Bitcoin Tech Talk #309
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What I've been working on
Fiat delenda est - My article in Bitcoin Magazine is the same as the talk I gave in Riga. Fiat must be destroyed because it’s a giant lie that causes civilization to slowly degrade and ultimately collapse. I make the argument and show how politics penetrates everything and creates the victimhood Olympics that’s currently at play.
Carl Trueman - I talked to this very insightful author on how people view themselves and how that’s changed in the last 100 years. If you’re curious about why the politics of the last 3 years has just so radically shifted, he has an excellent explanation. There’s a way that we view ourselves that has shifted and has consequently been brought into the public sphere. His book Triumph of the Modern Self is the main thing we discuss.
Vienna - I thoroughly enjoyed the city and really like the vibe of the place. You can tell that a lot of capital has been invested into the city over many centuries and the results speak for themselves. It’s a gorgeous place with some incredible buildings. There’s gorgeous art around every corner and inside every building! I can understand why it was a city that produced the geniuses that it did at the early part of the 20th century.
What I'm up to
BTC22 - I’ll be in Innsbruck later this week for this conference where I’ll be doing a Q&A with Rahim Taghizadegan. I’ll also be running a workshop for learning HD wallet programming and will be signing some books! The conference is for German speakers, but there will be some English content. Please come by and say hello if you’re there!
Online learning - I’ve been a bit obsessed with this topic for the past few years and I’ve recorded a podcast with David Perell to talk about it. I’m hoping to get something out in the next week or two.
Salzburg and Innsbruck - I’m continuing my European travels in Salzburg and Innsbruck. If you have any suggestions for me, particularly with respect to Bitcoin, military history or money related museums, respond to this email!
Tweet of the Week
What I’m Shilling
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Bitcoin
Headless Signers - Here is an interesting proposal to separate the user interface from the actual signing mechanism. The main idea is to make the signing open source and let each user choose their own user interface. This would mean you could have different services as key providers for your multisig setup. You could, for instance, have 3 of 5 keys and give one each to Casa and Unchained. That way, you could suffer losses of 2 keys and still be able to recover. There’s also the possibility that you can rotate keys easier with something like FROST.
Mechanics of Mining Pools - If you’ve ever tried to learn about Bitcoin Mining, you quickly learned that it’s a pretty difficult and hard to manage business. The article breaks down all the different terms, how the payouts work and how blocks are constructed. I generally discourage people from going into mining as the people that are good at it are really good at it and most plebs don’t have a chance, but in case you have some interesting idea or edge that you can bring to market, this is a good primer.
Paper on Securing PoS with PoW - The paper is an interesting way to checkpoint proof-of-stake blocks by embedding them to proof-of-work. This is not exactly merge-mining, but has some of the same characteristics. The fact that this is even thought about proves how insecure proof-of-stake is and the paper is essentially proposing that every chain be a sub-chain of Bitcoin. That’s honestly not a bad idea as other protocols, such as DID use Bitcoin in the same conceptual way.
HRF Grants - $325,000 went out to many different projects from HRF in partnership with Strike. Congrats to all the recipients, including BTCPay, Fedimint and core developer Jon Atack.
Lightning
Dall-E 2 LN - Generate some images for 1000 sats using a text prompt. I think all APIs should be this way and it’s a lot of fun to play with. Why pay for stock images when you can pay 1000 sats (or a bit more) to get something like what you’re looking for. Someone is going to be creating a whole comic or video game using an engine like this at some point.
ln-dashboard - This is a summer of Bitcoin project that makes something useful for routing node operators. There’s a bunch of useful data for node operators that are displayed in an easy-to-digest user interface. The main scheme is to use a rune to authenticate against your remote lightning node and get the data to display the most important statistics about your node.
UX review of Kraken’s LN - I always appreciate reviews like this which give a different perspective than mere functionality. UX people have a skillset that too many programmers dismiss, but they are in many ways, programmers of human interaction. They have insight into how people think and I think any lightning programmer would get a lot out of a video like this.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Bitcoin and Morals - Tomer Strolight asks some pretty deep spiritual questions as a result of Bitcoin. As he points out, the choices that we make regarding Bitcoin inevitably lead to questions of value, morals and even spiritual matters. His interpretation of Satoshi’s stash (~1M BTC) is an interesting one and worth pondering. You cannot stop examining Bitcoin after looking at its technical goodness. There’s an economic, and yes, spiritual dimension as well.
Mining and Energy - The report is behind an email wall, but the main points are ones well worth repeating. Bitcoin mining helps stabilize the grid, adds utility at the margins and makes energy production in general more profitable. The narrative that energy use is bad must be challenged as it’s anti-civilization. This report gently nudges people in that direction, but I prefer the more forceful work of Alex Epstein.
Coinbase funding TornadoCash lawsuit - In a rather surprising move, Coinbase will be funding a lawsuit against the Department of Justice in their sanctioning of TornadoCash. The statement reads a bit like they’ve been edited by a bunch of lawyers, but the main point is that they want to send a message that government entities are not going to get cheap wins at the expense of this industry. This is increasingly the case with any sort of legal battle as money determines the winner way more often than it should. Given the large amount of money in altcoins, I expect this to mean that many projects will engage in lawfare than go away quietly.
Quick Hits
ISIS and NFTs - A story that has to be read to be believed. They’re using NFTs to “spread terror.”
Binance exclusive-stablecoin - Binance is using their market position to impose its stablecoin on the market.
Self-hosted Email is dead - There are a few gatekeepers that make it hard to deliver email. Please, someone make something that uses Lightning and can be self-hosted!
MicroStrategy $500M raise - They’re uncovering every form of traditional fiat leverage here. They’re selling more stock so they can buy more Bitcoin.
Fiat delenda est.