switching to a khadas vim4 myself.

should be fine, if you don’t like how warm it gets a set of small heatsinks for amplifiers will run you a few bucks and takes all of 10 seconds to install.

i like both the argon and the simple heatsink setups, either work great. i did end up adding an additional heatsink to the argon, the flat case does not provide great heat exchange in an enclosed space.

you can do passive cooling as well, just all depends on how hot the location gets.

fired up my IRC client a few weeks ago, very quiet there but still running! what servers are worth joining these days?

also worth noting that Element is built with similar ideals to IRC but with E2EE included.

Also important to remember that IRC has some privacy issues that you may want to address before connecting as any IRC user can get your connecting IP and ISP info.

i think there was a lot of hope among some at the public systems, no clue if it will bear out, the tech however is a viable PKI distro strategy that has been proven to work already in multiple large orgs in different forms. We don’t talk about how expensive or difficult it is to control your own PKI. Its one of the key reasons why you have to yield so much data and control to providers.

I could go on a long rant about what the internet was built to be vs what “big tech” has perverted it into, using p2p technologies to do it then saying “i dont see what the point is for people to have versions of this for themselves rather than it being only in the hands of big corps controlled by share holders” but thats about as far as Ill go.

as for private systems, this stuff is already starting to rule your world. distributed PKI systems in enterprise require expensive and technically onerous trust ceremonies for each cross system connection. you also require functioning cert trees from root to tip in order to validate anything in most of these systems (tools like pgp are the exception rather than the rule sadly). These systems are expensive to operate and add another single point of attack to the system. There are already chains doing internal asset management at companies, and its quite likely that any DiD standard that becomes a gov ID will be on a ledger network not that it should matter to end users.

the biggest push with the latest wave of the tech is to stop trying to sell to people, sell to enterprise, the usecases are more solid and don’t require strange economic games to function.

You will be using blockchain tech, but if its deployed right. You will never know. Do you know or care what app server or db your provider uses? of course not.

Issue has been the workflow for that, everyone wants something that works with thier phone and self-updates. Also have only seen a couple good air-gapped signers. No one likes the offline signer story except finance governance ppl so far.

I think we are grasping for new words here really, its only been in the last few years orgs have been exploring actual deployments internally.

I do have a very reductive definition of “blockchain” as I believe it is what it says. what is considered “satoshi’s vision” includes a blockchain system but it does not define the word.

HL is a blank canvas that allows you to deploy whatever consensus you want including those commonly found in public chains, it is entirely possible to run a hyperledger instance that is compatible with any network you would like, presuming you would want that effort.

the issue with the hardware wallet is not a “simple math” problem but a “trust” issue. in reality you simply can’t trust any hardware you didn’t make yourself, in practical use we usually pick vendors we like and decide to trust them.

for example. many people considered ledger trustworthy until they introduced firmware that indicates a capability to exfiltrate the keys.

I think the problem you are speaking to was some older hardware keys (and maybe some strange off brands) that encode keys at the factory, to my knowledge no major product does anything like that and they take pains to show you are generating the key. the big back and forth there has been with hardware providers using methods that are potentially reversible or other types of vulnerabilities.

Yes pretty much all devices will allow you to import a key you have generated by whatever means you prefer, however once you put it on the device you are signing up for the other issues that come with hardware still.

there are opensource wallets, the standard is called BIP39

im not sure if any of the hardware providers are doing it though

im still not sure what you are getting at, if you are suggesting I somehow trust hardware cold wallet providers, I dont, does not mean Im not stuck using the tools.

thats how it works, im not sure what you are getting at?

So we can’t trust hardware wallets then. Isn’t that… a problem? Something that needs to be solved?

yup, huge one, something I have sat across the table from the engineers of some of the leading hardware wallet companies and asking them to address. so far what I see are a bunch of companies lining up to say “trust me bro”, I look forward to better options though I suspect that no matter how you cut it, due to people wanting convince it will still be you trusting someone, its just a question of how tight your grip on thier throat is. or you go techno-hermit and build your own kit if you really need something digital.

Why do you trust that cold wallet? Are you sure they didn’t leak the key somehow? We’ve already established that there’s no trust or reason to trust them.

Its a physical set of steel discs with the key encoded on them, locked in a safe with a copy locked in an off-location safe. they leak about as much as one might expect things in your safe might leak. do you control these places? I often think about systems like this looking top provide tiers of control and ownership, you own your accounts legally, physically AND technically. a data breech at a bank using this system drains only the banks accounts, yours are fine (assuming a correct fail-safe desgin)

If I were a cryptocoin blackhat, I’d sell a bunch of broken RNGs to the idiotic cold-wallet people and slowly steal money from them over the next 20 years. Its like the easiest steal ever, the entire crytpocoin community is completely blind to how fucking stupid they are.

You should get on that, I’m sure it will work really well, you realize there have been people working on satoshi’s cold wallets for over a decade? When this cryptography breaks it will be an advance in quantum tech and we will all be boned.

Are you sure that those people who think they’ve “forgotten their passphrase” really forgot their passphrase? What if its the cold-wallet that betrayed them?

Wow, a band of rng guessing thieves only targeting wallets that have been lost by those who would reasonably believe they forgot or lost access to thier key, this sounds like a script hollywood will need in its new AI future!

I’ll refer to one of my earlier responses someone asked about this in context of a process like docusigns’

so if you are looking at this its a question to trust scopes, at least in public systems. here you are trusting:

• the bank
• the broker
• docusign
• you govt
• your courts

the proposal for a decentralized ledger with neutral execution is that the only “trust” needed is that in the contracts function, however this is not entirely true, in reality you are shifting trust to:

• genesis ceremony

your ability/resources to asses the contracts function and your counterparties.

some people feel this is a better way of doing things, ive found it interesting to work in the space technically but I dont necessarily agree with the wildwest nature of the public systems and am more an advocate of regulated channels if these are going to be done at all. There is also the idea that a large enough network makes it possible for the network to handle larger loads than any individual processor could handle, this has borne out in some cases though its not perfect since we know P2P network instability tends to ripple through a network.

Finally if an application has been built with web3 practices enshrined its entirely possible to ensure service continuity even in the event of the provider failing financially and being unable to serve the users. Important to note this is RARELY done properly and I have only seen a couple cases where it worked so far. However personally this is one of the most impressive features, I am biased however as I was involved in the recovery of a commons that has turned into a defacto standard. Didn’t make anything from it other than consulting feed, just really cool to help a non-profit

If we are talking the internal org, like docusign itself, an org like might adopt a ledger based system for the in-built capabilities of some chains, you find quickly that enterprise grade cryptographic tracking of large scales of assets or process gets VERY expensive. Ledgers can be very helpful in these cases though are more a consideration when validating a new system rather than it being an impetus to upgrade in and of itself.

I often refer to it as a specialized app-server stack to clients.

you are talking to someone whos been doing cryptography since the 90s, the answer hasn’t changed since then, you cant. the ONLY was you can be sure is with old school means or controlling your own lithography system.

most people just pick what level of trust/control/effort they are most comfortable with and go with that. the more your life ends up under these keys the more youll want to move to physical storage, multiple cold wallets, etc etc.

This usability nightmare is part of whats hurt crypto’s adoption imo.

Why are insecure devices allowed to be sold? I don’t know, why do we let comcast sell routers with known firmware vulnerabilities that gets a large chunk of them infected with malware? Why do we only deal with dangerous things after they become dangerous and hurt people, esp when the danger is so damn obvious? I don’t know.

Is there a hardware wallet I like that I believe is secure? No

Do i use them? Well of course, insurance companies love them…sigh.

Do I use them for my personal stuff? No, the vast majority of my holdings are stored in physical cold wallets.

pretty much, think of the files like what you would see in your .git folder for a code project. they are all linked together in a history graph. so you are validating the data, its position in history along with its entire history, you also know who changed the data and what systems were responsible for writing those changes. really solid tooling for provenance and chain-of-evidence scenarios.

for the most part yes, there are interesting regulatory scenarios that are on idea boards, mostly they want the secure write and a form of DiD being provided. these system provide some interesting legal scenarios with regards to accounting for assets in escrow on behalf of clients. In one form they are liabilities, in another, they are technically under the customers control.

That’s a different conversation isn’t it? shifting from technical capabilities to what people do with them, we have a number of technologies in society that deal with this issue. Important to note that every form of messaging and storage tech ever conceived has likely or is capable of facilitating large scale fraud.

I understand wanting to point the anger, as someone who sat this tech out until I saw the govt take it seriously, I’d say collectively every government and municipality slept on this, which surprises me, I expected this to get killed long before it capped at 2T in value.

Also important to note that cryptocurrency technology was not central to the failure of these orgs as the vast majority of thier holdings never left the exchange. They bascially setup shop claiming to have the tulips everyone was raging for in full warehouses when they didn’t even have seeds. I’m angry at the abject greed as well, however if we apply the current thinking im seeing toward crypto tech as it would logically extend, get ready to throw out all the tech in your house, a surprising amount of it can be used to manipulate and defraud you. Most of FTX’s messaging went out over traditional communication channels, controlled by our governments and endorsed by broadcasters.

sorry, gpt said i could do better

A blockchain is like a special notebook that many people can write in. Once something is written, it cannot be changed, and everyone can check that it was written correctly. This notebook help different people or companies work together by writing down and sharing important information in a safe and secure way.

Some people use these special notebooks to make digital money like Bitcoin. But it’s just way to use them. Companies also use these notebooks for other things, like making sure their business runs smoothly and securely.

So, the blockchain is not just about digital money, but also a to help people and businesses work together safely and fairly.

so if you are looking at this its a question to trust scopes, at least in public systems. here you are trusting:

• the bank
• the broker
• docusign
• you govt
• your courts

the proposal for a decentralized ledger with neutral execution is that the only “trust” needed is that in the contracts function, however this is not entirely true, in reality you are shifting trust to:

• genesis ceremony
• your ability/resources to asses the contracts function and your counterparties.

some people feel this is a better way of doing things, ive found it interesting to work in the space technically but I dont necessarily agree with the wildwest nature of the public systems and am more an advocate of regulated channels if these are going to be done at all. There is also the idea that a large enough network makes it possible for the network to handle larger loads than any individual processor could handle, this has borne out in some cases though its not perfect since we know P2P network instability tends to ripple through a network.

Finally if an application has been built with web3 practices enshrined its entirely possible to ensure service continuity even in the event of the provider failing financially and being unable to serve the users. Important to note this is RARELY done properly and I have only seen a couple cases where it worked so far.

If we are talking the internal org, like docusign itself, an org like might adopt a ledger based system for the in-built capabilities of some chains, you find quickly that enterprise grade cryptographic tracking of large scales of assets or process gets VERY expensive. Ledgers can be very helpful in these cases though are more a consideration when validating a new system rather than it being an impetus to upgrade in and of itself.

I often refer to it as a specialized app-server stack to clients.

if you just keep your document on your machine and only use it for personal encryption sure. its a key exchange network, this is for when bob and alice want to talk, not look at something in the safe and put it back. distributed PKI has been a challenge for decades, im not sure about this current incarnation of public systems but I find a lot of promise in many other applications.

surprisingly small hardware is needed to sign a message. though I do agree that we are still a bit early for workable end-user use cases. People really dont care what the database or app server is, they just want it to work and raw dogging some public node is just a bit much for people, i dont blame them.

more packaged solutions are under development, these will be more like a proper application with the differences of a chain being abstracted by the provider

things like sms, what if i told you SMS would be fine with this, so would smoke signals