Posts

NFC seems to be all over Bitcoin Twitter recently, between Square/Spiral annoucement of a NFC enabled hardware wallet, Coinkite teasing their Satscard and Coin Corner messing around with hilarious NFC Lightning payment demos. What the hell is NFC? NFC stants for Near Field Communication. It leverages one of the most elegant physical phenomenon Mother Nature gave us1 to enable communication between two devices that are very close to each other. A varying current in one circuit creates a magnetic field which in turn induces a current in the other circuit....

Last week’s article dealt with Turbo Channels. Today, I’ll cover Hosted Channels, another kind of channels that seek to enhance the Lightning channels UX while staying in line with the specification and mitigating the required tradeoffs. Not on-chain enforceable channels The big difference between a hosted channel and a regular Lightning channel is that the former is not enforceable on-chain, simply because there is no channel opening transaction to spend from....

Today’s article is a fun one. The story it describes is not new, but it has resurfaced recently following a blog post by Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG). A story of how a group of criminals has used (and, to the extent to what we know, still uses) Bitcoin in a quite unexpected way: to send data to their malware. Its name was Glupteba Quoting Google, Glupteba is “known to steal user credentials and cookies, mine cryptocurrencies on infected hosts, deploy and operate proxy components targeting Windows systems and IoT devices”....

Chainalysis announced today that they are going to lauch support for Lightning Network transaction monitoring. This new feature would be integrated into KYT (Know Your Transaction), one of the main products of Chainalysis that supposedly helps businesses and services stay in line with regulation by providing them with transaction monitoring and traceability tools. In its blog post, the company didn’t detail how they plan on monitoring transactions on the Lightning Network....

This post contains my first thoughts following the reading of FX Thoorens’ article How a state can hack Bitcoin. I recommend giving this one a read first. In his article, FX distinguishes between two very different attack vectors on Bitcoin: the mathematical part of the protocol the human factor. FX then highlights how the mathematical part is an unpreignable Citadel, but how the human constituents of the network still are very frail blockhouses....