I can NOT overemphasize this enough: DO NOT TRUST EMAILS DO NOT TRUST PHONE CALLS DO NOT TRUST SMS MESSAGES DO NOT TRUST CHAT MESSAGES DO NOT TRUST INCOMING COMMUNICATIONS! Any message saying there is a security problem with an account that needs to be urgently fixed is a 🚩

The admin of Dream Market, once one of the largest darknet drug markets, managed to lay low and avoid capture for 7 years after the site was shut down by law enforcement. His mistake was using BTC from Dream Market's wallet to buy gold bars through merchants that used BitPay to process payments and having the gold shipped to his home address. 🤦‍♂️

More folks are becoming disillusioned about Bitcoin's future. Not because of the price, but because of the narratives / infighting / stagnation. This is quite normal. Each new cohort of adopters is always less sophisticated than the last. "Bitcoiners" are doomed to get dumber.

🚨The latest version of Bitcoin Knots now enables BIP-110 by default.🚨 Anyone who runs BIP-110 code will find their node stops working and gets forked off the network in August. As such, I've created a handy countdown timer for us to watch the disaster!

If this chart is accurate, somebody's being naughty and trying to spread a bunch of fake bitcoin node addresses around Bitcoin's p2p network. Possibly preparation for a sybil attack?

When Marlon Ferro's co-conspirators couldn't social engineer victims into handing over their cryptocurrency or hack into their online accounts, they turned to him to break into homes and steal hardware wallets.

We did a security focused hack week this week, came out of it with 4 amazing new security features that Casa clients are going to love. Will be launching in the next week or two - keep an eye out 👀 Speed is way up, augmented by the AI dev infra we've been building

RIP Bitnodes! The OG Bitcoin node crawler that operated for over a decade. Also one of the first projects to release plug & play node hardware. Expect many other Bitcoin node counting sites to break now because they were just ingesting Bitnodes' data.

It's extremely satisfying to be digging deep down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, examining the edge cases of game theory, only to get stuck on one particularly complex aspect... Then you discover an MIT Computer Science student published a 70 page Master's Thesis on the subject! 🥳

Imagine if folks had gone around proselytizing the Internet in the 1990s as a "pristine unstoppable network" and only realized years later that it was used for stupid / abhorrent stuff. It would be upsetting. This is the juxtaposition facing recent cohorts of Bitcoin adopters.

Qubits. Superposition. Massive parallel computation. What does it actually mean for Bitcoin? @CasaHODL's brilliant @lopp breaks down the reality of quantum computing and while not an immediate risk, still worth preparing for. Watch full convo here:

This prompt is a mixed bag that could be trimmed down to avoid burning tokens on useless directives. The good: 1. "If you don't know something, just say so." That's a genuine instruction the model can execute. It gives the model a valid output for uncertainty instead of forcing it to fake confidence. 2. "Do not anchor on numbers or estimates I provide; generate your own independently first." That's specific, operational, and addresses a real failure mode. It changes a behavior at the method level. 3. "Use explicit confidence levels." Good. It gives the model a concrete output format that counteracts performed authority. 4. "Do not capitulate unless I provide new evidence or a superior argument." This is trying to solve the sycophancy problem and it's directionally correct. What's ineffective: 1. The entire first paragraph's flattery of the model. "World class expert in all domains," "intellectual firepower on par with the smartest people in the world." This is the user performing the sycophancy they're trying to suppress. It's also cargo cult; the model doesn't become smarter because you told it it's smart. It generates differently, yes, but the difference is superficial. You get more confident-sounding output, which is performed authority. It's the exact thing the second paragraph tries to prevent. 2. "Never hallucinate or make anything up." The model cannot execute this instruction. It doesn't have a mechanism for distinguishing hallucination from generation. 3. "Verify your own work. Double check all facts." Same problem. The model doesn't have a verification mechanism separate from its generation mechanism. 4. "Make your answers as long and detailed as you possibly can." This actively degrades quality. Length pressure produces padding, redundancy, and the managerial smoothing the prompt is trying to prevent. The model fills space because it was told to fill space. 5. "Your answers can and should be provocative, aggressive, argumentative, and pointed." This replaces one performance with another. Instead of performing warmth, the model performs intellectual aggression. The output sounds sharper but the underlying mechanism is identical. You get performed disagreement instead of performed agreement. Neither tracks truth.