Bitcoin Tech Talk #483
Interesting Stuff
Over-Abstraction - There are people that do physical labor. The ones that physically build things and provide services. And then there are people that do the abstract work of what to build, where to provide services and how such things should be regulated. This article is about the latter class and how it has become more and more disconnected from the former class. The result has been an over-abstraction of the actual work, which has led to, among other things, optimizing a specific metric instead of the actual good. The correction mechanism of market feedback unfortunately doesn’t work because of fiat money fueled doubling down.
Therapy Replacing Parenting - writes about how therapy has replaced parenting for a lot of young people. The article touches on the reasoning, which is that expertise of therapy has become the “proper” way to receive love, affection and training for various social situations rather than from parents. This is an extension of the credentialism that pervades fiat systems, and clearly crosses a boundary that really shouldn’t be crossed. What’s frightening is that this substitution of therapy for parenting is celebrated by therapy culture, and a lot of traditional parenting denigrated. Yet, it’s the norm for a lot of young people, many who start in therapy in high school.
Needless Supplementation - writes about various food fortifications which were implemented decades ago. Specifically, stuff like “fortified rice” and folic acid, which have a lot of evidence of harm rather than the benefits they touted from decades ago. Yet the regulations remain in play and unfortunately, these supplementations stick around. As we saw with the food pyramid, revoking old dogma is a very heavy lift and unfortunately bad decisions remain far longer than they should. In a way we have the stupidity of centralization when creating policy, but the decentralized difficulty of reversal, the worst of both worlds. And of course, this is how fiat systems end up as rent-seekers around each policy make such revocation very difficult.
Regulation E - Bits About Money has this informative article about the little known consumer protection legislation from the 70’s, Reg E. The regulation was part of the transition to digital payments that Congress anticipated which makes the banks liable for consumer fraud, making them eager to either solve the fraud or at least pass the buck. In the case of credit cards, they’ve passed the buck to actual businesses who more or less have to eat the chargebacks, but the intriguing case of Zelle shows that banks are screwing over consumers instead. There’s also a bit about cryptocurrency, which points out that any bank providing services around crypto will become liable. Does this mean altcoins will be reversing more transactions?
Climate Climbdown - writes about the decreasing relevance of the Climate Change lobby, as companies like JP Morgan shut down the Net Zero Alliance. Donations are drying up, and predictions from 30 years ago are off by orders of magnitude, which has led to its slow death. He speculates that AI is both a convenient excuse to call off all the doomsday predictions as AI needs a lot of energy, and something that a lot of these organizations may pivot to next in the form of AI safety scares. I suspect the panic isn’t quite over yet as these large bureaucracies and accompanying infrastructure in education and media are unlikely to suddenly go away.
What I'm up to
Financial Fox - I talked on this podcast about Venezuela, the possible beginning of the Age of Empires and how a neutral currency is something that will be required in such a world. We also talked about government fraud and the need for a better system.
Bitcoin News Alerts - I was on this show as part of the Max and Stacy Invitational, where we talked about the helicopter ride to El Zonte I did with Max and Wiz, and the first time I met Max and Stacy.
Conversation with Max - This was why I was at the Max and Stacy Invitational. Fast forward to 1:55:00 to get to the talk I did with Max Keiser. We talked about treasury companies and whether it’s good for Bitcoiners, how David Bailey is doing similar things to Barry Silbert, about what low time preference Bitcoin conferences look like and the charitable industrial complex. There were some discussions of socialism, property rights and the entitlement of downwardly mobile young liberals. It was intended to be about 20 minutes, but we talked for about 45. Hope you enjoy it.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Fuzzamoto Part 1 - This is a post at Brink talking about a new testing paradigm for Core which combines fuzz testing with functional testing, with the goal of getting better test coverage without having to refactor critical parts of the code base, which are generally resisted by the review process. The architecture mostly treats the binary generated from Core as a black box and spins up a new instance every time to get the determinism needed to track down any bugs found.
Yam - If you’ve ever run a node and want more fine-grained control over who you connect to, this is your tool. You can use all the normal functions that Core uses, like accessing DNS seeds to discover nodes, connect or disconnect to them, and even graph what the network looks like based on getaddr commands. I honestly think these would be useful RPC commands and would be useful in any sort of UI for node software.
Mutant Testing - The main idea of this type of testing is to make sure that the testing catches obviously bad changes to the code. For instance, if you change < to > somewhere in the code, this should cause something to fail. As the post shows, this type of testing is pretty expensive, as each mutant needs to be compiled and tested. There’s also the problem that some of these mutations might cause infinite loops. Anyway, it’s a great way to understand test coverage and utilizing it more deeply looks useful.
Lightning
Lightning Development Start Guide - If you want to get started in Lightning development, making a transaction on a test network is a huge first step and in this guide, the author takes you from a fresh MacOS install to making a regtest lightning transaction. This is only part 1 of a multi-part series, and hopefully, you get a great idea of how to do development on Lightning as a result.
Subscription Manager - Subscriptions are ubiquitous in the fiat world and Lightning isn’t particularly good at them. So this is an LNBits extension that allows for taking payment on a regular basis. The key here is that the extension allows for onchain, Lightning and even fiat payments, which make it more likely for the user to be able to pay easily. The problem in the past with lightning subscriptions is that the channel management required enough balance and capacity every time the payment needed to be done,
Feasibility - This is a formalized mathematical description of the Lightning network in terms of scalability. The main idea here is of feasibility, which is equivalent to the ability to pay from one point to another on the graph of lightning nodes. The main result is that multi-party channels enhance feasibility and that there are limits to scalability whenever there are obstructions in the network.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
The Independent Fed and Bitcoin - The paper from Bitcoin Policy Institute is formalizing that Bitcoin protects against the various actions of the Fed should it become more politically driven. In theory, that could mean that the Fed could reduce the money supply at times, but such an action almost never makes sense politically, so the result of a Fed that’s not independent is a continual expansion of the money supply, perhaps faster than it has been. The conclusion then, is obvious: yes, Bitcoin hedges against a politically driven (and non-politically driven) Fed.
Sound Money and Family - The article argues that fiat money creates state dependency and thus is very bad for families, whereas sound money in general, and Bitcoin in particular champions family. I wrote about this in my book Fiat Ruins Everything, but the one insight I got out of this article is that the scarcity mentality is what creates a trauma-reactive parenting style. That is, even parenting becomes high time preference in a fiat economy.
Wrench Attacks - They are going up around the world, apparently, and unfortunately, this is one of the ways in which true property rights add some more danger. Without a central intermediary, kidnapping and violence are a bit more incentivized because the upside is so huge. As they say, with power (and resources) come responsibility. Don’t neglect yours.
Quick Hits
Strategy Balance Sheet - Increased Bitcoin holdings and USD reserves.
Samourai Coin - There’s some speculation that the coins from the Samourai dev case were sold by the DOJ.
Mining Story - A heartwarming story of a man with an energy source discovering Bitcoin.
Rumble Wallet - The YouTube alternative owned by Tether now has a wallet that supports BTC, Tether USD and Tether Gold.
Fiat delenda est.