatomy of the hands. My problem is too complicated for doctors to figure out in their routine 20 minute check, so I'm kind of on my own here.

Technique retraining. I'm working on changing the way I type and fixing my workstation to accommodate for my crippled nature. At the moment this mostly means using speech to text.

The future sometimes looks grim but I'm not going down without a fight.

  1. The word choice emphasizes the gentle nature. [↩]

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Speech to Text

September 20th, 2023

Using speech to text is painful. Nevertheless, the tool is a blessing. Without speech to text, I would be unable to write these articles.

I am currently using some program that comes built-in with the Mac OS. The error rate is about one word per sentence. So, I have to constantly edit everything I right.1

To edit, I have to use the keyboard. So my process is far from hands-free. However, I am able to take off a huge load on my hands. This prevents me from having a flare up the following day after writing.

I would like to get back to programming, but there are a lot of difficulties that I foresee using speech to text for coding. The tool as far as I can tell is more useful for writing prose.

The other problem with speech to text is that I have to use either a Mac or Windows program. As far as I know, the open sores versions of speech to text are absolute garbage. At least that was my experienced with Talon. This means I will have to program on my Mac.

But these are hurdles that I simply may have to overcome. Programming has more thinking and planning involved than actual typing anyways. Perhaps the severe limit I have on my ability to make inputs into the computer could help me write better software.

  1. I'll leave that misspelling there so you can see what I'm dealing with. [↩]

Posted in RSI, Reflection | No Comments »

Once again into the deep

September 18th, 2023

On September 17 I returned to the ocean. I was nervous about the idea of going free diving again. The thought crossed through my mind that I'm already very lucky to have the experience of being 24m deep. I could quit freediving now with a cool notch on my belt without having to put myself at more risk. Why did I need to dive again?1

I had every reason not to go. Hiring a pro cost 80 bucks, I have to drive for an hour each way, I have to then take a 30 minute boat ride (which usually leaves me seasick), and then I have to hold my breath until my diaphragm starts automatically contracting. Seriously, why the fuck would anyone want to do that? I asked myself this question over and over again as I was packing my bags and getting ready to go.

Well I realized why I needed to dive when I arrived at 15m below sea level. I floated there at zero gravity, an experience known only to divers and astronauts. And I heard the most beautiful noise, the calling of whales welcoming me to my home, the ocean. I floated there experiencing incredible bliss as I gave a thumbs up to my safety diver. I didn't have the slightest urge to breathe at any point during the dive.

Poseidon left me a parting gift - after diving, my hands were feeling much better! And although it may just be a fantasy, I have a reason to believe that freediving may help cure my RSI. Let me explain.

To do so, I must inform you about the most important aspect of the physiology of freediving. The astute reader of footnote 1 may be asking themselves how is it possible for freedivers to go to incredible depths of 100 plus meters? Wouldn’t their lungs shrink to a point, causing their rib cage to collapse?

The idea that one's rib cage would implode at a certain depth was a widely held myth for a long time. No one dared to test it. Legend has it that a drunkard dispelled the myth by doing the impossible in a public stunt dive to 50m. That his corpse would float to the top, or rather sink to the bottom, was a reasonable expectation. But who could have predicted that human mammals have a mechanism to pump the lungs with blood in order to prevent the rib cage from implosion under high water pressure? The drunkard was probably just a dumbass who got lucky as shit. His reckless stunt showed the world that free diving to great depths is possible.

The physiological phenomenon preventing the death of freedivers is called blood shift. It occurs as part of the mammalian dive reflex. When we submerge ourselves into deep water, blood rushes from the peripheries into our lungs so that the lungs can retain a rigid structure.2 it is undeniable that humans have aquatic roots.

Now to circle back to how this is connected with RSI. I have read that forms of tendinitis are caused because of restricted blood flow in the veins (i.e. - its an outflow problem). This causes swelling as the blood is unable to properly return home, possibly creating thick tendons that put pressure on nerves. Draining this blood may be an imperative.

I know it may be a fantasy, but could it be possible that blood shift from freediving can reduce some swelling that is causing pains my hands? I have a bit of evidence that this is the case, and I plan to explore that evidence further.

  1. Freediving is relatively safe compared to other extreme sports. There has only ever been one death in a freediving competition. Also, 24m is not deep for a competitor. People sometimes learn to free dive to 30m on the first day they try. With that said, at 24m the pressure is ~3.4 ATM. This means that your lungs are roughly one third the size that they would otherwise be due to Boyle’s inverse gas law. This is barring any effects due to blood shift which I will get to explaining later.

    So idk man, I think freediving is pretty fucking gnarly! [↩]

  2. Unlike gas, liquid cannot compress into smaller volume no matter how much pressure is applied to the liquid's containing body. [↩]

Posted in Apnea | No Comments »

Who is your daddy and what does he do?

September 17th, 2023

I remember BingoBoingo used to ask this question to newcomers in the old bitcoin assets channel. Somehow this seemed to offend people. It was rarely, if ever, answered directly. People are bothered by the idea of manifest destiny. They have difficulty accepting that their environment shapes who they are.

Well I am my father’s son, and there's no denying that I inherit a lot of traits from him. So without further ado let me answer the question.

My dad is Ronald Haack, a retired pro bridge player. He invested all his energy into a card game. He often procrastinates and struggles to get the important things in life done. But when it comes to the card game bridge, there are very few that can match his intelligence and energy.

So what exactly is this card game bridge? Why is it played by a small group of fanatics and a bunch of wealthy old people? Why did my dad dedicate his life to this card game?

It is the most interesting way to make use of 52 cards. The appeal of bridge comes from the unraveling of a mystery with every hand. Through the bidding and play of the cards, a story is told. You and your partner must collaborate to piece that story together and play your cards accordingly.

Bridge1 imitates life. Sometimes you’re dealt a good hand, sometimes you’re dealt a shit hand. In any event, you must always make the best of what you got. You must make decisions with imperfect information and adjust any inferences you've made as more information becomes available.

Ultimately, bridge is a fascinating triviality. And this fascination with trivialities is something that I inherited from my father. Almost all of my effort gets spent on games and pleasure. And now, just like my father, I've begun to invest an incredible amount of time playing bridge. It's not something I'm exactly proud of, but nevertheless it's part of who I am.

  1. Bridge has fallen out of popularity in the last 50 years. Bridge requires honor. It is a beautiful game, but it does not work if you cannot trust your opponents to not cheat. It takes an active effort to make sure that the only way you communicate your hand to your partner is through your bidding and your play of cards. [↩]

Posted in Reflection | 2 Comments »

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