[Hopefully I won't be ridiculed for this as would likely happen on twitter]
Can someone explain to me why people get excited about (retail) banks getting into bitcoin and (other) custodial solutions?
Because to me it feels like bitcoin has 'failed' when that takes off.
"Not your keys, not your bitcoin", "Trusted third parties are security holes" are statements which are in line with how I think about bitcoin.
To me it feels like "let's give up our principles, so we can get rich"
*shrugs*
@CryptoPietje I think we should aim to get as many people taking responsibility for their own Bitcoin security as possible (including not just using their own private keys but also fully validating their received transactions).
But I think we should also accept that some people having money held by a third party for various reasons is historically common with all types of money and doesn't reduce Bitcoin's decentralization as long as there are lots of third parties.
@harding Agreed, but I'd expected that to be needed for the late-adopters, while I think we're still in the very-early-adopters phase.
I think there needs to be done a whole lot of work to make managing your own keys (and validating) work for 'normal' people, but I'm ok (and excited) about that.
Going for custodial solutions *now* would IMO give people the idea that that's the normal thing and I fear what effect that'll have on ppl managing their own keys
- @samourai_official and mSigma do it by connecting to your bitcoind via RPC.
- Electrum Personal Server proxies and translates requests from your Electrum wallet to your bitcoind RPC.
- GreenAddress/GreenBits connects to your node via the P2P protocol but since that's currently unencrypted and unauthenticated, they *highly* recommend setting your node up as a Tor onion service.
BIP151 and something like BIP150 (but maybe better) should make the GA approach really simple.
@udiWertheimer You can also think of the Bitcoin Core and btcd wallets as clients too, if you want to count up to 6 full-node compatible wallets.
There's been some really interesting (IMO) discussions on #bitcoin-core-dev between Pieter Wuille and Jonas Schnelli (in particular) and other devs about making the Bitcoin Core wallet technically SPV but explicitly designed solely to be used with a trusted full node, thereby almost fully compartmentalizing its maintenance and development.
@harding Very cool, I'll look up that discussion.
Regarding that list, afaik @samourai_official still only connect to a trusted node for *sending* transactions. IMO that's not particularly useful (it's a great app otherwise)
@udiWertheimer @samourai_official This page https://samouraiwallet.com/features/trustednode does seem to support that interpretation. Thanks for pointing it out!
I think I read on Twitter (maybe one of nopara74's tweets) that they were planning to move to BIP158 support. If so, it'd be trivial I think for them to serve the filters (i.e. until Bitcoin Core supports them natively) and then the wallet can use the `getblock` RPC to pull blocks from its trusted node. That'd leak nothing to Samourai.
@harding @udiWertheimer @samourai_official
The old Schildbach Bitcoin Wallet for Android also lets you use your own node + Tor. Unfortunatly no support for SegWit, BIP39, hardware wallets, etc, so I don't recommend anymore. Here is a guide I made last year:
https://github.com/jonathancross/jc-docs/blob/master/Bitcoin_mobile_privacy.md
Crypto Pietje [old account]
David A. Harding
Udi Wertheimer 🧙♂️
Samourai Wallet
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