Bitcoin Tech Talk #490
Interesting Stuff
Rothchild Privilege - Christopher Brunet writes about one of the revelations of the Epstein emails, which is that an 8th generation Rothchild got a 1070 on the SAT yet got admitted to NYU. That's not quite as bad a score as the article makes it out to be, but it is pretty terrible for anyone aspiring to go into higher education. Fiat debases credentials as much as any other thing.
Agentic Coding - This article is about how so many things are about to change as a result of AI agents. Claude Code can do some truly remarkable things in a very short amount of time, and if you haven't tried it, I really encourage you to at least try.
Robot Masters - Nik Pash writes about an OpenClaw project where he funded an AI with $50,000 and told it to do whatever it pleased to see what would happen. Armed with an X account and pattern matching skills, it managed to get quite a following by first giving away money, then getting gifted some Solana memecoins, and then giving away even more money. At one point, it lost $450,000 because of a wallet mishap.
Rootedness - A.M. Hickman has this long read on what coastal elites get and don't get about "flyover country." He's surprisingly in agreement with a lot of their analysis, that a lot of flyover country is desolate and has a low quality of life. What's missing is that the quality of life in coastal areas and cities are also not that great unless you have a lot of money.
Roundup - Joel Salatin writes about the executive order that Trump signed this week, which essentially makes glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, national security status. Particularly surprising was the statement put out by RFK Jr, a known opponent of the chemical, given that the order essentially gives immunity to producers from lawsuits.
What I'm Up To
Bitcoin Sports Network - Talk with Max Keiser at the Golf Invitational about the fiatization of the world and the comparative reversal being found in El Salvador, property rights and other topics.
jimmysong.org - New website launched with the help of Claude. You can now buy signed copies of books and subscriptions to the newsletter using Zaprite.
BitBlockBoom - Conference in Dallas on April 9-12th, plus Thank God for Bitcoin conference beforehand.
Bitcoin
Binohash - Robin Linus has a paper on how you can use Bitcoin's Script system to introspect using OP_CHECKMULTISIG's find and delete property. The scheme essentially allows for BitVM to verify that a transaction pays out to the correct address within Script.
BIP110 Guide - Jameson Lopp makes the argument that BIP110 is reckless and doomed to fail. His main point that this is not a technical battle but a cultural one is what I think will be the biggest takeaway.
Stale Block Data - A list of stale blocks. Examining these will hopefully lead to better understanding of when these happen and what makes one block win over another.
Lightning
Agent Payments - Matt Corallo argues that this is the golden moment for Lightning as AI agents can't really use Credit Cards. Lightning's finality of settlement becomes a feature and not a bug.
Numo - A point-of-sale ecash terminal for merchants that is a Lightning wallet underneath. The advantage of using ecash is that you can get true tap-to-pay, and the whole thing settles to Lightning.
Nostr-Core - A simple and minimalist library for building NIP-47 (Nostr Wallet Connect) integration for lightning wallets. Simpler codebases cost fewer tokens for agentic coding.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
FATF vs Hosted Wallets - The Mexican government may soon be targeting "unhosted wallets," which are just self-custodied coins. 6102-style attacks are inevitable, and this is in a long line of governments thinking that they can legislate centralization.
MagicalTux Proposes Hard Fork - The founder of Mt. Gox wants a hard fork to pay back everyone that lost money at Mt. Gox. This is a dead-on-arrival proposal, but the fact that he's trying tells you that he's probably not done with this industry.
KYC ATMs - The manufacturer of 8000 Bitcoin ATMs in the US will soon require IDs to transact. All public facing things become a regulatory attack surface.
Quick Hits
FIBRE rebuttal - The story about using FIBRE to decentralize mining has a rebuttal.
Meta Stablecoin - The Libra currency that was supposed to revolutionize Facebook ran into too many regulatory hurdles, but now that they're cleared, Meta is trying again.
P2Q - A proposal from the Ordinals creator on quantum-safe outputs.
First BIP110 Block - The first signaling block was mined by Barefoot Mining.