Peter Todd @Peter Todd - 1mo
If people really want a ashigaru review, I charge $150/hr. Total for the coinjoin comparison blog post was about $8000, spread out over a few months. Most of the hours went into examining Wasabi (and writing about it).
The cool kids like to make their slides in beamer. The coolest kids: https://image.nostr.build/cf9b6423d5f2ce40b8fcda66defd175830e78157ff07216db5fed9853a4a93a0.jpg https://www.quantamagazine.org/at-17-hannah-cairo-solved-a-major-math-mystery-20250801/
Fact check: true.
Also, efficiency does matter. It's not good if you need to do 1000's of coinjoins to get reasonable privacy. Block size is limited.
Yes, the issue is not symmetric. But the economics just don't make sense: the person paying for privacy isn't getting it, and the people getting paid for that service are.
...at which point you really gotta ask why don't you just use Wasabi, which can get a better and more reliable k-anonymity set per transaction? JoinMarket should fix this issue too, maybe with some kind of out-of-band payment scheme. But even if it doesn't seems thwt Wasabi's huge transaction model is more efficient.
https://petertodd.org/2025/coinjoin-comparison My comparison of the three major forms of coinjoin in active use: Wasabi, JoinMarket, and Payjoin. tl;dr: Payjoin is cool and you should use it if possible. JoinMarket unfortunately has a serious flaw. Wasabi is the best overall and provides decent privacy.
...and yet again this morning: nostr:nevent1qqswa5hpdydy9jpe6lc7hzc7dx9gkn7xzvreqyn9cqcmdq5aku8pzpcpr4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezucnfw33k76twv4ezuum0vd5kzmp0qgsve2jcud7fnjzmchn4gq52wx9agey9uhfukv69dy0v4wpuw4w53nqrqsqqqqqpn3v3v2 I actually heard that particular attack – and indirectly saw it reflected off a nearby building. An extremely loud attack even though I was multiple kilometers away from it.
Peter Todd @Peter Todd - 2mo
Celebrating the deaths of evil people doing evil things is not radical or unjustified in any way. It's perfectly normal, and healthy. Any reasonable person should be able to figure out good-vs-evil in this conflict.
Cheering on Ukrainians killing Russians isn't "cheer-leading for a tragic war". It's cheering for victory over evil. As for "having no part in it", I'm literally in Kyiv right now, for good reasons. Among them being there's a big Bitcoin community in Ukraine and this trip I did two panels at Bitcoin events. You're ultimately just trying to make excuses to let evil go unpunished. Evil that if not stopped in Ukraine, will certainly continue to spread. Russia has been invading neighbors for centuries. As a Canadian I'm well aware of the fact that Russia and Canada share a long northern border, and Russia has been challenging Canadian sovereignty in the north.
https://petertodd.org/2022/surprisingly-tail-emission-is-not-inflationary Relevant reading!
Given how quickly Ukraine was able to take territory in Kursk, it wouldn't be surprisingly if they were able repeat something like that again with a stockpile of saved up equipment. There's also evidence that Ukraine is scaling up their own Ukrainian produced ballistic missiles. A new push might also involve a bunch of Russian targets getting unexpectedly taken out.
He's a Russian soldier in Ukraine. It's highly likely that he's a volunteer who signed up for the massive pay given to Russian volunteers (it's illegal under Russian law to send conscripts to Ukraine itself, and this law is followed with rare exceptions). Ultimately he was trying to murder the Ukrainian soldiers who are in turn keeping me and everyone else in Kyiv safe. Fuck him. It's a good thing he's dead. Given the opportunity I would have no qualms killing him myself.
Two particularly impressive Ukrainian operations I found videos of lately. A very nicely done FPV ambush against a group of Russian soldiers: https://video.nostr.build/fc58ab7b822f667a5a56695080bf2eb75f581686efb42a78bf133c3e57e18804.mp4 ...and an attack against a Russian fuel train – allegedly with long range drones – timed just right to destroy it in the middle of the central train station in Salsk, Russia: https://video.nostr.build/2ec49c595e20f0ce69627b14a43754a021ed105acb415d6de6bd571f55731b0b.mp4 Obviously, taking out the train station as well is a great use of all that fuel; 380km from the front line.
I also need to add that functionality to OpenTimestamps to be able to selectively reveal parts of media and other files. Unfortunately that'll have to be format specific.
Russia is the aggressor here. Not Ukraine.
😂 Nothing America has done in our lifetimes compares to what Russia is doing right now. Not even close.
With war at this scale if you're paying Russian taxes, you're meaningfully contributing to the invasion. About half the entire Russian tax budget goes to war right now. All working Russians are valid military targets.
Making this stop requires killing Russians, and lots of them.
Kyiv subway at the start of an air raid at night – likely to be a serious one as Russia is attacking with drones, which often get used against apartment buildings. Disproportionately mothers and grandmothers with small children, though there are people of all ages. This station was pretty full of people already, as it was near a bunch of apartment buildings. https://image.nostr.build/2f03b1882707a8ea2f9c43e1428404b62b7326f6fad0052345c995d9b5bfc0c1.jpg I didn't get a photo of it. But all the staff were wearing ballistic vests. A very good idea as Russia has repeatedly attacked the entrances of subway stations. They put out cheap little chairs for anyone who needs them:
