Bitcoin Tech Talk #467
Interesting Stuff
Authenticity and Hyperreality - The article is about the obsession with authenticity, how the desire for it is actually searching for a core that doesn’t exist. The main example from the author is about classic cars and what counts as an actual classic car. What was fascinating is that a lot of classic cars are manufactured again once they become popular collector’s items, to the exact specification of the original, either made by the original manufacturer, or sometimes even licensed to some other company. The main idea being that the core of authenticity is actually empty and that everything in the modern world is in a sense fake and that we should enjoy the pieces as art and not based on some connection to the original. The artificial scarcity is what made these pieces popular in the first place, and it’s the value of scarcity that got mixed up with artistic value which causes this disconnect.
Death of Rent Seeking - The article is about the meaningless corporate jobs that often are state-sponsored adult daycare centers, where work is made up, produced and go unconsumed. Rent-seeking, of course, describes how these jobs function, but the article is surprisingly hopeful. Many Millennial and Gen Z workers now recognize these jobs for what they are, and instead of despairing and drowning the meaninglessness of it all through alcohol, sports and entertainment as previous generations did, they’re doing side hustles that are at least a step closer to providing value instead of draining it.
Quantum Computing Paper - A must read describing how the “results” of quantum computing, particularly with respect to Shor’s Algorithm for factoring prime numbers is a slight-of-hand stage trick. Particularly noteworthy is that a lot of these supposed factorings multiply twin primes (primes which differ by 2) or a similar class which differ by 6, which are particularly easy to factor and the impressive sounding results are really gullibility tests for journalists that don’t understand anything about number theory, or even multiplication. The best line, though, is the fact that the factorization of 15 was really more like getting a dog to bark three times, that is, not actually using Shor’s algorithm, but manipulating the quantum gates to say what the researchers wanted it to say.
Making Villians - This is an essay on a topic that I’m not particularly interested in (in-group drama among feminists about the role of men) but the writing is so good that I couldn’t help but finish it. The writer is very self aware and articulate about expressing where her mind and heart are at and argues that feminists are demanding too much from men, resulting in isolating both men and women. For me, the complexities and contradictions of the kind she describes is more the result of an incoherent ideology than the fanatical devotion to ideology as she suggests.
The Protester’s Veto - There has been a lot of commentary about Charlie Kirk, particularly about the degrading of free speech. But as this post points out, oftentimes, the issue of free speech just comes down to economics. Conservative speakers have to pay for security and take out insurance to speak in hostile places like college campuses and they are silenced, not through government mandate, but through economic unaffordability. This is what’s called the Protester’s Veto, where the ruckus opponents cause silences free speech more than any direct censorship or ban. It’s unfortunately one of the weapons of the bureaucratic, managerial class to suppress speech and it’s way more effective than any government law.
What I'm up to
Center of Hash - I talked with my friend Parker Lewis about what’s going on with the OP_RETURN debate, how mining is central to the debate and what the possible forking scenarios might be if there’s a similar controversy around a soft fork. It was a great conversation, and I laid out my views about what I think may be happening.
Bitcoin Center - I was also on Cedric Youngleman’s show to talk about why I won’t be upgrading to Core v30 along with why the consensus process is becoming a bit worrisome. This one wasn’t nearly as long as the other appearance but hopefully, I made my point.
Young America’s Foundation Road to Freedom - I will be speaking at this conference in Raston, VA (alongside Yeonmi Park and EJ Antoni) to a bunch of college students October 3-4. I’ll speak about the trucker protests as a launching point for embracing non-governmental, politically neutral money.
Lugano Plan B Forum - A few weeks later October 24-25, I will be in Lugano for the Plan B Forum. It looks like I may be doing a debate and running a workshop for my open source project, the family Bitcoin banking app.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Core Initialization - This is a really cool series that goes through various parts of Bitcoin Core. This particular post goes into Onion proxy setup and exactly how that gets executed depending on user settings. For any developers looking for a good description of what happens in each code block, this is about as detailed as you can get. I wish I had known about this blog earlier, as it’s a wonderful resource for understanding what each part does.
HAB Node - Most plebs run nodes that are pretty standard, that is, probably connected to your ISP on a server with reasonable specs. This is an entirely different type of setup, which is specifically designed for high availability, hence the name HAB (High Availability Bitcoin Node). As users become more self-sovereign, questions like this, about the hardware of the nodes that we use, will develop and use-cases become a lot better understood. Having run a lot of nodes myself, I really do want one of these bad boys, especially if they’re reasonably priced, which they seem to be.
Minimizing Dependencies - This Brink blog post goes into one of the goals for Bitcoin Core, which is the minimization of dependencies. Libraries can be compromised and subsequently cause really terrible outcomes, up to and including theft, so this is an excellent goal to have. As the post notes, there have been a lot of dependencies that have been removed, including OpenSSL, Protobufs, Gitian and more. Libraries like Boost are still being worked on, but the usage of them has been reduced significantly.
Lightning
Rethinking Channel Factories - Roy Scheinfeld has a long and thorough explanation of what channel factories are, how they work and why we should consider Ark and Spark as channel factories. The main idea is that you can share a single UTXO among a bunch of parties instead of just two parties, which is what lightning is. As he points out Ark and Spark do the same, just in a different way, and furthermore, they use Lightning to transfer outside their L2’s. Indeed, maybe we should think of them that way.
High Availability Channels - Zman has this very interesting post on how to achieve some better availability of lightning channels in this very long post about a bunch of lightning improvements. The idea that channels would still be 2-of-2, with one being the user, but the other being a 2-of-3 sub-key (this is achievable using FROST). This means 3 forwarding nodes are available to interact on the other part of the lightning payments, of which 2 are needed. It’s a creative way of increasing availability as nodes go offline, though I imagine some backup solution is probably more straightforward.
Routing Profitability - Second.tech has an analysis of lightning liquidity markets and how they’re priced. Among other things, smaller channels cost more than bigger channels on a per-sat basis, probably due to overhead costs. The APR tends to be stable around 2.6% as channels get bigger and the fixed costs are spread out over the size of the channels. As the article points out, this is one of the least risky ways to earn yield on Bitcoin, though to be fair, there’s a lot of management of routing that need to be factored in.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Stablecoin President - Alex Gladstein writes about the disappointing Bitcoin policy of the Trump administration, largely confusing crypto and Bitcoin and making a large concession to banks through stablecoins. For me, it would be more disappointing if I thought he had a good understanding of Bitcoin in the first place, but from the Nashville speech that he gave last year, it was clear that his understanding was not on the level of, say RFK Jr. The money seems to drive this administration’s policies, and sadly, much more of it came from the broader “crypto” community than Bitcoin.
Adoption Stories - ETFs, Treasury Companies and datacarriersize debates may dominate X, but the real stories are the ones down on the ground. This is a good reminder that the perception and usage of Bitcoin is very much changing for the better, especially in the global south. The concerns in those places are often very different than, say what first-world westerners think about, as they don’t have access to the types of tools that first-worlders have. Suffice it to say that Bitcoin adoption is growing organically and naturally in those places and it’s not just Strategy financial instruments that make a difference.
Sub-Sat Economics - This is an X thread about how all the below 1 sat/vbyte transactions are going, and basically, the miners mining them seem to be getting a little more in fees through them (about 158,000 sats/block or 7.49 BTC total) and none of the 3 stale blocks during that period seem related to the sub-sat/vbyte transactions. That’s enough reward where a stale block every 1978 blocks would make it a break-even proposition. It’s been almost 5000 blocks so far, but of course, there’s not enough data to say conclusively what the risks seem to be. We will find out in the next year or so if these fee rates hold up.
Quick Hits
TradeOgre - The Canadian crypto exchange has apparently been seized by the Canadian government along with its $32M in assets.
PeerObserver - The project by 0xB10C is a way to look for forks and other possible attacks to Bitcoin.
525 BTC - That’s how much Strategy stacked this week. There’s definitely a slowdown due to stock price coming down and it does make you wonder if the party is soon over.
OP_RETURN - Many people are offering their opinions on the topic.
Fiat delenda est.