Bitcoin Tech Talk #333

Interesting Stuff

1. Programming Culture - This is a wonderful read about how engineering cultures at large companies are badly incentivized. Many of the practices and results in the article are things I’ve directly experienced as a programmer and one of the points of the article is how small companies have an advantage because there’s so much less process. I touched on this in my article in Bitcoin Magazine (see below). The main thing I got out of the article is that at a certain largeness, politics and status games are inevitable and they directly affect productivity and efficiency.

2. Defending Colonialism - This article is timely since I’m in the middle of reading the book that he’s basing the article on, Modern Times. The article makes the case that colonialism was much more a burden keeping disparate colonies in peace and that post-colonial countries have been much worse in comparison. While I agree with the assessment, many of the post-colonial governments were sadly influenced by Marxism, which led to a significant amount of suffering. I can tell you that the book gave me a whole new perspective on Ghandi, one I hadn’t heard before and worth pondering.

3. Economics of Glory - My co-author Jordan Bush has written an interesting analysis of the story in Genesis of Abraham’s interactions with the King of Sodom. The main point he makes is that the one who can afford to be generous and give is the one that gets the glory. There’s a communal reputation that is earned when you give to someone else, which is unfortunately the rational calculation that many billionaires like Bill Gates make to enhance their reputations. The whole thing is worth reading, as it sheds light on how much of what we think of as religious is really more economic than we think.

What I'm up to

1. Company Level Incentives - My article for Bitcoin Magazine continues the series on how fiat corrupts incentives. This time, we look at company-level incentives and how they’re unnaturally large and are very zombie-like as a result of fiat money. Unsurprisingly, this has meant that we, too, become zombie-like as we go into these soulless corporations running on borrowed money.

2. Real Vision Interview - I went on Real Vision to talk about Bitcoin, Nostr and a bunch of other stuff. Their founder tends to be very altcoin-centric, so it was my intention to try to orange pill these people. One of the thoughts for me coming out of this interview is that this line about how Nostr is to Twitter what Bitcoin is to fiat, including altcoins, is one that will get more powerful as Nostr gets bigger.

3. Changi, Siem Reap and Kuala Lumpur - I’m in Chennai right now, but will be traveling to these places over the next couple of weeks. If you’re in any of these places and have suggestions or a Bitcoin meetup that is happening, please let me know!

Nostr Note 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. TX Pusher - This is an interesting service that lets you push a transaction to miner’s mempools based on certain triggering events. The main triggers are price, price change in the past 24 hours, current fees and a certain block height. The idea would be to send Bitcoins to an exchange if the price hits a certain threshold or to consolidate UTXOs if the fees are below a certain threshold. It’s a form of smart contract programming, though it’s clearly dependent on a centralized service to push. That said, there’s no reason why a tool like this couldn’t be built into a node-as-a-service provider’s software suite.

2. eCash by Example - While using lightning has a lot of benefits, the post here makes the case that for truly private Bitcoin transactions, Chaumian eCash is much better. The post is great because it shows how a Bitcoin eCash system works with screenshots and does so on the Nostr network. It’s a little clunky right now and isn’t anything like zapping on Nostr, but instead sends eCash tokens via Nostr DM, but the potential for private payments here is enormous.

3. Guide for African Devs - Veronica Emiola has published a guide to getting started in Bitcoin development for African developers. The post goes through the pre-requisites, the reasons why and how they should get started. While the post is obviously geared toward African developers, I think the reasons are sound for all developers. The low barrier to entry is the main key. You don’t need permission and building something valuable will be rewarded without some third party getting in the middle of your income flow.

4. Marco Falke resigns - The long time maintainer of Bitcoin Core has decided to move on from his role as a maintainer. He merged my first commit to Bitcoin Core, so I have a lot of gratitude for his service to Bitcoin. I wish him luck in his future endeavors.

5. HRF donates 5 Billion Sats - Congrats to the many people that have gotten grants from HRF to continue their Bitcoin work!

Lightning

1. Flow 2.0 - Voltage has released a new liquidity tool which lets merchants get instant liquidity. They are calling this Just-in-Time liquidity, which apparently works by opening zero-conf channels with the right providers. The main idea seems to be to expand channel capacity with known counterparties quickly and settle on-chain a little bit later. In that way, Flow 2.0 is a bit more like how normal banking processes work where settlement is delayed a bit to allow transaction flow right now.

2. BlueWallet Sunset - It looks like the popular custodial Lightning Wallet is going away. If you have any funds on the service, get them out ASAP. I’ve found that the only path to getting the funds out is through Strike and only $10 at a time. In a sense, this is good as more people will switch to self-custodied lightning wallets like Breez and Nunchuk and many others. On the other hand, I suspect a lot of people will be stuck with not being able to get their money back because there won’t be an easy path to get the money out of BlueWallet.

3. Zaplife - This is a website that keeps track of lightning zaps on Nostr. What’s really interesting about this is that this is an independent organic version of what Twitter, Facebook and others do with their main feed. Instead of a one-size-fits-all algorithm, we can have different ways to surface what’s interesting because all the data is public. Obviously, voting with your wallet has a different feel than voting with a like and I appreciate that this lets me see that perspective. I can imagine a lot of different kinds of global feeds based on different metrics and I can’t wait to see what people come up with.

Economics, Engineering, Etc.

1. Monstr - This is a private messaging app that’s built on Nostr. By not having servers and whatnot, we won’t get scammy coins like on Telegram or Signal and won’t have to give up a lot of privacy like on WhatsApp or SnapChat. I’m not sure if this will turn out much more useful than Nostr Direct Messages, but I do appreciate people trying new things in this decentralized environment.

2. Mining Hosting Provider Economics - I’m not a fan of hosted mining services, but this post is a great explanation of the economics involved in providing the power and infrastructure, but not the actual mining equipment for other people. The main argument is that you can separate concerns more easily if one party takes care of more technical things like electricity sourcing, heat mitigation and service personnel and another party takes care of mining hardware purchasing, pool selection and marketing.

3. Blockstream Research Division - Blockstream has formalized their contribution to open source Bitcoin development by creating a whole division that’s dedicated to products and platforms that benefit the ecosystem. I honestly wish more companies would do something like this as organizations like this are the natural homes for open source developers. Instead of having to rely so much on grants which have to be renewed every 6 months or a year, why not provide an environment where people can contribute to the Bitcoin ecosystem? The main argument for making these would be that the growth of Bitcoin helps the company that houses them, so these would have to be very aligned with Bitcoin to begin with. Let’s hope for more of these initiatives from Bitcoin companies.

Quick Hits

• North Korea’s $1.7B Haul - Hackers from the isolated country apparently did very well last year.

• NIP-05 Support from LND - Now you can host your own lnd address and hook it up to Nostr! If that sounds too complicated, do it on github pages!

• SBF in deep trouble - The guy apparently broke more rules than Jeffrey Epstein’s enablers. The fact that it went on for as long as it did will likely trigger some regulation.

• Altcoin gets reorged - Polygon gets a 157-block reorg. I used to post a lot more of these stories, but it’s just sad at this point.

Fiat delenda est.