Bitcoin Tech Talk #505

Interesting Stuff

1. Artists Selling Out - Adam Mastroianni argues the 1990s anti-sellout ethic has completely collapsed. Back in the 90's, Pearl Jam refused to make music videos for five years due to criticisms from fans and other bands. This has been replaced by a culture celebrating celebrity brand collaborations. The reasons are complex, but the one that stood out to me is that the everyone that's successful in the fiat-induced arts are required in many ways to become influencers and that line between artist and influencer is pretty blurry. In a way this can be considered good, as the quasi-elite critic class has much less influence, but it also produces people like David Solomon and James Dolan, the CEO of Goldman Sachs and the owner of the New York Knicks respectively, LARPing as musicians at places like Lollapalooza.

2. Inconvenient Humans - Librarian of Celaeno argues that near-universal abortion of children with Down syndrome, exceeding 90% in many Western countries, reveals a spiritual sickness rooted in the rejection of the ethic of sacrificial giving. He reveals how pagan civilizations that practiced infanticide (Sparta, Rome) were eventually replaced by Christians willing to endure material hardship to bring children into the world, while Augustus's financial incentive programs for childbearing failed completely. The most provocative point is that accepting "the inconvenient ones can be dispensed with" logically extends first to all children, then to adults, like with the MAiD program in Canada. The connection between a culture's willingness to sacrifice and its demographic survival is hard to dismiss.

3. Female Immaturity and Feminism - Hannah Spier, MD argues that grievance-centered feminism functions as a developmental trap, preventing women from maturing. Gratitude, sacrifice, and reciprocity are essentially stunted by feminism, but necessary for adult relationships and parenthood. The main mechanisms are externalization of blame, victimhood as stable identity, and socially rewarded antagonism. The "mental load" discourse is a good example of such rationalization. Normal family burdens get reframed as evidence of exploitation, training women to see dependence, or two-way relationships, as inherently dangerous. Young women without children are now more likely than men to report not wanting parenthood at all, suggesting this framework is actively suppressing family formation.

4. Uniformity of Technocrats - Aaron M. Renn uses Columbus, Ohio to show how cities shifted from powerful, rooted families to professionalized technocrats who manage through consensus and stakeholder consultation. The technocratic model is more inclusive but structurally incapable of solving serious problems because its leaders optimize for career portability rather than local commitment. This produces a highly conformist policy, where every city essentially runs the same way. For example, during COVID Columbus, like many technocratic cities, followed national lockdown orthodoxy. The result is what he calls a K-shaped city: manufacturing booms coexist with 240,000 people in poverty and doubled food bank usage. Despite the D in DEI, popular in such places, there's little diversity of ideas, creating the same failure modes, making them all fragile in the same way.

5. Deep Blue Families - Joshua Sohn examines why certain Democratic families in deep-blue D.C. maintain remarkably strong marriages. The answer is that they quietly borrow from traditional conservative values. These families are almost universally dual-income and educationally matched, yet fathers still out-earn mothers, and roughly a third attend church weekly, not exactly the progressive ideal. What really stands out is their deliberate rejection of "greedy" career maximization: elite government lawyers choose flexible, lower-paying roles over Big Law partnerships so they can do school pickup and PTA meetings. This is a subgroup of America that I'm interested in watching. Will they become more prominent with the demographic crisis at hand or will they go extinct as they flip conservative or drop out entirely?

What I'm up to

1. Debate Room - This was recorded a month and a half ago, where I debated some guy that was trying to convince people that Solana was good for something. We also talked about how real estate debases naturally, and how it's inferior to Bitcoin as a savings vehicle.

2. Origin Seoul - I will be in Seoul, Korea for this event on July 18th. There's a gathering of Christian Bitcoiners followed by a more general (secular) one afterward. Sign up and come on by if you're in town then!

3. BTC Prague - I did two panels and a talk, but the videos aren't up yet. The first was on self-custody and inheritance. I argued that most uninterested friends, heirs and relatives are likely to do very badly in recovering your Bitcoin. The second was on how to handle the abundance that's coming where I argued that it's not all rainbows and unicorns where people without sufficient self control will get more deeply captured. And the third was my talk on how we view miners and developers very differently despite both groups being human.

Nostr Note of the Week

What I'm Promoting

• Books

  • Fiat Ruins Everything (audiobook)
  • Bitcoin and the American Dream
  • Thank God for Bitcoin
  • The Little Bitcoin Book
  • Programming Bitcoin

Bitcoin

1. Bark - The company Second launched Bark, their implementation of the Ark protocol, on Bitcoin mainnet. Bark aims to bridge self-custody and usability by enabling bitcoin payments without the complexity of Lightning channels or the slowness of on-chain transactions. The SDK is built in Rust with bindings for practically every language (Kotlin, Swift, React Native, Flutter, Go, Python, WASM), and several wallets shipped on launch day including Noah and Arke. The pitch of 'no surprise fees, no channels to manage' is compelling, though the protocol is still young -- and as we'll see in another article this week, two vulnerabilities were already found and patched.

2. Testnet5 - There's a proposal to replace testnet4 with testnet5, driven by sustained abuse of the '20-minute rule' that lets CPU miners create blocks at minimal difficulty after inactivity. Testnet5 would eliminate this difficulty exception to mirror mainnet behavior more closely and activate BIP54 (consensus cleanup) from block 1. That's 3 different testnets that are currently active, with testnet3 being the oldest and also most difficult to get coins on, and testnet4 suffering a similar fate as testnet3. I personally like signets better for testing, and the faucets for those work much better, but I realize there are some good reasons to test on a test network that uses proof-of-work.

3. CoinJoin Privacy Examined - This peer-reviewed academic paper from the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium digs into the actual privacy guarantees and failures of coordinator-based CoinJoin systems like Wasabi and Whirlpool. They have some very useful statistics, like how big of an anonymity set you get through these protocols, and the current state of these coinjoin protocols. The main takeaway is that much of the coinjoin ecosystem is dead or dying and that large wallet coinjoins are detectable. Sadly, this probably won't improve soon with what has happened to the Samourai developers.

Lightning

1. Rusty Russell's Lightning Contributions - Blockstream published a tribute to Rusty Russell's departure after eleven years building Core Lightning, and the numbers are staggering: 9,762 commits (53.9% of the entire codebase), averaging 900 commits per year, with only 18 reverts across nearly 10,000 commits. He built the first Lightning implementation, chaired the BOLTs specification process, created lnprototest for cross-implementation compliance, and championed BOLT 12 Offers. The post rightly frames this as the end of an era, but his legacy lives on through the developers he mentored. The Lightning Network literally wouldn't exist in its current form without him.

2. Lightning Earn - BitGo launched Lightning Earn, built on Amboss's Rails product, letting institutional Bitcoin holders deploy BTC as Lightning routing liquidity and earn bitcoin-denominated fees without selling or taking token risk. The minimum is 1 BTC with no fixed lock-up periods, and BitGo deployed 10 of its own bitcoin as a confidence signal. Routing income requires some serious operational complexity like node management, channel optimization, and liquidity allocation, but these are all handled automatically. This is significant because it creates a financial incentive for institutions to strengthen Lightning infrastructure rather than just sitting on cold storage. More institutional liquidity means better payment routing and perhaps more merchants.

3. LNTest - Researchers built LNTest, the first reusable testbed for studying botnets that use Lightning Network as a command-and-control channel, and found that the autonomous topology formation in D-LNBot creates fragile clustered chains rather than the uniform chains described in its design. Command propagation scales linearly with botnet size, contradicting earlier O(m log n) claims. The security implications are worth paying attention to: Lightning's privacy features that protect legitimate users also make it attractive for botnet operators. The paper was accepted at the 2026 ARES conference and the testbed is open-source for future defensive research.

Economics, Engineering, Etc.

1. Trump Loves Inflation - President Trump responded to the CPI hitting a 3-year high by saying "I love the inflation," suggesting prices would drop once the war against Iran ends and claiming "we've been taking out millions of barrels of oil." The CPI showed annual inflation at 4.2% with a 0.5% monthly increase for May. Of course he loves inflation, as it allows him to spend money that he doesn't have, particularly in the war in Iran. The Cantillon losers, like the ordinary American voter, and most of the rest of the world hate it because inflation is theft. Such is the reason why Bitcoin exists.

2. Tax Credits for Bitcoin Education - Bitcoin Scholars Fund offers dollar-for-dollar federal tax credits for supporting primary and secondary Bitcoin education. The interactive map shows which states have programs available, making it easy to find opportunities to support Bitcoin education in your area. Tax-credited Bitcoin education for kids is exactly the kind of grassroots infrastructure that will reverse the misinformation about Bitcoin in the long-term. If you're going to get a tax credit anyway, directing it toward teaching the next generation about sound money is a highest-impact thing you can do.

3. Canaan Avalon Nano3S - Researcher Nikos published the first public reverse-engineering of Canaan's A3197S Bitcoin mining ASIC, recovering the complete host-to-chip mining protocol from a personally-owned Avalon Nano 3s. The device uses a fascinating dual-core RISC-V SoC where one core runs Linux and the other is a dedicated real-time controller for the ASIC bus. What's concerning is that the stock firmware transmits operational telemetry to third-party endpoints, potentially linking your location, mining identity, and wallet history. The custom TNA-OS firmware eliminates this surveillance and unlocks user-adjustable frequencies beyond vendor limits.

Quick Hits

• The Satoshi Times - This is a new digital publication dedicated to documenting Bitcoin's history through primary-source journalism
• Satoshi Nobel Prize - Swedish financial company Valour is running newspaper ads arguing Satoshi deserves a Nobel Prize.
• Magnifica Humanitas - Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI warns about surveillance and data collection but doesn't names the state as the primary architect.
• WorldCup26 - This is a prediction platform where users forecast FIFA World Cup 2026 match outcomes and earn satoshis for accurate predictions.

Fiat delenda est.