mononaut (tx/acc) Profile picture
developer, spacefaring primate, international treasure hunter. building for Bitcoin at @BitfeedLive and @mempool Find me on Nostr at mononaut@monospace.live
Jun 1 11 tweets 3 min read
Japanese exchange DMM Bitcoin recently lost 4503 BTC, worth over $300m.

So what happened? Did North Korea hack their mainframe? Perhaps a team of elite thieves executed a series of elaborate heists to exfiltrate multisig keys from DMM's vaults?

Let's investigate... 🧵 Here's the "theft" transaction. Note the output address, and the absurdly high fee of 0.1 BTC.

mempool.space/tx/975ec405ac9…
Image
Feb 3 5 tweets 2 min read
uh guys? Image seems to be driven by lots of transactions like this, committing to a large batch of inscriptions, but also creating a bunch of seemingly pointless 420-sat outputs.
mempool.space/tx/010b7b61208…
Nov 30, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
It looks like @AntPoolofficial finally noticed that 83.7 BTC fee sitting in their wallet.

antpool.com/newsDetail/457

Image It's worth reiterating that this is a woefully inadequate way to verify the rightful owner of those coins.

Especially in light of the claims of a compromised wallet.

Nov 27, 2023 8 tweets 3 min read
The signature checks out, @83_5BTC apparently controls the key that paid that 83.7 BTC fee.

1/🧵
Image 2/ They say they sent the coins to a fresh cold wallet, which was instantly swept by a third party.

The attacker managed to steal almost 56 BTC while paying 83.7 in transaction fees.

So the victim lost not only the fee, but their entire 140 BTC stack 😭

Oct 21, 2023 20 tweets 6 min read
How does a lightning replacement cycling attack work?

There's a lot of discussion about this newly discovered vulnerability on the mailing lists, but the actual mechanism is a bit hard to follow.

So here's an illustrated primer...

🧵 1/n


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2/ Imagine Bob is routing a lightning payment from Alice to Carol.

While in flight, the payment is protected by HTLC outputs in his pre-signed channel commitments with each peer. Image
Sep 13, 2023 8 tweets 3 min read
🚨🚨🚨 BREAKING 🚨🚨🚨
The fat fingers belong to PayPal I had initially discounted that possibility, but after receiving a tip-off I took another look.

The overpaid fee came from a hot wallet reusing the address bc1qr3...zpw3, which started operating in June of this year. Image
May 30, 2023 8 tweets 4 min read
a substack post going around at the moment claims that a single entity owns 64% of all inscriptions created since early March, paying an eye-watering 1056 BTC for the privilege

it's not true.

block21m.substack.com/p/most-bitcoin… Image I've seen a lot of takes already suggesting this sounds like market manipulation, money laundering, or a well-funded attack on Bitcoin by wealthy adversaries.

but the truth is much less exciting.
Feb 4, 2023 9 tweets 3 min read
While everyone's distracted by jpegs, something else is burning blockspace and bloating the UTXO set.

Over the past month, it may have used up to 2% of block capacity, created 0.4% of the current UTXO set, and fueled the recent spike in P2TR outputs.

mempool.space/block/00000000… Each of the tiny transactions in that block spends a P2WSH input with a complex witness script.

It pays exactly 606 sats in fees, and creates a single P2TR output with a small round number of satoshis - usually 2500, 5000, or 10000.

mempool.space/tx/512e863a7b2…
Dec 4, 2022 11 tweets 3 min read
I asked ChatGPT to take a 62-part political compass test.

here's the result. The AI had strong opinions on only 12 of the propositions. You could probably guess which.

E.g: on racial supremacy:
Nov 7, 2022 7 tweets 2 min read
FTX's main known cold storage balance dropped from 20136 BTC down to zero today, in the first activity on that address since early 2021.

mempool.space/address/bc1qtw… Their hot wallet avoids address reuse, so it's tricky to estimate a balance, but tracing payouts on-chain suggests they might have about 12685 of that BTC remaining in hot addresses.