Bitcoin Tech Talk #363
Interesting Stuff
Liberal Teen Depression - Insightful article by a pretty influential progressive, Matthew Yglesias about an interesting finding that Liberal Teens are more depressed than Conservative ones by a significant amount. His contention is that there’s a doomerism among Liberals in general and a catastrophism that’s become a standard part of political discourse since the 90’s. He points out that there’s a cultivation of various groups’ fragility as a way to grab more power. As a result, what we’ve gotten is a particularly vulnerable group that feel they have little agency in making the future better. Sadly, the power dynamics of fiat money incentivize a powerlessness mentality and a catastrophism that removes hope.
Elite Colleges and Class - Apparently, a middle class student with the same SAT/ACT scores has a huge disadvantage compared to an upper-class student in getting into Ivy League level colleges. The authors of the paper conclude that more emphasis should be given to SAT/ACT scores and not less, given the importance for influential roles (NY Times reporter, senator, etc). What struck me was the very obvious ignoring of the race factor, particularly with respect to Asian-Americans. As a group, Asian-Americans are much more likely to be middle class, and I suspect that a lot of the gap can be explained on elite college admissions committees desire to limit their student population. Of course, most of the positions they talk about are rent-seeking institutions and I believe that the appeal of elite colleges will diminish as we move toward a sound-money economy.
What Killed Genius? - According to this rather unrefined blog post, the concept of intelligence. The main contention is that genius is what people that are deeply interested in a particular area do but that their confidence has been destroyed by the concept of intelligence, essentially making only high-IQ people qualified for such work. While I agree to some extent, I think this line of thought completely discounts the fiat-based gatekeeping that’s responsible for so much wasted talent. Credentialism is real and unfortunately, the path to get to most credentials require a lot of propaganda-swallowing and regurgitation. Is it any wonder we don’t really test new ideas in such an environment?
What I'm up to
Bitcoin Community - I talked to Matt Odell and Harry Sudock about the community they’re building in Nashville and the importance of face-to-face gatherings. We talked about the origin of Bitcoin Park, why they made it and how they’re focused on building the Bitcoin community through in-person events.
Stephan Livera Podcast - My podcast tour this week starts with the Stephan Livera podcast where I argued that people should get out of debt and use savings to consume, and not use debt. Mainly my argument centered around debt being leverage, creating more failure conditions and its immorality given that debt almost always expands the money supply.
Why Bitcoin Show - I made the argument against altcoins, talked about food and made the analogy to fiat money, incentives around family and much more. As with most industries, food has a few companies that control everything and are enormous and take short cuts.
Coach Carbon - I made some more basic arguments for Bitcoin, including explaining why Bitcoin is the only decentralized digital and scarce asset. I also talked a lot about family and the incentives that have been changed by fiat money.
CJ the Accountant - I talked to CJ from Black Bitcoin Billionaires, not only about the new book, but also Thank God for Bitcoin and Bitcoin and the American Dream. I discussed with him why these are separate books and the appeal of each including learning how most industries at this point are captured by 4-5 big companies.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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Bitcoin
UTXO Oracle - A very clever script to figure out the Bitcoin price using only on-chain data! The idea is that many of the outputs will send even dollar amounts and that should be enough information to determine the actual price. From reading the script, it looks like the way this is done is by creating a model (stencil in the code) for what the outputs would be at a certain BTC/USD price and seeing how well the actual outputs fit. What the script outputs is the best-fitting BTC/USD price. This is obviously game-able, but still a really clever way to get the price by observing on-chain behavior.
OP_VAULT demo - James O’Beirne has created a demo to show the reactive security model of covenants. This one uses his proposed OP_VAULT BIP345 and shows how if someone steals from an OP_VAULT based UTXO, that it can indeed be recovered. The purpose of the demo seems to be to show that you can have reactive security in Bitcoin by adding this feature. It remains to be seen whether the community will see this as enough of a win to activate a soft fork.
Spiderchain - It’s not exactly a sidechain, but it requires no consensus change and uses proof-of-stake to enable Ethereum-like VMs. As Shinobi points out, it’s a new set of incentives, though thankfully, it doesn’t create weird MEV that would change the calculation for miners. That said, there’s some element of trust involved in the incentives that are created for the staking entities, though there are bonds and such to incentivize good behavior. It’s a permissionless network and someone will try it, though I suspect that the gains are not high enough for most people to use it over any long period of time.
Lightning
Breez and Saitimoto - A developer wants to create an app that combines the various EV charging stations into a single app. Payment ends up being the bottleneck, so he makes one that’s based on Lightning, and voila! UX problems go away. The post itself is a bit of an advertisement for the Breez SDK, but points out what Lightning, and by extension, Bitcoin is good at. Non-KYC, non-bank compliance transfer of value. Most people aren’t thinking about this when they spend using credit cards, but as big data and AI make such spending creepier and creepier, this sort of opting out with LN, especially with better UX, will make headway.
iVPN - VPN services have been known to use Bitcoin as a way to get around keeping around user information. This service is taking things to the next level allowing for short-term VPNs paid with Lightning. Instead of having a permanent account like you would on Mullvad, you have a temporary account that you can pay for use for as little as 3 hours at a time. It would be better if you could customize the amount of time that you need, but the short-duration nature of these make tracking much more difficult. I hope more of these services pop up so we can see more privacy in a very unprivate web.
Budgeting - MutinyWallet has a new feature for Nostr which allows you to auto-approve zaps under a certain amount. As far as I know, this is the first instance of a feature like this in a Lightning Wallet and one that’s obviously useful for micropayments. Granted, Nostr is one of the only use cases where micropayments are continuous, but it’s sort of a chicken-egg thing. If we have wallets supporting these types of UX improvements, would more micropayment services exist?
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
OpenTimeStamps and Guatamala Elections - Apparently, OpenTimeStamps was used to record the various tally sheets for the election. The side that lost accused the side that won of fraud and showed some evidence which were shown to not be fraud by showing the timestamp. I love that cryptography is being applied to these trust systems, and I really hope that such techniques become more ubiquitous given the low trust environment that elections are now becoming. The press release from Simple Proof has the details on what it secured and how it did it.
Pay Me in Bitcoin - Parker Lewis makes the case for how the fabled method-of-payment/medium-of-exchange moment will arrive for Bitcoin. As he writes, this will happen when merchants recognize the store-of-value utility of Bitcoin and use the method-of-payment part as a way to add Bitcoin to their balance sheets. As he points out, the process itself will be gradual as merchants need to adopt Bitcoin as a store-of-value first and indeed, that process has already started. In other words, method-of-payment Bitcoiners, be patient.
Non-KYC Payments - Bull Bitcoin spells out exactly how to pay all kinds of bills in Canada in Bitcoin. Specifically, they show how up to $999.99 CAD of payments can be done without any identification documents. What’s incredibly frustrating for most people is the fact that a third party is getting all sorts of personal information and this is one of the ways in which that third-party snooping can be defeated. Especially in Canada where traditional financial rails were weaponized during the trucker protests, this option will increasingly gain traction.
Quick Hits
SBF’s parents - Turns out the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. His parents were in on the fraud.
Antminer S21 - A new generation of ASICs are now hitting the market, with up to 355 TH/s in hashing power.
Ordinals are a Disaster - They keep changing when they mean, which isn’t surprising given how centralized the whole thing was to begin with.
FASB Guidance - Explains why FASB guidance will make BTC a more desirable treasury asset.
OpenSats Roadmap - Board member Lisa Neigut explains the vision and how they plan to support the ecosystem.
Menendez Corruption - The guy who accused El Salvador of creating conditions for corruption w/Bitcoin is being accused of corruption himself. Maybe he was projecting.
Fiat delenda est.