Bitcoin Tech Talk #305

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What I've been working on

1. Holiday in the UK - I’ve been enjoying the various places here in the UK, I saw the statue of Adam Smith in Edinburgh, which appropriately had some birds poop on his head. If you’re not familiar, the guy basically did not credit any of the people before him and demanded that everyone after him credit him. He essentially declared himself the “father of economics” through political wrangling.

2. Taproot Talk - I gave this talk back in March, but it’s finally up now. It’s talking about how to do multisig on Taproot and the various approaches that are possible. In particular, I go over various MuSig, single leaf and multi leaf CHECKSIGADD approaches. The really nice thing about Taproot is that you can have all of them if you want, which you can check out in the talk.

3. Rant about altcoins - I have a lot of such altcoin rants, but this one was for Bitcoin Magazine live. Given what’s been going on with altcoins, this is an appropriate rant to send to your altcoiner friends.

What I'm up to

1. BitBlockBoom Talk - I’m preparing a talk called “Fiat Delenda Est” for BitBlockBoom. This is a phrase I’ve been saying for a while now, and I hope to show why fiat must be destroyed. The more I study the current system, the more I’m convinced that fiat actively prevents technological progress and civilization building. I’ll argue that it’s really a form of socialism that we don’t recognize as such.

2. Listener Questions - It’s been a while since I’ve had an episode like this. I’m going through the questions and figuring out how to answer them. There’s a lot of talk about stablecoins, which I’ll definitely think hard about.

3. Fiat Relationships - My article for Bitcoin Magazine will be about how every relationship that we have has been infected by fiat money, making them shallower and more political. My contention is that relationships in a market economy tend to be a lot more long lasting and hence more low time preference. The high time preference relationships that we have now lends itself to people screwing each other over, which is unfortunately all too common.

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What I’m Shilling

• Books

  • Bitcoin and the American Dream

  • Thank God for Bitcoin

  • The Little Bitcoin Book

  • Programming Bitcoin

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