Bitcoin Tech Talk #325
Highlights from 2022
Education, Bitcoin and Christianity - Here’s the interview I did with Reason back in May about my 2-day course, Bitcoin and Christianity. I really enjoyed talking about how the education system is broken, why Bitcoin is very compatible with Christianity and how our current society worships money.
Johnathan Bi interview - I recorded this interview about Rene Girard’s ideas, especially around Mimetic Theory. He has released a thorough exploration in a series of interviews with David Perrell. Understanding the importance of envy and status games in human nature has certainly helped me a great deal in interpreting the world correctly. If you’re curious about Girardian theories (and why Peter Thiel is such a fan), I highly recommend this series.
NFTs are bribes - This was an interview I did with the Bad Crypto guys back in March where I explain why NFTs are completely useless Rube-Goldberg machines. I did a lot of ranting in this one and the hosts were gracious in letting me continue to rant given how invested they were in the NFT ecosystem. It’ll be interesting to watch how this community copes during this bear market.
What I'm up to
Middle East - I’m in the middle east for the next month or so, traveling to Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Turkey among others. What I’m finding is that the place has some serious ancient history and there’s quite a lot to see. I really enjoy these so if you have any suggestions on things I need to see, so if you have anything, especially Christian sites, please send suggestions!
Rust - I’m planning to learn this language this year as a New Year’s resolution. If there are any particularly good resources that you recommend, I would love to hear about them! The idea would be to get enough of the language to play with LDK, among other things.
Conferences - If you’re in the Middle East or Southeast Asia and want to introduce me to conference organizers, I would appreciate it. I am planning to be in those places over the next 3 months.
Tweet of the Week
What I’m Shilling
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Bitcoin
Bitcoin 101 - This is a really thorough article on the origins of Bitcoin from both an economic and CS perspectives. It covers the emergence of fiat currency concurrently with the advances in computer science, like Diffie-Helmann and Merkle’s stuff to the advent of the internet, libertarian thinking and much more. The Cypherpunk movement and the goals it had are particularly well documented and the specifics of what Satoshi did are traced. A great article for programmers to really understand where Bitcoin came from.
Bitcoin Stats 2022 - Jameson Lopp has a comprehensive review of various statistics related to Bitcoin. He’s been doing his year end review of all these stats and looked at from a year-to-year perspective, it’s generally graphs that go up and to the right. All sorts of usage is going up as is hash rate, attacks against Bitcoiners and so on. The years-long perspective is a very useful one to have and these are some great things to look at during a bear market, especially.
Honey Badger Wallet - Nunchuk has a new multisig wallet out that’s 2-of-4. The main idea behind this wallet is to allow for better inheritance abilities. One is controlled by Nunchuk and another is an inheritance key that’s time-locked. The result is that even if you die, the keeper of the inheritance key can recover the funds. As I’ve repeatedly said in this newsletter, solutions like this are going to be very important in the future as a lot of early Bitcoin adopters will need some way to transfer their wealth after death. I’m frankly not sure if this is the be-all solution, but it’s good to see that companies are trying new things.
Multisig Relocation Strategy - Physically moving or replacing your keys in a multisig setup can be a pain and this article from Unchained outlines all the various things you may need to consider when physically moving keys. Your key may be in a safe deposit box in one city and transitioning them to another can be a stressful event. The key to making this all work is to make sure your key setup works and to test it multiple times. These sort of concerns are not really appreciated by the community yet, and the bear market is a good time to really think through these.
Lightning
Tip Cards - These are QR codes that you can print out to give to people as physical lightning tips. This is very much like the printed wallets of yesteryear, except the money doesn’t leave your wallet until someone redeems it. It’s honestly a much better tipping mechanism and much easier to hand out. I would love to see some stuff like this for kids where you put these in Kinder eggs or something similar.
LNURL Setup Guide - LNURL has a lot of potential, but it’s unfortunately a bit hard to figure out how to set up for the layman. This is your solution. You can setup a GitHub pages and create an LNURL with your own domain through these instructions. This is a lot more robust than hooking into your home server as GitHub is a lot more robust, generally. That said, I would love to see a solution by the Node-in-a-Box vendors that sets all this up for you, including DynDNS for the correct routing.
Plugin Bounty - 6 million sats are up for grabs to whoever can make a Rust plugin using LDK to de-prioritize splitting, not having payments stuck and having some memory about which paths fail. This honestly doesn’t sound like a big ask, though implementing it well may be a huge undertaking. The user experience here is what needs improvement and whatever needs to happen under the hood to make this better is essentially what this bounty is asking for. The people that are using this are asking for this improvement, which, in my experience, is the best signal there is for product-market fit.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Stealth Quantitative Easing - This Financial Times article argues that we’re already getting QE, just not through the traditional means of bond buying by the Fed. This is an interesting take and one that you would expect if they’re signaling tightening to calm inflation concerns while still bailing out all the companies that would fail with such high rates. The Fed is a very powerful entity and they are in the habit of working in very stealthy ways, so this type of maneuver shouldn’t surprise you.
David Marcus on Crypto - To be fair, he makes a lot more predictions, but this VC-speak of “real applications are just around the corner” is something I’ve heard for a decade now. Speculation/gambling is the only use case and it’s a game that’s very far from being fair. There are no real applications and hasn’t been for 10 years, there’s no reason to expect something to suddenly appear. As I’ve argued in the past, even if there were, a centralized player will eat its lunch because it’ll be cheaper, faster, more upgradeable, maintainable and user-friendly. I don’t mean to pick on David, but the guy really should know better having been in this space for roughly the last decade.
Bad analogies - Stephan Livera rails against the bad analogies that have come to dominate describing Bitcoin, like it being a tool for storing time, storing energy or it being some form of digital violence. As he points out, each analogy has pitfalls in our understanding of Bitcoin because taken too far, we get erroneous economic ideas. Sadly, erroneous economic ideas have huge consequences. See: Communism.
Quick Hits
Argo Acquired - Galaxy Digital bought the distressed mining company’s data center in Texas, relieving it of some of its debt burden.
Selling Claims - FTX, Genesis and Celsius people that got screwed are selling their claims. Mt. Gox people still haven’t gotten paid, so this is understandable.
Emission Hard Fork Proposal - This has no chance of being implemented, but at least it’s simple in concept.
Nostr being cheered - I suspect it’s more dunking on Elon than cheering Nostr, but it’s still interesting to see the mainstream press writing positive stories about it.
Fiat delenda est.