Bitcoin Tech Talk #518

Interesting Stuff

  1. Lindsay Clancy Psyop - The mainstream media's coverage of the Lindsay Clancy case is a coordinated campaign to expand psychiatric surveillance and increase pharmaceutical profits. The piece traces connections between defense psychologists with intelligence ties and Soros Foundation-linked chaplains.

  2. Dark Forest Academia - Erik Hoel writes about how AI competition incentivizes research secrecy. When OpenAI learned of Navier-Stokes progress, they rushed a competing solution, forcing serious researchers underground. Academic incentive structures amplify this behavior, pushing scholars toward private AI systems on personal hardware.

  3. Tolerating Fraud - Aaron M. Renn examines the Jason Arday plagiarism case which reveals a cultural inability to balance accountability with compassion. Right-wing responses destroyed without kindness; Nature's editorial excused fraud without honesty. A Christian ethic demands we do both.

  4. Overestimating The Drone - Pelle Taylor writes about how Ukraine demonstrates a historical pattern: revolutionary weapons lose advantage when countermeasures emerge. It now takes close to 20 drones to kill one tank that previously required two to four. Cost curves have reversed the initial drone advantage.

  5. Poor Chic - Russell Walter writes about how wealthy elites romanticize poverty through history, from Tolstoy to Bernstein. "Nostalgie de la boue" (French for longing for the mud) captures this phenomenon where poverty becomes aesthetic rather than reality for the comfortable.

What I'm up to

  1. Lugano Plan B Forum - This is my next scheduled big conference on October 23-24. There will be a Spaces on X where I'll talk about this with Max and Stacy on September 25.

  2. Bitcoin Historico - This conference is on November 11-12 in San Salvador.

Bitcoin

  1. hazync - This project compiles Bitcoin Core consensus code to RISC-V, then runs it inside a zero-knowledge VM. The key innovation is that it doesn't reimplement Bitcoin's rules. It uses Core's own unmodified interpreter, ensuring correctness inheritance.

  2. babiloniav2 - Adam Gibson's paper on probabilistic coinjoins and covert betting combines privacy-preserving transaction coordination with off-chain betting mechanics in a way that obscures both participation and outcome.

  3. Libbitcoin Lite - A full node implementation serving Electrum, LND, bitcoind in a 13MB executable. It supports multiple protocols simultaneously with independent credentials and TLS authentication across Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Lightning

  1. Alby Hub Security Update - An urgent security patch was deployed. They aren't saying yet what the actual security vulnerability is, but it seems like something pretty serious, probably putting your funds at risk.

  2. Onion Message Jamming - A denial-of-service vector has been identified. Bounce amplification ricochets crafted messages 500+ times between honest nodes. Four mitigations are on the table: upfront fees, hop leashing, prepaid bandwidth, and backpropagation rate limiting.

  3. Payment Channel Network Theory - Rene Pickhardt formalizes routing and liquidity using graph theory. Most protocol improvements in Lightning have been engineering-first. By contrast, this paper gives researchers and developers the theoretical scaffolding.

Economics, Engineering, Etc.

  1. Necessary Inventions - Aggregate primary energy consumption is a curve that goes up and to the right. The Permian Basin's water disposal problem demonstrates how enormous constraints become the mother of ground-breaking inventions.

  2. Bitcoin Reframed - Alex Gladstein writes about how Western discourse misses Bitcoin's actual meaning. For a dissident in Venezuela, a merchant in Nigeria, or a family in Afghanistan, Bitcoin is a way to hold value that no government can seize.

  3. Liquid Hacker - A hacker drained 4,000 BTC from Liquid's federated peg using OP_RETURN messages embedded in on-chain transactions. Blockstream threatened law enforcement; roughly 600 BTC remains unrecovered.

Quick Hits

  • CPI Methodology - CPI was designed around consumers who spend every dollar on present consumption.
  • OP_RETURN Messenger - A developer created a real-time chat app from the ongoing Liquid hack negotiations.
  • Wealth Rules - In a financialized world, earned income is almost irrelevant to quality of life.
  • Revolut Data Breach - Social engineering yielded a treasure trove of user data including passports.

Fiat delenda est.

View on Substack