Bitcoin Tech Talk #308
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What I've been working on
Fiat Relationships - My article for Bitcoin Magazine went through how fiat money and mentality have infected all kinds of relationships. In general, they’ve been made way more high time preference and thus, a lot shallower and more political. Bilateral relationships suffer when a third party standardizes certain things and unfortunately, this has exacted a cost in the quality of relationships and ultimately life that we have.
Fiat delenda est - My talk, which will be released as an article on Bitcoin Magazine is the same one I gave at BitBlockBoom. The main idea is that fiat is our mortal enemy and a form of soft authoritarianism destroying civilization. Most of the ideas are not going to be that new to most of you, but it does summarize why we fight this fight.
Listener Questions - I released a podcast with listener questions that I collected from stacker.news. I tried to give more long-form answers to some very perceptive questions from the readers of the site. In general, I’m very optimistic on Bitcoin but rather pessimistic on fiat and everything related to it.
What I'm up to
Riga - I’m here for Baltic Honeybadger 2022 and it is wild! During the previous edition, I didn’t get to see a lot of the city and it’s been great seeing the place in a bit more touristy fashion. The city feels very much like Scandanavian cities like Norway or Copenhagen, just a lot cheaper. That said, it’s not nearly as cheap as it was 3 years ago, as inflation is over 20% here. It’s also good to be back in Europe to see the community here thriving.
Bconf - I’m headed to Austria for the next couple of weeks (Vienna, Salzburg, Innsbruck) and will be in Innsbruck for the German Bitcoin conference. I will be teaching a 2-hour seminar on HD wallets in the same style as my seminars and book. For those that will be there, I look forward to meeting you!
Book - It looks like there’s a book that’ll be happening before the end of the year. I’ll be compiling the articles I’ve been writing for Bitcoin Magazine and doing some sort of Lightning crowdfund with different levels of book. I would really like a leather-bound version with gold leaf. If you have any interesting items I can put in the crowdfund, please email me!
Tweet of the Week
What I’m Shilling
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Bitcoin
Wallet Label Export Format - Labeling wallet outputs and accounts has been a bit of a pain in different wallets and being able to know what UTXOs came from what can be useful, especially for coin selection purposes. This BIP is a standard that will allow wallet labels to be saved along with other data. During restoration, even into different software, the labels should carry over. This would be wonderful as keeping track after a while.
Braidpool - The peer-to-peer mining protocol has made some progress and there was a good presentation at Baltic Honeybadger about it. It’s looking much more like a competitor to StratumV2 as it has a lot of interesting capabilities and doesn’t have the single-point-of-failure that pools generally do. The concept of hashrate futures is interesting and should in theory make the variance lower.
Mining Strategy Redux - There’s an interesting paper examining the game theory of rogue mining strotegies and concludes that even 20% of honest nodes is enough to thwart them! The paper is pretty technical, but we may need to rename the 51% the 81% attack as honest mining is strongly dominant in almost any game-theoretical setting.
Lightning
Rapid Gossip Sync - The main problem that’s being solved here is that most LN clients require you to either wait minutes for the network map/gossip to sync or to use a trusted server to create a route. Unfortunately, the latter compromises privacy, so this protocol reduces the amount of time needed to sync the information needed to route the payment. The protocol uses a lot of little tricks to reduce the payload needed and it ends up being something like a 10x improvement in the amount of data transferred. We’ll see if this leads to more private lightning routing.
Mempool Lightning Page - The very popular block explorer now has a page for Lightning statistics! As you might expect from that team, the visualizations are top notch and the statistics are an interesting way to keep up with what’s going on with the network. I would love to see more animations like the amount flowing through the network at any particular time somehow, in the same way that they do blocks.
Mutiny - This is a Lightning wallet that’s very private. They have just announced the wallet, but it’s nice to see a wallet that’s got a different focus. The more choices we have, the better the whole ecosystem will be. One particularly interesting feature is that they create a new Lightning node for every channel that they create! HD wallets introduced creation of new addresses as a default, we may eventually get a lightning network where users use different nodes for each channel.
Laisee Bot - There’s now a telegram bot you can run to tip people in Lightning. I’ve played with bots like this in the past and always thought this isn’t used enough in that context. It should be possible, for example, to do a small crowdfund and so on in friend groups.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Blockstream Satellite API - This post points out one of the functions of their satellite API, which is that you can send messages without the internet to anyone in the world. Bitcoin obviously benefits from capabilities like this, but the secondary uses of this technology are pretty mind-blowing for freedom. No longer will it be so easy to have a great firewall implemented by authoritarian governments.
Web5 Self-Sovereign Identity - Block’s vision of Web5 relies on the idea of self-sovereign identity. Having an identity that’s not under the control of a central authority does indeed seem like a critical component of making a decentralized web work. As such, they have created a pretty well thought-out specification on what that entails. They’re even developing a software development kit just for the SSI aspect, so that should in theory mean that it’ll be easy to integrate SSI in the same way that Google and Facebook logins are integrated.
AVAX treachery - The cryptocurrency created by Cornell professor Emin Gun Sirer apparently has a deal with a law firm to launch lots of class-action lawsuits against its competitors. This was inevitable, given how centralized these coins are. Note that they didn’t try to do anything like this with Bitcoin because there’s no central entity to sue. At best, they could target an exchange or something, but it’s not going to hurt Bitcoin any.
Economics of Hype - The article is eye-opening on how much YouTube altcoin influencers make. It’s no wonder the space is flooded with marketing types as it’s an easy way to monetize their skill set. Marketing people get paid much better on altcoins, at least until the altcoin comes down. The short-term game of destroying your reputation for a quick infusion of cash seems to be the game at play. It’s a sobering reminder that altcoins have a lot of money and they’re not afraid to spend it.
Quick Hits
Peach - This is a peer-to-peer exchange that’s a bit like Tinder.
Saylor Lawsuit - Michael Saylor is being sued by the Washington DC attorney general about payment of taxes.
ETH PoS - If you want to know what this disaster of a technical spec means, this is a great summary.
Bitcoin ETFs - We continue to see that spot ETFs are not being approved and this article explains why. Mostly, it’s regulators being confused about what protects investors.
Fiat delenda est.