Bitcoin Tech Talk #307
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What I've been working on
BitBlockBoom - I did a talk on “fiat delenda est” on Saturday, which talked about why the fiat attitude is our sworn enemy. I’ll be writing that into a written piece, perhaps as early as next week. I had a lot of fun doing this talk as it was a continuation of the talk from two years ago at BitBlockBoom, the Moral Case for Bitcoin. Unfortunately, the audio on that recording got messed up so it never got posted, but hopefully, this one will.
Bitcoin Times Launch - I was on hand to be on a panel for the Bitcoin Times launch. I was a contributor in edition 3 which had a written version of the talk from BitBlockBoom in 2020, the Moral Case for Bitcoin. The print magazine looks amazing and Aleks Svetski did a great job in creating that. The panel I was on isn’t online yet, but it did live-stream and hopefully will come online soon.
Hodlonaut Auction - I donated my hat for the defense of Hodlonaut against CSW and the hat fetched 15 million sats! The lawsuit is obviously baseless and for some weird reason lawfare seems to be CSW’s favorite attack against Bitcoiners. I am out of white straw hats at the moment, but I will be wearing a felt silverbelly hat for the foreseeable future.
What I'm up to
Baltic Honeybadger - I will be in Riga for this annual conference. It’s been 3 years since their last edition due to the pandemic, but if it’s anything like the previous edition, it should be pretty amazing. Last time, we sat and sang songs for a few hours in the cold.
New Book - I’m planning to compile my Bitcoin Magazine articles into a book for public consumption. The main topic would be how fiat money has ruined all sorts of things. This would be my second solo author effort and I’d love your feedback! Would you buy such a book? What other topics should I put in it? What would help you in your orange-pilling?
Comedy writing and satire - I’ve been doing a lot of experiments with satire as mockery is often much more effective than arguments. I’ve been playing with some Babylon Bee/Onion style headlines such as “Nic Carter’s puffy eyes totally not from breaking up with Bitcoin Maximalists,” “Hacker annoyed that his $20M exploit on Ethereum is not getting much attention,” and “Venture Capitalist skins puppies for the ultimate NFT.” I actually wanted to create a Twitter account to just do headlines like these but sadly, it’s already locked.
Tweet of the Week
What I’m Shilling
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Bitcoin
Seed Backup Test - Jameson Lopp did another round of seed backup hardware tests, including heat, crush and acid tests. The clear trend in the metal backup hardware is that they’re almost all single plate or double plate and a large number use punch holes. This is a far cry from even 3 years ago when many had lots of little parts that would cause data loss during heat or acid tests. Unsurprisingly, many of them did really well and the grade point average has gone up. The only problems seemed to be markings on the metal themselves. Kudos to Jameson and the manufacturers that are responding to the testing and making better products.
Taro and Bitcoin - The article is an argument for why Taro may not be as useful as you might think. The main reason is the negative feedback loop between Taro’s asset creation and the induced demand of Taro causing higher fees. There’s been a lot of hype about Taro, and this is a sobering reminder that ultimately, it’s not hype, but incentives that ultimately will determine the success or failure of the project. I’m becoming more convinced that stablecoins should be Chaumian banks and that using Bitcoin’s blockchain to issue stablecoins will lose to it.
Coin Selection - Figuring out UTXOs has always been difficult to do algorithmically and this post goes through exactly what was done in BDK to optimize coin selection. The main thing I got out of the article are the new terms, specifically around timing cost and creation cost. Of course, there are more optimizations than just the cost in fees, especially around privacy, but this is a good base from which to think about coin selection and the article is very helpful in ways to think about this complex topic.
Lightning
Validating Lightning Signer - The project’s idea is that instead of wallets trusting a node, there can be a way to validate what’s being signed. What’s being validated? Stuff like commitment transactions, routing amounts and channel closes. This is certainly a lot better than the blind signing that we’re used to and will allow for more trust models that may work better.
InSatGram - This is a lightning service where you can only see an image after you pay some amount. The concept is interesting, as a way to get money for useful images. I could see certain stock images get paid out this way and without the normal registration of credit cards and so on. There’s a lot of artistic assets that would benefit from something like this.
Wolf - NYDIG is sponsoring a Lightning-specific accelerator in New York City. Like most accelerators, the idea is to attract startups so that they can get funding and hopefully become investable. They’re offering some pretty sweet perks like a really nice office in a nice part of town and some guaranteed seed investment, but I really wonder if this model will produce a lot of good companies. I’ve seen a lot of accelerators and it’s the same story as the VC industry. The few at the top get all the good ones and everybody else fights over scraps. Still, I hope it helps more Lightning startups get some traction.
Setting up a CrowdFund - Voltage has an excellent tutorial for setting up a crowdfund on Lightning. They go through the main concerns like making sure there’s enough liquidity. Lightning adoption has been significant the past two years and I think someone that cracks the code on crowd funding will really create a lot more interesting crowd-funded projects going forward. Personally, I think this is the future and not the accelerator/VC funding model from the last story.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Self-Custody Pricing - The article is somewhat humorous and also a good reminder of why people don’t self-custody. The author’s opinion is that most people underprice self-custody and I agree. The reason is that people don’t value long-term holding nearly enough. The benefits in the future are way larger than the convenience now, but too many people think they’ll get bailed out somehow if these third parties fail.
The Case for More Energy Use - This op-ed argues that the more energy that Bitcoin miners use, the better it is for civilization. This argument is directly counter to the ESG narrative and is a good one to grasp. The main thrust of the argument is that private markets are much better than centralized governments in allocating resources, which is clearly true looking at any historical examples. Central control makes things more expensive and less efficient. For more like this, I recommend Alex Epstein’s Fossil Future.
Crypto in Argentina - The essay is about how Crypto is affecting Argentina, whose currency, the Peso, has lost most of its value in the past 27 years. Stablecoins and custodied solutions are the main ways Argentinians use crypto, which sets up a significant attack vector. Sadly, it’ll probably take the collapse of a stable coin or something similar for the people there to learn the value of self-custody.
Quick Hits
Eth Domains crippled - As Virgil Griffith is in prison, he was not able to renew the eth.link domain which is a single point of failure for the .eth domains so popular among the ETH crowd.
Cost of student loan forgiveness - Due to how incentives have worked, the forgiveness is going to be very expensive for taxpayers but really beneficial to future lawyers.
The Times Confuses Bitcoin with Alts - The article title mentions Bitcoin, but all their examples are alts. The conflation of the two is very annoying.
Circle playing games with USDC - It looks like USDC’s market cap is gamed by getting exchanges to hold it.
Fiat delenda est.