Bitcoin Tech Talk #310
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What I've been working on
Somi Arian Podcast - She’s a philosopher and filmmaker who’s into NFTs, Metaverse and all the Web3 buzzwords, so we had a pretty frank conversation. I explained why all those things are excuses for tokens and how that hurts the most vulnerable people in the world. If you want to know why I’m such a Bitcoin Maximalist, listening to this conversation should give you a good idea.
Bitcoin Developer Panel - The panel I did with Peter, Lisa and Martin is up. We talked about the incentives for developers, why development is so much more rigorous in Core and why altcoins fail so often. Good video to watch if you want to understand how the culture of Bitcoin development is significantly different than every other project.
Meat Mafia Podcast - I spoke with the meat mafia about first principles and how I approach food and money. There’s a lot of interest among Bitcoiners about being a carnivore and a lot of carnivores that are interested in Bitcoin and we explored the commonality between the two. The conclusion we came to is that both these come out of first-principles thinking and taking responsibility for your own fate in both these areas.
What I'm up to
BTC22 - I was in Innsbruck for the largest German-speaking Bitcoin conference. Most of the content was in German and I was one of only 4 presentations that were in English. Still, even though I don’t speak the language, I could tell I was among my people. They love liberty, self-sovereignty and hate authoritarianism. Also, they’re really, really fun. Despite the language barrier, this was one of the most fun conferences I’ve been to.
New Book - I’ll be working for the next month on a book about how fiat has ruined so much through its cancerous growth. I’m hoping to set up some sort of crowd-funding on Lightning for the book and would love suggestions on which solutions exist. Please let me know of any experiences you may have had in doing crowd funding with Bitcoin by replying to this email.
Rome - My next destination is Rome to see and study some of the most marvelous things that humans have ever created. I’m told that most Bitcoiners are in Milan in Italy, but given that Rome’s history, I need to experience and see the brilliance for myself.
Tweet of the Week
What I’m Shilling
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Bitcoin
Bitcoin Inquisition - AJ Towns has proposed a way to evaluate potential soft forks through a fork of Bitcoin core called Bitcoin Inquisition. The main idea is that currently, it’s hard to evaluate soft fork proposals and what they enable without seeing them in action. We could see them on Signet or Testnet, but that requires the code be merged into Core first and they don’t get merged into core until there’s consensus. We would be able to merge them into Inquisition to allow demonstrations of various functions from a soft fork without actually merging them to Core first. It solves the chicken-egg problem and allows demonstration of various functions before merging.
Private Block Explorer - This is an interesting concept of keeping address lookups private. That is, the block explorer has no idea what address you looked up, despite providing the data. The way this is done is through homomorphic encryption. The paper has more details on exactly how this is done, but the main CS subject at play here is PIR, or Private Information Retrieval. This is a protocol that is something like a bloom filter with encryption.
Patoshi Mining Patterns - Jameson Lopp does a deep dive into the Patoshi coins, which are estimated to be around 1.1M BTC and what the pattern of mining was. The main conclusion from his deep dive is that the machines Patoshi used probably slept for 5 minutes after finding a block to give other miners a chance. There’s also some evidence that the machines used to mine were scaled back starting in late 2009.
FOSS Mining Firmware Overview - There have been a lot of advances on mining firmware in recent years as more people want to control their machines. The post goes through the many different considerations for different mining hardware firmware and the options that exist. Braiins OS is the most well known, but there are also two others called VNish and MSKMiner which have their own tradeoffs. If you want to get the most out of each miner, learning and optimizing this stuff is a must.
Lightning
Fax with LN - On the rare occasion that I need to send a fax, I am always annoyed not only that the recipient can’t just receive an email, but that there’s no easy bridge to fax from a computer. This is the solution for the outdated government offices that demand faxes and you can use Lightning to pay for it! There’s no KYC or anything, just a straight payment. Please make more services like this! For example, a new phone number that forwards to another number or something similar.
Invoice Parser - This very educational site lets you paste a Lightning invoice and see what all the elements mean. This is similar to a transaction parser that gives you an idea of all the different elements of a transaction, but with lightning invoices. Maybe it’s just me, but when I see something like this so clearly explain all the elements of a lightning invoice, it makes me want to write code to implement invoice parsing.
LN Report - LN Capital has a nice report that shows some interesting statistics on the Lightning Network. In particular, they focused on routing nodes and how much “work” they do on the network. They compose of 5.2% of all nodes on the network, but have 87% of the capacity! What this tells me is that most of the network act as consumer endpoints and I would expect the routers to have larger capacity while being a fewer percentage of nodes as the network develops.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Bitcoin Misinformation - Michael Saylor writes about all the different misinformation there is on Bitcoin out there. This letter feels very much like it’s meant to inform regulators and politicians about Bitcoin. Battling all the FUD out there on Bitcoin is a hard battle, especially since altcoins have put so much money and marketing into sowing confusion. I’m appreciative of this attempt, but I believe that a more comprehensive work is needed and a more sustained effort in clarifying these very issues.
Debunking the Whitehouse Report - Nic Carter does a good job debunking the various claims in the White Hose OSTP report. As Nic points out, the data they use is from highly partisan reports and use inflated numbers to make Bitcoin look bad. The report also makes any efforts by miners to reduce CO2 emissions very difficult with what he calls a “can’t win” approach. The conclusion of the report is a bunch of counterproductive recommendations using a lot of dumb assumptions.
Mining Concentration in the US - Shinobi argues in this editorial that there’s far too much hash power in the US at the moment. The main argument pushed forward is that there are some seriously bad things that can happen with 51% of the hash rate. I tend to not share in the doomsday prediction mostly because it’s very difficult to know how much hash rate you have and the supply of hash power is elastic. I also think the threat of a UASF off a malicious chain is enough to keep miners in line. That said, he makes some good points about being under the same jurisdiction.
Quick Hits
Do Kwon Arrest Warrant - I can’t see him avoiding jail time. I really think this is just the beginning.
SEC looking at ETH - The transition to Proof-of-Stake has triggered some regulator scrutiny.
Binance Accounting Error - In the very large attack surface of altcoins, this is probably one of the easier ones to guard against, and yet, $19M was lost.
CSW vs Hodlonaut - This case in Oslo shows just how much of a complete fraud CSW is.
A project I want to see - I would love to see some more satire and humor in this space and this looks like a good candidate.
Fiat delenda est.