Bitcoin Tech Talk #368
Interesting Stuff
Locklin on Huberman - One of my favorite tech writers (whose article on quantum computing should be required reading for anyone that asks any questions about it) takes Huberman to task about the various supplements that he recommends. What I find fascinating is the breadth of the recommendations for all kinds of things that our ancestors had no trouble with. In a sense the supplement industry is a symptom of a much bigger problem: that of wanting easy fixes to detrimental and complicated lifestyle choices. This is how the pharmaceutical industry sells itself and sadly, it’s at core a laziness created by fiat money.
Gatekeeping Talent - The article starts with a complaint about the current state of book publishing, which, like most fiat industries is dominated by 5 big players. What this post points out is that new writers have a very difficult time getting their foot in the door to the big publishers as these publishers get a flood of submissions. The phrase that struck me from this article is the reduction of the denominator. It’s near impossible to read 12,000 submissions, especially for the staffs that these publishers have. But it is reasonable to read 100. The key is to make these companies small to let the market work. Without knowing it, the author gets to the heart of why many industries, particularly creative ones, do not and should not scale, but have anyway due to fiat money.
Fisking Michael Lewis - This is a brutal review of Michael Lewis’s newest book about Sam Bankman-Fried. The author of the review takes Lewis to task for selling out as he defends SBF with a strange tenacity. The main conclusion is that truth has little to do with a book’s success and as is usual in a fiat economy, the incentives, not the truth, drive the narrative. I’ve noticed this about non-fiction art in general, as many of them sacrifice the truth for better narratives. This one, though, is not even a very good narrative. A villain story would have been a lot more entertaining to read. I still suspect that Lewis got paid in the FTX scandal and that’s the reason for his scarcely believable defending of SBF.
What I'm up to
Food - I talked to Brett and Harry from the Meat Mafia podcast to talk about food. We touched on a lot of topics like how a lot of nutritional studies are manipulated by big food companies, the geopolitics of food and how the IMF uses structural adjustments to prevent developing countries from being able to feed themselves and the subsidization of farmland by fiat money to produce really terrible food. There was a lot of discussion about farming and how high time preference behavior has debased food.
Blox Interview - I talked to this news outlet from the Netherlands about the new book. We focused on companies and why 4 or 5 dominate every industry and why they continue debasing products to keep up in a fiat economy because of sticky prices. We also talked about Dunbar’s Number, savings and venture capital.
Cross Politic - I talked to this popular Christian show to talk about my book. We talked about how fiat debases families, technology and how it’s not really progressing and about the shortcomings of gold. I also talked to them about how Bitcoin is making a difference in the missions field and how financial censorship and rent-seeking are ways governments prevent organizations from doing what they want.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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Bitcoin
BitVM for Non-techies - This is a great explanation of what BitVM is and why it’s powerful and why it’s unlike something like Ethereum where every node runs every smart contract to verify it. Instead, verification is left as an exercise to the people that have an economic incentive to do so. The paradigm of the system is very different in that execution of the actual contract is limited to proving that someone cheated, or barring that, the execution is assumed to be valid. In a sense, the economic incentives have replaced the need for every node to run everything. The author is especially excited about its usage as a way to do zero-knowledge rollups.
Saving Satoshi - One of the more interesting ways to learn the Bitcoin protocol and it’s via an interactive story/game. They’re done with the first few chapters in this story, but it’s a really fun way to learn the rudiments of the Bitcoin protocol in a JavaScript environment. Edu-tainment has always been something that’s a little bit of a niche market, but there are enough Bitcoin enthusiasts where this sort of thing might motivate them to learn.
Why ECC Params are Fixed - If you’re a math nerd and have wondered how Elliptic Curve parameters are chosen, the post is a good explanation of why arbitrary parameters are a really bad idea. It turns out that there are many potential vulnerabilities in various curves and verifying that a curve is secure is very difficult. Having specific curves allows for better optimizations which in Bitcoin’s case is used for faster verification of signatures through the libsecp256k1 library.
Lightning
Lightning Subscriptions - Mutiny wallet devs explain how their subscription payment using Lightning works. Since Lightning is a push and not a pull system, the most a server can do is request payment for a subscription. This is enabled by something called Nostr Wallet Connect, which uses Nostr to request payments from a lightning wallet. This is defined in NIP-47 and it’s one example of how the two networks complement each other.
UMA - UMA stands for universal money address and is a concept by Lightspark, the company run by David Marcus, formerly of Facebook and Paypal. The main idea is that there’s something like an email address for money that can be used to pay in whatever currency. The main rails seem to be Lightning and will require something like Taproot Assets or RGB to make work. The standard itself is filled with a lot of compliance stuff, which honestly makes it unattractive for the end-user, but may be something businesses and governments try to enforce. I personally don’t see too many Bitcoiners willing to use this instead of the normal lightning network.
Replacement Cycling - Shinobi goes into great detail on the attack revealed by Antoine Riard. The attack is definitely possible, but as Shinobi explains, the main thing that needs to be manipulated is the target’s mempool and that requires not just having channels opened with the lightning node, but also having all the connections to the Bitcoin node so the hash revealing transaction isn’t exposed to the target. As he points out, this is a legitimate issue, but not one where the sky is falling as Antoine alluded.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Bitcoin Treasure Hunt - The story is about someone that stored a private key with over 7000 BTC on an IronKey device back in 2011. The device requires a password, which unfortunately, the owner forgot. It erases the contents after 10 wrong password attempts, and the owner has tried 8 times already without success. There’s a company that believes it can crack it using some proprietary techniques, but the owner doesn’t wan their help just yet. The story shows just how dubious some security claims of these devices can be, as they seem to have found a way around the 10 attempt wiping limit.
The Zombie is Coming - Peter St. Onge argues that we’re in for some massive government intervention in the economy over the next few years. As he points out, ever since 1921, the government has played the same playbook of reducing interest rates and increasing spending every time the economy was in a downturn. That led to more malinvestment and hindered recovery in each case and he expects this crisis to be no better. I suspect that we’re finally at the point where the seed corn has been drained and the real pain will be felt by people in the US this time around.
Blockstream Phishing Attack - There was an urgent email sent to all customers of the Blockstream store which asked users to upgrade the firmware of their Jade devices. This email was not sent by Blockstream, but by a bad actor trying to get the seeds of unwitting customers. It seems that the emails were leaked through a third party fulfillment provider. This is a good reminder that you should check the company website and Twitter among other places to see if such claims are legit.
Quick Hits
Javier Milei in Runoff - The libertarian Argentinian politician didn’t do nearly as well as he hoped, but he’s still in the final round of elections.
Bitcoin the Character - Making money better. If you don’t know, just watch.
ECB CBDC? - They’re definitely looking at it.
Arthur Hayes on War - He thinks the US is spending too much and that lower rates are inevitable.
Triible - Lightning-based sports betting platform. Honestly, it would be better if they used DLCs on the backend, but still pretty cool.
Bitcoin Confs 2024 - It looks like there will be a record number of Bitcoin-only conferences around the world next year.
Fiat delenda est.