Bitcoin Tech Talk #296
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What I've been working on
Fiat Marriage - I wrote about how the No-Fault Divorce law debased marriage and removed the backing of fidelity in the same way that Nixon’s suspension of gold convertibility debased money. The current conception of marriage is way too focused on self-fulfillment and not enough on children, family and duty.
Alex Epstein Interview - Reading Alex’s book and talking with him on my podcast has totally redpilled me on fossil fuels. They are one of the greatest things for humanity and it’s crazy that they’ve been demonized so much. Green energy is an altcoin and fossil fuels are the real engine of civilization growth. Listen to this interview to learn more.
Bitcoin Today Coalition - I’ve been part of this 501c4 to educate regulators and lawmakers on Bitcoin. We’re raising money to push our mission. Please join us to advocate for Bitcoin in government.
What I'm up to
Chattanooga - I’m coming to Chattanooga next week to hang out and talk about Bitcoin. The place seems to be growing and I’m excited to be visiting. I keep hearing how Tennessee is a competitor to Texas, so I’ll be there to evaluate it for myself.
El Salvador Scholarship - I’ll be teaching my class in San Salvador on July 18-19. If you are going to be there and want a scholarship, please apply. We have a lot of different companies and individuals sponsoring this and if your organization wants to supply a scholarship or three, please reply to this newsletter.
Rene Girard - I’m reading a lot on mimetic desire and the need for scapegoats. I wish I had read this stuff years ago, but his work didn’t really cross my radar until the last year.
Tweet of the Week
What I’m Shilling
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Bitcoin
Contributing to Core - Ben Woosley describes the process of getting a pull request merged into core and the path that he took. The pull request took 4 years to get merged, which obviously requires a staggering amount of patience. Nursing the pull request through all the twists and turns is intimidating, but you can get a decent idea of why. I still have this PR on the btcd repository from 6 years ago, so I can relate.
BTC Hard Forks - Jameson Lopp looks at whether Bitcoin has actually hardforked. The definition of hard fork is a bit muddy and his post does a great job of explaining the nuances of each “hard fork” in Bitcoin. The only one that he classifies as a hard fork is the enabling of OP_NOP in 0.3.6, which if you ran a client before that would have split some 10 months after 0.3.6. As he says in the piece, most of what were claimed to be hard forks were actually not in any practical sense hard forks.
Privacy Proposals - Sethforprivacy has written down all the different privacy proposals on Bitcoin in a single place. This is a pretty large list and many of them have been featured in this newsletter, though not altogether in one place like this. I still think Submarine Swaps are the most used privacy tool, but that’s already on the network. The hope is that these tools will give different tradeoffs.
Bitcoin… as cash - This product uses NFC chips securely embedded in a piece of paper to give it a cash feel. The concept is interesting and is one of the most backwards compatible ways to get people to use Bitcoin. I have to admit, the cash looks beautiful and it makes me want one. The technical claims are a bit confusing because apparently, each person can rekey the cash for one of the multisig keys. How that will work and whether there’s a trusted third party in there is the big question.
Lightning
Lightning Labs Newsletter - Ryan Gentry covers all the different ecosystem happenings the past month. There are a lot of companies getting funded and releasing real products on Lightning. Not all of them will succeed, of course, but the people who say ignorant stuff like “there’s no development on Bitcoin” need to be tarred and feathered for being the liars that they are.
PeerSwap - Liquidity is always a big deal in Lightning and this is a self-hosted service to balance channels for better routing. This service is different than something like Lightning Loop which has a centralized coordinator. The balancing is done on a bilateral basis instead of looking specifically for inbound liquidity. This looks like a really nice tool to complement the running of routing nodes, which I expect will become bigger as businesses as Lightning grows.
Web5 - Taking some of the lessons from Lightning, the team at Block is creating a new way of doing the decentralized web in Web5. I’ve been saying for a while now that Lightning is the infrastructure from which we can have the web we’ve always wanted, but the team and Block is taking that and making it more robust. The key add here is the decentralized identifiers or DIDs which make interacting with the rest of the web a lot more standardized. Having Lightning available as a money layer gives this self-hosted platform a lot of potential.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Lummis/Gillibrand Bill - There’s a bipartisan bill under consideration by the US Senate. The bill fixes the broker language from the Infrastructure bill of last summer and there are disclosure requirements for the airdrops/lending/rehypothecation and so on. CFTC is the entity regulating exchanges and anything under $200 does not need to be reported to the IRS. The whole thing looks like it will bring a lot more sanity to the industry.
Egg Prices in USD vs BTC - The St. Louis Fed of all places writes about how much egg prices fluctuate in sats vs. the dollar. The post reads like the idiotic Keynesian economics from which it springs forth, focusing on a short enough time frame to make Bitcoin look bad. Egg Prices in Sats over the long term clearly show that holding Bitcoin is way better, but Keynesians can’t be bothered to look beyond a time frame of a year and a half.
Wyoming Bank sues Fed - Caitlin Long’s bank is suing the Fed for essentially keeping their banking license in limbo the past 19 months. By their own admission, they should have gotten back to them in 5-7 days. Clearly they are dragging their feet. This bank is what’s supposed to be the gateway to Bitcoin banking, but clearly, the Fed wants to stall.
Energy Consumption Paper - A paper looks at the energy consumption use of Bitcoin and concludes that on-chain transactions are somewhere between 1 and 5 times more efficient than other forms of payment. Lightning obviously does much better.
Quick Hits
Paypal Withdrawals - Paypal is finally allowing you to withdraw your BTC.
stETH/ETH Depegging - Basically, there is some serious cause for concern for ETH if the two depeg, which it’s starting to.
Coinbase Employees’ Letter - The company has been a terrible example of silicon valley excess and the complaints in the letter are indicative of what I have been hearing for years.
Celsius Frozen - You can’t withdraw from Celsius right now, leading to speculation that the coin is insolvent.
Tech workers moving out - Stack Overflow traffic data points to more tech workers going to cheaper, nicer places than SF or NYC.
CoinJoin change - Some ideas on what to do with the change outputs of a CoinJoin.
Fiat delenda est.