Bitcoin Tech Talk #338
Interesting Stuff
Age of Average - Really interesting essay on how so many areas of life seem to be converging to something like an average. He points out that AirBnB apartments, cars and even corporate logos have converged to something that’s a bit bland. I don’t think the author made the connection to fiat money, but when you’re a big corporation and if there’s some authority that has a lot of influence over your success, the general tendency is to be risk-averse. The lack of innovation is entirely because that entrepreneurial spirit has been choked out by fiat money.
America are Byzantines - The parallels between America’s current position and Byzantine Empire’s toward the end are striking. In particular, the debasement of the currency seems to have substituted in both places for productive work, like trade, building and family formation. I don’t think the US is quite so far gone that it’ll collapse imminently, but I also wouldn’t bet on it continuing much longer as the pre-eminent superpower in the world.
Rethinking Operation Barbarossa - The turning point of WWII was always a bit of a confusing mess of blame for what happened. This was an excellent analysis of how Russia beat Germany, despite losing so many battles and having such terrible command structures. The basic gist is that Russia had far more soldiers than Germany dreamed and the main German strategy was to annihilate the Russian army. The Germans were fantastically successful in the operation, yet lost because they didn’t know their enemy was so numerous.
What I'm up to
BOB Interview - I was interviewed for the Building on Bitcoin podcast from a couple guys in Thailand and we went over a whole lot of topics, like my Bitcoin origin story, why I’m taking a trip around the world, my kids and much more. It was a fun interview and one of the few I’ve done live this year. There’s also a dinner in Chiang Mai if you happen to be in town this week.
Taipei BitDevs Meetup - I’ll be sharing the stage with Andrew Chow and Nopara on Friday, April 7 at this meetup. It’s my first time in Taiwan and I’m sure it’ll be a good time. The meetup is free and should be pretty technical. Also, if you have suggestions for any Bitcoin-related things I should see in Taipei, let me know by replying to this email.
Seoul - I’ll be traveling to Seoul in a little over a week and will be doing a meetup (or two) there. It is, of course, the country of my birth and I’ll have to spend some time meeting some relatives that I haven’t seen in a long time, but if you’re in the area, please stay tuned for some meetups.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Shilling
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Bitcoin
MuSig2 BIP - The long awaited bitcoin improvement proposal for MuSig2 has been merged as BIP327. The beauty of this algorithm is that public keys and signatures from multiple key holders are aggregated. While it’s n-of-n for the purposes of multisig, with Taproot, MuSig2 can aggregate any combination of k-of-n, though that does have some combinatorial blowup. I would love to see FROST be implemented as a BIP as well, so that we have k-of-n key/signature aggregatability without revealing that it’s a multisig.
LinkingLion - 0xB10C has a report on the behavior of this entity that connects to Bitcoin nodes and is suspected to be some sort of chainalysis provider. The main tell is that the UserAgent connection field is more or less randomized and the IPs all come from the same range of addresses. The post is instructive for how the network connection is made and why it’s suspicious and this sort of network behavior monitoring will be useful for knowing about potential adversaries working to undermine the Bitcoin network.
Floresta - This is an electrum server implementation that’s based on UtreeXO and written in Rust. Electrum servers have been the de facto standard for getting wallet information, and this server is no exception. The main benefit is that the resource usage is much less than a typical electrum server, but the drawback is that you have to provide it an xpub as it doesn’t store an address index. For resource constrained environments, this looks promising for running Bitcoin nodes.
Lightning
Routing Privacy - Route blinding is a method of providing some way to route the payment for payers so that they don’t know exactly who the recipient is. This is a major upgrade to the Lightning protocol for payment privacy and hopefully gets implemented on the network over time. The main way it works is through tweaks and dummies which are not known to the payer, but is to the various routers on a need-to-know basis.
Lotes - This is a project in its early stages doing physical bitcoin cash with lightning. It’s something like an opendime but with Lightning balances. It’s a really interesting concept and the validation of the amount has to be done using an app, but this has some potential to be a replacement for physical cash.
Zap Tunnel - You can now have a lightning address (LNURL) that forwards to another lightning address. I suppose in a way, this is outsourcing the receiving of the funds in a way that preserves some privacy. Speaking of which, there’s an excellent post about lightning best privacy practices.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Stability Pool - Fedimint has something like a stablecoin using essentially an options contract. This is a concept similar to what Atomic Finance does with DLCs, but in a Fedimint context. I suppose there’s more liquidity in the stability pool and that can help in hedging. There’s a similar sort of project on Lightning that you can read about on Kollider. With all the upheaval in the banking sector, I suppose it’s natural that there’s a lot of interest in these types of very bank-like services.
Meme Wars - Gigi makes the intriguing argument that it’s all memes and that they’re an important way in which the ideas about money get spread. He argues that Bitcoin itself is a meme and fiat money a poor one. The fight, in a sense, is metaphysical and memes are an expression of the ideas that are being fought over. Well worth reading and pondering.
Case Against FRB - There have been some arguments recently by a lot of people that should know better that fractional reserve banking is somehow good and part of a free market. On the contrary, Jonathan Newman argues that fractional reserve banking is why we have these crises. FRB is fraudulent and advocating for it is itself fraud. It’s weird to me that so many people make a free-market argument about it. That’s like saying the free market should welcome cheating crooks.
Binance v. CFTC - Binance is on CFTC’s radar with this very long indictment. The allegations are very troubling and they are accused of some very serious mischief, like trading against their clients. Of course, every tech company does this, like Google manipulating adword auctions for their benefit, but it’s usually not this brazen. Will they go down or settle? I’m guessing government bodies right now want some blood.
Quick Hits
Nostr Convert - Interesting read of a DID guy converting to Nostr and recognizing that perfect can be the enemy of good.
Block Getting Shorted - Jack Dorsey’s company is being targeted by a short seller and they are putting out some FUD.
World De-Dollarizing - Global dollar settlements are reducing.
TikTok Act Overreach - The so-called TikTok act is very much like the Patriot Act in giving government way too much power.
SBF Bribed Chinese Officials - As if what he did wasn’t bad enough.
Fiat delenda est.