Bitcoin Tech Talk #370
Interesting Stuff
Reality of Coding Jobs - An excellent summary of what modern coding jobs are like. Sadly, like most engineering endeavors, there’s a significant amount of bureaucracy around it, which make the job much less enjoyable. I honestly wonder how much of modern coding jobs are rent-seeking and how much of that affects both salary and job satisfaction. Of course, every “job” is really having only one customer that you have to satisfy, and that definitely factors into the inefficiency.
Teen Jobs - This is an article every parent should read and it’s about how teens should be employed. The argument is that jobs are much better prep for life as an adult than sports, extracurriculars or even school. What I didn’t think about was just how infantilizing not having a job can be. The lack of market touchpoints is one of the reasons so many people have a distorted view of reality. I suspect that the more people worked and earlier, the less popular socialist policies would be.
Iteration vs Fully Formed - The point of the post is to explain how real innovation happens, which is to say, incrementally and based on a single purpose. Generally, products evolve and the feedback from the market is what causes them to get better. Products don’t come out fully formed, in other words. In many years of doing startups this has proven to be true. Focus on one feature the user really wants and add from there. That’s how you get more complex products. This, by the way, is why I find altcoins so incredibly stupid. They try to release fully formed products and find that there’s no use because they haven’t iterated at all. What’s worse, the blockchain part makes iterating incredibly hard.
What I'm up to
Principles of Economics - I talked to Saifedean about his latest book and we discussed a variety of topics, including unemployment, energy and homo economicus. His explanations on the main questions of economics were very well thought out, which you can tell because he explains with such clarity. The book should be required reading before anyone opines on economics.
Fiat Withdrawal Symptoms - I wrote this piece a while back for Bitcoin Magazine, print edition, and they finally put it out on the website. In it, I talk about the mental shift that you have to make as you escape fiat and enter into radical self-sovereignty. The freedom we gain comes with a whole lot of responsibility.
Mark Moss Interview - I was on Mark Moss’s iHeartRadio show to talk about the new book. We discussed the book writing process, the power giant corporations yield and the way fiat money keeps things static. We also had some back and forth about the what makes a rich person rich in a fiat economy and how they all engage in massive amounts of theft through inflation and loans.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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Bitcoin
BitVM Deep Dive - If you’re still not sure what BitVM is, this is about as deep a dive into the topic as it can get. What I find astounding is that there’s a deep difference between it and the other systems that have been tried, like Ethereum’s solidity, which has turing completeness but needs this very complicated notion of gas to make sure smart contracts don’t DoS the network. The prover/verifier paradigm and a subsequent forfeiture of funds if the prover doesn’t prove something, is a much better way to make such programs in a decentralized context. There’s already Blake3 in BitVM, which, as will be noted, is not a hash function available in Bitcoin Script.
Bitstream - Robin Linus, the busy writer of the BitVM paper, has another proposal to incentivize file storage through Bitcoin. The main idea is that there’s an atomic swap of the data for the money which happens using hash-time-lock contracts. Once the file is transferred, it can only be unlocked by a hash which also unlocks the payment. Like BitVM, you can take all the funds if the server is lying and the vast majority of the time, there’s no need for an on-chain transaction. The concept of using fraud proofs and using game theory to create the right incentives is pretty powerful, and these two (BitVM and Bitstream) are hopefully the first of many such ideas.
OP Code Reference - Bitcoin Script has a lot of different OP codes, and knowing exactly what they do can be a bit of a pain. This website is a reference to all of them.
Game Wallet - You can now generate a seed for a cold wallet on a Gameboy! Yes, the portable video game system from the late 80’s can be used via cartridge, to generate sufficient entropy. It’s not entirely clear if it will be able to sign transactions and so on, but I like the direction of using common devices for Bitcoin purposes.
Lightning
LSP Specs - There’s a movement afoot to standardize what LSPs do and how they operate. The current model is that a Lightning wallet is generally tied to a single LSP. By standardizing LSPs, the wallet and the service provider can be separated, allowing users to make the tradeoffs between privacy, availability and fees. A standardized way of purchasing channels, for example, would be very useful and not force users to have many different wallets.
Submarine Swap server - Lightning Loop is not new, but this is a new implementation in Rust to essentially do the same thing. Multiple implementations is a great way to check compatibility and significantly reduces the possibility of funds loss from a critical bug. Submarine swaps are not just an important tool for lightning liquidity, but also for privacy, and I would love to see server software optimize for one or the other.
synctomic - This is really more of a re-imagining of Lightning than anything else as it’s taking advantage of the capabilities offered by Schnorr. Most people are familiar with the usage of MuSig for channel creation transactions, but there are other possibilities, like PTLCs and combining channel closes into a single output. It’s worth thinking about as a new network altogether, and in a sense, the constructions behind this may be something like LN 2.0.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Fiat Premium - Zaprite is a product for taking Bitcoin and fiat payments. I haven’t been shy about promoting them as they’ve solved the Bitcoin checkout experience in the simplest way possible. You give them your xpub and Lightning info and you get paid straight to your wallet. What’s really nice is that they also take fiat payments like with Stripe. But until now, there wasn’t a way to charge more for the hassle and risk of taking fiat payments, now there is one. If you want to sell anything and you’re a Bitcoiner, I highly recommend this service.
What we’re going up against - J.T. Woodhouse opines on the debate about Bitcoin with academics and fiat normies. Essentially, most don’t want the debate and instead rely on fiat credentials and conventional wisdom. In a sense, the rules for even debate are stacked against us as we debate Bitcoin. Yet, as reality proves that sound money will beat easy money every time, the crumbling of these rules is inevitable. In other words, don’t give up on these people. They will come around, even if it’s after a whole lot of pain.
Custodia Launch - Caitlin Long’s startup can finally take Bitcoin deposits. The concept of a Bitcoin bank is a little weird for most Bitcoiners, given that the point is to be our own banks, but the main use case is not for individuals, but for organizations. As they don’t want the responsibility nor the difficulty of custody, an institution like this can be very helpful in getting Bitcoin on their balance sheet. That said, given how hard this bank was to launch (they’ve been working on this for at least 5 years), I suspect that there will be more hurdles put by regulators.
Quick Hits
UV Lights - A Bored Ape Party used UV lights instead of Blacklights and it seems to have affected the attendees’ vision.
Banks against Bitcoin - There’s now a github repository keeping track.
Bitcoin Mailing List Moving - The Bitcoin Dev mailing list will be migrating somewhere else.
SEC Hiring - They want crypto experts, but the catch is that you have to divest yourself of all holdings.
Congress Fooled - Surely not the first time, but they believed a story that they wanted to believe about the Hamas and Bitcoin.
Fiat delenda est.