Bitcoin Tech Talk #314

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What I've been working on

1. Fiat Debases Children - My article for Bitcoin Magazine was about how people are having fewer children as a result of an increased dependency on government brought on by fiat money. The article is one of my most personal and I argue that children are the most important and meaningful achievement for everyone. It’s crazy that such an important part of continuing civilization has been debased so badly.

2. Altcoins are Immoral - I made mention of this podcast I did with a “crypto” influencer a month ago, but it really needs to be reposted. Altcoins, Web3, DeFi, Metaverse, etc are all scams to enrich the VC industrial complex. Too many people have gotten caught in the hype in large part due to the promises of these hucksters. If there’s any shred of rational thought in your friends that are into these scammy products, this is the one to share.

3. Naples - I made my way to the city to watch a Champion’s League match between Napoli and Ajax. I was honestly shocked at how passionate the fans were, though they were pretty mean to the visiting fans. I’m debating going to some football matches in South America when I make my way to Brazil and Argentina next month. Any tips would be appreciated.

What I'm up to

1. Activate - I’m teaching a class on HD wallets on October 25 and it’s free! You will need to have either read my book or taken my Programming Blockchain class to benefit from this. This class was originally supposed to be the first part of a new 2-day class I was going to offer called Programming Wallet, which I never finished. If you’re going to be managing keys in any way, this should be a practical introduction on how to program HD wallets.

2. Lugano PlanB Forum - I’ll be in Lugano next week to participate in this unusual city. They have already integrated Bitcoin in a lot of places like McDonald’s and I’ll be interested to see how easy it is to pay for things using Bitcoin. My talk will be on how fiat money ruins everything, which also happens to be the topic for my new book.

3. SatsConf - I’ll be in Sao Paolo for this lightning-centered conference in early November. This is a satellite conference to the Latin American Bitcoin conference where I’ll also be speaking. I haven’t been to this place in a few years, so I look forward to seeing how it’s changed.

Tweet of the Week

What I’m Shilling

• Books

  • Bitcoin and the American Dream

  • Thank God for Bitcoin

  • The Little Bitcoin Book

  • Programming Bitcoin

• Unchained Capital is a sponsor of this newsletter. I am an advisor and proud to be a part of a company that’s enhancing security for Bitcoin holders. If you need multisig, collaborative custody or bitcoin native financial services, learn more here.

Bitcoin

1. Jam - Jam is a nice UI for joinmarket, which lets you coinjoin in a decentralized way. A lot of people don’t understand the details around something as complex as coinjoin, so having an interface that helps users understand what they’re doing goes a long way. I would love to see some sort of interface on mobile as I suspect that this will be the far larger use case.

2. lnd/btcd bug - There was a showstopper bug in btcd which also affected lnd involving a crazy 998-of-999 multisig on taproot. The btcd client incorrectly rejected the block that contained this transaction. btcd thought that transactions with witnesses this large weren’t allowed. The Lightning Labs team managed to patch this pretty quickly, but this does bring up some important questions about testing for consensus. It’s not easy to test for every possibility and even with a well-written client like btcd, you can get bugs like this. For btcd/lnd users, the hotfixes are ready and should be upgraded.

3. BitcoinMRE - This is an interesting way to create a hardware wallet by repurposing MAUI Runtime Environment (MRE) phones. This was a standard type of OS environment in older Nokia phones and now there’s a Bitcoin wallet that you can use for it! The key is that these devices are relatively cheap ($15-$20), have a camera and keyboard. For multisig environments, this seems like a reasonable key holder as it supports PSBT. I hope more projects like this get worked on to make multisig more and more secure.

Lightning

1. LNSploit - This is a command-line lightning network explorer/vulnerability finder. I can imagine QA engineers for every LN company rejoicing. Tools like this that give you a better understanding of where the attack vectors might be and how to mitigate them are a godsend. The whole thing is built on LDK and interestingly, they’re using a different host for their code than the usual Github/Gitlab/SourceForge. Worth checking out if you do any LN development.

2. Lightning Node Insights - River has published a report of insights gleaned from running the 4th largest Lightning node in the world. The most interesting part of the report for me was the economic game theory around the lightning channels. For an exchange like River, the routing fees don’t make them much money compared to their trading. As a result, they entice more inbound reducing fees so they can get more business. This probably means that the topology of the Lightning Network will have a lot of entities like River as the main hubs, which bears out when looking at the biggest nodes by capacity on the Lightning Network.

3. RLS - River has another announcement in their River Lightning Service. The idea is to create an API for making Lightning applications as easy as possible. They seem to be competing with Strike and Lightning DevKit among others, but it’s always good to see more entrants as competition will make them better. It will be interesting to see who lines up with whom as you have a lot of choices for development environments.

Economics, Engineering, Etc.

1. Canadian Bitcoiners - The percentage of Canadians that own Bitcoin has jumped from 5% to 13% in 2021. That’s an increase of 2.4M people, a huge number. The country is set up to be orange-pilled massively over the next few years, which should change the political dialogue in the country. If Canada is a proxy for the US, we can expect Bitcoin to be a major issue going into 2024.

2. Resisting CBDCs - CBDCs are getting very popular with central banks as they allow for surveillance, control and economic incentives that central banks can’t deploy today. Resisting them will be a major project over the next few years. This article wasn’t written in your typical Bitcoin website, but in a more libertarian one, which is why they espouse gold and silver. I think it’ll become obvious that Bitcoin is the main alternative due to the non-physical nature and the battle will be Bitcoin vs CBDCs going forward.

3. Congressional Miner Inquiry - The other vector of attack is the energy FUD and it’s exclusively coming from the left. This is probably related to the item above in that they want to clear the way for CBDCs to come into play. Redistribution is so much easier when the unit of account is clearly visible to the powers-that-be. The tactic unfortunately puts Bitcoin a Republican issue at the moment, which might not be bad for the 2022 and maybe even 2024 cycle, but will be a problem on the other end when the pendulum inevitably swings back.

Quick Hits

• Eth and Google - You can Google ETH balances for any particular ETH address.

• Celsius Net Worth - You can look up who owns how much from the Celsius court filing.

• SHA-256 - A nice, step-by-step tutorial on implementing SHA256.

• Hydra Market Down - As seems to happen every couple years, the “hot” darknet market has been taken down by authorities.

Fiat delenda est.