2023 Mar 20

• What is a secure enclave that they’re talking (in the LDK sync) about for running VLS?

• channel_reestablish is another type of message in case peers disconnect while sending messages.

• Ok, finally a conclusion on when to rebase, you should rebase…only if you have conflicts, after a new release (if you haven’t rebased since then), or if you need a fix in upstream

  • Force push is good for really smaller stuff, but you should default to fixups and let other people tell you to squash them, as when you force push multiple times (without fixups) you lose the ability to see

  • If you just rebase whenever you can, it’ll make it difficult to view the changes as it’s hard to tell what you changed from the previous state of your branch when you forced pushed if it includes a bunch of stuff from the rebase

• Did cryptopals challenge 26. This was the bit flipping attack but with AES CTR, i.e. given an oracle that prepends and appends text then encrypts (where you can’t include certain characters in your plaintext), create a ciphertext with a target text injected in the plaintext. As we’ve seen with CTR mode, if the attacker has access to an encryption oracle, they can easily inject any text they want as long as they know what position their text is it, as the ciphertext is just the plaintext XORed with the keystream, so the simplest way would be to input zeroes, then xor that section of the ciphertext with whatever text they want.

• Was reading quite a bit about the history of the federal reserve. Oversimplification, but it seems that throughout the 19th century, banks were playing it too risky and there were frequent collapses.

  • My question: it seems like there are actually very different alternatives to fractional reserve banking, and I don’t know why they never worked out.

  • The problem: banks need to make money, and they noticed they usually had a lot of money laying around not being used, so they started using it, but that risks customer’s funds, and when they risked too much and failed, they lost customer’s money and people were mad about this, however there was no alternative to secure your money than a bank, so as customer you had no options.

  • Ideas for solutions: hold 100% reserves and charge a fee for securing assets. Seems like it would literally solve everything…but banks probably wouldn’t make nearly as much money (haven’t done calculations), so they never wanted to. Could also regulate banks more, maybe require a higher reserve ratio. Insurance was a good idea. Most importantly, banks need to fail to disincentivize risking customer assets as much as they do; let free markets play out. I really got to acknowledge this is a tough problem however, because letting free markets play out means real suffering, but in the long-term it’s probably better. Also importantly, this makes me really appreciate the purpose that Bitcoin can serve in providing secure custody of funds with no counterparty risk.

  • Instead what happened: people asked or it just happened, the government intervened by establishing the Federal Reserve which would have more central control over banking in order to provide liquidity when needed, and eventually control the supply of money. The initial function of federal reserve was to have federal banks that could lend to banks in different states in order to utilize the larger pool of capital to assist banks in times of need. This wasn’t inflating the supply of money to do so, but this was the first form of a bailout that incentivized (or primarily didn’t disincentivize) more risk/debt.