Coldcard is amazing because they go to great lengths to cover every possible avenue of attack they can think of. From tampering during shipping, to trick-pins in case there's a gun to your head.
The most important thing is, the company behind the ColdCard is Bitcoin ONLY! Unlike Ledger and most other hardware wallet companies. I refuse to do business with any company that perpetuates the notion that all crypto is equal. They are doing a disservice to the public. The public doesn't care to learn about what makes Bitcoin different, so it's up to principled individuals and companies to help show them!
Thanks so much for writing this up, critique of Monero is critical to continuing to improve it over time, and is heavily encouraged in the Monero community as well.
As an experienced Monero user and someone focused on privacy as a whole (not just in cryptocurrencies), I'd love to break down a few of the points made here and link to some further resources that have been helpful to me.
Monero has no upper layers, every user must rely on the base layer for every transaction.
While this is true today, it is not true forever, which makes a big difference when comparing something like Bitcoin and Monero's long-term decentralization.
Monero is capable of layer-two networks (even Lightning!) with future protocol changes (some of which are in the works today), and can even be achieved without protocol changes as has been proposed in PayMo:
I know that much of the Monero community likes to tout the functionality of Monero as obviating the need for an L2, but I disagree and think we will want (and then need) an L2 sooner rather than later, even if just for the ephemerality of transactions that it provides, scaling aside.
L2s will be necessary, can be built, and will actually be better because of Monero's privacy guarantees and dynamic block size than in Bitcoin. Much of the privacy flaws and onboarding issues in Lightning are due to the lack of on-chain privacy and block size elasticity, both of which are drastically improved in Monero.
Take TCP/IP for example, we use TCP/IP all the time even for encrypted (private) communication, yet TCP/IP itself isn't encrypted.
TCP/IP is a great example of the issues that occur when a system is not built for privacy and security from the ground up, and instead has to be bolted on higher up in the network stack.
Many of the privacy and security issues we still face today are due to the failings of designing systems and protocol like TCP/IP, HTTP, and email with privacy in mind as a core tenet. If these had privacy built in at the absolute lowest layer, all layers above benefit immensely and do not need to worry about privacy or security nearly as much.
Much of the issues that privacy-preserving networks like Tor, i2p, and Nym are trying to solve are due to the critical flaws in TCP/IP, flaws that could have been prevented had privacy been at the forefront of the protocol's creation.
Adding complexity to the base layer of a blockchain means every node of that network must be able to handle the extra load that the complexity has added at a full global scale.
Adding the minimum necessary complexity to provide two of the core tenets of money, privacy and fungibility, is a much better approach and lets upper layers focus on things like transaction speed, ephemerality, etc. without needing to try and solve privacy or fungibility failings of the base layer.
Privacy in cryptocurrencies is not this horribly inefficient monstrosity that many in the Bitcoin community make it out to be, and is in-fact quite efficient today and improving rapidly.
Using Monero privately is both cheaper and more efficient than Bitcoin:
Regardless of what you think of LN, its devs or the drama, this alone proves the layered approach works.
A layered approach is absolutely the path forward for all cryptocurrencies, as every payment does not need to be preserved for all eternity in a base layer. Even in Monero, I hope the base layer will serve mainly as a settlement layer and high-value layer, and not need to be used for coffee payments etc.
Again since Monero lacks the ability to scale in layers, its base layer must process every transaction every user wishes to perform.
As mentioned above, this isn't actually true -- Monero can scale in layers, it just hasn't been needed (and thus hasn't happened) yet.
Now finally let's imagine that somehow Monero were to suddenly overtake Bitcoin and become the only form of money anyone wants to transact in. Every transaction of every user, machine, and program would have to use Monero's base layer, which would have to be validated by every node on the network.
A few notes here:
In this scenario Bitcoin simply couldn't handle the transaction load anyways, so I'm not sure the argument has weight. Bitcoin is already hard-capped on throughput many days, so this nightmare scenario for on-chain usage is somewhat pointless as a comparison.
Monero's dynamic block size is not infinite, and has a growth cap of 1.7x per year
Monero's dynamic block size is not meant to be an infinite growth method, and is way to handle elastic transaction usage, like seasonal spending around Christmas etc -- it handles short periods of rapid usage that then returns to normal without any issues, but has preventative measures in place to ensure the chain growth YoY is not a major barrier to node accessibility
There is a lot of info on the current and future approach to fees and dynamic block size here, for those interested:
I couldn't let this slide, as this is an absolutely abysmal way to end what was a legitimately excellent critique and set of thoughts around Monero. The idea of laughing at people for being poor as some supposed incentive to pull Monero users "over to Bitcoin" is one of the many reasons I find the Bitcoin community at-large repulsive.
One of the many reasons I spend most of my time in the Monero community is that they are not price focused and are seriously laser-focused on building a necessary tool, protecting all user's privacy, and improving the space as a whole.
"Have fun staying poor" is quite possibly the worst and most off-putting meme in the space, and really mars your otherwise excellent post.
Resources
For those who have managed to read this far, here are some great resources I'd recommend you dig into to better understand Monero's approach:
https://localmonero.co/knowledge - A wealth of info on practically all of the design decisions behind Monero, laid out in approachable and non-technical format https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC9Uu5BUxII - A long but very insightful video that walks through the key differences between Bitcoin and Monero with the angle of utility, store of value, etc. in mind.
Anything Taproot related is super cool, great work! Hopefully some day we'll see people switch to more efficient Taproot outputs for script/multisig addresses.
Speaking of which, and this is maybe a more appropriate question for Bitcoin Stack Exchange, but do I need MuSig2/MuSig/MuSig-DN if I'm all of the parties in a multiparty address? I know simply adding schnorr keys together is insecure (rogue key attacks), but imagine I want to setup a multisig address where my keys are in different locations. Could I avoid using MuSig in this case (thus skipping the extra rounds of communication), since I trust myself?
People asked for it. I think the idea is that you want to connect to home/office private nodes, and not cloud nodes that are typically clearnet and possibly part of a larger organization.
Reddit is a vestige of the 0% and low-interest rate world we all lived in up until early 2022. Same goes for lots of this crap that can only survive in a 0% rate environment. In such a reality, they need to centralize faster and extract more free labor, bomb the API bridges, develop more addictive algorithms, collect revenue with subscription payments, pop-ups and other abusive practices. Take, take, take, because they have to deliver quarterly to their own fiat overlords after an IPO, or worse, some fiat creation in the form of a wealthy individual buys it all and takes the thing private, willing to squander the money to satisfy megalomania, which is just a new version of the prior fiat creations buying ownership stakes in newspapers. It's all added too much distortion for me to deal with anymore. The SN and Nostr models are built around all that trouble of rates, closed-source, permissions, etc. They've impressively existed only in higher-rate environments and a bitcoin bear market.
Hey! This is Graham (Founder and CEO of Voltage). Great post and I appreciate the dialog. I think you are pretty spot on in the reasons I created Voltage. I didn't create it to suck up every LN node out there and be against people running their own nodes. In fact, Voltage and myself are big proponents of running your own node and we encourage it whenever possible. But the fact of the matter is, not everyone can do that.
For the individual, some people don't have the technical abilities to do all the required steps to run a node at home. Even if they do, the upfront costs of a node at home can be high and maybe they just want to try it out first. We see our platform as a stepping stone where they can learn and then maybe the later run a node at home.
For anything business/app related, a node at home isn't really practical, you must put it in a datacenter. For small apps, all you really want to do is work on your app, not managing the node itself. Similarly for larger businesses, hiring out a team to do all the Lightning things is a big task and most places will just ignore Lightning if the lift is that big. To really boost adoption in this stage, we must make it very easy and that's what we're trying to do.
Additionally, there is a whole lot of things we're working on to make it even better/more trustless/more redundant to run a node on Voltage. So this is really just phase 1 and things will improve over time. Lightning isn't consensus so there is a much wider range of trust models and delegation that's possible while still being sovereign. I said this on my recent TFTC interview, but if Lightning is so hard that the only way to use it is custodial then we've failed. So ultimately, to boost adoption we must make it easy for those interested but we also must keep the ethos of Bitcoin. This is just the beginning and so much more to do!
Day 363 of snailposting everyday 'til BTC hits $100k.
__@_'-'
+100 sats
Here is a Bitcoin brochure if it helps: https://twitter.com/linkinparkrulz_/status/1543348394181148672
Also an introduction: https://anarkio.codeberg.page/bitcoin/
Both are open source, so you can adapt or edit them if you want.
Coldcard is amazing because they go to great lengths to cover every possible avenue of attack they can think of. From tampering during shipping, to trick-pins in case there's a gun to your head.
The most important thing is, the company behind the ColdCard is Bitcoin ONLY! Unlike Ledger and most other hardware wallet companies. I refuse to do business with any company that perpetuates the notion that all crypto is equal. They are doing a disservice to the public. The public doesn't care to learn about what makes Bitcoin different, so it's up to principled individuals and companies to help show them!
Support Bitcoin-ONLY companies!
Big update to zapple pay
Thanks so much for writing this up, critique of Monero is critical to continuing to improve it over time, and is heavily encouraged in the Monero community as well.
As an experienced Monero user and someone focused on privacy as a whole (not just in cryptocurrencies), I'd love to break down a few of the points made here and link to some further resources that have been helpful to me.
While this is true today, it is not true forever, which makes a big difference when comparing something like Bitcoin and Monero's long-term decentralization.
Monero is capable of layer-two networks (even Lightning!) with future protocol changes (some of which are in the works today), and can even be achieved without protocol changes as has been proposed in PayMo:
https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1441
https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1445
I know that much of the Monero community likes to tout the functionality of Monero as obviating the need for an L2, but I disagree and think we will want (and then need) an L2 sooner rather than later, even if just for the ephemerality of transactions that it provides, scaling aside.
L2s will be necessary, can be built, and will actually be better because of Monero's privacy guarantees and dynamic block size than in Bitcoin. Much of the privacy flaws and onboarding issues in Lightning are due to the lack of on-chain privacy and block size elasticity, both of which are drastically improved in Monero.
TCP/IP is a great example of the issues that occur when a system is not built for privacy and security from the ground up, and instead has to be bolted on higher up in the network stack.
Many of the privacy and security issues we still face today are due to the failings of designing systems and protocol like TCP/IP, HTTP, and email with privacy in mind as a core tenet. If these had privacy built in at the absolute lowest layer, all layers above benefit immensely and do not need to worry about privacy or security nearly as much.
Much of the issues that privacy-preserving networks like Tor, i2p, and Nym are trying to solve are due to the critical flaws in TCP/IP, flaws that could have been prevented had privacy been at the forefront of the protocol's creation.
Adding the minimum necessary complexity to provide two of the core tenets of money, privacy and fungibility, is a much better approach and lets upper layers focus on things like transaction speed, ephemerality, etc. without needing to try and solve privacy or fungibility failings of the base layer.
Privacy in cryptocurrencies is not this horribly inefficient monstrosity that many in the Bitcoin community make it out to be, and is in-fact quite efficient today and improving rapidly.
Using Monero privately is both cheaper and more efficient than Bitcoin:
https://sethforprivacy.com/posts/comparing-private-spends/
A layered approach is absolutely the path forward for all cryptocurrencies, as every payment does not need to be preserved for all eternity in a base layer. Even in Monero, I hope the base layer will serve mainly as a settlement layer and high-value layer, and not need to be used for coffee payments etc.
As mentioned above, this isn't actually true -- Monero can scale in layers, it just hasn't been needed (and thus hasn't happened) yet.
A few notes here:
There is a lot of info on the current and future approach to fees and dynamic block size here, for those interested:
https://github.com/monero-project/research-lab/issues/70
I couldn't let this slide, as this is an absolutely abysmal way to end what was a legitimately excellent critique and set of thoughts around Monero. The idea of laughing at people for being poor as some supposed incentive to pull Monero users "over to Bitcoin" is one of the many reasons I find the Bitcoin community at-large repulsive.
One of the many reasons I spend most of my time in the Monero community is that they are not price focused and are seriously laser-focused on building a necessary tool, protecting all user's privacy, and improving the space as a whole.
"Have fun staying poor" is quite possibly the worst and most off-putting meme in the space, and really mars your otherwise excellent post.
For those who have managed to read this far, here are some great resources I'd recommend you dig into to better understand Monero's approach:
https://localmonero.co/knowledge - A wealth of info on practically all of the design decisions behind Monero, laid out in approachable and non-technical format
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC9Uu5BUxII - A long but very insightful video that walks through the key differences between Bitcoin and Monero with the angle of utility, store of value, etc. in mind.
Suggestion for day 14, learn to use a real lightning wallet
Anything Taproot related is super cool, great work! Hopefully some day we'll see people switch to more efficient Taproot outputs for script/multisig addresses.
Speaking of which, and this is maybe a more appropriate question for Bitcoin Stack Exchange, but do I need MuSig2/MuSig/MuSig-DN if I'm all of the parties in a multiparty address? I know simply adding schnorr keys together is insecure (rogue key attacks), but imagine I want to setup a multisig address where my keys are in different locations. Could I avoid using MuSig in this case (thus skipping the extra rounds of communication), since I trust myself?
Another misconception about SN.
https://m.stacker.news/53290
People asked for it. I think the idea is that you want to connect to home/office private nodes, and not cloud nodes that are typically clearnet and possibly part of a larger organization.
Reddit is a vestige of the 0% and low-interest rate world we all lived in up until early 2022. Same goes for lots of this crap that can only survive in a 0% rate environment. In such a reality, they need to centralize faster and extract more free labor, bomb the API bridges, develop more addictive algorithms, collect revenue with subscription payments, pop-ups and other abusive practices. Take, take, take, because they have to deliver quarterly to their own fiat overlords after an IPO, or worse, some fiat creation in the form of a wealthy individual buys it all and takes the thing private, willing to squander the money to satisfy megalomania, which is just a new version of the prior fiat creations buying ownership stakes in newspapers. It's all added too much distortion for me to deal with anymore. The SN and Nostr models are built around all that trouble of rates, closed-source, permissions, etc. They've impressively existed only in higher-rate environments and a bitcoin bear market.
Hey! This is Graham (Founder and CEO of Voltage). Great post and I appreciate the dialog. I think you are pretty spot on in the reasons I created Voltage. I didn't create it to suck up every LN node out there and be against people running their own nodes. In fact, Voltage and myself are big proponents of running your own node and we encourage it whenever possible. But the fact of the matter is, not everyone can do that.
For the individual, some people don't have the technical abilities to do all the required steps to run a node at home. Even if they do, the upfront costs of a node at home can be high and maybe they just want to try it out first. We see our platform as a stepping stone where they can learn and then maybe the later run a node at home.
For anything business/app related, a node at home isn't really practical, you must put it in a datacenter. For small apps, all you really want to do is work on your app, not managing the node itself. Similarly for larger businesses, hiring out a team to do all the Lightning things is a big task and most places will just ignore Lightning if the lift is that big. To really boost adoption in this stage, we must make it very easy and that's what we're trying to do.
Additionally, there is a whole lot of things we're working on to make it even better/more trustless/more redundant to run a node on Voltage. So this is really just phase 1 and things will improve over time. Lightning isn't consensus so there is a much wider range of trust models and delegation that's possible while still being sovereign. I said this on my recent TFTC interview, but if Lightning is so hard that the only way to use it is custodial then we've failed. So ultimately, to boost adoption we must make it easy for those interested but we also must keep the ethos of Bitcoin. This is just the beginning and so much more to do!
SN feature request - pay a hefty fine to edit after 10mins. One that gets more expensive as time passes.
The amount of time I’ve messed-up and only notice later..
Trump had better open with "As I was saying.."
https://m.stacker.news/4215
SN bingo: