Bitcoin Tech Talk #323
What I've been working on
Bitcoin vs. Fiat Money - My talk from laBitConf is up, where I talk about fiat money, how it’s tyranny under the veneer of market forces and how it enslaves us. I contrast fiat money to Bitcoin, which is based on freedom, merit and more. The freedom we have in Bitcoin cannot be overstated. We are enslaved under fiat money and it’s an elaborate trick.
Why Bitcoin? - This short interview I did in Innsbruck is where I make the case that Bitcoin is the only thing that matters and why it will change everything. As usual, I do an altcoin rant and explain how terrible they are in taking Bitcoin’s good name and muddying it.
InfoMoney - Last podcast, this one I did on the FTX collapse and the contagion that we can expect. We also delved into CBDCs, legal tender laws, halving and macro-economic factors for central banks. I find that many of these news outlets that interview me are very favorable to Ethereum, and I find that I have to explain why Bitcoin is so different. Regulation is the big unknown at this point and I expect them to be very unfavorable fairly soon.
What I'm up to
Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt - I’ll be in these places over the next few weeks and I’m especially excited to be in Israel for Christmas season! As a Christian, this is a pilgrimage that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. If there are any particular places or tours you’d recommend, I’d love to hear about it! I’m also curious if there are easy ways for me to turn Bitcoin into local currency as many of these places have weird capital controls.
Year end review - The year end is always a good time to reflect and see what I have done and what I can do differently. I’m realizing one of the main ways in which I’m still in a fiat mindset is in how I treat money. I should care a lot more about quality and convenience than I currently do. You can take fiat out of a man, but not the man out of fiat.
Art of Rhetoric - I’m reading this ancient book and realizing that what we identify as memes are really forms of rhetoric, something identified from a couple thousand years ago. It’s a bit of a hard read, but I’m trying to be a more patient reader, so this is good for me. I would love book recommendations, but only if the books are older than 100 years!
Tweet of the Week
What I’m Shilling
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Bitcoin
Core 24.0.1 - Bitcoin Core client 24 is finally out as a last minute issue delayed the release until the point release. The main feature is implementation of full replace-by-fee, including inside the wallet. It’s still strange to me that a lot of miners don’t replace-by-fee on many transactions and forego fee revenue. Perhaps this release will make the transition to building RBF blocks easier.
TAPS - One of the really awesome things about FROST is that it’s a threshold signature, that is, you can get any k-of-n signers and as long as the signatures are valid, you can create a single signature that corresponds to a single key. Threshold signatures are nice, but if it fails, you will want to know who is misbehaving. There are threshold signatures where you can tell who’s misbehaving called accountable threshold signatures, but unfortunately, you also give away that information to the public. Enter TAPS, which lets you figure out who’s misbehaving, but only if you have a TAPS secret key. It’s an interesting development in cryptography and I’d love to see something like this get implemented in Bitcoin context, to see if such things might make sense.
Node Performance Tests - Jameson Lopp runs his annual node performance tests and the results aren’t too surprising. The libraries that use libsecp256k1 tend to be a lot faster (under 8 hours) and the others are over 2 days to sync. The biggest improvement is BTCD, which improved by 35%. Though (or because) I worked on the BTCD secp256k1 code, I can confidently say that they’d improve their performance significantly if they switched to libsecp256k1, which, by the way had a 0.2 release.
Lightning
Mash - Really exciting product for Replit fans, of which I am definitely one. You can set up a lightning payment app and write all the code in the Replit style, that is without any of the scaffolding needed for local development. Mash is an easy way to create lightning payment apps quickly and easily with all the examples and such available to copy, much like Replit. Development has come a long way and though the Replit way of doing things is a bit more centralized than I’d like, the speed of development on these things is really a huge game changer and hopefully will lead to more people being able to get new services running.
MiniBolt - This is more a guide than anything else and it shows you how to build a full Bitcoin node plus C-Lightning on anything that runs Debian. Of course, there are boxes that do this for you, but if you don’t trust those vendors, or if you just want to learn how to do everything yourself to learn, this is an excellent guide to setting absolutely everything up.
Channel Factory Optimization - Lightning has a new proposal for channel factories, that is a way to create lots of channels between many different parties with a relatively small number of on-chain transactions. The concept is exciting as the way more channels can be opened and the scalability of lightning goes up. The main problem is that when you have many parties in a single transaction, even one unresponsive party requires an uncooperative close, which can be expensive for everyone involved in terms of waiting. There are ways to kick the unresponsive parties out, but require a new op code such as OP_EVICT.
Free Payments to Africa - Strike has done something interesting in that they now allow dollar payments converted to local currency to be free for Africa. The way they do this is by using Lightning as the rail to make this work and given that Bitcoin has lots of liquidity, it makes the actual transfer much simpler than the traditional remittance process. What’s really remarkable about this process is that you get the real market rate and not the government-controlled one which many countries have. This is because the capital controls that many of these countries impose are completely bypassed. This could be a killer app for the many, many people out there that remit their money home.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Nostr - Twitter’s been under fire and there has been a lot of momentum towards Nostr lately. There’s no real platform here, but rather a protocol that you can implement to be a part of a decentralized network. I’m sure a lot of the dissatisfaction around Twitter both on the left and right are responsible for this, but the tech around Nostr is intriguing to say the least. Everyone runs their own server and we can get decentralization through individual control of data. Let’s hope this and other decentralized protocols gain traction as the big tech control looks more ominous and inevitable than ever.
0% Interest World View - A very thoughtful article on how our mental view of the world is heavily influenced by the Fed. The decade of the 2010’s was almost all driven by the Fed’s low interest monetary policy, meaning that there’s a lot of the world that has been shaped by it. In many ways our perception of reality has been skewed significantly as a result. How many suboptimal decisions will we make in the next decade due to what we thought was normal in the 2010’s?
Japan using Excess Power for BTC Mining - It’s still crazy to me that more electric companies aren’t doing this. There’s almost zero risk to these companies with the right partner and the upside is pretty high. The energy that’s not being used gets wasted, so using it for mining only makes sense. Japan is a mature energy market, but it seems that immature markets can use this outlet for their energy much more.
Quick Hits
SBF Arrested - He’s in a Bahamian prison and is surrendering himself to US extradition later today.
Binance next? - Lots of rumors going around, and a bank run seems inevitable.
Or DCG? - Again, more rumors, but the $1.5B they owe to Genesis is the big issue.
Egypt Gold - They’re buying Gold in Egypt, probably because they don’t think of Bitcoin that way yet.
Bitcoin Beach, South Africa - This is just one of a dozen such movements. There’s some real grassroots stuff going on with Lightning.
Fiat delenda est.