Bitcoin Tech Talk #339
Interesting Stuff
Hoax of the Century - A long read on how information warfare is used by the US intelligence agencies against their own citizens. The article is deeply disturbing in that it essentially argues that the politicians have to abide by what the intelligence agencies want as a result of the power they have manipulating the public. Propaganda is insanely effective and it’s now a weapon used to perpetuate the power of those wielding it. I don’t think the author thought too much about how this intelligence agency industrial complex grew from fiat money, but this is one of the scarier outcomes.
Algorithmic Masters - This article asks some very important questions about categories and the power of being able to distinguish. As the article argues, traditional categorization was known to the people being categorized, which meant that they could counter it to some degree. The new age of algorithmic categorization by machine often means that we are blind to these categories that we are being put in. The predictability of the category is very valuable and can be used for control. As there’s good evidence that we don’t understand these algorithms, this is something we really need to pay attention to.
Preaching to the Remnant - An amazing read on the desire to reach the masses, which happens so much in democracy especially. As the article argues, if you’re interested in popularity, you have to aim at the masses, which often has a very low denominator, indeed. But aim at the Remnant, and you can focus instead on telling the truth. That prophetic voice lives in the Bitcoin Maximalist crowd and it is this tension between serving the Remnant vs serving the crowd which is the main conflict in our community.
What I'm up to
Fiat Ruins Everything - My book is near submission with many tens of thousands of words so far. Despite it being my fifth book, it’s the first where I’m both writing it myself and taking on a topic that’s more economics and ethics related than specifically technical. The last few weeks have been particularly fruitful and hopefully, it’s something that will capture the depth of debasement of our age.
Twitter Spaces - I’ll be on one April 10th around when this newsletter is released to talk about adoption in SE Asia and other stuff I’ve been up to. It’s been a while since I’ve done a spaces or any audio recording with Bitcoin Magazine, so this should be fun. Please join!
Seoul - I’ll be doing a couple of meetups in Seoul over the next couple weeks. If you’re in town, please come by and say hi! The first one, I’ll do a talk, the second will be mostly Q&A. If there are interesting Bitcoin related things in Seoul, I’d love to hear about it. Please contact me by replying to this email.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Shilling
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Bitcoin
Bitcoin Development Philosophy - Kalle Rosenbaum, of Grokking Bitcoin has written a comprehensive development philosophy book. It’s a thorough look at the various considerations that Bitcoin developers should have, laying out the framework by which their work will be judged. The book is thorough and covers some of the most important concepts and what they mean very practically in detail, including decentralization, open source, trustlessness and much more. If you plan to contribute to Bitcoin Core, this would not be a bad place to start before you get neck deep in the code.
Hard Wallet SIGHASH - ColdCard will now sign alternate SIGHASH types besides SIGHASH_ALL. I’m guessing SIGHASH_DEFAULT is supported by various hardware wallets for Taproot, but this is the first I’ve heard of hardware wallets signing SIGHASH_NONE or SIGHASH_SINGLE. I personally would not use this as there’s just a lot of ways to screw this up and I’m not sure what the UI is going to look like, but perhaps they’re preparing for a world with a different SIGHASH like ANYPREVOUT.
Bitcoin Developer Docs - This is about the most comprehensive non-source-code documentation of what’s in Bitcoin Core that I’ve seen. The site is very well laid out and quite thorough about the various technical aspects of Bitcoin while giving lots of concrete examples. There are even exercises to help people really see that they understand the various parts of the code. I don’t think it’s complete, but this is an excellent overview of the various modules of Bitcoin Core.
Hardware Wallet Gotchas - The folks at Shift Crypto (makers of BitBox) have a good list of flaws in hardware wallets. The list includes stuff like not validating change addresses, multisig co-signing address validation, large fees and so on. I suspect that the developers themselves had to fix all of these as BitBox was known at one point as a hardware wallet that would sign pretty much anything. A great list, not just for hardware, but a lot of software wallets as well.
Lightning
Alby Zaps on Amethyst - You can now link the Alby Lightning wallet to the Nostr Client Amethyst using something called Nostr Wallet Connect. The standard is defined in NIP-47, but the basic idea is that you can zap using Nostr without having to open another wallet app to do the actual zapping. It’s a way to do a one-click zapping experience, which, IMO is badly needed. These tiny UI tweaks make all the difference.
Atomic Multipath Payments - This is a new way to pay a large amount on Lightning, which is more private than multi-path payments. The idea is to do multiple separate payments, but add atomicity (all go through or none go through) to the set of payments. The atomicity is done by combining the hashes to essentially complete the payment. It’s a clever solution and more general than MPP. This way, you can get add privacy to MPP, which has a clearly identifiable hash that all paths share. This feature is available on LND 0.13
Price of Anarchy - Very interesting post on how to think about Lightning Routing. The basic concept is that there’s a price to be paid in being decentralized in that payments fail. The post analyzes the different ways in which routing can be completed and notices that the more centrally coordinated a payment is, the more likely the payment is to go through. So in a sense, there’s always a tradeoff between the likelihood of a payment going through and the privacy/decentralization of a payment. That’s what the author calls the price of anarchy. The natural question is, what percentage of the network is willing to pay that price?
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
The Case Against Reserve Currency - Maybe the exorbitant privilege is also an exorbitant curse? The argument made in the article is well worth reading and thinking about given that the US is not doing that great in manufacturing. The sad reality is that while being able to print money and export inflation sounds great, it ultimately slows down technological development because labor is cheaper everywhere else. I’ll be paying attention to J.D. Vance given his insight here.
Paxful Down - The peer-to-peer trading platform has suspended its services, probably due to this very messy court case. It’s not entirely clear what’s going on, but there’s a good chance we won’t see this marketplace again. Much like localbitcoins before it, a very useful peer-to-peer trading service seems to be shutting down. hodlhodl still continues to operate.
Texas Anti-Mining Bill - The bill is bitterly disappointing in a state that’s made so much progress as a Bitcoin friendly jurisdiction for miners, but the senate has already passed it. The real mystery is who’s behind the bill and who benefits? There’s some speculation that the people behind it are the fossil-fuel power plants that make windfalls during energy demand spikes, which Bitcoin mining clearly competes with.
Quick Hits
Whitepaper on Macs - Not sure who’s the person at Apple that did this, but the Bitcoin whitepaper is on every Mac since 2018 or so.
Mullvad Browser - Open source browser focused on privacy. As they explain, it’s a TOR browser without TOR.
Microstrategy still buying - Another 1045 BTC, bringing their total to 140k BTC. This is a truly large stack that very few can match. We’ll see if it has an affect on the market.
Satellite Syncing - You can now use ZeroSync and Blockstream satellite to sync your node using a satellite dish instead of an internet connection.
Fiat delenda est.