Bitcoin Tech Talk #480
Interesting Stuff
Millenial White Men Need Not Apply - has written this explosive piece about the discrimination against white men in academia, hollywood and media. He definitely brings the receipts and shows that his cohort, Millennial straight white men are being shut out in those industries. The article highlighted for me the reason why so many Millennial and Gen Z white men are going so hard right. The hard-left DEI regime has essentially cancelled them wholesale. The results are not just a harder turn to the left, but deeply debased outputs, probably from the degradation of merit.
Then They Came For Me - ’s response to the first article is to put it in context of how a similar plight has been happening to middle and lower class white men for a generation longer. As he points out, globalization and outsourcing took out a lot of manufacturing jobs and shipped them to cheaper countries. An example of this is Adam Carolla’s having to wait 7 years to even be considered for a firefighting job, which a black lady had to wait just a few days. The plight, in other words, was only recognized when it came for the upper class liberal cohort of white men. Carl is not sympathetic to their political homelessness because for him, they still want to be part of the liberal status-granting regime.
Rejecting the Status Game - also has a response, where he points out that the real error here is wanting to be part of the corrupt system in the first place. In a moment of self-reflection, he admits that if he were offered a place in it, he would probably have accepted, and counts it a blessing that he wasn’t offered such a spot. And with that, he offers not sympathy, but hope, because in a sense, their talents are much better used in areas outside these fossilized, decaying systems. Like a spurned lover, the best revenge is a life well-lived.
No Evangelical Elite - authored this long-read on the lack of evangelical elites. As he points out, the leading conservative thinkers are much more likely to be Catholic, Jewish or even Mormon than Evangelical despite being a plurality and he spends much of the article on why this is. Part of it is historical. Many of the mainline denominations, which used to house elites are now hopelessly liberal, of which evangelicalism is a reaction. Evangelicalism has populist roots, which naturally is not as elite-driven. The other problem is that clergy are venerated more than other vocations within Evangelicalism, leading to celebrity pastors being the biggest influencers, centralizing thought leadership around them.
Peer Review is Useless - writes about the ROI of peer review and the results aren’t good. Collectively, peer review takes 15,000 man-years every year. It’s supposed to catch errors, but clearly it does not as shown in the replication crisis, so how can we justify keeping it? Sadly, the reason is because most of the funding for science research is from governments, and they require it. Much like the health insurance system and university administrative offices, these are entirely rent-seeking operations, ultimately caused by the availability of fiat money.
What I'm up to
Core v Knots VII - The series I’ve been doing with Tone took a more moderate turn with our guest Parker Lewis. We talked about his main concerns, which are not about CSAM, but about the precedent being set about discounting non-Core developer concerns. We also talked about what competition to Core that isn’t Knots might look like and what some of the things that have happened since we had our last show.
Reflections on Grad School - I wrote this after learning that the Brown shooter was a spurned graduate student. Inspired a bit by this piece from Scott Locklin, the main point I was trying to get across is that “safe” paths have a lot of risk, too, and that the tradeoff isn’t so clear cut on the risk spectrum when it comes to choosing a career. I’m thankful certain doors were shut for me, and those turning points are good times to reflect.
Max and Stacy Bitcoin Invitational - I will be at this event in El Salvador on January 8-10. Besides Bitcoin, there will be golf, pickleball and poker among other things.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Hash Based Signatures for Bitcoin - Quantum concerns seem to be all the rage, and this paper by Jonas Nick and Mikhail Kudinov of Blockstream does a survey of the various hash-based schemes that are quantum resistant. Some of the consequences of hash-based signatures is that there are no good ways to do hardened key derivation, making HD wallets difficult and multisig would require interactivity and/or setups. That said, there are some optimizations that we could make for Bitcoin, that would make signatures smaller than conventional hash-based signatures.
64-byte Transactions - This is part of BitMex’s series on the vulnerabilities fixed by BIP54, the consensus cleanup proposal from Antoine Poinsot and Matt Corallo. This particular vulnerability has to do with the Merkle Root in the block header, which can be used to fool a simplified payment verification node into thinking that a transaction is in a block when it isn’t. It’s not an easy attack to pull off, and it’s questionable if anyone can, but the solution, as the blog notes is to ban 64-byte transactions. Read the whole thing for the technical details.
Non-Seed Backups - The BIP39 standard backups have been the industry standard for a long time, but there are certain wallets, particularly around lightning that do something else, mostly because they like the tradeoff in the security model. This post goes through one developer’s journey in figuring out a reasonable backup model that uses the infrastructure for backup that already exists in a secure way. Seed backups are the standard and I think people should use them in all cases involving a meaningful amount of Bitcoin, but additional backup solutions like this is useful to think about and perhaps implement.
Lightning
Channel Rebalancing - Routing nodes need to rebalance their channels frequently as channels deplete in one direction. This article goes through the various different ways you can rebalance and the various gotchas of rebalancing. Of course a circular rebalance is ideal as it won’t cost very much, but other tactics like changing the fees you charge as a node and even choosing which peers to have are alternatives to the blunt instruments of exiting and reopening channels.
Lightning Verification in TEEs - Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have been around a while and are used for a lot of cryptographic security on different computers. This is a novel way to verify lightning channel balances using these environments to give some proof to interested nodes about the balances that these channels hold without privacy leakage. It’s a very interesting idea as the ability to isolate malicious actors this way makes the lightning network work much better.
Taproot Assets on LN - Lightning Labs’ colored coins protocol that operates on LN has a new release. The main new feature is that there’s a universal static address you can give for any Taproot asset and a fully auditable supply of any particular asset. Of course, none of this would be that interesting without the lightning integration, and they have as part of this release, a way to use something like multi-path fulfillment of transfers of these assets.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Merchant Adoption - Square enabled Bitcoin payments on their ubiquitous terminals a month ago and this blog post is about their learnings on how that went. Among other things, it turns out that a lot of terminals aren’t updated, which prevents the turning on of the Bitcoin feature. The merchant adoption varies based on their familiarity and risk tolerance, and it seems that small owner-operators are the most likely and larger places not as much.
Design Analysis - This is a long-read on the design aspects of Bitcoin and how the Bitcoin experience fails on multiple levels. The one thing that stood out to me is the critique about beauty and how the whole experience of holding Bitcoin simply is ugly and tedious. There’s little about the process of backing up seeds and setting up hardware wallets that feels like a premium experience the way that storing a gold bar into a bank vault might. Indeed, that sounds like something that would make for a good business.
Jade Security Disclosure - If you own a Jade hardware wallet, you should upgrade the firmware. The security disclosure reveals a vulnerability in registering descriptors, which if exploited can execute code from an attacker. There’s no active exploit that exists for this vulnerability, but it’s generally good practice to keep these things up to date.
Quick Hits
BTC from Steak and Shake - If you shop at the restaurant and upload the receipt on the Fold app, you can get $5 in Bitcoin.
Memecoin Crash - The CoinGecko report goes through just how much of a crash it’s been. Who could have possibly seen that coming? /s
BitcoinProducts - If you want to recommend some product or service that’s Bitcoin Maximalist, this is a website that you can use.
Bithypha - An pretty and new blockchain explorer.
Fiat delenda est.