Bitcoin Tech Talk #478
Interesting Stuff
Fascism, Defined - has this article on what this oft-used slur by the left actually means and goes through the historical context in which it happened. As the article shows, Fascism really is a form of socialism and is much more like its brother political philosophy, Communism than leftists believe. The main difference is that under Fascism, trade unions reign supreme, whereas Communism got rid of unions altogether and instead opted to use party bosses to rule. If the difference sounds subtle, that’s because it is. Sadly, the usage of the term Fascism has evolved since to be a meaningless one of disapproval of some group that the user of the term disagrees with, something the Soviet Union pioneered after WWII.
Antichrist Analysis - This is one of those articles that has to be read to be believed. Peter Thiel has apparently been studying who the biblical Antichrist is and goes through a wide range of literature in this long-read for First Things. He analyzes four different works, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Alan Moore’s Dystopian Comic The Watchmen, and a long-running Japanese manga called One Piece. These are not typically works that you would connect with the Antichrist from Revelation, but there’s a lot of symbology in each work that Thiel unpacks. Apparently, examining who the Antichrist could be is very popular in Silicon Valley right now and this piece is certainly part of that trend.
Warren G Harding - Mises.org has an article on this not-too-popular president, showing how he’s been unfairly maligned due to the agenda of the FDR apologists. As the article shows, most of what’s said about him even now is framed in terms of being lazy or abusive of power, when in fact he was a fairly shy man who resisted the urge to intervene in the markets. His handling of the 1921 depression contrasts sharply with what both Hoover and FDR did from 1929-1938 in that he let the economy recover on its own instead of insisting on all kinds of programs. The article is a reminder that history is almost always put through a lens of propaganda based on what the historian wants you to believe rather than what actually happened.
Cyrus, the Persian - has this book review of the education of Cyrus, perhaps the greatest ruler of the Persian Empire. The book is not about the accomplishments of Cyrus, per se, though they are many, but about how he was raised. As the book review makes clear, he was trained from the beginning to be a military leader. What stood out to me is how foundational the basics were in his training. He learned how to drill soldiers really well and ultimately, being a great military leader made others want to follow him, many whom he had just defeated. The lesson here is that if you want respect and adoration, become worthy of it by being great, especially at the mundane things, like drilling soldiers.
Somalian Fraud - This long read is about the billions of dollars of fraud that the Somalian immigrants have scammed from the state of Minnesota. This is not just a single program, but many, including a childcare assistance program ($100M), food assistance programs ($50-$100M/yr), resettlement programs ($200M), housing subsidy programs ($30-$50M/yr), heath care programs ($100M). The total estimated by the article ends up being around half a billion dollars from a relatively small community, much of which ended up as cash in East Africa. The coordination involved in making such large scale fraud possible is staggering, but not surprising given the terrible incentives of welfare programs like this.
What I'm up to
Model Collapse - I talked to the pseudonymous Copernican about his idea applying AI model collapse to other places, including human cognition and ideology. We talked about a whole gamut of things, including the idea that education is what people train on and as that educational material goes through multiple generations of training on the previous generation of content, it gets nonsensical pretty quickly. We also touched on the role of compression of information and various ways in which centralization creates the right conditions for model collapse.
Jethro’s Podcast - This was a short conversation, originally meant to be about 3-5 minutes which ended up being 13. We talked about my visits to El Salvador, Noblesse Oblige, Christianity and Bitcoin and how common sense is how El Salvador has improved so much so quickly.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
NAT-PMP - Bitcoin Core Insider has an informative post on how your node connects through your router to other nodes. Older routers require manual port forwarding, but NAT-PMP allows the node itself to ask the router to forward a port. There’s also a bunch of information on peer management and what the options in the software do, particularly useful for specific relay policies that you might want to set.
Bare Multisig Griefing - UTXO set bloat is pretty harmful for running nodes, as the set needs to be kept close at hand, ideally in RAM, but at least indexed so that they can be quickly retrieved for transaction validation. The original bare multisig outputs, which are especially large (hundreds of bytes vs 22-33 bytes), were used to do multisig before 2013 when pay-to-script hash came out. They’re still standard and used on the network today. This article shows that about 75% of these outputs are not spendable because they’re using the Stamps protocol to embed data rather than actually using it for multisig. It’s a mystery to me why these are still standard given the very obvious and continual harm to the network.
Joinmarket Analyzer - Defeating coinjoins, particularly of the kind where you have disparate input amounts, is supposed to be hard because of combinatorial blowup. That is, there are too many ways in which a particular input can correspond to various outputs to be practical. Yet here is a tool to trace some joinmarket transactions, using lots of processing and chipping away at the problem a bit at a time. The tool reveals one of the weaknesses of coinjoins, which is that every input/output pair that’s correlated strengthens the traceability of all the other inputs.
Lightning
Zap Me A Coffee - This is a Nostr-enabled Lightning based tip jar for content on the internet. If we didn’t have centralized silos that gatekeep the content like YouTube and X and Substack, this sort of thing would be far more useful, but sadly, those platforms have a huge lead against the decentralized alternatives like Nostr, blogs, self-hosted video and so on. That said, the mass-patron model works largely on regular support, which unfortunately is hard to do with lightning.
lnd 0.19 fixes - This delvingbitcoin post goes into the three critical vulnerabilities that were patched in lnd 0.19. There was a DoS vulnerability that allowed an attacker to drain the RAM of an lnd node by creating lots of connections to the node, a variant of the fallback attack that could have been used to steal funds, and another one that created conditions so that lnd couldn’t recover funds on-chain for 80 blocks.
koerier - This is middleware to translate lightning addresses to lightning invoices. Currently, it works only with lnd to do this. I have mixed feelings about middleware like this, as on the one hand, a stand-alone project will generally be more responsive to user requests for features, but on the other hand, will require more from the user in installing yet another thing onto their lightning server.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Samourai Dev Pardon - BTC Policy Institute makes the case that the Samourai Devs should be pardoned for their money laundering charges. As the article shows, their prosecution was pretty biased and loaded, given that they never took possession of the coins and is a travesty of justice. Such results are exactly why pardons exist, though sadly, pardons are used much more politically for paying back political favors.
BTC-to-USD Converter - Obviously, a bitcoin-to-dollar converter is available in a lot of places, including Google search. But what’s unique about this one is that it lets you specify the date and converts based on that date. Honestly, this would have been very useful for a lot of tax filings in the past. It’s also a great way to experience regret at spending Bitcoin in the past as it shows just how many sats you would have had you not spent it.
Labitconf Retrospective - This was a really good review of what it felt like to go to Labitconf this year. The piece was insightful in pointing out the tension for a lot of these conferences between the Bitcoin content that’s good and the Shitcoin companies that fund these things. As one of the oldest conferences in the space, they really know what they’re doing and have the organizational part down pat. And there was even some space for actual Bitcoiners, the maximalists to connect with each other. Yet the Shitcoiners always act like the proverbial turd in the punch bowl and ruin so much.
Quick Hits
Brock Unhinged - Mike Brock makes the case that Bitcoin is fascist. This might be the ragequit we’ve been looking for.
POW Game - A Bitcoin-themed maze game.
Bitcoin Puzzles - There’s a website that keeps track of the various on-chain puzzles, that if solved, can net the winner some Bitcoin, often in large amounts.
Psychology of Selling - Pleb Underground gives some reasons OGs sell.
Fiat delenda est.