Challenges in Cryptocurrency Software Development

Hi, my name is Michael, and I used to work on Boltz, the submarine

swap and swap exchange on Bitcoin.

Because we recently shut it down, I think it was the beginning of August

twenty

twenty-six, where we decided that it was not a worthwhile

thing to run anymore. In this current environment of like an

onslaught of AI exploits being found in the entire computing stack

that we know

these days from, like, the Linux kernel at the very bottom to,

like, our own

software right at the top. Everywhere,

vulnerabilities are being found en masse.

So when considering this, it doesn't make much sense, in our

opinion, to risk bunch of Bitcoin in hot

wallets and operate any online service for

basically pennies of yield by risking it all, all the

time. There is this saying in finance called

picking up pennies in front of

a steamroller, which means that you risk it all for

tiny yield. So the whole risk-reward ratio

is screwed

and skewed in this current environment.

It's, it's a new environment we'll have to

adjust to.

There is a couple forks, or rather

new instances popping up that run the service

and try to make it work for them.

It's been,

I guess, working fine for them. They are still around and going strong for the

last

two months.

We'll see how it develops. It's a brave new world where not only the

writing software side got completely obliterated, but also the

black hat side got a revolution,

and we'll have to adj-adjust to that.

I don't know what it's gonna look like, but it's gonna be interesting and

unpredictable

in which ways the world is gonna change.

The concept is still viable because, like, the

fundamental logic is still

working. It's just about

trimming it down to the bare essentials, minimizing attack surface,

and building it with security first principle

in this current age of AI, which means constant scanning, red

teaming yourself like crazy. When you do all these things, it

could be viable to run. We just had like a mountain of tech debt

of the last ten

years

of basically bullshit code we wrote back then, which, like, was not a

sustainable and maintainable thing anymore in this current environment.

It might sound like a black pill that I'm handing out here,

but it's actually gonna

be for the better because once this onslaught is over,

software's gonna be better for it.

There's gonna be fewer bugs than ever before because the AI found

all the issues that the humans put into software over the last

fifty years.