hugomofn

Founder of nunchuk.io

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Last Notes

2025-09-10 14:55:12 UTC

I've been heads-down working on shipping Miniscript in Nunchuk. I look up three months later, and people are STILL debating mempool filters. 😀
Since we have a moment before our next major release, I’ll jot down my thoughts on the matter.
Disclaimer: I have no horse in this race. I don't think keeping the current OP_RETURN limit or raising it will have a material impact. My only interest is the truth and what's best for Bitcoin. Interestingly, I disagree with both sides of the debate (the so-called "spammers" and the "filterers") for reasons I'll explain below.
Let’s first establish some ground truths:
1. Proof-of-Work is more special than you think.
History is filled with rulers who debased their currencies—the original "Proof-of-Stake" systems. Yet, historical PoW money (gold) always prevailed. People in ancient Rome and Confucian China alike knew gold was valuable. This is distilled wisdom, passed down through diverse cultures. Our ancestors have an intuitive understanding of PoW, despite not knowing PoW is (unforgeable costliness). It is the most objective truth we have, independent of language or belief system. Everything else is fake in comparison. The JPEG peddlers don't fully grasp PoW's economic implications, and the filterers gravely underestimate its power as the ultimate filter.
2. Monetary transactions have a higher economic density than data transactions.
A monetary transaction moves value (V) for a fee (F). A data transaction moves value (V) plus some perceived data premium (D1) for a fee (F) plus an extra fee for the data payload (D2).
Thus, the fee rate for a monetary transaction is F / V.
The fee rate for a data transaction is (F+D2) / (V+D1).
In the long run, the on-chain data premium (D1) trends toward zero, except for a few special truly non-fungible, rare sats (not artificially rare). As this happens, monetary transactions become vastly more economically efficient and will inevitably outcompete data transactions for block space.
3. Relying on data alone to prove a positive is a logical fallacy.
Data can help formulate a hypothesis, but that hypothesis is fragile. It only takes one contradictory data point to destroy it. For instance, I've seen the argument: "Our OP_RETURN filter must be working, otherwise why would there be significantly more transactions with under 80 bytes of data than over 80 bytes?"
This logic is trivially debunked. For 16 years, we rarely saw transactions paying less than 1 sat/vB, a long-standing mempool policy. One could have concluded the policy was an iron law. Yet, in just a few months, 0.1 sat/vB transactions have become common despite 99% of nodes still enforcing the old policies, proving the policy was a transient heuristic, not a fundamental truth. It works until it doesn't.
Here’s another analogy: A society that lives next to a volcano for a thousand years without an eruption might theorize that fire can never fall from the sky. That theory, based on a millennium of "data," will one day get them killed. Data is insufficient without being coupled with first-principles analysis.
Now, for my opinions:
I strongly believe that any non-PoW-based method to filter spam, which must rely on subjectivity and "rough social consensus," is doomed to fail. Worse, it has a centralizing effect, mirroring the dynamics of Proof-of-Stake. This "social consensus" filtering is just PoS by another name. We've seen this cat-and-mouse movie too many times, especially during the internet's evolution (see: email, SMS, DNS, social media).
Email is the perfect case study. It demonstrates two things: (a) The cat-and-mouse game of subjective filtering inevitably leads to extreme centralization. (b) Bitcoin is luckier than email because it has a built-in spam-mitigation tool: transaction fees.
The cost-benefit analysis for email spam is that it's nearly costless to send, so a 0.001% success rate is a win. All costs are externalized to the network and its users. The cost-benefit for on-chain JPEGs is the opposite: one must pay a higher fee rate per unit of economic value transferred. This cost is internalized by the "spammer" (with some long-term storage costs borne by the network). Therefore, on-chain JPEG spam is inherently not sustainable. Email spam is.
Furthermore, concerns about short-term consequences or chain "bloat" are sufficiently mitigated by the existing blocksize limit. The worst-case scenario is a linear chain growth of 100-200 GB per year. In the grand scheme, this is perfectly acceptable, as the falling cost of storage continues to follow Moore's Law, making this a manageable and decreasing burden over time.
Ultimately, this all comes down to one thing: PoW is the only objective, incorruptible mechanism for separating signal from noise in the digital realm. Chasing a non-PoW filtering method is like chasing a perpetual motion machine, a utopia that defies physics. PoW is about understanding the world and its constraints through the lens of physics. It's the highest signal of truth because it's literally built on the undisputed currency of the universe: energy. Everything that isn't grounded in this way is a pale imitation. Bitcoin's PoW mechanism is a beautiful, profound emulation of the cosmic process that forges gold from energy (neutron star collision). It connects digital truth to physical reality. To truly appreciate Bitcoin is to appreciate this fundamental connection. It's a special, almost sacred, principle, and I believe it's the one that matters most.
What's ironic is that while we debate, the economic reality I described is already playing out. All past and current attempts at selling on-chain JPEGs have fizzled out or are in the process of doing so as people wise up to their true worth. At this rate, people will spend more time talking about filtering JPEGs than the JPEGs themselves will remain relevant.
Spending time debating JPEGs when the mempool is near empty, fee rates at historical low, and people flocking to paper Bitcoin is an inefficient allocation of time and resources.
Believe in PoW. Let's focus on the real fight: making self-custody safe and accessible for everyone. That means working on things like Miniscript, MuSig2, and FROST, more hardware signers and form factors/UX, and education. We must dispel the myth that self-custody is impossible for the average user. Turning as many people as possible into sovereign individuals. That is the real fight.

2025-07-12 05:47:38 UTC

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🫡 Hope all is well bro.

2025-06-09 06:16:26 UTC

Bitcoin taught us that the only sustainable way to filter “spam” is Proof-of-Work. Look at all the communication protocols (SMS, email, etc.) being slowly destroyed without a PoW mechanism. Look at all the PoS “L1 blockchains” that sprang up and died, or are dying. Look at the reCAPTCHA mechanism, which works only because it’s a PoW variant—albeit an impure one; Bitcoin PoW is the purest since it’s backed by quantifiable energy expenditure.
I don’t think even Bitcoiners have internalized this lesson well enough.
Using SOFTWARE ALONE to fight “spam”, to separate signal from noise, is a losing proposition. That’s the biggest lesson of Nakamoto Consensus. Proof-of-Work is a true innovation that underpins the whole network.
JPEGs on the blockchain are not a long-term problem because they inherently lack PoW. Just because you call a JPEG-attached sat “rare” under arbitrary rules, doesn’t mean it’s actually rare. It’s fake scarcity. Fake scarcity is not PoW. One sat will always equal one sat for 99.99% of sats. You only waste transaction fees by playing pretend that 1 sat > 1 sat. That’s not sustainable. The only reason inscriptions have any relevance is because of the market being temporarily irrational, and people chasing pumps and dumps for quick gains.
You can call out the hype, but Bitcoin has much bigger fish to fry. JPEGs are pure distractions. Don’t get lost in the distractions.

2025-05-16 16:53:43 UTC

I don’t think people fully grok the risk of KYC in Bitcoin.
KYC honeypots & data leaks are already dangerous in the analog world. But zoom out and fast-forward 20 years into a hyper-digitized, hyper-bitcoinized future, and that risk 10x’s.
In the analog, pre-hyperbitcoinized world, if someone gets your family’s name, SSN, and address, what’s the worst the can happen?
Maybe they impersonate you. Maybe they sell your data to ad companies.
It’s bad, but not end-of-the-world bad.
But with Bitcoin — a digital bearer asset — it’s different.
Once someone knows your family holds a large stack, you’re a forever target.
You don’t get spammed. You get hunted.
By North Korean hacker teams and ransomware crews from every corner of the world. Forever.
You do not want a target on your family’s back for eternity.
Zoom out & think long-term. KYC isn’t just a risk. It’s a ticking time bomb.
P.S. Some historical context: KYC was invented before the Internet.
Not only has it failed its objectives, its creators NEVER anticipated a world shaped by the Internet & Bitcoin.
The ramifications of this outdated policy will be insane in the years to come. A lot of people will get hurt.
#note1g2r…2y54

2025-01-20 08:48:06 UTC

AI and Bitcoin are discoveries.
They reveal themselves once we’ve fully harnessed the power of moving atoms at the speed of light, fueled by an inordinate amount of energy. The entire century before this was just preparation.

2025-01-20 08:39:09 UTC

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Agreed.

2025-01-20 08:11:47 UTC

The world is converging on two forces: AI and Bitcoin. It’s probably not a coincidence that both rely on power-hungry chips and vast amounts of energy—two sides of the same coin.
Prediction: an energy race is coming to see who dominates both fields. The next 10 years will be wild.
P.S. We thought the Internet was our final form. Turns out it was just a stepping stone to discovering AI and Bitcoin. 😀

2025-01-12 09:53:27 UTC

Part of the infatuation with Bitcoin vaults is believing that you can “have your cake and eat it too”: mixing spending with saving.
In reality, people don’t give a shit what they use for spending (e.g., they’ll move USDT on Tron if it’s convenient). They only care about security for generational wealth.
You can observe this behavior empirically: when people pick a payment solution, their #1 priority is convenience—“I just want to pay, and pay fast.” That’s why PayPal, custodial LN, and USDT dominate. But for savings, it’s all about preserving purchasing power and security.
So at its core, the “problem” vaults try to solve is mixing high-time preference usage with low-time preference usage.
And you end up with these Frankenstein setups that are suboptimal for both spending AND saving.

2025-01-09 09:29:21 UTC

Nostr might be a great alternative to Medium or Substack for long-lived, long-form content.
I’d love to see a separate category for blogs and articles—it would help keep them organized and distinct from quick notes.
Off-the-cuff thoughts vs. deep dives.

2025-01-02 03:15:38 UTC

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Great question Big Dan Brown.
Let me rephrase your question: What happens to the inheritance service if Nunchuk ceases to exist?
The short answer is that just like other types of services, if the business goes away the services will no longer be available. What we recommend to our users to mitigate unexpected events (such as Nunchuk ceasing to exist) is to use a "rolling short timelock" approach: Set an Activation Date not too far in the future, such as one or two years from today. Then the owner can review the inheritance plan every year and push the date back if necessary.
To help remind users, we start sending email notifications as the timelock is about to expire, starting at the 6-month mark. This approach allows users to lengthen the time the inheritance can be claimed as needed, while guarding against long-term uncertainties. If something unfortunate happens to Nunchuk, the owner can use their own keys to move funds to a new wallet. If something unfortunate happens to the owner, their beneficiaries can claim the inheritance quickly without having to wait many years.
Since the odds that Nunchuk ceasing to exist and the owner passing away within 1-2 years is small, the approach above reduces risks significantly.
Hope that answers your question.

2024-12-29 00:13:43 UTC

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If I have to guess, it’s likely because it isn’t written natively.

2024-12-29 00:01:25 UTC

Self-custody is the cornerstone of Bitcoin. The day self-custody dies, Bitcoin dies with it.
Nunchuk is fully committed to improving free self-custody tools—it’s 1000x more important than our paid services.
Principle over money. #note1lw3…m06e

2024-11-06 08:26:24 UTC

Whether you like Elon or not, you must give him credit for buying Twitter and possibly changing the trajectory of history by keeping free speech alive.
Some would look at it as a victory, but I’d rather look at it as a strong lesson/warning for Bitcoin, of what to AVOID.
We don’t want things to get so bad that the whole thing comes down to depending on the act of one single individual to survive.
The (naive) architecture of the Internet allowed information to be centralized and censored. It’s not a victory, it’s a walking disaster. Even if Elon can temporarily protect free speech, how long can it last?
All efforts must ensure Bitcoin remains as decentralized as possible. #note1lgj…7zq8

2024-11-06 08:00:59 UTC

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I’m optimistic on that, given the fact that no one/country has a monopoly on cheap energy.
Bitcoin ETFs worry me more.

2024-11-06 07:10:34 UTC

When the Internet was invented, everyone thought it would democratize knowledge. Fast forward 30 years, it got so incredibly centralized and censored that it took one man buying Twitter to (hopefully) save it from itself.
What’s the equivalent of that threat in Bitcoin?

2024-10-21 04:39:53 UTC

IMO, one of the biggest threats to Bitcoin is the ratio of Bitcoin held by exchanges and ETFs compared to the total supply.
We sort of got lucky that Wall Street ignored Bitcoin for the first 15 years, resulting in an ownership distribution that currently favors individuals (>50%).
2 problems:
(a) it could be temporary
(b) high coordination costs among individuals in the event of a fork
As Bitcoin goes mainstream, complacency and a loss of vigilance among ‘Bitcoiners’ is almost inevitable. The further we get from the last fork crisis, the more likely this becomes — if not with today’s Bitcoiners, then perhaps in 10-20 years.
And I want to emphasize that this is a UNIQUE problem to Bitcoin.
Gold doesn’t have this problem. You can perhaps find ways to inflate its supply, but you cannot fork gold. Or real estate.
It is a unique problem because Bitcoin relies on continual PoW/Nakamoto Consensus.
At the heart of Bitcoin is a system that sustains itself with ‘heartbeats’ roughly every ~10 mins. Each one secures the network, but also retroactively locks down the entire ledger, all the way back to the genesis block.
In other words, Bitcoin is a LIVING thing. Unlike gold which is an inanimate object.
And because Bitcoin is a live and living thing, it CAN be tampered with. Extremely difficult, but possible.
Bitcoin incentive scheme must hold and Bitcoiners must remain vigilant for the whole thing to work. Proper checks and balances.
This is why self-custody is so incredibly critical to Bitcoin’s success.
Without the economic majority holding Bitcoin in self-custody, the system can be co-opted, bringing us back to square one: the reunification of money and state.
This is also why I see most concerns about Bitcoin as secondary. Yes, Bitcoin can and will improve on privacy. Yes, it can be a decent, “good enough” MoE. But it doesn’t need to excel at these.
It must first lock down the self-custody and SoV use case — or the whole system will collapse like quicksand.
To reiterate: it must be INSANELY EASY to self-custody Bitcoin, or the rest of the stuff we build doesn’t matter. Not one bit.
P.S. About Saylor, I suppose his vision is a future where Bitcoin and the state co-exist peacefully. In other words, the state will gladly accept Bitcoin as a check on its once unchallenged power to print money.
But that’s just one possibility — and it doesn’t seem like the likely one. #note1ukh…my48

2024-10-19 02:33:41 UTC

We either continually set and pursue higher goals, or we regress and die mentally. That’s the essence of the saying ‘most people die at 25.’
What I’ve learned is that there’s no in-between. Retirement is a false dream. Stasis is death.

2024-10-18 16:57:37 UTC

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Agreed. And thank you for your work 🫡

2024-10-12 21:39:33 UTC

Increased adoption of distributed multisig benefits all Bitcoin users, even singlesig users.
An attacker may assume they need to compromise multiple locations if they SUSPECT multisig is in use.
So even if you don’t use multisig, it’s in your interest to encourage its adoption.
#multisigftw

2024-10-12 01:19:10 UTC

🚫 Do NOT use a hot wallet (mobile or desktop) for main Bitcoin savings
✅ Do use a phone as a watch-only wallet coordinator for distributed multisig for Bitcoin savings — get a second, dedicated phone for this purpose. #note1p09…upal

2024-09-05 07:49:56 UTC

Key quote regarding Yubikey vulnerability: "We estimate that *the vulnerability exists for more than 14 years* in Infineon top secure chips."
32 million Yubikey units have been sold.
Multi-vendor multisig is the only rational setup for your BTC savings.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/yubikeys-are-vulnerable-to-cloning-attacks-thanks-to-newly-discovered-side-channel/

2024-08-20 07:15:40 UTC

There’s something satisfying about Nostr feeds being deterministic: if you sign in on different Nostr clients or different devices, you most likely will get the same exact feed for a given moment of the day. It’s true even for different moments of the day: if you scroll long enough you will encounter the old set of posts, minus a few new ones for the last X hours.
It’s satisfying because you know the feed is not gamed. That this is the raw, unmanipulated experience. Unlike something like X which increasingly show you garbage that plays on our worst instincts.
On the other hand, once the amount of content on Nostr blows up, some filters will likely be needed. It’d be cool if you can craft your own feed algorithms based on a human-readable language, or a set of commonly-defined control knobs. Something like:
1. Prioritizes posts from people I regularly interact with (with weights I can go in and adjust)
2. Prioritizes posts that have some minimum number of likes/comments from the people I follow
3. For freshness: Occasionally surface posts from accounts from my extended network (friends of friends), provided that they pass some level of quality control (e.g. account older than Y months, minimum likes, etc.).
And you can keep finetuning your algorithms as you go along. Have a few that you quickly switch between. Share your algorithms with others, etc.

2024-08-07 01:57:24 UTC

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Anti-exfil techniques spill engineering challenges into the user space. They also add a new dependency on the wallet coordinator to perform security-sensitivity tasks.
Tasks which they are not well suited for.
How can you even verify that the coordinator will be able to provide good entropy? You can’t.
So there’s also this hidden danger of using anti-exfil with singlesig with a coordinator running in unsafe environments, and THINK you’re safe, but you’re not. Turtles all the way down.
Just use multisig and be happy.

2024-08-07 01:00:36 UTC

In the world of Bitcoin wallets there is a plethora of security threats that you need to stackrank.
What anti-exfil would do is to break 90% of the current wallets’ UX to solve a fundamentally low-risk threat, relative to other threats. When better solutions exist.
A big no-no.
Introducing a new round trip / new interaction every single time a user signs a Bitcoin transaction is a terrible idea from both UX and engineering perspectives.
It violates Single Responsibility Principle. Coordinator should stay purely coordinating. No more, no less.

2024-08-01 06:29:57 UTC

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Great comment Rusty!
Just the basic idea of identifying that there are 3 groups of people (can afford; can sometimes afford; and cannot afford a UTXO whatsoever) is a huge upgrade over past conversations, which tend to jump straight into technical details and gloss over the actual user profiles and market demand.
Personally, I agree that more research is warranted. I’m not particularly optimistic on UTXO-sharing as a solution for people who can’t afford standalone UTXOs at all because of the group coordination cost, “Tragedy of the Commons”issue (LN counterparties are heavily incentivized to police their LN channel state, whereas in a Timeout Tree you can freeride others to do the policing for you, leading to no one doing it at all), “ghettorization” issue as you mentioned, and the inevitable complexity of any such solution. Secondly, did anyone bother to ask whether users like sharing at all? Why would they opt for a complex sharing solution when they can use something like gold for savings.
I’m slightly more bullish on locally-run ecash mints where people fall back to long-built relationships and hard-earned reputation to prevent cheating. Basically, use the social layer to address a technical limitation.
I like your quote here: “can’t engineer a solution if we can’t think about the problems.” That’s a great way to think about it. As someone else once said, the most common mistake engineers often make is to “optimize for something that shouldn’t really exist”. I’ve seen it happen way too many times, being an engineer myself. Just because UTXO-sharing with large N is possible, doesn’t mean it is ideal or will actually have a market.
In the spirit of thinking deeply about the problem (and not the solutions), it would be wise to also visit assumptions such as there will be 10 billion people who want sovereign UTXOs and the responsibilities that come with it. I think that assumption is highly unrealistic. IMO the actual demand will remain well below 500 million people, realistically more in the range of 100-200 million people. Being your own bank, as it turns out, is quite a heavy burden.
So if you believe in these numbers, Bitcoin does not have a scaling problem. At the very least, it’s not urgent at all. The math might work out by just making current things as efficient as possible.

2024-07-28 03:07:42 UTC

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💯

2024-04-07 10:42:05 UTC

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Thank you !

2024-04-02 01:59:11 UTC

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I’ve been lurking on Damus for a while 😛 Great progress on UI/UX ! Cheers.

2024-04-02 01:34:55 UTC

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Agreed. Bitkey design clearly optimized for usability and I think they swung a bit too hard in that direction. Too many security concerns to be used for large savings. The mobile phone in particular is highly vulnerable. An attacker would know they can get to an owner’s bitcoins through the phone and the phone alone (just by waiting out the Delay and Notify protocol). If popularized, it will incentivize kidnappings.
I wrote a full review of Bitkey here: https://nunchuk.io/blog/bitkey

2024-03-27 23:54:39 UTC

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Two different devices, ideally always geographically distributed.

2024-03-27 23:53:25 UTC

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Author here. Thanks @npub1sg6…f63m ! Hope you guys can make some adjustments. Cheers.