Bitcoin Tech Talk #367

Interesting Stuff

  1. Global Liberal Order - The article makes the case that the global liberal order has been an unqualified success the last 75 years or so and it’s hard to argue that, given the advance in life expectancy and so on. What strikes me is that so much of the benefits are attributed to a liberal order, when it seems much more about technology. Life expectancy improved in large part because China improved, and that’s not a liberal democracy. I also suspect that much of the benefit was gained at the expense of the future.

  2. Seeing Death - The point of the article is to show that there is a natural human fascination not just to think about, but to actively look at and be entertained. The author’s lament is that it should be disturbing and while it is, there’s almost an animal desire to watch. He argues that this is an indicator of the decline of civilization itself and that we really are regressing. I suspect that there’s a propaganda angle which is missed because we tend to react so strongly to visual images, particularly moving ones. Regardless the signs of societal fiat decay seem to be everywhere.

  3. AI Losing Money - An interesting perspective on the economics of AI. Apparently, Microsoft, OpenAI and Github are all losing money on it, as the computing power necessary to run these services is way more than what they charge the users. This is, of course, a common fiat strategy of getting users now and upselling them later, but it’s not clear whether any of these places can keep their lead. As costs for these services come down, it does for the home user and competitors as well, which ultimately looks like a race to the bottom. That may be the real reason behind the push for regulation in this area.

What I'm up to

  1. Jurisdictional Arbitrage - I talked to Stephan Livera and Simon from Mempool about finding a jurisdiction to work and do business and how they chose the place that they live. We discussed how to think about the entire problem and the concerns that led them to relocate. Finding community and finding the right work environments and best handling taxes were talked about as well.

  2. Panel from Viareggio - We talked about training developers and how the fiat mentality has disincentivized building. There was a good amount of talk about gameification, talking about how to help people stop LARPing. There’s a good need to not debase the product and not market too much as well.

  3. Kitco News - I talked to this popular channel to talk about my book. We talked about rent-seeking, time preference, morality and much, much more. I argued that the safety nets of government are causing a debasement of other relationships. Lastly, I made the argument that the ETF is not going to ruin Bitcoin because of the ability to take delivery.

  4. Sovereign Reset - I talked on this podcast to talk about family and liberal cities and the flipping of the demographics of the Republican and Democrat parties. We also touched on real estate and the weird reality of cities which are getting really unsafe on purpose, perhaps to lower the prices of these places. I talked about politicians loving inflation because of the plausible deniability they get.

Nostr Note of the Week

What I’m Promoting

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Bitcoin

  1. TapLeaf Circuits - BitVM already has some very basic programs written by SuperTestnet that you can play with in this playground. The whole thing is a proof of concept for more general programs that will inevitably come to pass here. I like how the burden is on the developers to prove out a use case rather than arguing ad nauseum about a soft fork. SuperTestnet has shown some proof of work and the usage of things like what he’s set up will show the demand for these things.

  2. Alternate BitVM Construction - Zman has a clever construction of BitVM which uses ECC points rather than hashes, which should obviate the need for NAND gates which are the basis of BitVM. He calls this a Scriptless Scripts version of BitVM and it’s an interesting tradeoff between the operations needed to be executed versus doing ECC math. It’s not entirely clear what the benefits and drawbacks would be, but it is an alternate construction to one of the most interesting proposals in years.

  3. UTXO backup - Instead of building your UTXO state from scratch, this tool will let you import them by backing up the leveldb file that contains them. It can be a useful thing to not have to sync everything from the beginning should something go wrong with your node.

Lightning

PANIC MEMES image memes at relatably.com

  1. Mempool Problem - Antoine Riard has disclosed a vulnerability with respect to HTLC timeouts that he discovered. He’s stopping development on lightning as a result of this bug and seems to be taking this very seriously. That said, the actual bug/issue isn’t entirely clear to most people looking at it and it looks like Matt Moorehouse has a mitigation. This is a reminder that we’re still early and that there are complex things still to be worked out.

  2. Taproot Assets - The artist formerly known as Taro has launched on mainnet, and it looks like the first use case will be some sort of dollar backed stablecoin. Atomic swaps have been something we’ve been looking forward to in Lightning for a long time and the combination should allow for some sort of decentralized exchange. One of the most annoying arguments by altcoiners is equating altcoins with backed stablecoins and this will hopefully put a lot of that to bed. I, for one, do not like having to download who-knows-what’s-in-there altcoin wallets to transact with Tether. We’re getting close to a world where no one will have to.

  3. Bleskomat - This is a cool lightning ATM that you can either buy or make yourself. The idea is to exchange cash for lightning payments in one direction or the other. ATM prices have come down over the years and it honestly makes me wonder if this is the future of cash, as a bridge to lightning and back. I know I could certainly use such devices whenever I enter or leave a country!

Economics, Engineering, Etc.

  1. Jimmy Zhong - This very early adopter of Bitcoin (as early as 2009 apparently was also the guy that stole 50,000 BTC from the Silk Road. This is an article about his capture and his lifestyle, which, given how much money he had, was a profligate one. As usual in these things, one mistake caused him to be discovered and the IRS got him. In a sense, this episode shows just how difficult it is to have really solid security around your coins. It also shows that the life of a thief is forever tainted and pretty pathetic.

  2. MDK Hashboard - This open source ASIC is making some incredible progress with their first board prototype in the post. It’s not clear how many TH/s it gets, but the power draw seems to be relatively modest and production seems relatively close. I’m impressed that they’ve gone from concept to prototype this quickly, though it remains to be seen if this is commercially competitive. Even if it isn’t there will be interesting use cases for people that use the waste heat for other applications.

  3. China Bank Run? - Evergrande, the Chinese real estate giant has been in trouble for some time. Their impending bankruptcy is triggering some serious issues which may lead to a bank run. This follows the general pattern we’ve been seeing where a lot of things are starting to break as a result of an overall rise in interest rates. We very well may be finding out that the ZIRP of years past have so corrupted the economy that few things can survive the slap of reality.

Quick Hits

Image

Fiat delenda est.

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