Bitcoin Tech Talk #356
Interesting Stuff
Cryonics - A fascinating story about the history of freezing people after they die and the state of the art at present. The science itself seems to be completely overhyped, perhaps because people want to believe that they can somehow live forever. But more interesting to me was what actually happened to these bodies as companies, descendents and law all added chaos to what actually happened to the body. Suffice it to say that most bodies don’t continue in their frozen state and given that it’s an industry that’s scarcely 50 years old, it doesn’t look like it’s anything more than a lottery ticket.
Modern Dating - For people like me that really have no idea what’s going on in the dating market, this article is an insightful look into what the stats and surveys say. Fewer people are getting married, fewer people are satisfied and there’s a lot more “dark triad” behavior. What was probably the most shocking was that most people still meet through other people in person, rather than on apps, perhaps suggesting that dating apps are being found out for their terrible incentives.
Lefty Academia - A rather long book review of why academia became such a bastion of leftist politics. As he shows, the intellectual ancestry is definitely Marx and the tactics that of Nietzsche. Thus, we get stuff like Critical Race Theory becoming major forces, not just in universities but in government offices and corporate HR departments. There is hope, however. The current dominance of Marxist ideology relies entirely on state funding, that is, fiat money. As fiat money weakens, so do these Marxist things.
What I'm up to
Fiat Ruins Everything - I just submitted the final edits to the book I’ve been working on the last year. The PDF is almost ready and we are very close to production. I’ll be running some sort of Bitcoin/Lightning based crowdfund in the next few weeks for delivery in the next month or two (or longer). There’s a lot of new material for the book and I’ll be releasing a book trailer among other things.
Bit Block Boom - The annual Bitcoin-only conference in Texas is coming soon! I’ll be speaking at the event and will be speaking about unshackling from the golden handcuffs of fiat money. I’ve tested this talk a couple times and got a lot of good feedback from the events I did in Canada. I’ll also be selling some books and I’ll also have some information about the crawdfund for the book. Please stop by!
Crossfit - I’ve been doing powerlifting for the past 10 years, so this is a bit of a switch, but after coming back from my year long trip abroad, I needed something that required less decision making and this fits the bill. I have to say, it’s a lot more taxing on my cardio than powerlifting and I’m enjoying the difficulty. There’s also a cold plunge class that’s I’ve been working to get better at.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Shilling
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Bitcoin
Floresta - This is a fully validating node that runs with much less disk usage due to using UTreeXO. The main ideo of UTreeXO is that instead of keeping a complete archival record, or even a pruned record of the ledger, we keep a much smaller hash and get proofs for each UTXO’s unspent state and amount. We’ve been waiting for something like this for a while, especially for mobile and what’s particularly interesting about this is that it uses Bitcoin’s libconsensus to do the script validation. This is to guarantee the correct validation of blocks and not cause any consensus forks. If this can run reasonably on a mobile phone, this will be a huge UX improvement going forward.
Surfchains - This is an interesting sidechain concept as the consensus on the sidechain is separated from the peg-in-peg-out market maker. The main idea is similar to drivechains in that there’s a different kind of chain that lets people experiment with different smart contract languages and features, but the mechanism is different in using a single Sponsor to convert between the sidechain and the main chain.
ChatBTC - You can now ask intelligent questions about Bitcoin to a chatbot powered by AI and trained on quality Bitcoin content. It’s still a little rough in figuring out exactly what you are asking, but it’s a great tool to get answers to questions that you don’t know. I suspect that anyone that’s sufficiently interested in Bitcoin can learn a lot about Bitcoin using this chat and we should encourage its usage when Orange Pilling newbies.
Lightning
SmartSats - With AI APIs requiring payment, allocating a credit card for their use is not a good idea as that’s a huge security hole with a massive downside. Enter SmartSats, where you can budget a program’s usage using a Lightning channel and create programs that use APIs reasonably. Given the computing power needed to run some of these LLMs and Image/Voice/Video engines, this is likely going to be a fruitful avenue for creative programmers and some security around their payment is a must. I hope to see much more of this stuff.
Nodeless - This is a hosted Lightning/Bitcoin node solution for merchants, which, as you might expect, requires some transaction fee to go to the service provider. It’s not a Lightning Service Provider exactly, as it’s more a node provider. The main use case seems to be to onboard merchants that want to get paid without having to do KYC on their customers and such a system could definitely benefit a lot of online retailers. I do wonder if companies like this will get targeted with AML/KYC legislation.
LDK Anchor Outputs - Fees in closing channels tend to be a pain because they need to be signed by both parties to the channel. Unfortunately, if the fee in the pre-signed transaction is not sufficient, there needs to be another round of signed transactions, which both participants need to negotiate. Currently on the network, this fee negotiation is the reason for a lot of channel closures, creating a less robust network. Anchor Outputs fixes this and allows for use of Child-Pays-For-Parent (CPFP) to take care of the fee instead. LDK has implemented this in their 0.0.116 release.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Tether Juggernaut - Tether is benefiting massively from the high interest rates being paid out in treasuries and being the longest and most trusted stablecoin and they’re using it to build up their Bitcoin treasury. The amount of issued Tether is now considerable, with $83B in token liabilities against $86B in assets. They’re showing banks that you really can run on a full-reserve basis and make lots of money and in a sense, they’ve become the pseudonymous digital fiat replacement for the paper dollar in many places.
Microstrategy Selling More Stock - Forget about an ETF, it looks like MSTR is acting as a substitute for Bitcoin on the markets with them filing to issue another $750M in shares so they can buy more Bitcoin. There’s probably a significant investor demand for exposure and GBTC looks very sketchy while futures-based ETFs look more manipulable. Thus, if you’re a Bitcoin believer and want good exposure, this might be the best vehicle for it.
PSBT Tutorial - Arman the Parman has a nice tutorial on how to get a PSBT signed and goes into what a PSBT is in general. The airgapped transfer of the PSBT is the key feature that keeps the offline signing device secure, and he goes into why this is important for security.
Quick Hits
Treasuries Downgraded - The bond rating of US Treasuries is down to AA+ after racking up about $2T of more debt since the Debt Ceiling was suspended.
Coinbase Lightning - Brian Armstrong says Coinbase will integrate lightning, finally. This after the SEC asked them to delist everything except Bitcoin.
WorldCoin Illegal in Kenya - The dystopian nightmare is getting pushback from Kenya, at least as they reveal that they’re going to share the biometric data with third parties.
KPMG Simping Bitcoin - They’re saying it’s ESG compliant of all things, which likely means that Blackrock had a hand in this report. The narrative is changing.
Block Shareholder Report - They had $2.4B in Bitcoin revenue (likely sales) just this past quarter. That’s a lot of buying pressure.
Fiat delenda est.