Bitcoin Tech Talk #484
Interesting Stuff
Downsides of Efficiency - Efficiency is a staple of the modern fiat world and unfortunately, has debased a lot of experiences in its wake. As shows, much of what we value as humans have been debased by the inherent cheapness of production. One of the big insights in this article for me was the irony of how efficiency saves people time, which robbing it of value. This isn’t all fiat money’s fault, of course, modern technology is a big reason, but surely, the relentless drive for efficiency is deeply driven by the pressures of inflation and sticky prices.
Thanking JP - has a clear-eyed reflection on the legacy of Jordan Peterson. His fall from grace since 2020 or so has made him something like a Girardian scapegoat, hated by the left for empowering a lot of young white men, and hated by the right for his unwillingness to quite embrace them. In that sense, he’s become something like a modern day prophet, speaking truths that ultimately relegated him to the position he has now. I thought the article was a great summation of why we should be thanking the man for bringing truth into the public sphere without the “yes, but” which seems to accompany his mention lately.
Boomerlib Fiction - has a semi-review of the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. I say semi-review, because the article is much more about the deceased author’s worldview as it relates to the plot and characters of the 34-book series than it is about the series itself. The main insight is that the many plot devices used by Pratchett reflect his Boomer/Liberal view of the world, which is that reality can be made by enough people believing in some vision. As he points out, there’s almost always some authoritarian streak that goes with it, enforcing empathy and acceptance on a non-cooperative population. It’s a worldview born of fiat prosperity, which Boomers enjoyed without having to suffer all the consequences which generations after them have.
How We Learn Virtue - has this article on how first and second century Christians did church. You might expect that there was a lot of theological education, but indeed, that was not the case. What was much more prominent was 3 years of discipleship, where people learned simply to be Christ-like. The modern emphasis on information or knowledge is misplaced, in that regard. Virtue does not come from knowing, but in doing. Unfortunately, it’s a pervasive societal fiction that if you know better that it makes you more virtuous, but as this article shows, information is probably the least important factor in changing behavior.
Physics and Conditional Probability - has another post on some physics topics, and as you might expect, it’s a fun one about how stupid very smart people can be. Conditional probability is a very obvious and known concept. If you know that a card is red, for example, the probability of the card being a heart is 50%, but if you don’t know, it’s 25%. That sort of thing, apparently, is hard for physicists to grasp as they’re not trained in it. Yet as he points out, conditional probability may be a much cleaner and logical way to understand quantum entanglement than some woo-woo spooky action at a distance.
What I'm up to
Cocomax - A vlog of the chopper trip I took to El Zonte is online. The normally 45-minute car ride took a mere 10 minutes by helicopter and we did this to get Max’s signature drink, the Coco Max (coconut and some other stuff). When I think about how often I’ve been stuck in traffic, I get upset that we don’t have this type of transportation available everywhere.
Condensed Financial Fox - If you missed my interview with Financial Fox, here’s a condensed 10 minute version of why Bitcoin will be great in a multi-polar world, why taxation is slavery, and why there’s no way out of a fiat monetary system without hyperinflation.
Plan B El Salvador - I will be in El Salvador again at the end of this month for this annual conference. One of the things I will be doing is talking about whether Treasury Companies are good for Bitcoin.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Short lived Private Connection - Recently merged PR lets you broadcast your transaction via TOR or I2P to a peer, exclusively for the purposes of broadcasting that transaction. The idea is that the peer won’t know much about you as you’re connecting over a private connection and because the connection ends shortly thereafter, that they won’t find out very much. Of course, such nodes may black-hole the transaction, but then you can try again with another peer. It’s a clever way to preserve privacy by not unnecessarily leaking information in later stages with other data.
BIP 3 Merged - The improvement proposal process, first defined in BIP 1 and then updated in BIP 2 is now on BIP 3. The main changes are around statuses and how they are owned. Some of these changes are overdue, but it’s a bit of a centralized point in the Bitcoin ecosystem as the repository is seen as some sort of standard. That said, the management of the repository has gotten a lot better and this particular BIP addresses a lot of the issues that BIPs have had in the past.
Block Time Calculator - Blocks in Bitcoin increase roughly every 10 minutes, but not always. Sometimes they are shorter, sometimes they are longer, so knowing the block number doesn’t necessarily give you when it was mined. There is also the timestamp in the block header, but miners are allowed to keep this value within a certain range of the actual time, so it turns out that finding the actual time is not so simple. This is a tool to translate them using the miner header time, which is useful, though not necessarily perfect.
Lightning
Conway’s Game of Pacman - This is a lightning based mashup of Conway’s Game of Life and Pacman. You can play once for free, but afterwards, need to pay with lightning to play. It’s sort of a different take on Mobile games in that instead of getting people addicted and playing constantly, this is more a challenge to do better. Once you add payouts for getting past a certain level, it then becomes more like a gambling system. Whether this becomes popular remains to be seen, but pay-to-play hits different with lightning.
Blitz Wallet Dollar Transfers - The lightning wallet now has in beta, an option for receiving dollars on lightning. The mechanism is a little bit obscured, but there’s some trustless swap going on in the background between when the payer pays in Lightning and the recipient receives dollars from BTC to something called USDB, a stablecoin on Spark. I suppose this could appeal to certain merchants that prefer doing business in dollars, but I’m not sure whether they’d download a lightning wallet, let alone adopt Bitcoin to accept dollars.
PlebQR - This is a project in Thailand that lets you pay any Thai QR payment code with Bitcoin. Like many countries, Thailand has a ubiquitous payment system, in their case called PromptPay. The way PlebQR works is that a local is given an offer to convert this by paying the QR code in exchange for your Bitcoins. If they accept, they receive the Bitcoin after paying the QR. It apparently works really well there, and given how many digital nomads are drawn to the region, it seems like a viable destination for the Bitcoiner.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Bitcoin Volatility at a Low - According to this report from Ark Invest, Bitcoin’s volatility is the lowest it has ever been. Staying in a reasonably tight band will do that. The report has other nuggets, like the role of digital asset treasuries on the market and how derivatives are pricing Bitcoin going into 2026. Overall, the impression that you get is that volatility of Bitcoin is declining as the industry matures with the availability of all kinds of financial instruments. Hard to say whether that’s true long-term, and if so, whether that reduction of risk correspondingly reduces upside.
Carre Four - (Article in French) This European grocery chain is apparently offering a 20% discount for paying in Bitcoin. That’s quite the discount and unusual for anyone that’s not a raging Bitcoin Maxi. Yet, if true, this would indicate what we’ve been anticipating for some time. The real adoption for payments will come when the merchants want Bitcoin so badly that they start offering discounts. Whether that’s the case or whether this is just a PR/marketing stunt remains to be seen, but it’s good to see that we’re moving in that direction.
Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act - Lummis and Wyden have joined forces to introduce this bill in the Senate, which protects open source coders from being subject to money transmission laws (like AML/KYC). This is definitely a step in the right direction, especially after what’s happened with the Samourai devs, and the fact that the Republican and Democrat most friendly to Bitcoin have introduced this bill, tells us that this applies most to Bitcoin indeed. Let’s hope other senators feel that way.
Quick Hits
Hash Visualizer - Input any data and you can see the various rounds of expansion and compression that happen in SHA-256.
13627 BTC - Strategy continues accumulating at a heavy rate, perhaps in anticipation of lower rates.
Muslim Bitcoin Summit - I suppose this was inevitable given how successful Thank God for Bitcoin has been, but also intriguing that it’s taking place about a week after the TGFB conference in the same city.
Steak and Shake $10M - The Bitcoin-accepting fast food burger joint has increased their Bitcoin reserve by this amount, apparently.
Fiat delenda est.