Bitcoin Tech Talk #472
Interesting Stuff
Fake Science - agrees with Sabine Hossenfelder that most of scientific research is bad science, or even not science at all. The diatribe by Sabine is worth a watch because she’s a well-respected physicist who’s in the unique position of not needing grant money because she’s done a good job explaining physics on YouTube. This tracks with the general failed model of fiat/socialist/government-funded science. When you pay people to write papers, they write papers, whether they say something or not.
Pro-Monarchy - does a savage takedown of the “No Kings” protests in Washington, with equal parts humor, history and analysis. The humor part is in observing that many of the protestors were aging Boomers. The history part is in what democracy meant for most of history (mob rule) and how this protest ironically proved their point. But the most insightful part was the analysis about the framing of the whole thing as essentially matriarchal. That is, the protest felt cringy and impotent because the protesters claimed to be the moral arbiters who had a right to tell you what to do. In other words, it was a Karen protest writ large.
Honesty About China - There’s a lot of buts when it comes to China’s progress. China has progressed a lot… But they’re authoritarian. But they’re bad on human rights. But they have lots of pollution. This is an article that attempts to look at China’s progress without all the buts. The article is written mostly from a left perspective, taking climate change as gospel for example, as you might expect from a US academic. But it points out that there’s a lot of Girardian mimetic escalation going on between China and the US. China has imitated the US’s free markets and the US government has taken more control of industries like chip manufacturing.
Role of Birth Control - and review another book about how child unfriendly society has gotten. As with their other reviews, they talk about what’s unsaid in the book, in this case Birth Control. As they show, the causes for lower fertility include much of what’s said in the book, but the most obvious answer is that birth control separates sex from child bearing. In particular, having a child is a daunting decision, which in the past wasn’t really a decision at all! The many ways to back out of the decision, from various birth control to outright abortion, they argue is the real reason.
J6 Motive - One of the oddest things about the January 6th incident is the presence of Feds who were telling people to storm the Capitol. It’s such a strange thing for Feds to be doing, but the fact that people like Raymond Epps, who was telling everyone to get into the Capitol building, haven’t been arrested have led many observers to conclude that indeed, he was a Fed. But the question remained, what possible motive did a Fed have to get people to storm the Capitol? This is your conspiratorial answer. Because they wanted to prevent a Supreme Court review of the electors.
What I'm up to
Guy Swann Show - I was on Guy’s show to talk about the OP_RETURN argument. We spoke about the dev culture being left coded, how I’m very much pro-ossification and what Bitcoin should be as money first and even money only. We also did a bit of a post-mortem on Taproot, the shortcomings of Core software and some level of humility that we should be seeing with Core that we haven’t seen. It was 2 hours of discussion, and one of my favorites in this debate.
Lugano Debate - This is a link to the live broadcast, which was 10 hours long, so skip to 7:23 or so to get to it. I made the case that nodes use filters already, so getting rid of them would be bad for many different reasons. First, it would be bad because it makes your node vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. Second, it would be bad because it will enable cheaper spam transactions. Third, it would be bad because it reduces the social cost for miners mining non-monetary transactions. I was disappointed that Peter didn’t really take the debate too seriously, but you can’t control what your opponents in a debate will be doing.
Bitcoin Historico - I will be in San Salvador on November 12-13. There are general Bitcoin conferences, altcoin conferences, technical conferences, financial conferences and even ones focused on moral and spiritual aspects (like Thank God for Bitcoin). But this one is focused on the long-term societal change, and the speakers will be talking about that. I’ll have a talk on noblesse oblige, particularly the moral failure of fiat elites and the moral obligation of Bitcoiners in the world to come.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
TROPIC01 - This is a new secure element chip, notable for its open architecture. It’s the element used in the new Trezor 7, announced this week. Of particular note is that it doesn’t seem to support secp256k1, the elliptic curve used in Bitcoin, but supporting Ed25519, the curve used by cryptonote coins like Monero. In addition their “quantum-ready” claim is really just a different signature algorithm for their firmware, which really doesn’t protect your Bitcoin at all. Apparently, the chip was turned down when offered to ColdCard. Still, it’s a step in the right direction as the norm in secure elements is closed source requiring NDAs to get the specs.
Chain Code Delegation - One of the problems of multisig collaborative custody is that your collaborators that help you sign will know your balance in a traditional setup. This is a proposal to make it so that a collaborator will not know the balance of the entire wallet when signing by not giving the chain code part of the HD keys. Instead, only the information necessary to sign the transaction in question is shared with the collaborator and the collaborator only learns about the details of the transaction itself and not the entire multisig wallet.
Arkade Primer - Ark is a reality on Bitcoin already (without covenants!) and this is a technical guide to integrating with Arkade, an Ark implementation. Much like lightning, Ark allows for unilateral exit, giving users the option of coming back on chain should the protocol fail for them. The main innovation is the concept of vtxos, or Virtual Transaction Outputs, which are essentially UTXOs batched for off-line execution and on-line settlement. The fact that it’s compatible with lightning makes it much easier to bootstrap users and perhaps the efficiency gains will make it more popular.
Lightning
MPFlow - Liquidity efficiency is a critical component of running a routing node, as the capital required is higher for inefficiently distributed liquidity. But allocating liquidity is a pretty difficult problem, known as MaxFlow in network dynamics. MPFlow is really a way to allocate that liquidity using what the proprietors claim is AI-aided. They claim to get better throughput versus the autopilot algorithms that are typically used.
Reputation Games - The post looks at the various attacks using the lightning network reputation system to potentially profit while behaving badly. The incentives on complex systems like this are often very difficult to analytically prove, so simulations end up being the next best way to get a good grasp of whether mitigations sufficiently punish the attacker. The details are complicated, but it’s a good lesson in learning how to analyze really hard to analyze things.
Square Lightning - Buried in this piece about lightning adoption is the assertion by the Voltage executive that all Square terminals are rolling out Lightning integration by the end of the year! This is obviously pretty huge news, and would mean that many merchants won’t even be aware that they’re capable of taking Bitcoin payments. Though those kinds of merchants are likely not going to be keeping the Bitcoin they get, there are others who really want Bitcoin but haven’t had an integrated PoS system to use it with that may offset it.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
CZ Pardoned - By Trump, of course, setting up what would probably be a much worse pardon in Sam Bankman-Fried. What’s been particularly disappointing about Trump in his zeal to do favors for the funders of his campaign is that he’s mostly doing good for altcoiners and not Bitcoiners. To be fair, there are far more scams in altcoins, which make favors to altcoiners much easier to bestow, like with the aforementioned link. But why is it so difficult to get something like de minimis?
BPI - The lobbying organization for Bitcoin has hired Connor Brown, the former Lummis staff member on all things Bitcoin and AI. As noted in the last story, I’ve been pretty disappointed with the results of all the political donations and lobbying in the Trump Administration. But with the hiring of Connor Brown, this I’m more optimistic. Connor actually knows how things work on the hill and knows how Bitcoin works and this fairly innocuous-looking move may be the beginning of a much greater Bitcoin lobbying influence in Washington.
Consensus vs Policy - Yes, anyone familiar with the OP_RETURN debate has examined this to death and knows the difference, but for people that have managed to ignore this very loud argument the past 6 months, there’s this article to explain what the difference is. I’m sure it’s helpful to the newbie, but I can’t help but think that the tone of the article is very ivory-tower, trying to explain to people that already understand the difference.
Quick Hits
bullishMarket - An online farmer’s market using Nostr and Bitcoin.
retire-on-bitcoin - Answering the question FIRE people always ask, when can I retire?
DNN - An attempt to make better nostr names than the very long and ugly npub, using Bitcoin’s blockchain.
AWS Outage - This affected many websites, including some exchanges like Coinbase.
Fiat delenda est.