Bitcoin Tech Talk #288

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What I'm working on

  1. Airline Miles - My column this week was on airline miles and how they’ve essentially ruined air travel. Airlines are now banks than print airline miles and use air travel to discharge their miles debt. The completely backwards system is a good example of fiat contagion.

  2. What Bitcoin Did - I made the moral case for Bitcoin on Peter McCormack’s podcast. The Monero fanbois are after me for saying what I did about their anonymity set, which you would expect since Submarine Swaps completely obsolete their coin. Once you understand the moral case, it’s hard to not recognize the moral imperative in Bitcoin.

  3. Rants about NFTs - In both podcasts, I talk about NFTs and why they’re scams. Both podcasts are very pro-NFT, so some fireworks went off. I enjoyed bursting their bubbles a bit and showing them that you can do an NFT much easier using a website. I felt like I was explaining how Santa isn’t real to these people.

What I'm up to

The Meat Comics And Cartoons | The Cartoonist Group

  1. BitDevs April 2022 - I’ll be at this week’s Austin BitDevs meetup (April 21) with my fellow Austin Bitcoin Devs. If you haven’t been to one, it’s a great way to meet a lot of fellow Bitcoiners and I promise no altcoin talk, which is in contrast to Bitcoin 2022. Come for the signal, stay for the meat.

  2. Beef Initiative Conference - I’ll be speaking at the Beef Initiative conference on Saturday, April 23. The alliance of Beef and Bitcoin makes all the sense in the world and I’ll be speaking this week on faith as well! This is going to be a great event in Texas Hill Country. If you haven’t been out west of Austin, this is a great opportunity to see just how great it is.

  3. Fossil Future - I’ve been reading this wonderful book by Alex Epstein. I got an advanced reader copy because I’m planning to interview him in a month or so. Trust me when I say that the book so far is a tour-de-force. It’s so logical and based on first principles. Go and preorder the book. It’s really that good and I promise you’ll think about energy very differently.

Tweet of the Week

Bitcoin

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  1. CoinJoin Effectiveness Paper - A recent paper looked into what information could be gleaned off of coinjoin mixing transactions. The researchers were able to detect mixing transactions given certain patterns. They were not, however able to correlate input and output transactions, suggesting that the mixers were effective in obscuring the history of a particular UTXO.

  2. Thinking about covenants - Jeremy Rubin has a long post on the dev mailing list about how to think about covenants. The framework is useful, particularly thinking in sets of transactions rather than individual transactions as covenants are really about not just the restrictions placed on a particular transaction but also the transaction which meets those requirements. I’m still hesitant about covenants in general, but I can definitely appreciate how deeply Jeremy has thought about them as can be seen in this post.

  3. Apollo BTC - This is one of the more interesting devices I’ve come across as it’s a desktop and ASIC all-in-one. The desktop isn’t anything to write home about (4GB RAM, 1 TB SSD HD), but the idea of running a node that’s also a miner as your desktop is quite intriguing. The hash rate is only 2.5 TH/s or so, and it’s not going to be profitable by any means, but it does raise the possibility of a base-level hash rate that users can contribute to as part of the Bitcoin network. After all, many already pay to run their own nodes, and a device like this will put some hash rate that’s not subject to being turned off. This ought to strengthen the network. We’ll see if this potential is enough of a benefit for users, though.

Lightning

Pin on Our Strategies

  1. Cliche - This is an open-source lite lightning node for programmatic use. The tool looks like a great way to integrate lightning while calling the daemon for the main lightning functions. The API has all the basic functions like creating an invoice, confirming payment and so on which give it that micro-services feel. For those that want Lightning integration at a more bare-metal level, this looks like something worth looking into.

  2. Taro - Ryan Gentry of Lightning Labs sheds a bit more light onto their plans for the asset protocol for Lightning. It looks like they’re serving the large contingent of developing world users who want access to USD or instruments like USD with their recent $70M series B raise. The instant payment aspect of Lightning and the comfort most people around the world have with the dollar make this a compelling use-case. It does bring up the question of whether this is an effective alternative to a USD CBDC. There’s some accusation that Taro is more or less the RGB protocol but adding Taproot. I do find that their naming of the original as CMYK as pretty convincing in this regard, and I hope they give proper credit.

  3. Lightning Node Hardware - notgrubles opines on the ideal hardware for running a Lightning Node given all the tradeoffs. He recommends a $415 open firmware Linaro96 board, which I hadn’t heard until the post. The board has some pretty solid specs and the fact that it has open source firmware is a huge plus. He recommends running Core Lightning with some of the plugins. The setup is a nice contrast to the node-in-a-box vendors and is for people who want a little more control of their node instead of a turn-key solution. I imagine routing nodes and people who are seeking to make money off their lightning node will want to go in this direction.

Economics, Engineering, Etc.

Hedgeye on Twitter: "CARTOON OF THE DAY https://t.co/DQzbkGldPw" / Twitter

  1. Bitcoin Correlation to Tech - Arthur Hayes writes one of his characteristic long-reads. The analysis is quite depressing as he thinks that the macro environment will lead to a lot of USD tightening and that in turn will cause equities and Bitcoin to fall. The analysis is highly dependent on Bitcoin correlating to tech stocks, which I wish weren’t true, but seems to be at the moment. Is there a dollar crunch coming? Will the period of loose monetary policy stop? Given China and Japan aren’t going to print money, who will step up? The macro forces sure look like some sort of tightening in the near-term.

  2. Janet Yellen on Bitcoin - Her remarks were extraordinary in that we couldn’t have dreamed of her making comments like this even 3 years ago, yet here we are. She seems to be angling to make the Treasury Department the driver behind the regulations that the President’s task force is asking for. Her remarks on CBDCs are also pretty worrying as she hints at supporting them. I don’t get the sense that she really gets Bitcoin or how it’s really different from altcoins, but that’s to be expected given the lobbying efforts and dollars being thrown around by altcoin foundations.

  3. Nigeria and Bitcoin - An incredible 35% of Nigerians have some exposure to crypto in a country with only 51% internet penetration! That means 86% of internet users in Nigeria have some form of crypto, which just goes to show how important an alternative to the Naira is there. If there ever was a doubt that Bitcoin is adopted faster in distressed places, this is it. We need to show these stats to every naysayer in those ivory towers.

Quick Hits

What I’m Shilling

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Fiat delenda est.

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