Personal website of Gijs van Dam. Topics: privacy, programming, cryptography and cryptocurrencies, open source and web technologies.
My PhD research is mainly on the Balance Discovery Attack (BDA). The BDA was introduced (in academia) by Herrera-Joancomartí et al. . In their paper they used the term balance discovery attack and balance disclosure attack interchangeably. Nowadays the term probing or probing attack is more commonly used, but I prefer BDA, so I'll keep using that while shouting at the clouds. The BDA is an attack…
Lightning Network uses source-based routing. What that means is that the sender is responsible for finding a route to the payee. But because the sender doesn't know the balances of all channels along a possible route, the proposed route can fail for lack of liquidity. So the sender is forced to try routes until it stumbles upon one that has enough liquidity to relay the payment; it's a process of…
There is this cool trick you can do with Schnorr signatures. It is called Adaptor Signature (AS). An adaptor signature is an extra signature that, combined with the original signature, allow for revealing a value that was previously hidden. You can use this trick to solve trust problems as they appear in atomic swaps, coin swaps and Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs). Signature Aggregation (SA) is a…
Lightning Network is a peer-to-peer payment network that runs on top of the Bitcoin Blockchain. Because it runs on top of the Blockchain it is called a layer-two solution , which groups it together with other solutions that have this property of being built on top of a Blockchain. Layer One is the base layer, where the Blockchain lives. Because of the inherent properties of Layer One, it is…
Image conversion and resizing for the web can be quite fiddly. Take responsive websites for instance. You want to show a smaller version of your image on smaller devices: You don't need to download a 1080px wide image to show on a 360px wide device, especially since that device is likely constrained in the amount of bandwidth it has. Then again when your website is shown on an ultra HD screen with…
Writing a scientific paper is hard. Doing your PhD is hard. Writing your thesis is hard. And to make me feel even more miserable I decided to measure my progress by counting the net change in words I achieve throughout each day. I am by no means a productivity guru and I don't know whether word count is a useful indicator for measuring the progress of a paper. That being said, it is a reality…
While writing my papers I try not to get bogged down too much. So if a paragraph doens't flow right I just type TODO: rewrite on the line below it, and continue writing. When I think of something that I shouldn't forget, like an extra analysis to run I just write it down as a todo in the running text of my paper. I also write thoughts on my paper as a todo. Ideas on structure, whether I should…
I found this super easy alternative way to animate your slides with reveal.js that works out of the box with Markdown and Pandoc. Here is how to do it. Last week I had to give a progress presentation about the current state of my PhD, and I can whip those up in no time. I use Boilerplate Paper not only for writing my papers, but also for presentations like this. I write the presentation in…
The goal is to run c-lightning with plugins in a local testing cluster. For my cluster I use Simverse . Simverse allows for additional command line arguments to be passed to lightningd , so it should be possible to run lightningd with the plugin argument. Let's first clone our plugin. We will be using one of the plugins that are available through Lightningd on Github. cd ~\simverse\_repos git…
I do most of my development on a remote machine. The machine isn't that remote, it's a mini-pc running Ubuntu that is standing right here on my desk. It has no peripherals, so I have to do all my development remotely through my Windows 10 laptop. Remote development with Vscode is amazing. It just works. Once you are set up, there's no difference with working locally. To have that seamless…
If you want to debug LND, or if you want to take a real deep dive into LND, you probably want to be able to set breakpoints in the source code to see what is actually happening. Not only that, you also want to have the node run in a local cluster of other nodes, so that you can perform some real Lightning actions like opening a channel and make payments. This post takes you through the setup I use…
I've been following Bitcoin and more importantly the Blockchain from the sidelines for a few years now, but I wanted to get my hands dirty. Obviously I could just download the Bitcoin Core executables from bitcoin.org, but I always feel it gives me more insight if I build something myself. Also it's was a nice test case for Bash on Windows.