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Making Bitcoin Speak Human - Spiral Blogspiralbtc.substack.com/p/making-bitcoin-speak-human
1036 sats \ 13 comments \ @Scoresby 12h bitcoin
Interesting read by the Spiral folks on BIP 353 (DNS payment instructions).
To my non-technical mind, BIP 353 is somewhat similar to NIP 05 and the way nostr identities can be vouched for by a record on your website (or anyone's website). In the case of BIP 353, your payment information is placed in a DNS record. If you have a domain you control, you could put your payment information in the DNS record for your domain, or you could have a service do it for you on the domain they control.
This way someone could pay you@yourdomain.com and when your BIP 353 supporting wallet looks up that address it will retrieve whatever payment information you have placed in the DNS record. BIP 353 is agnostic about the payment type: you can put a Bolt12 address or a silent payments address in the DNS record.
DNS records are not super secure, but apparently this is remedied by something called DNSSEC.
The Spiral blog post about BIP 353 is good and if you want a quick primer on BIP 353 and how these "Human Bitcoin Addresses" work, definitely give it a read. I do wish, though, they had spent a little time explaining the trade-offs of this approach.
This Bitcoin Design article addresses some of the tradeoffs:
Every approach requires at least one intermediary that is being contacted to serve the payment information. This creates potential privacy and security risks that users need to understand.
Key considerations:
  • Intermediaries can track requests and metadata to build profiles of users and payment patterns
  • DNS queries may leak information about payment relationships
  • Services can potentially serve different payment information than specified
If the domain (website) where the payment information is stored, is not controlled by the user, we will refer to the address as “managed”. To be clear, intermediaries cannot move funds at the user-provided address. They can only prevent payment information retrieval, or re-route funds by returning different payment information.
There is a Delving thread about DNS payment instructions as well, but it doesn't provide too much in the way of a consideration of the downsides.
There is also this SN post by @JuanGalt from 2024 (#804155) where the comments address a few other considerations.
Bitcoin Optech also did a nice newsletter piece on BIP 353.
I seem to remember seeing an online discussion about this before, but I couldn't find it now.
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102 sats \ 8 replies \ @DarthCoin 11h
  1. Who the hell is still sending onchain txs to a buddy ?
  2. We already have LN address for that, let's not just reinvent the wheel.
This whole BIP 353 is totally useless like BIP 177
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102 sats \ 0 replies \ @endothermicdev 8h
You can put a BOLT12 in your BIP353 DNS record and get paid by lightning. lnaddress works but it always felt a little hacky. If I have the option I'd prefer to get a proper BOLT12, complete with blinded paths, signatures, etc..
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102 sats \ 4 replies \ @sime 10h
  1. It happens a lot, but It's obviously not ideal
  2. LN Address depend on LNURL, which depends on an HTTP server. DNS is a little more fire and forget
I don't like that it depends on things you don't actually own, meaning it's not entirely censorship resistant: a. The domain can be taken away from you. b. DNS records can be modified. OK, they mention DNSSEC, which I have zero experience so that angel might be covered.
The spec is more pushing BOLT12 without a webserver that is backwards compatibility to Layer 1.
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1 sat \ 3 replies \ @DarthCoin 10h
So a LNURL server depending on a DNS is not censorship resistant but a BIP353 address depending on the same DNS is censorship resistant.
I do not see the logic here.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @sime 6m
Never said DNS is censorship resistant.
Off topic, but using pubky for DNS is a censorship resistant (it's quite cool, uses DHT that the torrent network uses)
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @sime 5m
Using pubky with LNURL would be censorship resistant. (I think)
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nevermind 2h
Agree
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54 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 10h
I think they are trying to shoot for something where you can give someone one thing (a paynym, an address, a lnurl thing) and it works for all kinds of ways a person wants to pay you.
There is some value to that. I don't mind qr codes though. I'm not sure it is so much of an improvement on just sending qr codes around.
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102 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 10h
The whole thing they want to "fit" Bitcoin in that old antiquated mindset of fiat, where everything must be "verified" or "human readable" by dumb people that can't even read an analog clock anymore...
Bitcoin it have its own way forward and the world MUST adapt to it not the way around. Nobody in the right mind will want to memorize a long bitcoin address, and QR codes are not to make it easy to pay, but to HIDE exactly that address from human eye. That human eye can make mistakes and same mistakes can be made with a scor3sby@scoresby.com instead of scoresby@scoresby.com.
Just imagine how many scams will start spoofing those "human readable" addressee like they try to do today with emails. And why some of them have sucess? Exactly because we've skipped the education of people and we tried to hide these technical things. How many people you see looking into an email header today ? Almost none. Yet they believe any email the receive.
A QR code is just scanned, hardly can be faked. Also Bitcoin is a push system, that means you need an invoice to be paid, not just sending money to an address... An invoice is created and presented to the payer.
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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @nevermind 2h
How the hell does anyone type that bitcoin ascii symbol, anyway?
And the dunking on LNURL really discredits this post. A group of bitcoiners willfully rejected something that found market fit because they’re not fans, and then promoting the same thing but worse.
There’s much of the “gist of the idea” to agree with here, but it’s still impractical.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 46m
https://altcodeunicode.com/bitcoin-sign-alt-code/
If you will read my guides page you will always have it at hand, together with many other resources:
https://darth-coin.github.io/resources-en.html
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 2h
How the hell does anyone type that bitcoin ascii symbol, anyway?
I just google it, then copy and paste the symbol
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nevermind 2h
Haha, sounds scalable!
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