chris-belcher

Design for a CoinSwap Implementation for Massively Improving Bitcoin Privacy and Fungibility

25/5/2020

Abstract

Imagine a future where a user Alice has bitcoins and wants to send them with maximal privacy, so she creates a special kind of transaction. For anyone looking at the blockchain her transaction appears completely normal with her coins seemingly going from address A to address B. But in reality her coins end up in address Z which is entirely unconnected to either A or B.

Now imagine another user, Carol, who isn't too bothered by privacy and sends her bitcoin using a regular wallet which exists today. But because Carol's transaction looks exactly the same as Alice's, anybody analyzing the blockchain must now deal with the possibility that Carol's transaction actually sent her coins to a totally unconnected address. So Carol's privacy is improved even though she didn't change her behaviour, and perhaps had never even heard of this software.

egmontkob

Hyperlinks (a.k.a. HTML-like anchors) in terminal emulators

[ Update 2020-05-31: I won't be maintaining this page or responding to comments anymore (except for perhaps a few exceptional occasions). ]

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Most of the terminal emulators auto-detect when a URL appears onscreen and allow to conveniently open them (e.g. via Ctrl+click or Cmd+click, or the right click menu).

It was, however, not possible until now for arbitrary text to point to URLs, just as on webpages.

martijnvermaat

Installation of NixOS with encrypted root

These are my notes on instaling NixOS 16.03 on a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (4th generation) with an encrypted root file system using UEFI.

Most of this is scrambled from the following pages:

• Encrypted Root on NixOS - Nix Wiki
• Installing NixOS - Chris Martin
• Linux administration and use - Earl Douglas
• Installing NixOS on a ThinkPad W540 with encrypted root - Bluish Coder

Nadrieril

# I used this shell.nix to build LineageOS 13.0 for my maguro (Samsung Galaxy Nexus GSM) phone
# The build instructions for normal Linuxes are here: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/maguro/build
# For NixOS, follow those instructions but skip anything related to installing packages
# Detailed instructions:
#   cd into an empty directory of your choice
#   copy this file there
#   in nix-shell:
#    $ repo init -u https://github.com/LineageOS/android.git -b cm-13.0
#    $ repo sync
#    $ source build/envsetup.sh

quchen

13:15 <xQuasar>      | HASKELL IS FOR FUCKIN FAGGOTS. YOU'RE ALL A BUNCH OF 
                     | FUCKIN PUSSIES
13:15 <xQuasar>      | JAVASCRIPT FOR LIFE FAGS
13:16 <luite>        | hello
13:16 <ChongLi>      | somebody has a mental illness!
13:16 <merijn>       | Wow...I suddenly see the error of my ways and feel 
                     | compelled to write Node.js!
13:16 <genisage>     | hi
13:16 <luite>        | you might be pleased to learn that you can compile 
                     | haskell to javascript now

edolstra

General notes

• nix-channel and ~/.nix-defexpr are gone. We'll use $NIX_PATH (or user environment specific overrides configured via nix set-path) to look up packages. Since $NIX_PATH supports URLs nowadays, this removes the need for channels: you can just set $NIX_PATH to e.g. https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-15.09/nixexprs.tar.xz and stay up to date automatically.

• By default, packages are selected by attribute name, rather than the name attribute. Thus nix install hello is basically equivalent to nix-env -iA hello. The attribute name is recorded in the user environment manifest and used in upgrades. Thus (at least by default) hello won't be upgraded to helloVariant.

  @vcunat suggested making this an arbitrary Nix expression rather than an attrpath, e.g. firefox.override { enableFoo = true; }. However, such an expression would not have a key in the user environment, unlike an attrpath. Better to require an explicit flag for this.

TBD: How to deal with search path clashes.

banksean

// Ported from Stefan Gustavson's java implementation
// http://staffwww.itn.liu.se/~stegu/simplexnoise/simplexnoise.pdf
// Read Stefan's excellent paper for details on how this code works.
//
// Sean McCullough banksean@gmail.com

/**
 * You can pass in a random number generator object if you like.
 * It is assumed to have a random() method.
 */

pervognsen

A quadratic space is a real vector space V with a quadratic form Q(x), e.g. V = R^n with Q as the squared length. The Clifford algebra Cl(V) of a quadratic space is the associative algebra that contains V and satisfies x^2 = Q(x) for all x in V. We're imposing by fiat that the square of a vector should be the quadratic form's value and seeing where it takes us. Treat x^2 = Q(x) as a symbolic rewriting rule that lets you replace x^2 or x x with Q(x) and vice versa whenever x is a vector. Beyond that Cl(V) satisfies the standard axioms of an algebra: it lets you multiply by scalars, it's associative and distributive, but not necessarily commutative.

Remarkably, this is all you need to derive everything about Clifford algebras.

Let me show you how easy it is to bootstrap the theory from nothing.

We know Cl(V) contains a copy of V. Since x^2 = Q(x) for all x, it must also contain a copy of some nonnegative reals.

hlissner

# ag <https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher>
# usage: ag-replace.sh [search] [replace]
# caveats: will choke if either arguments contain a forward slash
# notes: will back up changed files to *.bak files

ag -0 -l $1 | xargs -0 perl -pi.bak -e "s/$1/$2/g"

# or if you prefer sed's regex syntax:

ag -0 -l $1 | xargs -0 sed -ri.bak -e "s/$1/$2/g"

TheBB

Emacs packages, features, files, layers, extensions, auto-loading, require, provide, use-package… All these terms getting you confused? Let’s clear up a few things.

Files

Emacs files contains code that can be evaluated. When evaluated, the functions, macros and modes defined in that file become available to the current Emacs session. Henceforth, this will be termed as loading a file.

One major problem is to ensure that all the correct files are loaded, and in the