Bitcoin Tech Talk #295
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What I've been working on
Fiat Science - I wrote about how science itself has been corrupted through fiat money and made into a rent-seeking enterprise. A lot of supposed ground-breaking technologies are nothing of the kind and they take advantage of the Cantillon Effect. If you think quantum computing is on the horizon, read this article first!
Bitcoin Maximalism - Cory Klippsten was my guest on my podcast and we talked about the path he took to become a Bitcoin Maximalist. Cory’s had a lot of experience in different industries, so if you’re interested in learning how to chart your own path, this is a good episode to listen to. Of course, there’s a lot of altcoin dunking in the episode, too, which may also be entertaining.
Green Energy is a Scam - I expanded on my rant from last week on this episode of Bitcoin Magazine Live. Like with most fiat things, these industrial complexes create their own momentum and grow into cancers sucking the life out of everything else. Have a listen if you enjoyed last week’s article.
What I'm up to
Consensus - Austin is turning into altcoin scammer central for a week, so I’m here to help by helping you navigate the place. Join us at Bitcoin Commons for Bitcoin++ and many other events. I’ll be doing a book signing for Bitcoin and the American Dream at the event as well. I’m sure there will be more than a few steak dinners for those of you who are in town.
Docker - I thank God every day that I’m a coder because I can use tools most people can’t imagine using. It had been a while since I’ve played much with docker, but I’ve been looking for a good self-hosted photo server and it turns out, most of them have a Dockerized version. I’m also discovering how much I’ve missed by avoiding docker-compose. Getting a secure https website is a breeze now with the certbot Docker image as is getting up a VPN setup with wireguard.
Mail Server - Speaking of which, I’m now looking for a good mail server to really de-Google. I would honestly love to pay for software that works well (and is Dockerized!) that I can run. Ideally, it would come with a web client.
Tweet of the Week
What I’m Shilling
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Bitcoin
Silicon Salon - Blockchain Commons held the first working group to get more hardware support for hardware wallets. There are many issues discussed on the website, including the problem of trust for some of these secure elements, which require an NDA, the architecture, lack of talent and many other issues related to silicon support for these wallets. The whole thing is worth a read to learn about the issues that hardware wallet vendors face.
Empty Blocks - Jameson Lopp looks at empty blocks and how frequent they are over time. At some points, the mempools might really be empty, but there are other times when an empty block is a sort of failsafe for the mining pool’s bad software. Jameson concludes that empty blocks have generally decreased since 2017 and that the only pool consistently producing them while the mempool has some transactions is ViaBTC, who, of course, was a big supporter of the BCH split.
Tracing malware BTC txs - A paper looked at exactly what services are being used by the malware writers who extract Bitcoin from their victims. The paper, through chainanalysis figured out which exchanges and mixers were being used by these places. What struck me about the paper is how 90% of malware organizations still need an exchange to help them. They’re really just coming into and out of Bitcoin as quickly as possible.
Lightning
Torq - This is a capital management tool for running your routing node. I can’t imagine that these tools will be free forever as there’s a lot of money to be made by managing these properly. In the meantime, frameworks like this will help add more liquidity to the network as profit is a great motivator.
Fuji - This is an interesting mashup of Lightning, Liquid and synthetic assets. They have an asset backed by Bitcoin called fUSD, which is a stable coin backed by some collateral. The collateral in this case is Bitcoin. The use case that’s obvious are atomic swaps for some sort of decentralized exchange, but it depends on how liquid fUSD becomes.
Social Engineering Hack - One of the bigger nodes on the Lightning Network was hacked apparently. The good news is the hack didn’t result in the hacker gaining any funds, but the forced channel closes look like they’ll be necessary to reset everything. This is one of the only lightning node hacks I’ve heard of and the security held up pretty well. Still, be careful of putting anything in the cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer!
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
BTC Report - Block, Inc has published a report on the public perception of Bitcoin. The report has three key findings. Bitcoin is considered more equitable. The more people learn about Bitcoin, the better they like it. And Bitcoin stands heads and shoulders above altcoins. In other words, the world is getting orange pilled.
LUNA post-mortem - The car wreck that nobody can resist looking at has a thorough post-mortem from Nic Carter and Allen Farrington. Perhaps the line of the entire report is that Total Value Locked is not total, isn’t value and isn’t locked. The whole post is entertaining and reflects the absurdity of DeFi in general and I hope they continue writing these because there will be a lot of graves to dance on.
Argentina Bitcoin Adoption - I’ve always felt that Bitcoin is way more useful in developing countries that have higher inflation. This story shows why. Argentinians are experiencing 50-70% inflation and are actively trying to hedge against long-term loss. Many of these countries dollarize, which is only a small step from bitcoinizing. That’s a very good thing.
Broader Macro Landscape - Arthur Hayes thinks that we’re near the bottom. His analysis takes into account the current electoral landscape and the war in Ukraine and concludes that the Fed is going to be loosening its monetary policy in the near future. He doesn’t think that there’s going to be a huge spike for Bitcoin or anything, but does think the macro winds are shifting again.
Quick Hits
NY imitating China - They’re banning mining unless it’s from a “clean” source. They’re well on their way to becoming Detroit!
MIR drained of $2M - This “DeFi” protocol made the mistake of reporting the wrong price. Let me repeat, Oracles are centralized!
DOJ going after NFT insider trading - An OpenSea employee apparently bought the NFTs that were about to be featured on the site’s home page. Honestly, it doesn’t seem that bad considering much worse has been done in altcoinland.
Crypto Layoffs - Gemini, Coinbase and Bitso are just some of the companies laying people off. Bitcoin-only companies are faring better.
Fiat delenda est.