Bitcoin Tech Talk #485
Interesting Stuff
Text is Lindy - examines the doomer claim that reading is going extinct. As he points out, this is neither a new panic nor an original one. People have been saying that books are dying since the invention of the things that were supposed to displace it, like radio, movies, television, the internet, YouTube and Social Media. Yet books persist, not because it has more and better features, but because books do what they do very well. Part of that is articulating ideas and compressing them in understandable chunks. But to be truthful, we don’t fully understand their function in the grand sweep of history. It was a reminder to me that features are not what makes something last. Something we should be mindful about with respect to Bitcoin.
Giving to Kids - has a guest post about when people should be giving wealth to their children. The current model is to give to your kids upon death, which, because of longer lifespans, is typically when the kids are in their 50’s and 60’s. As the article points out, this is usually way too late and largely after life trajectories have mostly been set. The better model, in his articulation, is to give to your children in their 20’s when the money matters a lot more and has more impact. There’s a lot of wisdom in this idea, that the timing is as or more important than the amount, which as any fight fan will tell you, is true of many other areas of life.
MLK Jr’s Theology - has this eye-opening piece about the Reverend’s theological beliefs. As he shows with full receipts, MLK Jr was not what you would call a conventional Christian, denying, among other things, the divinity of Christ, the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection. I had never heard of this until this article, but in a sense I’m not that surprised. His well-known philandering, for example, is very difficult to square with Christian beliefs, but is not nearly as hard in the context of the “social gospel” or liberal theology. As with many powerful men, I suspect that the temptation he succumbed to changed his beliefs rather than the other way around.
Chesterton’s Microscope - writes about this useful heuristic, that of looking at the local and not the global. The whole thing is worth reading, but the part that stood out to me was his contention that depression is ultimately a form of learned helplessness and that learned helplessness is exacerbated by looking too much at global or macro trends that you can’t control. This struck home with me and showed, for me, why the Bitcoin community has such a different feel. People have way more agency due to focusing on the local and controlling what they can control.
Visualizing the Past - has this article on looking at pictures and videos of the past and how they are triggering to modern people. The visuals in the post are stunning. The beauty of the architecture, the elegance of the people and the general overall wholesomeness of everything is unmistakable. For me, the lesson of seeing these is that this focus on beauty was taken away from us through the debasement of the money. Sadly, the debasement continues unabated for most of society, though perhaps some of that is coming back with Bitcoin.
What I'm up to
Core v Knots Part VIII - Tone and I talked to reardencode, who is a Core supporter, despite not being enamored of their work. We talked about the wallet bug, glozow’s X hack and whether the difference between relay policy and consensus is a bug or not. He also had some thoughts on BIP-110 and soft forks in general.
Core v. Knots Part IX - We also talked to Chris Guida, who is a Knots supporter and is advocating for BIP-110. This was a bit more contentious with competing claims on what the results of the soft fork would be should it be successful. We also talked about what sort of node runners we want on the network and the utility of long-term permanent data storage and whether that will compete with monetary transactions.
Plan B San Salvador - I will be at this conference later this week and going on a panel on whether Treasury Companies are good for Bitcoin. Sneak preview: I’ll be arguing more about whether they’re good for Bitcoiners, rather than the abstract entity Bitcoin.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Permissionlessly Extensible P2P Messaging - Known as BIP-434, this is a BIP to make messaging a lot more extensible across different implementations. The main method by which this is done is by using a new network message “feature” which tells what features a node provides instead of using the protocol version number as a way to indicate such. This way, different implementations don’t have to coordinate before a new network message.
Kompactor - This is an interesting way of using coinjoin infrastructure to actually do payments. The main thing here is that under WabiSabi, you get anonymized credentials for how much you put in. These credentials can then be used to pay people anonymously. So instead of transferring Bitcoin, the payor sends the credentials to the merchant for them to redeem. It’s an interesting, second-layer-ish way of doing payments in a way that’s pretty private, though it does require some coordination and centralization.
signingroom - You can coordinate multisig using this tool instead of throwing around PSBTs using this tool. Multisig coordination with PSBTs assumes some asynchronicity and as a result, leaves a lot of digital residue. The main idea of this project is that you keep everything ephemeral and allow for more synchronous coordination in a provably secure environment. For multisig that’s actually multiple parties, say in controlling the funds of an organization, this makes more sense.
Lightning
Blinded Paths - Most lightning wallets don’t prioritize privacy currently, but that’s not always going to be the case. This article lays out what blinded paths are, how they work, what’s being used under the hood and the various attacks that it’s trying to mitigate for. The actual details are pretty cool and the understanding in this area is helpful for lots of cryptographic things in Bitcoin in general.
Programming Lightning - According to the author, this is the Lightning analogue to my book Programming Bitcoin, though it’s using replit instead of Jupyter Notebook, and it’s written in Rust rather than Python. The first part is online and free, so if you’re familiar with Rust and want to learn Lightning, here are some very good step-by-step exercises.
ZapFunder - If you have some sats sitting around that you want to donate toward ecosystem projects, this is the website for you. The main idea is that anyone can post some funding request and get it. A lot of the funding requests are for less than 1000 sats total, which suggests that people are just playing with the platform, but there are some more significant amounts desired here. I like that there’s no minimum, making the whole thing feel more fun.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
AI and Bitcoin Mining - Rob Hamilton has this report from a Bitcoin Mining conference. Most people by now are very aware that AI systems take a lot of energy, but as Rob shows, the path that they’re on is very similar to the path that Bitcoin has taken. LLMs are largely about GPUs at the moment, but the efficiency of ASICs are much greater, so that’s where AI systems are currently heading. The competition of AI along the entire supply chain (chip design, chip manufacturing, energy sources and such) have some significant implications in Bitcoin, including possible opportunities for miners as these AI data centers spin up.
BankToBTC - If you’re banking somewhere and want to buy Bitcoin using its funds, it’s a bit tricky because some of these banks may cut off your access without much explanation. This is a website that scores these banks on their general Bitcoin friendliness. I can’t tell how accurate this is, but if you’re in the market for a banking relationship, I can see how useful such a reputation score can be.
Cypherock Hack Demo - This article goes through exactly how the Cypherock hardware wallet was hacked. The security researchers pulled off a successful supply chain attack where some custom firmware essentially made the wallet vulnerable, creating mnemonic phrases that the attacker knew. Sadly, the attitude of the vendor seems to be to not even acknowledge DarkNavy’s efforts. I would be very careful using this wallet.
Quick Hits
glozow X hack - The maintainer’s X account was hacked, so you should not trust any messages from that account.
$500M USDT - That’s how much the Iranian Central Bank controls, according to this report.
700K BTC - Strategy has surpassed this mark with their 22k BTC buy this week.
Steak and Shake - The Bitcoin treasury fast food chain is now giving their hourly workers some Bitcoin that gets paid after 2 years.
Fiat delenda est.