ravel rule
prove you own an address
[info]
The pencil pushers want to watch and control your financial life, and now they ask for cryptographic proof that you own your withdrawal address. This data goes into a database next to your passport and home address. From there it goes to their compliance vendor, their chain-analytics vendor and, eventually, the regulator. These databases leak; the only question is when. When one does, it becomes a shopping list for wrench attackers: who holds bitcoin, how much, and where they sleep.
The approved ways to comply are worse. Hand over your xpub and the spooks get your whole stack and its history. Make a test payment and you've drawn an on-chain line to your other coins. Sign with your cold wallet and you've put a permanent, undeniable signature on their paperwork.
This tool provides a hop address that does the signing instead. You withdraw to it, and it forwards everything to the destination. Cold keys stay cold: the destination signs nothing.
- The panopticon gets the bare minimum: one signature for one address, and one later payment from it to the destination, which they'd have seen anyway. No xpub, balance or history ever enters their system.
- This system is designed so it can't take your coins, but that depends on the code this site serves being honest. So the safest way to use this tool is to download the browser client and run it on your own machine.
- If you lose this browser, or the server vanishes, the destination's own key can still claim the funds with the emergency kit you saved at step 2. Bitcoin Core can do this spend if you give it the address's tweaked private key.
- The service never asks your name. The server sees which hop address goes to which destination address, the exchange's message you sign and your deposits, and, like any website, your IP address.
- There's no service fee. The destination receives the deposit minus the forward's network fee, which step 5 estimates before you withdraw.
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1 Destination address
where the funds end up: a taproot address (bc1p…), usually a fresh receive address from your cold wallet.
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2 Save your emergency kit
one small file that backs up every hop address this browser makes. with it, the destination can claim the funds even if this browser and the server are both gone. you save it once, and again only if you switch server.
check your kit, or restore one
phone wallets' built-in browsers sometimes drop a download without saying so, so check yours before going on: type groups of its rescue key, or upload the file.
made hop addresses in another browser, or this one forgot them? upload that kit, or type its whole rescue key, to bring them back.
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3 Your hop address
add this as your withdrawal address at the exchange. it forwards everything to the destination.
these are the address's spending rules, here so you can check them. you don't need to save them: your emergency kit rebuilds them.
to check them without trusting this site, give them to bitcoin core. it should print the address above:
this proves the destination can always claim the funds. it can't show who holds the shared key. read how it works.
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4 Sign the exchange's message
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5 Withdraw
withdraw to your hop address. once the deposit confirms, this page sends it on to the destination. you can close it meanwhile: the funds wait safely at the hop address, and the page forwards them next time you open it. on another device, restore your kit at step 2 first.