SkateSpots Drop #005

It's a WEEKLY newsletter and we ship whenever the f*** we want — and this week the geniuses at OpenCrack announced they're 'fixing Bitcoin's cryptography libraries,' which is a bit like hiring the guy who set the kitchen on fire to redesign your smoke detector. We watched a room full of $300-hoodie engineers 'harden' a curve implementation that worked perfectly fine until they touched it. Meanwhile, over here in the parking lot, we made the Lab three times bigger, gave Crews a spine and a lie-detector, and — this'll shock you — we STILL have not audited a single line of this app. One day we will. And on that glorious day, we will finally have the tooling to shoot ourselves in both feet simultaneously. Progress!

What shipped

OpenCrack is here to 'fix' Bitcoin's crypto libraries — sleep tight

Not Financial Advice

This week a well-funded lab we'll charitably call OpenCrack declared they're going to 'improve and harden' the cryptographic libraries the entire Bitcoin ecosystem leans on. Wonderful. Nothing soothes the soul like a team that ships a chatbot every Tuesday volunteering to rewrite the math that guards a trillion dollars. These are the same wizards whose last 'safe' release needed three emergency patches before lunch. Look — secp256k1 has been battle-tested by fifteen years of people trying very hard to steal from it. It does not need a growth-hacked refactor with a launch video and a Medium post. As Groucho said, before he was a Bitcoiner: 'Those are my principles, and if you don't like them… well, I have others — check the changelog.' We'll be over here NOT touching the curve.

A humble confession: we have never audited this app. Not once.

Vibes

In the spirit of the honesty we keep demanding from firmware vendors: SkateSpots has received exactly zero security audits. None. A big beautiful nothing. This entire app is held together by optimism, Nostr, and a Sasquatch. We custody no Bitcoin, no seeds, no funds — the worst we can leak is your favorite curb — so the blast radius is 'someone knows where you kickflip.' But we're not going to pretend. ONE DAY, when we finally hire a real auditor and get real tools, we fully expect to discover the perfect vulnerability, patch it heroically, and in doing so shoot ourselves in both feet, reload, and go for the kneecaps. Until then: it's BETA, it's free, and we told you so. Groucho voice: 'I refuse to trust any app that would have me as a user.'

The Lab got THREE times bigger — it's your whole scene now

The Lab

The Lab used to be coaches, filmers, photographers, builders and editors. Now it covers the entire ecosystem around a session: we added Designers/Artists, Graffiti writers, Tattoo artists, Trainers/Physios and Musicians as first-class crafts. Ten crafts, one directory. Whether you need someone to film the line, ink the memory of it, or fix the ankle you rolled attempting it — the Lab has a human for that. List your craft, or go find one.

The Lab stopped hiding half its crafts off the side of your phone

Fix

With ten crafts, the mobile filter row turned into a sideways-scrolling mystery box — you'd see 'Coaches, Filmers, Photo…' and have to swipe into the void to discover the other seven existed. Gross. It's now a clean, tidy grid: every craft visible at a glance, no horizontal scrolling, nothing lurking off-screen. Revolutionary concept, showing people the buttons.

Crews now cover every scene — art, music, wellness, the works

Crews

Crews aren't just for skate spots anymore. Pick from seven scene types — including Art, Music and Wellness — and they map straight onto the new Lab crafts, so a crew and the talent it needs speak the same language. Your local isn't just a spot list anymore; it's a whole subculture with an address.

Crews got a lie-detector: opt-in visibility + web-of-trust vouching

Trust

Two upgrades. First, founders can now see their members — but it's OPT-IN, so nobody gets outed into a roster they didn't agree to join. Second, a lightweight web-of-trust vouch system: real people vouch for real people, so a crew of one guy and eleven sockpuppets can't cosplay as a movement. It's anti-fraud without a middleman — which, unlike certain crypto libraries, we did NOT need a launch event to build.

The Crew page got a full redesign

Crews

While we were in there, we tore the CrewDetail page down to the studs and rebuilt it — cleaner layout, the members, spots, events and (if they've got one) the band all connected and legible instead of stacked like moving boxes. It reads like a crew now, not a database dump.

Music and Events are wired together now

Music

Because half of skateboarding is the soundtrack and the other half is arguing about it: events can now feature a musician from the Lab, and a musician's profile lists their upcoming gigs. Crews with a band get nudged to hook into the Lab's music side so bookings and collabs actually connect instead of living in separate universes. Book the session AND the after-party in one place.

Still loudly, proudly BETA — and still un-audited (see above)

Beta

The first-launch beta heads-up and the little BETA badge in the footer are still there, still telling the truth. We'd rather warn you it's cooking than slap 'production-ready' on it, ship it to a hardware wallet, and lose $88 million — a mistake we are structurally incapable of making, because we hold none of your money and, as established, have audited none of our code.

Community

No cryptographic curves were harmed — or 'improved' — in the making of this newsletter. We didn't touch secp256k1, we didn't ship an unaudited seed generator, and we still don't hold a satoshi of yours; the only thing SkateSpots custodies is a list of curbs. Go add a craft to the Lab, start a crew, book a musician. Everything syncs through wss://goskatespots.nostr1.com. Keep your keys, distrust anyone launching a 'crypto library' with a hype video, and keep skating.

---

Read every drop at https://skate-spots.org/#/newsletter