Bitcoin Tech Talk #341

Interesting Stuff

  1. Last Vestiges of Merit - The article is about the SATs and how they help identify talent. The fact that 80% of colleges no longer require them speaks to how they really want to determine who gets in, not based on merit, but based on politics. As readers of this newsletter probably know, that means that what they really want to do is add more rent-seeking cronyism. A fiat society will deprecate merit in favor of subjective criteria that can always be fudged.

  2. Predicting Revolution - An article on the pre-conditions of revolution and what sort of societal conditions need to exist before revolution foments. The main conditions seem to be related to income inequality, which naturally comes from rent-seeking and the argument in this article is that we seem to have the right pre-conditions in the US. I would say that this may not be the most accurate gauge as income inequality in 1900 meant people that were literally starving on the bottom whereas even the poorest in America are at risk of obesity.

  3. Suppliers to Customers - Interesting way to look at the way that the internet changed commerce. Previously, the big advantage companies had was in access to suppliers. For example, book publishers had access to authors and had a gate-keeping function. Companies won by controlling access to supply and having large distribution networks. Now that the internet has greatly reduced distribution costs, owning customers is now much more important. Hence, the winning formulas of Google, Facebook, etc where you are the product.

  4. Inflation Reduction Act - The article in the Economist is written as a way to show what opportunities now exist as a result of this legislation, but I kept reading it as a massive growth of the bureaucratic state and rent-seeking industries. The article surveys who is now “in demand” as a result of all the environmental subsidies in the bill and it’s an enormous list. What I found striking is that these are all people that add no value to civilization and are experts at compliance or getting on the good side of government regulators. $800B monetary expansion to fund all this…

What I'm up to

  1. Zion - I talked to Justin Rezvani about Bitcoin. Zion is the decentralized Facebook alternative and this interview was about introducing Bitcoin to his audience. A lot of the interview was talking about the basics of fiat money and why it’s evil. We also talked about thinking for yourself and taking initiative vs comfort in trusting authorities and being passive.

  2. Krypto Seoul Writeup - This is an article written by a CoinDesk Korea reporter about my appearance at the altcoin meetup where I trashed both fiat and altcoins. The article is in Korean, but there’s a video coming for those that don’t understand Korean. It was interesting since the reporter seemed to lean socialist when she asked a bit of a loaded question about how what I blame on rent-seeking within fiat is really attributable to capitalism. Anyway, this is my general strategy in dealing with altcoiners, which is to talk about the evils of fiat money and letting them make the obvious connections to altcoins which have very similar properties.

  3. Seoul, DMZ, etc - I’m staying Seoul another week and enjoying the many sites and museums. One place that I got to visit was the DMZ, which was absolutely unreal. I did not know this, but there’s a village within the DMZ, which is managed by the UN. The people there don’t pay any taxes and the men don’t have to serve in the Korean military, which other South Korean men all have to do. The more I study the Korean War, the more I’m convinced that UN intervention made things much more difficult.

Nostr Note of the Week

What I’m Shilling

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Bitcoin

  1. MuSig2 Explanation - Elle Mouton explains in detail what MuSig2 is, how it’s done and what it looks like in the context of Taproot. There are a lot of helpful diagrams, especially around Taproot and how partial signatures combine and it’s an excellent resource for those that want to implement this new feature that’s now possible as a result of Schnorr Signatures. I really hope more wallets will support this standard as the use case and savings are useful tradeoffs.

  2. Tapscript Library - This is a JS library for working with TapScript and all the little oddities around it. For programmers, this is an excellent way to check your work and make sure that what you code for Taproot corresponds to what this library produces. As I’ve mentioned in this newsletter, there are a bunch of things you have to learn, particularly around x-only keys, which are a giant pain. Libraries like this will hopefully help you understand these intricacies or get rid of the need to know them intimately by just using them.

  3. Blockstream Green - This is a blog post on how they designed the wallet which has very useful security features, like 2FA and using a Jade hardware wallet for private key storage. The really nice thing about how they designed the wallet is that you can essentially upgrade your security on the fly, instead of having to create a whole new wallet setup. You can have a single key setup for a small amount, but as you stack sats, you can add 2FA and eventually move to hardware-protected by deleting the private key. I really hope more wallets do this.

Lightning

  1. MutinyNet - Mutiny Wallet has launched its own signet with 30-second block times. The idea with this signet is that it would be much better for lightning testing as channels will confirm faster and testing punishment mechanisms, especially around long CSV/CLTV timeouts will be much easier. I really like this trend of custom testnets as the original testnet is very useful for some things, but is very impractical for a lot of other iterative testing, not to mention the coins are a bit of a pain to get. Signet testing FTW!

  2. Wavman - An interesting deep-dive into streaming music for sats and how Wavlake decided on the technical decisions they made. The feature is the ability to stream a song from their catalog on Nostr. There are protocol decisions that were made and the post explains why they made them. It’s a nice look into the development of a new feature on a public decentralized network and it gives insight into what you might want to consider when building on Lightning or Nostr.

  3. Watchtowers - Voltage has an excellent post about how Watchtowers work, including the rationale and mechanisms for various punishment transactions. More practically, they give resources on how to connect to watchtowers or even to run one yourself. These seem to me value-add services that may at some point combine with routing as the Lightning ecosystem grows.

Economics, Engineering, Etc.

  1. Hidden Repression and Principles of Economics - My friends Alex Gladstein and Saifedean Ammous have two wonderful new books that are sure to add to their respective collections. The first is an explanation of how the IMF actually works, specifically with respect to controlling the countries that they’re supposed to help. The second is an introduction to economics from first principles. These are both excellent resources to prime people into thinking about the brokenness of the current system.

  2. Riskless Interest Income - Encrypted Energy has a post arguing that Lightning routing is not the risk-free return holy grail of economics. I agree, mostly because I don’t think it’s riskless and that the concept itself is deeply flawed. Channel partners can at least try to cheat, and if you don’t react in time, you may lose some money. Similarly, your key has to stay online, meaning there’s more risk of private key loss. The article concludes that cold storage Bitcoin is the best way to minimize risk, which I think is correct.

  3. HexHoot - This is a library for ZKP authentication. The main idea here is to allow for decentralized authentication that doesn’t require some central database. It’s an interesting concept since authentication on almost everything requires a lot of server-client authentication. Allowing users to host their own data is a concept that’s been around a while, they’re trying to make it a building block of a decentralized web.

Quick Hits

Image

Fiat delenda est.

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