Consensus Rules vs Relay Policy

There are a lot of new people arguing on X about relay policy these days (and some old people who have suddenly returned). I see a lot of conflation and confusion between Consensus Rules and Policy. Here's a short explainer of each 🧵 Consensus Rules are rules that full nodes enforce that determine which transactions are valid. Put another way, if your node receives a block containing transactions that violate consensus rules, your node will reject the block.

Slugline: A Bitcoin Transaction Carpool, paid with Runes (or, a runes paymaster for L1 Bitcoin)

Pay your L1 transaction fees with Runes

🧵 This weekend I was at @PlebFi, an awesome Bitcoin dev conference. The theme was Metaprotocols. While I didn't enter the hackathon (I was a judge) I decided to hack something up anyway.

My project is called slugline, and even though its pretty rough, it works and is neat :)

This week, @PresidioBitcoin hosted the Bitcoin Quantum Summit (pbquantum.com). I was thrilled to be invited to attend, and wanted to write up a thread about what I learned this week. I’ll save my commentary for the end, and start with where we are, the challenges we (might) need to solve, and some of the solutions that have been proposed or that people are thinking about.🧵 Some quick table-setting before we get into it: Why and how would Bitcoin be affected by Quantum Computing? When you spend Bitcoin, the network requires you to prove that you are authorized to spend that coin (UTXO). Most of the time, this is done by providing a digital signature. The security of the digital signature schemes we use in Bitcoin rely on a problem called the Discrete Log Problem (DLP) being hard for computers to solve. In other words, it is computationally infeasible for a computer to take a Public Key and do the math to figure out the Private Key. That means that if you have your private key(s), you and only you can spend your Bitcoin.

Taplocks: Verifiable but unspendable tapleafs

or, a hashlock over a tapleaf

🧵 If you wanted to emulate a new opcode (CAT, CTV, some PQ signing scheme, OP_WASM, whatever) today, you could do it with a policy signer or a signing oracle:
- they vend a pubkey
- you encumber your UTXO with the key
- they sign if you satisfy the script (out of band)

Can OP_CAT make AMMs for Runes/BRC20? Probably not. Can we make a token protocol that is AMM-friendly with OP_CAT? Yes! (with some interesting tradeoffs) The big challenge with Runes, BRC20, and other many other colored coin protocols is that token validity is dependent on all of the prior state of the token (and in some cases like open mints, on the state of the whole chain). In an AMM, you need the `swap` script to know how much of a token is in an input/output. If you rely on the user to tell you, they can set their own price. If you’re using a token protocol that relies on an offchain indexer to determine token validity, you need to stuff all the previous transaction data for the lifetime of the data into the transaction witness and validate it in script. Yikes!

I made a vault using OP_CAT!

What is a vault? Why OP_CAT? How does it work? 🧵 A vault is a construction (using either covenants or presigned transactions) that let you add reactive security to your Bitcoin.

We've been working super hard on @QuantumCatsXYZ. in addition to the incredible artwork by @0xfar, there's a lot of cool tech behind these Evolving Inscriptions.

Ordinal Inscriptions are on Bitcoin. The Bitcoin Blockchain is immutable. How did we build evolving inscriptions?
👇 What's an Evolving Inscription? Check out this tweet (and the whole thread), but what you have is a single inscription that sits in your wallet under your full control, but the way it renders changes over time on a pre-determined path.

https://x.com/QuantumCatsXYZ/status/1745824369085919570?s=20

Career Update: I’m joining @TaprootWizards as CTO!

Why Wizards? Read on 👇 Some folks know that I’ve been working on self-custody tools for a while, I’m setting those problems down for now to work on what I think is the most important problem of the space: reasons to use Bitcoin.

And we’re going to solve those problems with JPEGs.

A few weeks ago I somehow ended up in a conversation with a BSV fan. I made a comment about how now you coins can be stolen from you on BSV (“confiscated”). He said I was wrong and I didn’t know enough about the system to defend my assertion. Until now!

Let’s take a look! 🧵 First, let’s look at the slick marketing page! Here’s the landing page for BSV’s Digital Asset Recovery program: bitcoinsv.io/digital-asset-…

Hey @raw_avocado here's something fun:

pretend for a moment that we have some opcode that takes the transaction hash and pushes it onto the stack 1 bit at a time. Ok, with that in your mind, I wrote a tapscript that can validate a lamport signature of a transaction! ... So to keep it readable, I'm pretending that bitcoin signatures hash down to 4 bits. Just look at this and imagine it 63 more times...

A quick thread about BIP324, the new encrypted P2P transport

Check out this packet captures. It is clearly a bitcoin node downloading a block from a peer. It's so clear that wireshark will automatically stitch all the packets together and annotate it as a block.
... Now look at this packet capture. Just a bunch of random looking noise. What is it? could be anything. Wireshark has no idea.

This is *also* a bitcoin node downloading a block from a peer, but now it's been encrypted in transit!
...

Had a conversation with a colleague yesterday about the impact that the Internet (in general) and Bitcoin will end up having on the world. Everytime I have this conversation it reminds me of a couple things, one of them is how long it took for electricity to change industry. 🧵👇 Edison invented usable lightbulbs in the 1870's. The first commercial power plant opened around 1880. But by 1900, something like 5% of the mechanical power in factories was coming from electricity.

Why is that?

A quick thread about Bitcoin and helping people in a disaster 🧵 I spent a lot of time working on the ground with both government agencies and NGOs (for example FEMA and the American Red Cross) helping victims of natural disaster. Everything from debris removal to running kitchens and supply distribution to needs assessment, i did it.