Bitcoin Tech Talk #332

Interesting Stuff

  1. Discipline »> Motivation - A nice article on how looking for motivation is the exact wrong way to get something done. Looking for motivation to do something is a form of wishful thinking, that if somehow, some genie could make you feel like doing something that it would be easy. All things worth doing require some level of doing something you don’t like and the degree to which you look for wishful thinking solutions is the degree to which you’re immature.

  2. Attention Economy of Science - Science hasn’t made much progress because the incentives for scientists are awful. There are many incentives to exaggerate and few incentives to course correct. The impression that I got from the article is that the most “successful” scientists in the current system are the ones that are the best at marketing themselves. That sounds to me like what politicians do, not scientists, and unsurprisingly, politics seems to have taken over much of science. I don’t think the author has thought much about fiat money and its role in centralizing funding and requiring satisfaction of the money printers rather than the truth.

  3. They Hate Cars - An article on the ever shrinking engine of cars and how they’re getting more and more regulated, perhaps even to extinction. It reads a bit conspiratorially, but you have to admit that there is a “greening” of the car industry that has little to do with efficiency. Sadly, the car manufacturers are centralized entities and fairly easy to regulate. Hence, why cars continue to get more expensive. Regulatory inflation is real and it is regressive for civilization.

What I'm up to

  1. Nostr - I swear, this thing is interfering with my life. Every time I think about it, I keep wanting to build something new to take advantage of its lack of central controller. My thought right now is that relays may end up like gmail, where a decentralized protocol gets captured by a centralized entity that dresses it up with nice UI and convenience. That said, there’s so much to like about the fact that the network you build on there is really yours! After I finish my book, I’m going to have to build something with this thing.

  2. Lightning Conference Vietnam - I will be speaking at LightningCon Vietnam on March 23-24. This should be an interesting conference as there hasn’t been a Lightning conference in this region of the world. Tickets are very reasonably priced and it should be a fun time.

  3. Dubai and Chennai - I’ll be in Dubai this week and will have a meetup with some Bitcoiners on Tuesday 2/21. If you’re in the area and want an invite, please reply to this email. I’m going to South India after that. I’m not sure if there’s a big Bitcoin scene there, but if you have recommendations, I would love to hear them!

Tweet of the Week

This may have to get renamed Nostr Note of the Week.

What I’m Shilling

  • 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. OP_VAULT BIP - James O’Beirne has published the spec for his OP_VAULT proposal. The whole thing makes for good reading as it gives nice detail on the use cases that you can expect, like being able to mitigate against the $5 wrench attack. The main benefit to this approach is that there’s no need to precompute transactions and that the explicit op code makes clear what functionality it’s implenting. I like this approach the best of the various covenant proposals as there’s more clarity around what’s happening for the coder.

  2. Nonce Reuse Analysis - Ishaana has embarked on an interesting historical analysis of nonce reuse in Bitcoin. Of course, reusing nonces is a terrible practica and can leak your private key, which is why it’s an interesting analysis. Just how many clueless devs reused nonces? The data indicate that there’s a non-trivial number of them. I’m looking forward to further parts of this series, which should indicate whether there are still people rolling their own crypto.

  3. Bitcoin Technical Document Search - There’s now a search engine for Bitcoin developers! It looks like a combination of using the bitcoin-dev mailing list and answers from bitcoin.stackexchange.com, but hopefully will include other high quality documentation, perhaps even from the source code itself. Bitcoin documentation has come a long way from the days when you had to figure stuff out from c++ source code.

  4. Learn Miniscript - The developers of BitBox02 have put together a post on the how and why around miniscript. As they point out, working with Script directly is difficult and hard to reason about and this is why miniscript was created. The compression of different paths into an easy to understand language is much easier to compose. Taproot obviously makes a lot of this much easier, but the language is still a much easier thing to learn than the weird Script constructs needed.

Lightning

  1. Highly Available Flag - Joost Jager has a proposal for a flag to indicate that a channel is highly available. The main idea is for channels to make certain claims for routing purposes, but also for nodes to use this in a calculation of which route to take. The route may be chosen more often, but the penalties would also be more severe. It’s an interesting way to make routing less prone to failure and to add more information for evaluation.

  2. Consultant report on Lightning - Interesting report from some business-y types on the Lightning Network. The report is pretty basic, but is interesting for how it’s geared toward executives of companies. The topics covered are what any Bitcoin Maximalist might list, including why it’s important and how it’s going to change in the future. The report is pretty bullish and is a reasonable one to send to your normie friends in corporate settings.

  3. Lightning Address Using CLN - The ostensible reason for this post is that the author wanted to create a Lightning Address on his domain, but in going through what he did, you learn a lot about how Lightning addresses work under the hood, including the invoice negotiation and much more. I would really like this functionality from one of the node-in-a-box vendors, including buying a domain with Bitcoin from NameCheap or something similar. In the meantime, go through this guide to learn how to set up a Lightning Address.

Economics, Engineering, Etc.

  1. Full Potential for Bitcoin - Croesus argues that the full potential for Bitcoin is replacing the store-of-value premium for collectibles, stock market, real estate, bonds and other currencies. The argument is made in the context of figuring out its eventual price (he thinks $10M/btc), but I think it’s more interesting for what Bitcoin will potentially replace. In a sense, all of these are terrible stores of value and the lack of functionality of fiat currencies is what causes all of the asset inflation. Sound money destroys inflation, especially asset inflation.

  2. Guide for mobile phone privacy - Mobile phone privacy is a tough nut to crack, largely because we depend on it so much and even a little data being given to it can totally compromise who we are and what we’re doing. The authors of this book have laid out a very thorough way of having a mobile phone that doesn’t compromise your privacy. This is not for the faint of heart, and I really hope there will be a more turn-key solution for those that want this.

  3. Binance Stablecoin in Trouble - Paxos was ordered by the SEC to stop minting Binance USD and charged by the SEC. This has led to a whole host of secondary effects, like $2.3B of Binance’s reserves being lost, and a lot of the money flowing out of the exchange. They’ve been taking a lot of punches recently and it doesn’t seem like it’ll stop. Will a big blowup here bring back a bear market? Remember, it was CZ’s exposure of FTX that caused its blowup and bear market. Something similar could happen if Binance went down.

Quick Hits

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  • WSJ on Core Maintainers - WSJ joins the FUD parade on how maintainers are basically “shadowy supercoders” a la Elizabeth Warren.

  • Zion v2 Launched - The decentralized replacement for Facebook now uses the Web5 framework from the folks at Spiral.

  • PGP key as BTC addr - You can do this because GPG v2 supports elliptic curve keypairs. Surprised no one has done this for Nostr.

  • Bitcoin Talent - A recruiting firm that’s focused on Bitcoin-only businesses.

  • Ben’s Bytes - Ben Carman has a new blog about technical things in Bitcoin that he finds interesting.

Fiat delenda est.

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