5 entries tagged privacy. All writing.
OCTOBER 6, 2026 The Rule That Never Mentioned Lightning FinCEN withdrew its 2023 proposal to label crypto mixing a "primary money laundering concern." I read the withdrawal notice and the original proposal. Neither says the word Lightning, but the proposal's definition of mixing was written so broadly that a literal reading brushes against how Lightning works. Here is what the rule said, what it would have meant for Lightning service providers, what the withdrawal changes today, and what it leaves alone. SEPTEMBER 30, 2026 Two Bits at a Time, Through a Stranger's iPhone Tonight Calle posted a photo of a thumb-sized board taped to a battery, a screen reading "FIND MY NUTS," and a terminal showing a 409-byte bitcoin ecash token reassembled on the other end. It traveled with no internet connection on the sending side. Every piece of it was carried by iPhones that happened to be nearby and had no idea they were carrying money. Here's how it actually works, what it does and doesn't mean for Bitcoin, and what I think Apple does about it. SEPTEMBER 29, 2026 The Coins Exchanges Won't Let Back In CoinJoin — a real, measurable Bitcoin privacy technique — mixes coins in a way that risk-scoring vendors flag and some exchanges won't cleanly accept back. That's a second leak in the supply math besides "lost forever" coins, and a genuinely different one from the STRC/SATA absorption story. I went and sized it. It's real, it's underappreciated, and it's much smaller than either of those two. SEPTEMBER 29, 2026 The Jar Learns to Hide Which Jar A quick follow-up to my Lightning in a Jar review — the wallet's author tells me he's shipped Silent Payments, send and receive, with the first inter-wallet transactions running tonight. Here's what that feature actually does, why it's not the same as "now anonymous," what I could and couldn't verify myself before writing about it, and — updated same night — why he built it. SEPTEMBER 25, 2026 A Private Room With a Public Door Someone sent me a write-up I didn't understand at first, claiming Zcash-style privacy now works on Bitcoin itself — no soft fork, no new coin — and a real private transfer confirmed on mainnet this morning to prove it. Both halves are true. Here is how it works in plain English, what the demo actually proved, the flaws its own builders list first, whether swapping the one-key vault for a decentralized escrow would fix it, and why, if I had to make Bitcoin private for a normal person tomorrow, I would still start with Lightning.