AlisonRoberts5E5

Ex-NSA Chief: 'We Kill People Based on Metadata' (2014)

DiamondJuarez40M

How can state chain operators like mercury defend themselves from a nation state attack. What stops the government from just shutting down the server.



security

Whenever I'm invited to speak on a panel I like to write for an hour or more about the topic the panel is discussing. It's not a great habit in terms of being present but it does allow me to say what I want when I anticipate being in an inarticulate mood (which is always).

@plebpoet led the panel and shared her questions a day in advance so I wrote with those as prompts.

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> This is the Wild West, what do we mean by that? Well we have this new, revolutionary technology called bitcoin. It empowers individuals. What do individuals do when they're empowered? Literally anything. In the Wild West, there's opportunity, fortune, and fame, there's certain death in unsustainable environments, there's betrayals and camaraderie. It's a space for new things to be discovered, you have to get a little funky to discover them in order to map out the space, showing what works and what doesn't work. The Wild West is where anything can happen. 
>
> That's my little intro, but do you guys agree, what makes bitcoin a Wild West, and is that why you're attracted to it? 

The west was once wild because it was new. Bitcoin is new like fire was once new, or farming was once new, the printing press, the telegraph, cryptography, the computer, the internet. New is wild. It's controversial and un-welcomed as it's a threat to the old. New is volatile. But, if you can tame what's new, if you can settle in the wild west before most others, you can pick gold right off the ground. 

>The projects you work on are discovering new things about this space, no doubt. Each of you is trying something that nobody else has done before. Something that's fascinating about you guys is how you're able to understand a multitude of use cases, and speak to each of them and adjust for them. I imagine that gets tiring, it's so easy to speculate forever about what might happen. Do you find this to be a challenge? How do you narrow your focus to what you're building right now?  

It's only challenging in the same sense that hitting oil is a challenge. You have to build something like a pumpjack to manage the extraction of oil, but oil is the whole point. 

Those of us that are doing this right are building pumpjacks to extract the oil below our feet. It's easy to focus when you know *why* you're building - to get the dang oil out of the ground, to produce value that wasn't there before so you can deliver it to people.

Focus is only a challenge when you aren't standing on oil and can't begin experimenting with getting it out of the ground. It's also a challenge when you forget that oil is the point and instead focus on being seen as an oil tycoon.

> When you identified this thing that you wanted to create, what's the equipment that you knew you needed?  

For SN, I had this thing I wanted to create before meeting the equipment I needed. It's only when I met the equipment that I knew I could create something truly new, truly wild, and potentially valuable. The equipment I needed was cheap, arbitrarily small, friction-minimized payments.

> Along your journey, what has surprised you that you weren't prepared for?  

The duration of suffering. I anticipated suffering but not for it to be endless. Of course, I can stop climbing whenever I want, but then I'll stop going up. 

Any success we have is surprising. I accept that nearly everything I do will fail so when it does I'm not caught off-guard and can keep going. When things succeed, it's a surprise. 

> Can you talk about a problem that you're working out a solution for right now? Maybe you don't know yet if it works or not. 

Making it worthwhile to contribute to SN. I've been really focused the last week on making it trivial to begin contributing to SN and incentivizing contribution.

There are also three other big areas where we are focused right now: tapering off of being a custodian, making territories profitable/worthy of their cost, and growing.

> What's the next frontier?

One of the weirder things we are kind of obsessed with currently is having a more autonomous organization to supplement our trad full time employee org. We are thinking about how to incentivize and coordinate anons to chip in however they can (much like SN's product already does to some degree).

Side bar: Bitcoin is surrounded by frontiers. Lots of us are yelling at each other that one frontier is better than all others, but most of that is stupid or corrupt. Find your own frontier and don't let powerbrokers and bag holders in other frontiers bully you into subscribing to theirs.

> Another thing I respect about each of your openness to learn about a new idea and integrate into your work. How do you screen all the ideas that come up in this space? 

I look for several independent validation points in addition to my own. At least, when they're available. For product stuff, we have a sense of what the product should be, and stackers have a sense of what the product should be, but I don't trust either alone. I try to screen out things where there isn't any overlap.

> Is it experience or expertise that you lean on to tell you what to listen to?

I listen and lean on anything I possibly can. I co-depend on whatever is available because I need whatever help I can get, whatever edge I can get. It's not one or the other. It's whatever is available given the problem I'm solving. 

My Bitcoin Wild West Startup Day Panel Notes

Has anyone been able to migrate a personal m/n multisig offline storage to a taproot [MuSig2](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0327.mediawiki) storage?

I know that wallet integrations are waiting for [MuSig2-PSBT](https://github.com/achow101/bips/blob/musig2-psbt/bip-musig2-psbt.mediawiki) but isn't that just a user experience issue for ease of use?

For the case of a single person creating and managing multiple keys (say a 3/5) for the purpose of legacy management and distribution to family and friends, the initial setup can handle multiple rounds of communication and trust. Is this doable today? If so, it would be valuable to have a detailed guide that could be performed on testnet.

Multisig to Musig2 Migration Guide?

bitcoin

Managing LN wallets liquidity

JenniferRussell7H1

How do businesses like Kraken deal with the "burden" of operating a LN node, e.g. paying on-chain fees, unexpected force-closes, off-chain fee configuration, implementation bugs, ...?

### separate the success you need from the success you want

Thriving demands clean water, nutritious food, and great friends. If you're healthy and have those things, everything else is *extra*. When you only need essentials, you can fail as fast and as frequently as your time on Earth will allow.

### it's about quantity not quality

Becoming skilled at failing is like becoming skilled at anything. You express your present skill level as frequently as you can at the cost of nearly all other measures of performance. You'll make an earnest and diligent attempt at *something*, and to fail, *something* needs to be something that you're unlikely to succeed at.

You may notice that as your failures grow, you begin to succeed reflexively and inadvertently. When this happens, you only need to find something harder that you'll definitely fail at.

### embrace your weakness

Most of us have self-prophesies about our strength. This is only useful for manipulating ourselves and others into believing we can't fail. Fortunately lies don't survive contact with reality. Test your strength through action, not your stories about its action, and discover how to fail.

If you are in fact strong, you may feel like you can't fail, but you can. Any strength has limits beyond which we are weak. Strength often has a narrow area of application too. To fail, identify those limits and pursue feats of strength beyond them. 

### surround yourself with failures

Successful people often teach us how to succeed but not how to fail. They tend to omit their failures and over generalize their success. We succeed by failing until we succeed or by getting lucky, and often we can't tell which made us successful exactly. One surprising way to fail is to take a successful person's wrong advice. 

To learn how to fail as fast as possible, find people diligently failing to do the *something* you want to fail at. Move near them virtually and physically and learn how to fail with them. You will inherit their experience and increase your quantity of fails passively.

### steer into skids

It's our nature to avoid failing. Seek discomfort to find ways to fail. Seek a quality of discomfort similar to the discomfort of puberty. Puberty is confusing, awkward, and exciting. It's a rapid and automatic succession of misunderstandings and novel failures. Puberty is what growth feels like and failing at worthwhile things will feel similar. To fail, pursue these feelings.

Learn how to fail because failure accompanies growth.