This is a bit insulting to be called a “quiter” by someone who has never made a substantial technical contribution to bitcoin or lightning, to the best of my knowledge.

Though as a note, even Satoshi did “quite” Bitcoin. Nature of open-source, if successful your projects are growing beyond your personal outreach and what you can master by design.

I bet you even Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk or Ray Dalio would quite Bitcoin FOSS if they were working on it.

Like said, keeping an eye on consensus changes and I’ll keep doing a bit of security research. I love security research for its own sake, and the taste of solving hard and unique problem.

Generally, those types of contributions create more value for the ecosystem that 90% of the bitcoin developers will do during all their careers.

I wonder how much if it the equivalent of btc privacy vs Monero: political elections are the biggest and most important fish, they could, in theory, have the biggest upside, but if prediction markets became significant it would be such a dramatic threat to existing power structures that they would crush it, assassinate people, etc.

It's kind of funny for me to say this, since I'm normally the one who has so little patience for all the idiot conspiracies that knock around this space, the mysterious elites who are rigging your phone service and trying to make you fat through corn subsidies, etc. Anyone who's ever managed a large group should know how impossible it is to orchestrate things like that.

But when the stakes are really high, there's a phase transition, and I expect more conspiracies, not less. I'm a fat tail conspiracy theorist maybe.

microstrategy

In January 2024, we reported several vulnerabilities being exploited by the XRY tool from MSAB to get data from Android devices including stock OS Pixels. In April 2024, Pixels shipped a reset attack mitigation we proposed preventing the whole attack vector. We plan to expand it.

Currently, non-Pixel devices are still vulnerable to these reset attacks. In June 2024, Android 14 QPR3 included another feature we proposed providing wipe-without-reboot support for the device admin wipe API. We shipped this early and use it in our duress PIN/password feature.

We also began triggering a full compacting garbage collection cycle in system_server and SystemUI when the device is locked based on info about these attacks. This releases memory for no longer allocated objects to the OS, where our generic zero-on-free feature clears all of it.

In the near future, we plan to ship support for adding a PIN as a 2nd factor to fingerprint unlock to enable users to use a strong passphrase combined with PIN+fingerprint secondary unlock for convenience. We have an initial implementation, but it needs more work before shipping.