Participate anonymously to have the chance of gaining more than $1,500 USD in bitcoin, or multiple other prizes such as 4 Coldcard MK4s, 2 Cryptosteel Capsules and bitcoin merchandise.

Hunting Sats at Bitcoin Amsterdam is sponsored by Wasabi Wallet and 8 partners including BTCPay Server, BTCTKVR, Bull Bitcoin, Coinkite, Cryptosteel, Trezor, Vexl, and Wizardsardine. Read this article to understand how it works, why Bitcoin Amsterdam is the place to be, and to read additional information on all partners involved.

How Hunting Sats at Bitcoin Amsterdam Works

A bitcoin wallet was created and backed up with a standard 12-word recovery phrase with over $1,500 of bitcoin. All the words from the recovery phrase are hidden in the Bitcoin Amsterdam venue, as seen in the map below.

Together, these words make up the recovery seed of the wallet which is securing the prize money. Find the words, place them in the right order and get over $1,500 of bitcoin rewards. First come, first served! Placing them in the right order requires brute forcing software. 

You have all the words but can’t find the correct order? Find @thibm_ at the Bitcoin Amsterdam venue to win 4 Coldcard MK4s, 2 Cryptosteel Capsules and some Bitcoin merch. Hurry before it runs out!

For More Information, Visit HuntingSats.com 

For all the general information regarding the contest, including updates about this contest’s edition!

Additional Information on Bitcoin Amsterdam 2023

On top of hosting Hunting Sats’ latest edition, Bitcoin Amsterdam is a festival for financial freedom. If you want to learn the basics of Bitcoin or go deep, this conference will be great to push further your educational objectives. 

Don’t forget that it’s all about networking here, and you can do so talking not only about bitcoin but art and culture as well. Amsterdam is one of the greatest cities on earth. Visit huntingsats.com/amsterdam for more information. 

Official Hunting Sats Amsterdam Partners 

There are 9 partner projects and companies who each have contributed to this Hunting Sats edition along with our team at Wasabi Wallet. All partners have bitcoin-only products and care deeply about security, privacy and Bitcoin education. 

BTCPay – A self-hosted, open-source bitcoin payment processor. It’s secure, private, censorship-resistant and free. 

BTCTKVR – The home of insightful Bitcoin articles, podcasts, videos & music.

Bull Bitcoin – The World’s best non-custodial Bitcoin company. Buy, sell and pay bills with Bitcoin. Our Mission: Destroy Fiat.

Coinkite – A leader in security and hardware manufacturer. Maker of some of the most iconic Bitcoin products, such as OPENDIME, COLDCARD, BLOCKCLOCK and more.

Cryptosteel – The mother of all backups. A fireproof, shockproof and waterproof offline tool that you own to backup your bitcoin and passwords. 

Trezor – A hardware wallet providing advanced security for handling bitcoin.

Vexl – Vexl is a mobile app giving its users a simple, accessible and safe way to trade bitcoin as it was intended – peer-to-peer and without KYC. 

Wizardsardine – A team of bitcoiners with a passion for security. Our mission is to make bitcoiners sleep better at night. We focus on safety: preventing both theft and loss.

The post Hunting Sats is Back at Bitcoin Amsterdam 2023 appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

Cracking a Bitcoin Wallet

For this game, brute-forcing a bitcoin wallet means finding the seed words and a passphrase, in this case, arranging them in the right order and using the resulting backup as a way to recover the wallet’s funds. There are many ways to achieve this and general knowledge about bitcoin wallets, script types, derivation paths, checksums, passphrases and BIP-39 seed words will be helpful. Each partner will be sharing their own seed word and the passphrase to the public in random order for anyone to attempt to guess the wallet backup. As more words are revealed, brute-forcing gets easier, so time is ticking as people from around the world compete to crack the wallet.

Without Anyone’s Permission

Shadowy super coders and sociopathic sat stacking anons from all over the Internet are welcome. From Guatemala to New York, Seoul or Dakar, anyone can participate without permission. This is bitcoin! Participants are welcome to join and brute-force a passphrase-protected 12-word seed backup with 3,454,811 sats on it (0.03454811 BTC). Participants from bitcoin communities can share tips, scripts and educational content to achieve this individually or as a group. There is only one rule for participants joining from all around the world: first come, first served. Crack the wallet, earn millions of sats; or more accurately, take what’s now rightfully yours before others do! Anybody is also welcome to send more sats to the bounty address as the game unfolds.

How Hunting Sats Works

• A passphrase-protected 12-word (BIP39) bitcoin wallet was created
• One bitcoin address was generated and 3,454,811 sats have been sent to it (bc1q7kw2uepv6hfffhhxx2vplkkpcwsslcw9hsupc6)
• Each word from the wallet backup, including mnemonic seed words and a passphrase, were randomly distributed to the 12 Hunting Sats partners
• The Wasabi Wallet Twitter account will announce the start of Hunting Sats on January 23rd, 2023
• Each partner will randomly reveal their secret word on Twitter within a full week of the start using #HuntingSats.
• As each word is shared by partners, participants will attempt to brute force the seed backup and ultimately claim the sats.
• If no one successfully sweeps the wallet within a week, hints will be shared accordingly.

Visit HuntingSats.com

For all the general information regarding the contest, including updates about the words that have been revealed to the public.

Official Partners

There are 12 partner projects and companies who each have been trusted to share a random word from the wallet backup. All partners have bitcoin-only products and care deeply about security, privacy and Bitcoin education.

BTCPay – A self-hosted, open-source bitcoin payment processor. It’s secure, private, censorship-resistant and free.

Trezor – A hardware wallet providing advanced security for handling bitcoin.

Cryptosteel – The mother of all backups. A fireproof, shockproof and waterproof offline tool that you own to backup your bitcoin and passwords.

Blockstream – The global leader in bitcoin and timechain technology. They make financial markets more efficient by reducing reliance on trust.

Bull Bitcoin – World’s best non-custodial Bitcoin company. Buy, sell and pay bills with Bitcoin. Our Mission: Destroy Fiat.

Hodl Hodl – P2P bitcoin trading & lending platform that doesn’t hold funds.

Bitcoin Reserve – Easiest way to unlock the professional OTC buying and selling experience, without all of the hassle and high-trade minimums of traditional brokerage desks.

Coinkite – A leader in security and hardware manufacturer. Maker of some of the most iconic Bitcoin products, such as OPENDIME, COLDCARD, BLOCKCLOCK and more.

Swan Bitcoin – On a mission to inspire and educate 10 million new Bitcoiners. Start buying Bitcoin in 10 minutes or less. Services for HNWI, companies and financial advisors.

BTCTKVR – The home of insightful Bitcoin articles, podcasts, videos & music.

mempool.space – Explore the full bitcoin ecosystem and be your own explorer with The Mempool Open Source Project.

Wizardsardine – A team of bitcoiners with a passion for security. Our mission is to make bitcoiners sleep better at night. We focus on safety: preventing both theft and loss.

“Entropy is still a very alien concept for most people. When your money is at stake, you should spend some time to understand how it impacts security. Breaking a wallet without any info? No. Breaking a wallet when you find 6 of the words? Well, maybe. How many will the cracker need? 7? 8? Let’s see.” – Kevin Loaec, Co-Founder & CEO at Wizardsardine

“Gamification is a good way to educate users and that is what Hunting Sats is all about. On the one hand, it shows how brute force becomes more achievable if users reveal part of their seed – for example, if they expose it to cloud storage or split their recovery seed into parts. On the other hand, when users work responsibly with their seed and keep their private key in dedicated cold storage, the risk of cracking the wallet is practically zero. We’re excited to watch how the game will play out and looking forward to further cooperating with Wasabi Wallet.” – Jiří Kroulík, PR Manager at Trezor

“Brute-forcing Bitcoin wallet by playing around the seed phrase sounds like a fun game, but in fact, it is all about educating us on the delicate security that our private keys need to be attributed with. Understanding these basic concepts is one of the first steps towards self-sovereignty and self-custody. We are happy to be part of this initiative and cooperate with companies that share our values.” – Hodl Hodl

“Hands-on learning through fun games like Hunting Sats is a fantastic way for users to learn about seed phrase security and other benefits of self-custody. At Coinkite, we have been creating Bitcoin security & fun devices for over a decade. Today, we are excited to support Hunting Sats, a fun and engaging way to educate and for freedom-loving people.” – NVK, Co-Founder & CEO of Coinkite

“For years, we’ve made a constant effort to spread the word and educate about the need for financial self-sovereignty and best security practices for private key protection. Entering 2023, we’re happy to begin celebrating our tenth anniversary by joining this exciting event organized by Wasabi. Best of luck to all the contestants – may the hackiest hacker win!” – Team Cryptosteel

“As bitcoiners, we wanted to organize a fun game to start 2023 on a high note with projects and companies we respect and use every day. Bitcoin security and privacy are essential and we hope Hunting Sats can bring together bitcoiners who care about these principles.” – Thibaud Marechal, Contributor at Wasabi Wallet

If you have additional questions, please reach out to the Hunting Sats organizers on Twitter by DMs to @thibm_ or via email to [email protected]. Don’t forget to follow @wasabiwallet and all the partners on Twitter for the latest announcements and join the contest with #HuntingSats.

About Wasabi Wallet

Reclaim your privacy with Wasabi Wallet, a free and open-source bitcoin wallet with built-in coinjoins. Coinjoins are collaborative bitcoin transactions to enable cash-like privacy features for bitcoin in the era of digital surveillance. Download, verify and try Wasabi Wallet here.

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Open source means that the programming, or source code, is open to everyone and anyone can see it.  Additionally, anybody can contribute to the development of the code and use the code in any way they see fit. It’s typically developed by people committing their free time to collectively writing, testing and updating the code. Most open-source projects are decentralized in that developers collectively agree on what or what not to merge into their core programming. This means that consensus has to be reached for progress to be made. As expected, the process can be painfully slow and achieving consensus is often next to impossible. A good example of this are all of the major changes that have happened with Bitcoin over its lifetime. For each, the process of achieving consensus took months of debate before the process of reaching consensus even began. In fact, it’s not uncommon for this to take years to go from conception to completion.

zkSNACKs is centralized when it comes to approving the source code. There are only 2 developers with permission to merge any changes. In an ecosystem where centralization is treated as a dirty word, the reasoning for this makes sense. Anybody can still contribute to the development, testing and checking of the code; but by limiting the final approval process to just two developers, it removes the lengthy process of reaching consensus. This, of course, vastly improves the speed with which changes can be implemented while maintaining all of the beneficial attributes of an open-source project.

zkSNACKs is a private company. Like most private companies, it generates revenue in an attempt to make a profit. But Wasabi Wallet is a free software…so how does zkSNACKs generate revenue from a product that is completely free? Most companies working on open-source software go into the business of consulting. But once again, zkSNACKs does not do this. Instead, it draws a marginal fee for operating the server that is coordinating the CoinJoin rounds. This means that the software is free to download. The wallet is free to use, but making your Bitcoin private through CoinJoin costs a marginal fee that is hardly noticeable to the user [0.003% of the amount times the anonymity set].

What is significant about this is that the money going to the company increases the privacy guarantees of all users. Because there is a small fee on every CoinJoin input, it is a verifiable cost that must be paid. In doing this, the honest user with one input (for themself) has a negligible fee. But for a malicious user attempting a Sybil attack (one entity simultaneously impersonating multiple users), the cumulative fee becomes substantial.

The way the company spends its revenue aligns much more with a charity than a for-profit business. The vast majority of the company’s revenue pays the salary for everyone working at the company. What are these people doing? Well, most of them are developers, some of them work on the marketing/public relations (myself included), some of them handle the support, and some of them are designing the UI. This means that instead of relying solely on the charitable contributions of time and skills to the development of its software, the company is providing these people with the means to spend all of their time focusing on the development and innovation of Wasabi Wallet.

Additionally, the money is also spent to fund bounties for the contribution games. Producing an open-source software is great, but you’re essentially competing against people’s full time jobs to get the attention from the contributors to focus on its development. Of course, there’s no competition when you’re not getting paid. As a hobby, there are intrinsic benefits to working on the project, but at the end of the day everyone has to pay their bills. By funding contribution games, the development of Wasabi Wallet can compete for your time, even against your regular job. It’s the equivalent of gig work for musicians. If you’re really good at contributing, the potential exists for gig work to become full time work (by being hired by the company, zkSNACKs). So the fact that zkSNACKs is being paid directly by Wasabi Wallet’s users whereas many other companies are paid through consulting services is a bonus since the users are financially contributing to making the software better.

Aside from all the contributions Wasabi Wallet has made to the Bitcoin ecosystem by enabling users to easily gain privacy, the company sponsoring the development of Wasabi Wallet is quietly making an equally significant impact on the way open source software is being developed. One can’t help but point out the irony behind what is essentially a privacy wallet developed through multiple contributions being supported by a company sponsoring the contributorily developed wallet which is, itself, making a profound contribution to the way open-source software is being developed.

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This is great because it fixes the two greatest pain points of Bitcoin: portability and fungibility. It puts Bitcoin on the path to becoming an anonymous, instant and free e-cash; the holy grail of cypherpunks: an ideal money.

If this would truly be the case we would not need to offer this grant, but unfortunately reality is more nuanced than this. Although there are things to be said about long term portability aspects of LN, much more work needs to be done on its privacy properties as was highlighted by numerous research papers [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].

Grant Design & Schedule

1.11 BTC will be distributed during MAGIC Grants Lightning Network Privacy Research Grants (0.555 BTC each). This grant is made possible by pledges from zkSNACKs Ltd. (Wasabi Wallet; 1 BTC), Dan Gershony (0.1 BTC), and the Wasabi Wallet crew (0.01 BTC).

We’re looking for researchers and teams of researchers to design, (not implement), the best possible privacy-focused Lightning Network light client. The scope of research is narrowed by the assumptions explained later in this article. Applicants may apply with a team or individually. Selected individuals will be formed into another research team.

Researchers are encouraged to apply by March 14th, 2022. The Lightning Network Privacy Committee will select the researchers by March 31st, 2022. Research teams will have until the end of the year to submit their research papers.

Both teams will receive 20% of the grant value (0.111 BTC each) up-front and 80% (0.444 BTC each) after the research paper has been reviewed and accepted by the committee.

In your application, you don’t have to write your or your team’s ideas because that task is for the research period. We want to hear about your exploration plans, experience and credentials instead. If you are interested, send your application to [email protected] by March 14th, 2022.

Narrowing The Research Space

We are not going to give an overview of Lightning Network privacy. Rather, we will describe already existing solutions, narrowing down the problem space for the researchers.

Technological Advancements

We’re building software for the future and not for the past. Therefore, we should assume certain technological advancements. For example, we can assume that in the future, computers will rarely be turned off (always on) and everyone will have a reliable and unlimited Internet connection (always online).

Network And Blockchain-Level Privacy

Let’s start with an ideal on-chain privacy setup. We assume Tor [7] for communication (notably for transaction broadcasting), full nodes or client side filtering for acquiring wallet state [8] and WabiSabi [9] CoinJoins to fix on-chain privacy issues. This is so far the setup for Wasabi Wallet 2.0 [10]. Furthermore, we’ll also assume Taproot [11] utilization so LN operations won’t be immediately noticeable on the blockchain.
Although we could assume LN operations with coinjoins and indeed that’s possible with Wasabi 2.0, we won’t because we’ll solely focus on privacy and the assumption that LN operations happen before and after coinjoins will suffice. LN operations inside coinjoins are efficiency improvements.
Finally we can also omit talking about trivial things like how to use Tor circuits properly, not sending unnecessary information to trusted third parties and why not use LN node ID, an alias that is leaking information about your setup or your real world identity. Privacy developers eat such problems for breakfast, assuming they aren’t doing intermittent fasting of course.

References

• [0] How Does the Lightning Network Affect Users Privacy?
• [1] An Empirical Analysis of Privacy in the Lightning Network
• [2] A Quantitative Analysis of Security, Anonymity and Scalability for the Lightning Network
• [3] A Cryptoeconomic Traffic Analysis of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network
• [4] Security and Privacy of Lightning Network Payments with Uncertain Channel Balances
• [5] Security and Privacy of the Lightning Network
• [6] Privacy Guarantees of the Bitcoin Lightning Network
• [7] Tor Project
• [8] Network Level Privacy
• [9] WabiSabi
• [10] Wasabi Wallet 2.0 In The Finish Line — Introduction & Demo By The Lead Developers
• [11] Privacy and Scale — Everything you need to know about Bitcoin’s Taproot

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Open Source vs Closed Source Software

Most companies opt to work on closed-source software to maintain control and to profit from their work. The point of opening a business, after all, is to make money. But many argue that some of the best innovations are open source.

This is a problem because there is no financial incentive to develop open-source software. It’s as if a pharmaceutical company puts in years of research to find a cure for; polio, let’s say, and then gives this cure to the world completely free of charge. Although Jonas Salk did exactly this, it’s hard to imagine any of today’s big pharmaceutical companies doing this (did someone say COVID 19?).

Wasabi Wallet is in a unique situation where it is an open-sourced software under the MIT license, but has a private company, zkSNACKs backing its development. This development has been a collective effort by scores of contributors over the years.

Without the support of zkSNACKs however, Wasabi Wallet would certainly not be as refined as it is today. More importantly, there certainly wouldn’t be a team of developers working on the underpinnings of its next iteration, WabiSabi. To this point, the entire Bitcoin ecosystem is based on the development of open-source software.

Collaborating for Philanthropy

This is why zkSNACKs, alongside Francis Pouliot, CEO of Bull Bitcoin, have come together to make a .86 bitcoin, or $40,000 contribution (split evenly between the two companies) in support of the growth and development of Bitcoin Knots – an open source enhanced bitcoin node/wallet software. More specifically, Bitcoin Knots is a Bitcoin full node and wallet software which can be used as an alternative to the more popular Bitcoin Core.

Bull Bitcoin was created with the objective of building the financial and software infrastructure to support the establishment of the Bitcoin Standard. Bull Bitcoin is Canada’s most trusted exchange to buy and sell Bitcoin and is designed to let you retain full control of your bitcoins when you buy, sell or spend Bitcoin on this platform directly with your own Bitcoin wallet.

One of Bull Bitcoin’s core values is “skin in the game”.

Cypherpunks write code, but cypherpunks don’t always get paid. We can’t expect the world’s most talented experts to contribute indefinitely without financial compensation. If the companies that profit from Bitcoin open-source development don’t provide the necessary funding, who will? ~ Francis Pouliot

It is no secret that all transactions coming in and out of bullbitcoin.com and bylls.com are anonymized via CoinJoin using software developed by Wasabi Wallet, which itself relies on the Bitcoin Knots software developed by Luke-Jr.

And the Winner is…

Luke-Jr has dedicated years of his life to the advancement of Bitcoin technologies. ~ Francis Pouliot

The list of his contributions and achievements are too long for us to describe without doing Luke a disservice. His knowledge, skills and expertise are invaluable and some might say are without equal. There is no doubt he has been – and remains – one of the most valuable contributors to Bitcoin development.

In the End, We All Win

Of course, zkSNACKs has a history of supporting open source software development. Last June, the company donated 1 bitcoin to the HRF’s Bitcoin Development Fund. Meanwhile, Bull Bitcoin believes that for the decentralization of Bitcoin, it is critical that users have different options when choosing the Bitcoin node implementations that suits them best. Making a contribution to support the development of Bitcoin Knots aligns with both company’s mission in the bitcoin ecosystem: to support the development of open source software to maintain the decentralization of Bitcoin.

The grant has been paid in full, without conditions or expectations.

Something for the Purists:

*Astute observers will note that this grant is awarded at an important time in the history of Bitcoin development: the activation of the Taproot soft fork. While it is true that this event may have reminded us of the invaluable past and current research and development contributions of Luke-Jr in respect to the activation of soft forks, we want to make it absolutely clear that our grant is unrelated to Taproot activation via BIP8 LOT=True.

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By making a 1 BTC (nearly $10K) donation to the Human Rights Foundation’s Bitcoin Development Fund, zkSNACKs Ltd., a company fanatically devoted to privacy and creator of Wasabi Wallet, publicly supports work providing privacy to the world’s first truly independent digital currency.

Most people have no idea that the transaction history of each Bitcoin is written in the blockchain. As the Forbes journalist Laura Shin says,

Your financial transactions say a lot about where you’ve been, what you were doing, and what you intended to do — making them a perfect way to surveil you.

Wasabi Wallet believes it’s important that people become aware of the privacy risks when using Bitcoin and that there should be options for maintaining your privacy. HRF is continuously fighting for the freedom and privacy of individuals in difficult political environments.
They clearly recognized that although Bitcoin is a powerful tool, regarding privacy, it still has some shortcomings. If not used properly, personal financial information can unintentionally be leaked. This is something most of its users are unaware of and requires further development.

Imagine getting a $100 bill and in fine print, you can read every transaction that the bill has been through since its minting. This may not be a big deal where governments respect people’s privacy and puts the burden of proof on law enforcement. But considering that more than half of the world lives under some form of tyranny, it’s easy to see why and how privacy should be viewed as a fundamental human right.

Bitcoin has already proven its value as an invaluable medium to immediately transfer funds. Furthermore, because Bitcoin is independent of governments, financial institutions or business hours, users no longer have to rely on third parties or middlemen taking a cut or stringing out the process for transactions to take place. These onerous markups and fees end up pointlessly costing millions of dollars for its users.

Adam Ficsor, Wasabi Wallet’s co-founder, realized the privacy issues in Bitcoin and constructed an easy to use privacy wallet. For the past few years, CoinJoin software has been implemented to make 70,000 BTC (roughly $658 million dollars) private as of May this year.

Together with Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at Human Rights Foundation, we understand the concern for privacy in Bitcoin’s blockchain and how it can be used to surveil and oppress. Gladstein’s work in highlighting and promoting Bitcoin’s potential as a liberator “for the 4 billion people who can’t trust their rulers or who can’t access the banking system” meant that it didn’t take much of a leap to realize HRF’s Bitcoin Development Fund is the best place to make such a large donation and contribute to the development of privacy protections for cryptocurrency.

In today’s world, Bitcoin developers are often free agents, relying almost exclusively on the generosity of exchanges and corporations. Hopefully, HRF’s fund can inspire other organizations in the non-profit and academic space to support Bitcoin research and software development. ~ Alex Gladstein.

Wasabi Wallet has garnered an incredible amount of support from the bitcoin community. They hope that their donation brings further awareness to the need for privacy and is a catalyst for others to contribute to the fund. To follow in Wasabi’s footsteps and donate to the Bitcoin Development Fund, click on either of the links below.

The post Wasabi Wallet Donates 1 BTC to Defend Privacy in Bitcoin appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

Wasabi Wallet has always adamantly believed that privacy is a fundamental human right. It’s great to see that this philosophy is being shared and even promoted by such a powerful charitable organization as the Human Rights Foundation. In fact, they are even featuring the program right now to bring awareness to the work that people like us do to keep Bitcoin secure.

The Human Rights Foundation has launched a fund to support software developers who are making the Bitcoin network more private, decentralized and resilient so that it can better serve as a financial tool for human rights activists, civil society organizations and journalists around the world. ~ The Human Rights Foundation

If you too, are passionate about keeping bitcoin secure, please make a contribution to this cause by clicking on the links provided. It’s such an honor to know that organizations like this are recognizing the work of people like us to protect everyone in this new digital age.

In today’s world, Bitcoin developers are often free agents, relying almost exclusively on the generosity of exchanges and corporations. Hopefully, HRF’s fund can inspire other organizations in the non-profit and academic space to support Bitcoin research and software development. ~ Alex Gladstein

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