Bitcoin Tech Talk #294
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What I've been working on
Fiat Education - My article this week was about college and how it became such a terrible deal. Fiat money has a lot to do with it and the propaganda around college has been running rampant. We all know that college is now a 4-year vacation which too many 18-year olds get sucked into. Exploring the cause and effect of Bitcoin on the system was the main theme of the article.
Oslo Freedom Forum - The article details the power of Bitcoin for human rights. It’s easy to lose sight of what’s really important when we’re debating things like covenant proposals and soft fork activation methods, but this is really why so many of us are in this space, to see human freedom thrive. The craziness in the world today requires hope and Bitcoin is a beacon. I will be featuring more people from the Human Rights world on my podcast.
Lofoten - I got to visit this fantastic place this week. You can see a pic from one of the mountain peaks in my Tweet of the Week. I’m seriously impressed with Norway and the natural beauty of the country. Also, if you haven’t tried the Scandinavian sauna and cold water plunge, you really haven’t lived yet.
What I'm up to
Consensus - I’ll be speaking on a panel featuring William Foxley, Alex Thorn and moderator Natalie Brunnell to talk about fees and whether the current low fees are good for Bitcoin. Earlier in the week, I’ll be at Bitcoin++ and I’ll also be at the Coin Center Dinner. I would highly encourage anyone coming into town to visit Bitcoin Commons.
Photo and Calendar Server - I’m starting to look into self-hosted servers for a bunch of things that I want to move over from Google. I keep running into their storage limits and that’s become a forcing function to figure out what I need to do to really own my own data. If you have any suggestions on what I should be running, I’d be very grateful.
Chattanooga - I’m scheduled to speak in Chattanooga next month for their very first Bitcoin meetup! I haven’t been to the city and am curious about its feel. If you have any must-see places or interesting places I should check out, I’d love suggestions.
Tweet of the Week
What I’m Shilling
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Bitcoin
Silent Payments - The concept is that payments can be sent to a tweaked public key by doing some elliptic point math. The tradeoff is that every P2TR transaction has to be checked to see if it’s your tweaked pubkey but in exchange a different address is guaranteed to be used. This is now implemented on Signet, though not with some of the other stuff like a new address format. This is essentially BIP47 without the overhead and takes advantage of the public key being exposed in a P2TR address.
Ranking Bitcoin - Caleb’s Commentary shows just how big a project Bitcoin is as an open source project. I didn’t realize that it’s in the top 40 projects according to a variety of metrics and it’s certainly deserving of the attention it gets. Sadly, much of the popularity is because so many “crypto” projects use Bitcoin as the base, but it’s undeniable that Bitcoin is one of the most robust open source projects out there. There’s also a cool video of code contributions over time.
Clustering analysis - A paper looks at the very obvious on-chain usage pattern called a peel-chain. This is a chain of payments with an obvious change output that’s much bigger than the spending output. Such chains give a lot of information, which can be collated to compromise security. The conclusion is that on-chain privacy is hard to achieve given current wallets. The authors suggest at the end that privacy-centric coins like ZCash and Monero also suffer from similar clustering analysis.
Lightning
ln.cash - This is a way to make a secret Bitcoin stash on Lightning. This can be put into a puzzle or a game or something else to give a real prize. I would love to see a coding contest have ln cash as a prize. Back in the old days we had to leave a private key with some money on it, this seems like a much better and more secure way to leave prizes.
LN Visualizer - The site is the entire public network visualized with nodes and channels. The site is wonderful to get a good idea of the network topology and could perhaps be used to identify where channels should be opened. I suspect the network topology will evolve over time and show certain behaviors as economic incentives come into play. Lightning routing is probably what mining looked like in 2011.
Zero Login - This is an LNURL based passwordless authentication protocol. I’ve always wondered why websites insist on passwords when public key cryptography has been available since the 1970’s. LNURL is a logical way to start some sort of challenge so the method makes a lot of sense. Passwords are so sucky that most websites these days use “login with Google” or “login with Facebook” giving these central entities even more power. The web needs to move towards standards like this lest the data be mined against us.
Pay to Comment - Like the last one, this is something the web should have had a long time ago, but hasn’t. It’s a simple WordPress plugin to make commenters pay a LN invoice first. I think even staking would be enough to prevent most obnoxious people from commenting. Comments on the internet are so low signal because they’re free. Adding cost makes all the sense in the world.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Much ado about inflation - Jerome Powell is complaining that wages are too high and this article argues that it’s corporate monopolies that are somehow responsible for inflation. The confused narrative around inflation that it’s something, anything, other than the gigantic increase in money supply the past year is a scapegoating of their own monetary excesses. There’s a false narrative being built around workers vs. corporations when it’s really the ridiculous policies of the last 2.5 years. It’s idiocy like this that makes me realize we’re still really early.
Finland’s Lightning Adoption - Roy Scheinfeld shows how Finland’s adoption of Lightning is taking off. The interesting part is how they’re thinking very long term on this idea. Too many Bitcoin merchant adoptions have gone by the wayside because they were short-term thinkers who wanted the temporary boost in sales. The correct way to build out merchant stuff is to play for the long-term like the LN-Kassa people are doing.
Stripe to Bitcoin - OpenNode is letting every merchant become a potential holder! I’ve been waiting for more of this use case from Strike, but it hasn’t taken off the way I thought it would. Integrating Bitcoin into the PoS cycle and allowing users to withdraw in Bitcoin even when paid in a fiat currency is massive buying pressure. Not that many merchants are looking to stack BTC and surely, their suppliers are expecting fiat money, so this is only for the real stackers. Still, it’s a good step.
Quick Hits
Ethereum Reorg - Ethereum 2.0 chain has experienced a 7-block reorg. Proof of stake is centralized.
WeWork Guy doing Web3 - He raised $70M for a Web3 startup. Bear market, what bear market?
Viral Hypocrisy - A song about how boyfriends shouldn’t be doing crypto is being released as an NFT 🤦.
House Probe - Apparently, a member of the House of Representatives promoted the “Let’s Go Brandon” coin which is a violation of the House ethics rules. I guess this is different than insider trading…
Fiat delenda est.