Richi's blog

A blog about personal projects and experiences

  • Saving our holiday at the last moment

    We were late this year with planning our holiday. We discussed a couple of options, but were always too busy to look at them more closely. By end of June, less than a month before embarking, I finally booked an apartment in Tossa de mar at the costa brava in Spain. We spent our honeymoon […]

  • Stoos Trail

    Last year when we bough something at a sports shop in Schwyz, by chance I saw a flyer for the Stoos Trail. Usually I run only to keep myself fit, and I have no aspirations to compete. But a trail comp so close to home looked interesting. On the website they advertised a training class […]

  • It sucks when you realize that a big established company is trying to scam you

    Last February I drove my car backwards into a pole. The bumper sure needed to be replaced, but the rest I thought could be put back into place. First I went to the Tesla service center. Since Tesla doesn’t have body shops, they sent me to AMAG. The guy at AMAG who handled my case, […]

  • Lightning wallet for ubports

    Bitcoin is about being in control of your money. For this to be really true, all the components have to be trustable. It is worth nothing if the application is fully open source, when it is run on a compromised platform. On the desktop this is easy. Linux distributions have been well supported, and more […]

  • Lightning operated chocolate arcade

    After the Covid lockdowns are only a faint memory, conferences are back again. Last October I was at the Lugano PlanB Forum with lots of familiar speakers. The talks were good, but not as technical as I would prefer. And last month I was at the Swiss Bitcoin Conference in Kreuzlingen. The talks there were […]

  • Two decades of paragliding

    According to my flight log book, it was the first of April 2002 when I had my first flight on a paraglider as pilot in control. Prior to that I did a tandem flight as the passenger and a few days at the training hill. Of course it all started much earlier. I wanted to […]

  • Rest in peace Seppel & Hoppel

    Yesterday I had to bury the beloved pet bunnies of our kids. But let’s start from the beginning. While I had plenty of pets in my childhood, my wive was less lucky in that regard. So she was especially eager to enable that possibility for our kids. Before they went to school, we bought a […]

  • Creating proof of reserves for an Electrum wallet

    In my last post I promised to write about how you can produce a “proof of reserves” for your own wallet including hardware wallets. So, here we go. First you need an electrum multisig wallet that involves at least one hardware wallet. I won’t go into the details of how to construct this. Recently I […]

  • Proof of Reserves

    As part of my work at SEBA Bank, I recently implemented a “Proof of Reserves” feature for our cold storage. The idea behind “Proof of Reserves” is that custodial businesses holding cryptocurrency should create attestations as to their reserves. Essentially proofing that they indeed hold, and have control over the coins that customers deposited. We […]

  • Blaming the healthy

    More and more often I hear claims that the unvaccinated occupy beds in hospitals and shall somehow be solely responsible for spreading the virus. In reality 3% of hospital beds are currently occupied by Covid patients, and about half of them are fully vaccinated. 22% of beds in the supposedly overcrowded hospitals are empty. In […]