Bitcoin Tech Talk #474
Interesting Stuff
Belt and Road Failure - The article is about China’s Belt and Road initiative, which has been promoted by China as an infrastructure investment into developing countries that have not been able to get investment from the G20 nations. Because it’s written from a western perspective a lot of the dirty details come out in this essay, such as the fact that almost all of the infrastructure contracts go straight to Chinese companies and are often done in shoddy ways with lots of cost overruns. The important part is that the debt stays with the developing country and is a method by which China gets control of resources of the country when the debt isn’t able to be paid back. Sadly, what the author doesn’t seem to realize is that the IMF and World Bank do the same thing.
Burning Man Exposed - This is a long and entertaining read about one writer’s experience at Burning Man. Unlike most reflections about Burning Man that you read, it’s not focused on how the event has gotten away from its roots or has sold out, rather, it’s much more a clear record of what actually goes on. There’s a lot of setting up, a lot of discomfort just from the desert environment, but also just the really out-there culture that’s full of degeneracy both pharmaceutical and sexual. What stood out to me is that the people that attend are desperate for meaning but have boxed themselves into a particular progressive mindset that does not allow for a morally ordered universe.
Fiat Failing Upward - writes about something I’ve written a lot about. Specifically how fiat money has bloated the administrative state since 1971. The article goes into detail about the mechanism of administrative growth, about how there’s essentially no accountability at the top, and how, if there’s any accountability at all, is generally at lower levels. As the author is a military veteran, much of the article details the many policy failures in the War on Terror, but the general pattern is that every failure justifies administrative growth, rather than shrinkage. The perverse incentive is then to fail as success would mean many of these bureaucrats would lose their jobs. Education, Health Care, the Fed and Environmental Regulatory Bodies are just some of the many that have grown rapidly in this way.
Marxist Origins of Feminism - brings the receipts in this charge that feminism is really Marxist in origin. Citing foundational feminist texts from the early 70’s, much of the modern feminist movement doctrines are almost explicitly from the frame of Marxist thinking. What stood out to me is how much of the feminist terms (burden of reproduction, emotional labor, caregiving cost) are in Marxist-economic terms. The Marxist imperative to dissolve the family figures prominently as well, which is why the same 70’s feminist academics asserted lesbian superiority. Reading this article, my suspicion is that modern feminism is an economic delusion more than anything else.
Deconstructing Bugs - has one of the more creative conspiracy theories, specifically about Bugs Bunny, the Looney Tunes character. The main assertion is that this particular character is something like a trickster god that can conjure all kinds of things out of nothing to torment his enemies. And by being exposed to Bugs Bunny, we were being set up to accept all sorts of demonic ideas from various death cults. But more intriguingly, the attitude and vibe of this cartoon character has more or less been US foreign policy the last 80 years.
What I'm up to
Zuby - I interviewed rapper and fitness enthusiast Zuby Udezue. We talked about motivation, programs and diet among other things, discussing the role of exercise in your life and how it makes life much better. We also talked about disruptions like travel and young children, how to manage burnout and discouragement of plateaus.
Tone and Murch - Tone and I talked for almost 3 hours with Murch, a Bitcoin Core developer who signed the Core position letter back in May. We had what I thought was a pretty productive conversation where he explained his priorities for the network, which are mostly around utility both at the user and macro levels and allowing certain kinds of data in places that are easy to prune.
Bitcoin Matrix - I talked to Cedric Youngleman on his podcast about the Knots vs Core debate, mostly about my positions that I put out in the vlogs I did a couple months back. We discussed breaking precedent, Taproot and scaling among other things.
Bitcoin Historico - I will be in San Salvador this week to participate in this event and will be giving a talk on Noblesse Oblige. The setting couldn’t be more appropriate as I hear the venue is truly beautiful.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Aggeus - Supertestnet has a project that lets you do a prediction market. The main idea is that a Discrete Log Contract-like thing is traded without any interactivity requirements or knowledge of the counterparty. Unlike the many stupid altcoin projects in this category, there’s no need for a token or even another blockchain, just Bitcoin. You still need an oracle, as almost anything worth betting on does but it would make for something like a decentralized Kalshi.
BIP3 - Murch has been working on this new BIP process, which replaces BIP2, which in turn replaced BIP1. BIP2 was written in 2016, so there has been about a decade of learnings on how the process works and more importantly how it doesn’t. The new process is meant to require less judgment calls from the BIP editors and account for situations which previously weren’t handled, like the transfer of ownership of a BIP.
Signature Validation Stats - This post on Delving Bitcoin goes through the efficiencies gained by libsecp256k1 versus what was used before, OpenSSL for elliptic curve operations in Bitcoin. The libsecp256k1 library blows OpenSSL out of the water, as it’s specifically optimized for the curve that Bitcoin uses, rather than OpenSSL’s more general approach. The main improvements within libsecp256k1 were the GLV endomorphism and safegcd modular inverses.
Lightning
Orchard - This is a “bundle” of various services, which include Bitcoin Core, a Lightning Node, a Cashu mint, Taproot Assets node and an AI server. The first four, obviously being Bitcoin-related. The whole thing is supposed to go into the cloud, though I’d be pretty hesitant to leave too much money in such a setup. Still, it’s nice to have something that connects all of these things for you.
OTS Payment Channels - OTS stands for one-time signatures and this is a brand new, different construction of payment channels than the Poon-Dryja one that populates the current Lightning Network. The main benefits are that the complex revocation mechanism is replaced with a hash-based one-time signature on a sequence number that increases monotonically with each channel update. That means only the last state is needed and not all of the previous channel states. The drawback is that the signatures are bigger (800 bytes) and some sort of OP_HASH is required.
libermedia - This is a file hosting server that uses Nostr for login and Lightning for payment. The files are stored in a decentralized way per NIP-96 and ideal for videos and such that you might want to post on Nostr. I can see something like this being used to store configuration files and bookmarks and maybe even personal photos. I do wonder what the pricing will be like, as that will largely determine how useful and profitable something like this might be.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
EVO and Metaplanet - Metaplanet, of course, is a posterchild of Bitcoin treasury companies. Supposedly, because of the taxation rules in Japan, a Bitcoin treasury company that is native to the country will have an advantage over the ones that are outside the country. This article poses a bunch of questions about its relationship with EVO, which allegedly has warrants at below their share price, which can be used to not only dilute the stock, but also sink its price. As treasury companies face more scrutiny, partly because Metaplanet is now underwater on its Bitcoin purchases, questions about the ownership and outstanding warrants will need to come to light.
Bitcoin Direct Deposit - River has introduced this as a new feature where you can designate their service to receive your paycheck and they’ll auto-convert some percentage (maybe even 100%) to Bitcoin. Of course, Strike, Cash App and Fold have been offering this service for a while now, and all of these services have some sort of debit card to make the process of spending easier as well. For anyone considering going on a Bitcoin standard, this is an excellent way to go about it.
Sequans Sells - The French Bitcoin Treasury Company has sold 970 BTC to cover 50% of its convertible debt. To my knowledge this is the first treasury company to sell Bitcoin, and if price goes down further, this sort of selling will become the norm. These were always leveraged plays and while the upside is greater than the Bitcoin price appreciation, the downside is also greater. This particular company has sold almost a third of its holdings because the debt service was getting out of hand, and I suspect they won’t be the last ones to do so.
Quick Hits
FBI Wipe - They wiped a hard drive that had $345M in BTC in it after the defendant kept saying there was very little Bitcoin in it.
Learn Simplicity - The Liquid sidechain language has a tutorial site.
RecoverBull - This is a different way to back up a hot wallet, based on an encrypted payload and a server that has the key.
Silent IPO - This is an article about the theory that the reason Bitcoin isn’t going up is because a lot of OGs are selling.
Fiat delenda est.