Bitcoin Tech Talk #500
Interesting Stuff
Technological Symbiosis - Aaron M. Renn argues that most people who say they want to mitigate the downsides of technology aren't actually willing to sacrifice any personal comfort, the upside, to get it. Most people recognize that social media, mobile phones and even AI fundamentally have tradeoffs and that we're deeply vulnerable to the downsides. Yet the convenience, always having something to do and instant gratification are too much to give up in exchange. The article reminded me that Jacque Ellul's analysis of technology having a purpose of its own causing a deeper and deeper embedding into our lives makes it nearly impossible to extricate. In a sense, we are being hacked by technology as much as we are using it.
Radicalization of Girls - Jenny Holland traces how upper-middle-class white women became the shock troops of progressive ideology, not through oppression but through institutional capture of education and media. These women are the primary consumers and distributors of luxury beliefs, or ideas that confer status on the believer while inflicting costs on everyone else. The results are some shocking poll numbers showing how they hate men, capitalism, are mentally unwell and don't want children. The mainstream media likes to point at incels and MAGA men as the problem, but the numbers show that it's actually the single women.
SPLC fraud - Bits About Money dissects what exactly happened with the Southern Poverty Law Center where they used fake invoices and shell companies to launder money to their opposition through the banking system. I didn't realize until reading this article that the SPLC was the provider of ban lists for banks, where appearing on one of them would make it extremely difficult to open a bank account. There's also good detail on the banking system's compliance apparatus and how it's structured to charge whoever the prosecutor does not like ex post facto. The SPLC ban list turns out to be a stealth way for people on the left to deny banking services to their opponents. That same mechanism ironically caught them doing something pretty terrible.
Rousseau's Disease - κατακαῖον argues that many homeschooling families sabotage their own efforts by adopting Rousseau's romantic notion that children are naturally good and will flourish if simply left alone. The result of such schooling is undisciplined children who lack the rigor and grit that actual learning demands. Unfortunately, the Rousseauian idea is very popular because it avoids conflicts with the children who would rather not be memorizing times tables or reading Homer. Real education, in other words, requires real discipline from the teacher.
Unemployed USAID - Yuri Bezmenov documents the absurd LinkedIn profiles of laid-off USAID workers whose entire careers consisted of subjugating countries to globalist domination under their watch. Unsurprisingly, the ultimate rent-seekers are not making anywhere near what they made with USAID. What's surprising is how much publications like the NYTimes are trying to make them seem sympathetic in this regard. So we should print and waste more money to help these people who can't do anything else? I think I'd prefer UBI.
What I'm up to
Atomiq Level - I was on this substack live with Chris J Snook and talked about Bitcoin, ProductionReady and a bunch of other things.
Finder - I was on this show produced out of Australia to talk about Bitcoin, how it's changed and not changed over the past 7 years and what the future looks like for Bitcoin as a Global Reserve Currency. Here is Part 2.
BTC Prague - June 11-13, I will be in Prague for what will be my third time for this conference. It should be a good time
Nostr Note of the Week
What I'm Promoting
Bitcoin
CVE-2024-52911 - A use-after-free vulnerability in Bitcoin Core versions 0.14.0 through 28.x could let a miner craft a special block to crash nodes by accessing freed memory. While remote code execution was theoretically possible, practical exploitation was extremely constrained. What's particularly worrying about this bug is that Core specifically doesn't patch any of the older versions before 0.29 due to being "end-of-life." This is not a small policy change, and somewhat buried in the 0.31 release, but something to consider as any core software user will more or less be dragged along on upgrades due to security patches not being available.
Mitigating Undercutting Attacks - This MIT paper examines whether miners can profitably fork the chain to steal high-fee transactions from already-mined blocks. As Bitcoin's block subsidy continues to halve and fees become the primary miner revenue, understanding these attack vectors becomes more important for gaming out the incentives. The research maps out safe parameter ranges for block size and fee structures to keep the network stable long-term.
Public Fraud Proofs - Thomas Voegtlin proposes a fraud-proof scheme for just-in-time Lightning channels, where an LSP signs "UTXO commitments" pledging to spend specific inputs into a channel funding transaction if the payment preimage appears on-chain before a deadline block. If the LSP cheats. the client can publish the preimage in an OP_RETURN to create a publicly verifiable proof of theft, with Nostr suggested for fast real-time sharing of commitments between clients. To make stealing unprofitable, LSPs publicly burn bitcoins as a fidelity bond, and the total amount they're trusted with at any time should not exceed what they've sacrificed.
Lightning
Simple Taproot Channels - Simple Taproot Channels have been formally merged into the Lightning spec, upgrading channel funding outputs to use P2TR with MuSig2. This makes Lightning channels indistinguishable from regular on-chain transactions, which is a privacy win. The incremental, careful, perhaps slow approach to adopting Taproot capabilities shows that either Taproot adoption takes a really long time or that Taproot just isn't as useful as we thought it would be.
Post Quantum Lightning - This article is a thorough analysis of how quantum computing threatens Lightning's security model and what replacing elliptic curve cryptography with post-quantum alternatives would look like at each protocol layer. The bad news is that post-quantum signatures are 15-75x larger, which means real engineering trade-offs ahead. The good news is that Lightning's overall architecture works and just needs bigger cryptographic building blocks.
Zap Browser - This is a privacy-focused Chromium fork with a built-in Lightning wallet, Cashu ecash, and Nostr identity management all derived from a single seed phrase. It ships with a 106,000+ domain blocklist and WebRTC leak prevention baked in, no extensions needed. Agentic AI coding definitely makes projects like this a lot more viable and I hope to see more Bitcoin-centric forks of mainstream software.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
The Fabric of Desires - Nick Szabo argues that money did not emerge from barter or markets but from the deeply human need to transfer value during life's most critical moments like deaths, marriages, and disputes. Using the Yurok people's dentalium shells as illustration, he shows that trust-minimized, durable stores of value predate markets by tens of thousands of years. Bitcoin is not some modern invention but the latest expression of an instinct older than civilization itself.
Dollar Dominance - Ten31 argues the US is strengthening dollar dominance through energy market control, with record exports and the UAE's OPEC exit following dollar swap negotiations. These geopolitical maneuvers create conditions favorable to sustained fiscal expansion and dollar-denominated assets, which inevitably benefits scarce assets like Bitcoin. The house always wins in the short run, but Bitcoin is the long game against the collapsing house itself.
Riot and Nuclear - Riot Platforms is partnering with Terrestrial Energy to develop nuclear-powered data centers for Bitcoin mining. This is the kind of long-term energy infrastructure investment that makes critics' "Bitcoin wastes energy" argument look increasingly absurd. When miners are literally building nuclear plants, they are not parasites on the grid, they are the grid's customers of last resort.
Quick Hits
Bitcoin equity loans - Pyrus Financial offers financing Bitcoin purchases over 4-7 years with 10-20% down, using credit scores.
Lightning Native Roulette - Robin Linus designs a trustless two-party roulette game using Bitcoin payment channels.
Bitaxe Seller Index - The fully open-source Bitaxe miner project now has a proper vendor directory organized by region.
Bitnodes.io Done? - The most widely used Bitcoin node tracking service went offline after its domain expired.
Fiat delenda est.