Bitcoin Tech Talk #359
Interesting Stuff
The Therapeutic Culture - This article is from someone on the left, decrying the constant validation that’s required of everyone and the self-serving lies of therapy. The post is ostensibly about psychiatry and the author comes off as skeptical of the incentives at play. The article is a dive into the world view of those that use therapy is a metaphysical anchor, and to say that it’s failed in that regard is an understatement. The author really wants reality to be reasserted but therapeutic culture simply doesn’t allow for it. I haven’t been to therapy, so I don’t have any personal experience, but I came away thinking that therapy is in many ways a fiat religion.
Learning to Draw - The article is about one artist’s quest to learn how to draw and how it was taught before the modern era. There used to be a progression that every art student went through to learn how to draw realistically. As the author points out, this more or less disappeared in the 20th century as “creative expression” became the bigger target. I suspect that the main reason for the diminishing of technical capacity was because abstract art rendered such skills unnecessary. This does make me wonder, what other educational resources and wisdom about learning have we lost due to modern laziness masquerading as “freedom?”
The Case for Memorization - Perhaps related to the last article, this is a lamentation on how memorization has been devalued in contemporary education. Yet as the article points out, the ability to look up information alone does not supplant memorizing. The ability to reason holistically is dependent on holding many things in mind at once and without memorization, there’s a limit to how much the mind can hold. I suspect so much of human ability is locked up because people don’t know how to memorize.
What I'm up to
Fiat Ruins Everything - My book is out and I’m doing a crowdfund! I’ve already reached the goal, but there are lots of goodies that you can get, including prints of the cover, a bulk pack of books, dinner in Amsterdam and even a meetup appearance! Your support is greatly appreciated and I hope to be providing you with more content in the future!
Unshackling the Golden Handcuffs - My talk and subsequent interview from BitBlockBoom are on YouTube! I make the case for getting out of the fiat system and practical ways to execute on that (hint: get rid of debt and start saving in Bitcoin first!) The interview afterwards was about some of the macroeconomic issues that we face today. Speaking of which, I’ll be releasing a new podcast of Bitcoin Fixes This for the first time in a year this week with Parker Lewis and Tuur Demeester!
Bitcoin Amsterdam - I will be doing a signing for my new book at this event in October and if you’re looking to go, you can use the code JIMMYSONG for 10% off! I’m also looking for European locations to visit between this conference and Plan B Forum in Lugano the week after and if you’re interested in having me at your meetup, please email me.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Shilling
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Bitcoin
Yet Another Covenant Proposal - reardencode has a proposal to essentially merge BIP118 (SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT) and BIP119 (OP_CTV) with his hybrid proposal which introduces three new opcodes: OP_TXHASH, OP_CHECKSIGFROMSTACK and OP_CHECKSIGFROMSTACKVERIFY. The idea is to get the APO and CTV camps to agree on something to move covenants forward as the proposal takes ideas from both. The main idea is that there are several hash modes that let you do the same things as both APO and CTV. It’s an interesting proposal, but whether it gets any traction is anyone’s guess.
BIP324 work underway - BIP324 is about a new protocol for the peer-to-peer network. As this does not affect consensus, it’s not a soft fork but a way to do the communication more securely and efficiently. Unlike the covenant stuff, this is not that controversial and a clear win in both privacy and resource consumption. That said, it’s at its beginning stages of implementation, after years of design discussions. But that’s normal for Bitcoin as improvements require a lot of review.
Beme - A developer that got burned on BlockFi is now creating his own wallet. What’s instructive in this post are the rationales for the various technology stack choices as it touches on everything. Single-sig wallets, multi-sig wallets and lightning wallets. He even discusses Nostr as a messaging layer for the communication that’s needed. This is an ambitious project and I hope the developer succeeds in integrating these very different modes of Bitcoin storage.
Lightning
Fake Lightning Channels - There was a DoS vulnerability in every major lightning implementation where channels would not be published on chain and consume a lot of a node’s resources. This was reported to the implementations and fixed in the 11/2022-1/2023 timeframe by each of the implementations. As Matt points out in the article, there seems to have been a prioritization of features rather than security for lightning implementations recently, and hopefully disclosures like this help put more emphasis on security going forward.
Testing Lightning at Scale - Lightning, being the decentralized network that it is, is difficult to set up and test. Each implementation has come up with their own custom setup to test various edge cases and this project aims to unify some of these to make testing easier. The project aims to create various signets where lightning applications can also use the test environment to mimic the real lightning network.
Nucleus - Payment channels can be annoying because they tie up funds that often don’t get used. This paper introduces a new protocol for a different type of lightning network that allows multi-peer channels, allowing for much better capital efficiency. The paper gets into a lot of different benefits including less strict liveness requirements, faster transactions and better liquidity. It’s also apparently compatible with the current lightning network. It’ll be interesting to see whether lightning software will implement these channels as we move forward.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Real Estate Reality - This article paints a very dreary picture of what’s currently happening in the real estate market. The current situation is that we’re in a lull before a cascade of forced selling. Too many employees linearly projected the extraordinary pandemic situation into the future and are getting burned on real estate deals that will end up losing them a lot of money. The article is well explained and honestly, it’s pretty scary for any home-owner with cash flow issues.
Tornado Cash Devs Charged - The US Justice department charged the developers of Tornado Cash with $1B in money laundering. The charges are especially serious as there’s evidence that North Koreans were using the service to launder stolen funds. The problem here is that anonymity in altcoins is quite difficult, even with decent cryptographic tools because many of these anonymity sets are simply too small. I expect devs to operate pseudonymously, at which point the centralized controllers of these altcoins will start getting targeted.
Consumers not able to Consume - Peter St. Onge shows through data that consumers are running out of money and credit to buy the things they’ve been buying. As he points out, this is just the beginning of the storm as the effects of the Fed’s policies haven’t even gotten that bad yet. Essentially, in a credit contraction, the lack of money starts breaking a lot of the stuff that worked under credit expansion. There’s a lot of pain to go and it’s not going to be avoided.
Quick Hits
Nostr Browser - Maybe Nostr really is becoming the decentralized web we always wanted…
IRS Reporting Requirement Proposal - The IRS may be requiring exchanges to provide info on specific trades soon.
Hayes on Institutional Investors - He theorizes that the banks know they’ll get raided, so they’re getting protection from “crypto.” I suspect that everything other than Bitcoin will prove to be a false hope.
Malware targeting crypto traders - A zero-day in WinRar was used to get access to 130 traders’ accounts and exploited to take their funds. Expect more such targeted malware in the future.
Fiat delenda est.