Bitcoin Tech Talk #353
Interesting Stuff
Van Halen M&Ms - You’ve probably heard this story before. Van Halen (a rock group) forces venues to get rid of brown M&Ms in their dressing room. In the 80’s it was seen as the excesses of a rocker culture that demanded ridiculous things. In the 90’s and 00’s, it was seen as a clever tactic to make sure that the venues they performed at read the contract. Here’s a third reading of what the M&M demands were for: marketing. In a fiat world, this story of why they demanded this is an insight into the various justifications, which ultimately only Van Halen knows.
Fake Work - The article looks into how rent-seeking fiat work proliferates. Instead of blaming the workers as being lazy, the article puts a lot more blame where it belongs, which is managers that are trying to advance in a fiat organization. The incentives of a fiat money are such that they prioritize status games and the article shows exactly how those games get played in tech companies to bloat headcount and create meaningless work. In other words, the rot is deeply embedded in the way these companies run. Some correction was not just needed, but healthy.
Rock/Paper/Scissors - As this article argues, rock/paper/scissors is way more interesting from a psychological perspective than is commonly believed. I did not know, for example, that rock is chosen more frequently as the first throw because it’s the laziest option. There’s also significant bias against selecting the same throw more than 3 times, though statistically, it should happen reasonably often. It’s one of those articles that makes me think that I can make a bot that can win more than 50% of the time against humans.
What I'm up to
Simply Bitcoin Podcast - I spoke on this podcast about Bitcoin, the dollar hegemony, and how things will play out once the dollar hegemony is over. I also talked a bit about the hyperinflation that many countries are experiencing and the causes of the phenomenon from a more practical dollar-hegemony perspective. Lastly, I reflected a bit on how truth is something that people crave and how it’s very difficult to go back to a diet of lies after that.
Unschooling Podcast - I did another podcast and this was an exploration into my experience traveling with my family this past year and what we did for education. I got into why we did the trip, our strategy for our kids’ education and my general impressions of what needs to be inculcated into my kids. We discussed what family culture is and why it’s so important.
Gatekeepers Article - My article for Bitcoin Magazine print edition is now available online. I wrote about the zombies that fiat money creates and how it’s unnaturally keeping unhealthy companies and organizations alive. Sadly, this has been most obvious in the various gatekeeping functions of these organizations as they’re more concerned with political correctness and satisfying bureaucrats than making good products and services.
Bitcoin Amsterdam 2023 - I’ll be speaking at the conference in Amsterdam in October. My book should be out by then so if you’re in Europe and want to support me, please come by!
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Shilling
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Bitcoin
Better than FROST? - A new paper about a different kind of signature algorithm that would allow for k-of-n multisig but without the drawbacks of FROST has dropped. The main requirement is Schnorr and the benefits are that certain types of attacks are mitigated, while optimizing for significant throughput. It’s the sort of thing when I see it, I immediately want to go code to understand. I encourage you to follow that instinct if you so have it.
Covenant Taxonomy - Rusty Russell has published the collection of different covenant proposals and gone through and categorized them. The main distinction is that there are ways to get covenants “through the back door” and it’s probably not desirable to enable covenants that way. There’s also the proposal to move to a different scripting system like Simplicity soon as the current pathways don’t seem that elegant.
Simplicity Building Blocks - Speaking of which, Kiara Bickers lays out what the Simplicity language is made of in this post. The main idea of simplicity is that it’s much simpler to analyze and create programs that provably do what you want without the headache of Turing completeness. The post is rather thorough, but you can get a good sense of what’s possible with this language. Will we get a soft fork for it in Bitcoin? Perhaps, but more likely, it’ll be used on Liquid first to see if it’s useful more generally.
Lightning
Phoenix Splicing Support - Phoenix now supports this very important feature to splice channels. This simplifies the channel management for the lightning wallet as it will now only need 1 channel per user. The update also adds a nice anonymizing submarine swap service as a natural extension. The architecture on this wallet looks to be a major upgrade over existing wallets and I suspect most wallets will move toward this.
Mutiny Wallet Beta - Mutiny is a web-based self-custodial lightning wallet. This is unlike most lightning wallets which require some sort of custom app (and app store approval) for whatever computing platform you happen to be on. The liquidity is managed through Voltage’s Flow 2.0 product, making this essentially a plug-and-play lightning wallet requiring no installs. Given that Lightning is used as mostly a cheap payment method, this architecture makes a lot of sense.
Matador - On the heels of Aperture from Lightning Labs, there’s now an open source project that lets you put a 402 wall on any API. For subscription services, this seems like a no-brainer way to create some arbitrage opportunities. If you have unlimited calls to the API, why not try to monetize it to people that want only sporadic access? Sure, terms and conditions likely don’t allow for this sort of thing, but I suspect there’s going to be people that try.
Node/Channel Migration Guide - nullcount has a guide on migrating a Lightning node to different hardware without closing all your channels. This is a significant barrier for most nodes that want to upgrade, and being able to freely switch between them would be a win. Of course, the much more useful thing would be to switch between different Lightning implementations as well as hardware, effectively switching wallets without channel closes. That’s not likely to happen soon, but we can always dream.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
SEC vs Ripple - Initial impressions were euphoria for the broader crypto market as XRP rallied 60% because news reports gave the impression that XRP is not a security. A closer reading of the ruling suggests that there’s a lot more to settle and that most of the lawsuit still needs to be fought over. Given how important this case is for Gensler’s bid for regulating altcoins, I don’t think the SEC will give up so easily as XRP Army hopes.
VC Funding Sucks - I’ve been saying this for a while, but this post goes into why it’s so damaging and how it’s really all a fiat money printing game gone crazy. The conventional wisdom under fiat money posits that VC money is necessary to grow, and in some sense, that’s correct, but for health, it’s not. As the post points out, profitability is the lifeblood of a business and killing or suppressing that is what VC money does.
Soft Secession - This is not a new idea, but one that’s been coming up more often as political divisiveness grows. The idea is that states can cooperate with other states and obviate the need for the federal government. This likely means blue states cooperate more with blue states and red with red. The main idea being that if states want to do something between themselves the federal government doesn’t have the authority to stop them. This would be an avenue of getting policy that certain groups favor.
Quick Hits
Mashinsky Arrested - It was only a matter of time and we’ve been expecting this for a while, but wow, the charges are worse than people thought.
Surveillance Sharing - As part of the Blackrock ETF application, regulators will be able to request all kinds of information in the name of preventing market manipulation.
BlackRock ETF up to be heard - The ETF itself is ready to be evaluated by the SEC and is scheduled to be on their docket. We should hear something very soon.
Nostr step-by-step - A guide for people that know nothing about Nostr but are curious.
BRICS gold currency - There continues to be more smoke around this fire and if they really do make gold the backing for their currency, there’s a lot more potential for de-dollarization sooner than we anticipate.
Fiat delenda est.