hoppe2 / hoppe2 is on Nostr

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2026-10-16 00:28:08 UTC

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I tried DMing between a Nostr app on iPhone and one on Android. Sending from the iPhone to the Android worked fine, but when I tried sending from the Android side, it said the recipient hadn't set up DM relays, so it couldn't go through. So I went to set them up on the iPhone app, and there's no separate DM relay setting anywhere ☺

2026-10-09 14:34:45 UTC

Here is what the wallet I built does. When it refreshes, it doesn't merge everything into one VTXO. It sets aside a few small "hot" coins for everyday payments and gathers the rest into a single "cold" coin (the names are my own). And when it pays, it uses a single coin whenever it can, because merging spreads the contagion.
Which coin it uses is also fixed: the most worn-out one first. The measure is the amount minus the exit cost, that is, what I could actually salvage on the worst day. The coin where that number is lowest, or already negative, gets spent first. A coin whose exit cost has passed its amount has nothing left to salvage, so piling a hundred more payments onto it costs me nothing further. Spending from a clean coin, on the other hand, eats into money I could have recovered in full.
Done this way, no matter how fast exit cost builds up, it stays quarantined inside one hot coin, and ownership of most of the balance remains intact.
https://npub1pt4qwkcpp76et45pfatrxqywsuxh0gky84xa592yapesuqye29zql4eera.blossom.band/4c786abeffd009e9f46973fdb40ebc7f589b6918b5bf2b6ff93864c1d8b76713.png
Here is the actual state of my ark wallet. At refresh I split it into three hot coins of 5,000 sats each and one cold coin, then routed every payment through one of the hot coins. While that coin's balance fell by about 600 sats, it accumulated 123 transactions, and its exit cost is now around 87,000 sats. That is 20 times the coin's value, and more than the wallet's entire balance of about 67,000. Had I been spending from one merged coin, everything I own would be impossible to exit (possible, strictly speaking, but pointless). Yet the 52,000-sat cold coin can still leave for about 2,400 sats, 5% of its amount.
As you can see, an Ark wallet has a lot to get right, especially if it is to guarantee ownership without sacrificing usability. But I don't count that as a weakness, because everything that has to be done sits on the local side. What matters for ownership is not whether the logic is complicated, but whether it has dependencies. Even the simplest thing isn't fully mine if it needs someone else's cooperation. Something a bit complicated that depends only on client logic just takes some care to build.
Once a coin has been refreshed, the worst an ASP can do is refuse to cooperate, and then I simply exit. But if that exit costs more than the money, the promise is hollow. Keeping the exit cost down to a reasonable level is what makes it real. And if users can walk away cheaply, the only one ruined by a refusal is the ASP itself, so it has no reason to refuse in the first place.
#nevent1q…e93d

2026-10-09 14:01:29 UTC

Over the last four posts I looked at how Ark gains scalability while staying self-custodial. Today I want to look at another of its drawbacks: cost. In the first post I said that most criticisms of Ark are things a well-behaved client can overcome. This is the biggest of them.
Ark's self-custody rests on the right to exit unilaterally. But unlike Lightning, where a unilateral exit takes just two onchain transactions no matter how heavily the channel has been used, an Ark exit has no fixed size. To exit a VTXO, I have to replay its offchain transaction history onchain, in order. Not all the way back, of course; only as far as the last refresh. Still, if I've been spending actively offchain, that can mean dozens or even hundreds of transactions, and whoever exits pays the fees for all of them.
So every time a VTXO is spent, an "exit cost" quietly piles up behind it, separate from its face value. An onchain transaction costs a few hundred sats, so each time I pay a few dozen sats offchain, the onchain value of that coin drops by far more than what I spent. Keep going, and at some point the exit cost exceeds the amount of the coin itself. From then on, my cryptographic ownership of it is ownership in name only.
It gets worse, because exit cost is contagious. If I put a heavily used VTXO and a clean one into the same payment, the change inherits the history of both. Nothing I do offchain can shrink it. Only a refresh resets it to zero.
And a wallet left to its defaults drifts straight into the worst case. A refresh merges my whole balance into a single VTXO, so every small payment after that raises the exit cost of everything I own. Even when I do hold several VTXOs, the SDK's default coin selection reaches for the largest one first.
So is the unilateral exit an empty promise for anyone who actually uses Ark? No. And once again, the fix is entirely up to the client.
#nevent1q…fdxg

2026-10-09 03:33:16 UTC

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nice

2026-07-16 01:37:12 UTC

I think I’ll get fired at work this year. Being a developer doesn’t seem to suit me, so I’m considering doing manual labor.

2026-07-03 00:16:05 UTC

https://npub1pt4qwkcpp76et45pfatrxqywsuxh0gky84xa592yapesuqye29zql4eera.blossom.band/4c6c4ad6860824e6e8d7b3070127bb6a5775e5dca1e99aedc9bb28db7ed41cab.jpg
3 hop 0 fee
first time seeing something like this

2026-07-01 01:14:43 UTC

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Batch openings don't seem to provide much scalability benefit, but sharing outputs could be significantly helpful — arc is considered to be implemented for this purpose. While it may not offer the immediate finality comparable to Lightning, it pertains to an area where economies of scale apply. In the future, large-scale ASPs will be able to conduct batch settlement transactions in every block, and when that happens, Arc enables:
1. Cheap utilization of vtxos with unilateral exit rights reset every block.
2. Much more reliable operation for zero-conf payments (here, meaning participation in a batch round rather than onchain confirmation) due to the incentive model — since it’s not anonymous customer but ASPs maintaining an ongoing business that must cooperate.

2026-06-24 11:16:41 UTC

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2026-05-18 13:37:27 UTC

People say on-chain zaps are dangerous because they make you a target. But here's the thing: if that's actually true, then promoting "accumulate Bitcoin as money" is way more dangerous. A couple months of salary gets you way more Bitcoin than someone could ever get from zaps in a lifetime.
So either the security risk is real—in which case these people shouldn't be publicly known Bitcoin advocates in the first place—or it's not that serious. You can't have it both ways: tell people to accumulate Bitcoin while also warning them not to be seen with Bitcoin.
Ironically, Krugman or Schiff staying quiet might actually be the most consistent move here. If holding Bitcoin visibly is dangerous, then not broadcasting it is the smarter play. These vocal Bitcoin advocates are basically contradicting their own security argument.

2026-05-18 09:13:49 UTC

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When I first heard about Nostr—introduced as an SNS protocol built by Bitcoiners—I read a document explaining that it solves the identity verification problem the exact same way Bitcoin does.
So I thought, 'Ah, if it uses public-key cryptography for identity and shares the same elliptic curve as Bitcoin, then a Nostr account itself could basically function as a Bitcoin address. That’s what they mean by Bitcoin-native.'
As it turned out, that wasn't the case at all back then. But what I envisioned back then is finally being implemented now.

2026-05-14 13:06:00 UTC

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what client have this option?

2026-05-13 00:29:19 UTC

I've been thinking about inheritance, and I discovered something called the Liana wallet. It seems almost like a perfect solution.
I created a script address that allows me to spend without any restrictions, while adding a time-lock condition for heirs—giving them the ability to spend after a relative time-lock of one year. No third parties or additional requirements needed.
As long as I don't die suddenly and my heir doesn't simultaneously lose access to their device, it's quite secure. And since the script allows great flexibility, I can enhance safety further by using multiple keys in a multisig setup, while maintaining the same overall structure.
As long as I remember to make one on-chain transaction every year, it should be nearly perfect.

2026-05-12 00:33:39 UTC

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and do not enable auto-update

2026-05-10 05:33:58 UTC

There used to be a few things about real estate that I just couldn't wrap my
head around.
Take the 'squatting' controversy in the West, for example. The idea that someone
could illegally occupy a vacant house, stay there long enough, and suddenly gain
rights that make it impossible for the owner to evict them seemed absurd. I
honestly thought America was turning into a socialist country when I first heard
about it.
Then there’s the fact that anyone can legally snoop on a property's registry
just by knowing the address. I couldn't understand why complete strangers were
allowed to check if a house was rented, owned, or heavily mortgaged just to
guess someone's net worth.
Or the lack of absolute 'legal conclusiveness' in the real estate registry. You
hear these incredibly unfair stories of people buying a house trusting the
official state ledger, only to lose their home later because the ledger had been
forged sometime in the past.
And finally, the concept of a tenant's 'opposing power'—the rule that a tenant
must officially register their move-in to protect their deposit. I always
thought, "If I signed a lease and handed over my money, shouldn't my deposit
just be naturally guaranteed?"
Life is full of laws that don't seem to make sense, so I mostly just brushed
them off at the time. But as I dove into Bitcoin and started questioning what it
truly means to 'own' something, all these disjointed mysteries suddenly clicked
into place.
The complex rules around a tenant's rights exist for a very specific reason. A
lease is basically a private contract (a claim) between the tenant and the
'previous owner.' When the house is sold, from the perspective of the new owner
who legitimately paid for the property rights, it is logically correct to argue,
"Your deal was with the last guy, not me. Get out of my house."
But what happens if the law just unconditionally protects the seemingly
vulnerable tenant? A scammer could take out a massive mortgage, default on it,
and then pull out a fake, backdated lease agreement made with a relative to
screw over the bank when they come to seize the asset.
That is why 'public disclosure' is required. By making the existence of a
legitimate contract public at a specific time (like registering a move-in date),
the government promises to review and recognize that right later. It’s a
compromise. And the reason anyone is allowed to look up another person's
property registry is precisely to maintain this public disclosure system.
But herein lies the critical dilemma: the ledger managed by the government—which
effectively acts as a 'monopolistic sequencer'—doesn't perfectly guarantee the
truth.
This is exactly why courts don't grant absolute legal conclusiveness to the real
estate registry. Historically, there have been too many cases where the name
written on the state ledger didn't match the true owner of the land. Fraudsters
have long exploited wars or administrative chaos to manipulate the ledger and
hijack property rights while the true owner was unaware.
So, to make up for this flawed ledger, what happens if the law starts
prioritizing 'actual physical possession' over paper documents? You end up with
the exact squatting crisis we see in the West today.
Whichever path is chosen, scams exploiting the legal loopholes will inevitably
follow. The fundamental reason real estate is so legally tangled and fraught
with endless lawsuits is that, technically speaking, perfectly proving ownership
of a physical asset is impossible. It can only ever be 'presumed.'
High-level verification requires massive costs. People wanted to protect their
assets but didn't want to bear those verification costs, so they handed this
complex arbitration over to a central authority: the government. This has become
the root of many modern social problems. When the government unfairly takes a
side, or when it becomes a player itself and intervenes in the market, we are
left completely defenseless.
This is the core reason why I don't see real estate as the ultimate store of
wealth. I look beyond simple inflation hedging to the true essence of an asset:
"Can I truly own it? Can I prove my ownership without needing anyone's
permission?"
For me, the only assets that pass that test are physical precious metals and
Bitcoin.

2026-05-09 11:18:17 UTC

I’ve previously mentioned that I wasn't entirely convinced about the future of Bitcoin. To put it briefly, my argument was that even with the Lightning Network, there are inherent limitations to Bitcoin evolving into a global-scale payment solution. I was curious to see how Bitcoiners would respond to this, but at the time, I received no answers, which led me to believe it might be an unsolvable problem.
However, I recently started looking into Layer 2 solutions other than Lightning, and I found one that seems quite promising: the Ark protocol. While it’s impossible to explain exactly how it functions in a single post, the conclusion is that it appears to effectively address the limitations of Lightning.
Based on my understanding of their documentation, here is how the UX of Ark works:
Off-chain payments do not provide the same level of finality as Lightning immediately. To achieve Lightning-level finality—meaning no one can touch my funds, and I am cryptographically guaranteed a unilateral exit to Layer 1 without relying on anyone else—I must participate in what is called a 'batch settlement transaction.' This is an on-chain transaction that anchors to Layer 1 to achieve finality.
One might ask, 'If it requires an on-chain transaction, how is this a scaling solution?' The key is that this batch settlement transaction involves multiple people simultaneously, allowing the fees to be shared among them. Furthermore, the size of this batch transaction does not scale proportionally with the number of participants; it remains a fixed size.
In other words, it is an on-chain transaction that enables true 1/n cost efficiency. With Lightning, the decisive obstacle to global scale is that when you open a channel, you have to pay for that on-chain transaction yourself. Ark solves this by allowing for massive, shared efficiency. If this becomes fully realized, it is theoretically possible to achieve self-custody without ever needing to make an on-chain transaction in your lifetime.
This is made possible through Taproot and other technical mechanisms, and based on my current knowledge, it seems theoretically sound. While it still requires code-level verification, this discovery has resolved my only lingering doubt about Bitcoin. I now have genuine hope that it can function as a global-scale payment solution.

2026-04-28 00:44:48 UTC

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So BitVM has that issue? If I'm understanding correctly, Bitcoin L1 can't verify ZK proofs at consensus level, so anchoring relies on operator good faith?
If that's right, then maybe the more natural approach for Bitcoin L2s is to compose only from primitives that L1 can directly verify. Ark protocol seems to fit that mold - periodic batch settlements using only what L1 natively understands, with each settlement providing on-chain finality at fees split across all participants.
Curious whether you've looked at how Ark handles this differently, or if you see issues with that approach too?