Bitcoin Tech Talk #374
Interesting Stuff
Carbon Analysis of Tesla Batteries - You may or may not like Elon Musk and what he’s doing on X/Tesla/SpaceX, but this post is an analysis of the things that go into a Tesla battery. According to this accounting, a Tesla battery, requires so much fossil fuel to create that it takes 7 years of driving it without filling up on gas to offset the CO2 emissions. Given that these batteries have to be replaced every 10 years, there’s a pretty small impact. What’s worse, the human cost of digging up cobalt is not small and the economic impact of strip mining is not considered.
Cashless Conspiracy - The article is about the deprecation of cash and how it’s sold to the public. But the more interesting part of the article is the journalist’s lack of self-awareness about how the political territories have shifted. The main complaint by the journalist is that being pro-cash is now “right wing” and being a good liberal journalist, wants the left to embrace the values of not being spied on by our governments. The journalist seems completely oblivious to the fact that left and right don’t mean what they did 30 years ago and seems a bit caught off-guard by it. Also, for an article about money, it doesn’t mention Bitcoin once. Still, this is probably where a lot of society is at when it comes to cash. We are, as they say, still early.
North Korean Literature - A fascinating read by a North Korean born in Japan that worked in North Korea as a writer for many years before returning to Japan. The most fascinating part for me was the way that the Kim family act as gods in their literature. There’s a genre of stories that the best writers work on, which are essentially re-tellings of their leader visiting normal people and blessing them in some way. The message is obvious: loyalty to the regime and devotion to the cause is more important than anything else. While this sort of fiction-cum-propaganda looks really obvious to us, I honestly wonder if the woke films of today will be viewed the same way.
What I'm up to
Macroscopic - I recorded this interview a couple of months ago about Fiat Ruins Everything and a lot of other things. I talked about the history of the cypherpunk movement, mining pool centralization and much more. I argued that pizza day lessons are really rent-seeking fantasies. I didn’t realize that the interviewer was more of a gold bug, but it was a great conversation.
VC Debate - I had a really fun debate with Muzz with Gary moderating (see pic above). It was definitely a big highlight for me at the conference. Muzz took the side of VCs providing lots of value and startups being the beneficiaries of VC capital and wisdom, and I took the side of VCs being the new bankers who want to rent-seek off of the labor of naive young people. We honestly could have gone for a few more hours and I didn’t make all the points I wanted to make, but I thought I did pretty well.
FROST/MuSig/Taproot Class - I’m stall taking signups for the 1-day Taproot class in Austin January 8th. This class will be in the style of my Programming Blockchain classes, which are based on coding the concepts as you learn them and with real transactions on testnet and signet. I already have around 10 people signed up. Spots are scarce, so apply today!
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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Bitcoin
26.0 Released - A new release of Bitcoin Core is out and we have some groundbreaking changes. Among other things, we have support for BIP324, which is the ability to do secure transmission between nodes instead of the normal clearnet communication. You can now load a UTXO set from another of your nodes using loadtxoutset. This should make node syncing on a second device much faster since you can dump from the one that’s synced and use the UTXO set from that one to sync much faster.
UTXO Consolidation - BitBox has a blog post on UTXO consolidation, particularly around the technical details of what such a transaction looks like. The article points out the pros and cons, particularly around privacy, which most people don’t necessarily think about. One particular point of interest from the article is that consolidation transactions are great opportunities for CoinJoins. Good article to reference if you’re thinking about incorporating this into your wallet.
Timelocks - BitMex blog has a great explanation of the various options for time locks in Bitcoin. The post goes through a description of both OP_CLTV and OP_CSV before going onto more interesting topics like incentives around fee sniping and how locktimes can be used to incentivize fewer chain reorgs. The article is worth reading to understand the mechanics of timelocks in Bitcoin transactions.
Lightning
Nostr Wallet Connect - Mutiny has a blog post on how Nostr Connect (NIP49) works. Essentially, a wallet and a Nostr client can communicate and make the approval for zaps much more streamlined and automatic than the typical copy and paste invoice stuff that so many clients used early on. Among other things, wallets now have the option of auto-approving certain zaps which should make the experience of rewarding content creators much smoother. While it’s interesting already for the text posts we see on Nostr, the killer app will be when we get audio and video, and having something like podcastindex done over Nostr.
Breez and Crowdhealth - This is a wonderful blog post by the Breez guys about how they’re being integrated into the Crowdhealth platform to bring their decentralized, community-based health care system outside the United States. As the post points out, as soon as you transmit dollars outside the US, you run into a lot of red tape in the form of money transmission laws. Lightning and Bitcoin let you get around this since these laws only apply to USD. The service already has a lot of members from the US Bitcoin community. It’ll be interesting to see how many more will sign up outside the US with this integration.
Delphi - This is a lightning betting market where you can create pretty much any bet. It’s not live on mainnet, but it’s a really cool idea and hopefully, they can work toward something that’s escrowed in some secure fashion, so both people don’t get rugged. There have been many altcoins that have sold scammy tokens premised on this very idea, and the fact that it’s been coded just using Bitcoin should show these deluded altcoiners that it was never about the features.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Invariants of Building Software - Will Cole has written one of the most interesting documents on group software development. This isn’t a process like Agile or Waterfall, but is much more of a first-principles based approach to development. I haven’t used this approach yet, but it makes a lot of sense and given how successful Will has been in this role, I hope more development, particularly in Bitcoin, starts using this approach.
FinCen and Property Rights - Preston Pysh goes through in painstaking detail, why the new FinCen rule around cyrptocurrency is a gross violation of our rights. He shows how it violates a significant number of rights listed in the Bill of Rights and much more. The fact that such rulemaking is not completely dead already shows how the deep state must flagrantly violate the values of the United States on a regular basis. The financial control that the government has been wielding has eroded our rights significantly since the establishment of central banking.
Paying for Storage - Zman has posted a really interesting proposal for an encrypted storage service using some form of Chaumian e-cash. The idea is that you can pay the minter of the e-cash is also the storage provider and that data can be encrypted and then stored there for some fee on a rolling basis. This shows how you can build stuff that is useful using Bitcoin and not scam people with an altcoin like so many have with this idea (Storj and Filecoin being notable examples).
Quick Hits
El Salvador Investment Program - You can get Salvadoran residency (and eventually citizenship) for you and your immediate family by investing $1M in El Salvador.
Rant on Adoption - J. T. Woodhouse has a nice rant on the people coming back into our lives now that Bitcoin has crossed $40k.
Core Architecture Doc - Great overview from Chaincode that shows what files do what in Bitcoin Core.
Multiple Wallets - Useful design pattern for wallets that want to offer different levels of security.
Fiat delenda est.