Bitcoin Tech Talk #390
Interesting Stuff
Economics of Perpetual Adolescence - This is a long, but worthwhile read about the plight of male Zoomers and their “lack” of masculinity. As the article points out, the things that “make” a man are protecting, providing and procreating. But all of those things require money and as the article points out, everything that’s required to become a man has gotten wildly more expensive. The price for manhood is too high for most Zoomer boys to afford. I’m not sure if this explains all of their infantilization, but the fiat monetary expansion surely has a huge role in their being unable to afford those things that define manhood.
The Decline of Particle Physics - This long time blog written by a Physics professor laments what’s happened to the field as a result of the String Theory subsidization. As he points out, he’s been writing on the blog for more than 20 years about how String Theory is “not even wrong” and has no experiments even theoretically possible to validate or nullify it. Yet it persists and as he points out, it’s made the entire field a laughingstock. Fiat money preserves things that deserve to die, and unfortunately, even a hard science like physics is not immune.
The End of Science - Along the same lines, this blog post looks at a new book about the end of science. The main thing I got out of this article is that current scientists are not just delusional, but unhinged about their own importance. As the blog points out, science is pretty fragile and it’s very difficult to make the right environment where it will thrive. Safe to say that fiat money’s contribution is to upset that environment significantly so that there’s little science being done.
The UX of the bicycle - The article is a fascinating exploration into how the bicycle developed. It started with no pedals, then pedals attached to the front wheel, then the front wheel getting larger to give the rider more mechanical advantage, then finally the pedal being connected to the wheel via a chain. The seemingly obvious development took decades, despite the popularity. Which should be comforting to Bitcoin wallet developers. There’s probably plenty of improvement yet to go.
What I'm up to
Small Business - I talked to Parker and Bobby about small businesses and how Bitcoin can help them. I really think this is going to be the next growth edge for Bitcoin as small business owners really use the power of saving in Bitcoin to not just have healthier balance sheets, but to get access to low time preference customers in Bitcoiners. So many people are looking for Bitcoin jobs, but as these guys point out, there are way more opportunities to acquire profitable businesses and incorporating Bitcoin into them.
Bitcoin Boomer Show - I was on Gary LeLand’s show to talk about my new book, Fiat Ruins Everything. We talked about the various books I’ve written, including the one I wrote with Gary, Bitcoin and the American Dream, and the visit to the capitol during COVID, among other things. The show is aimed at a crowd that’s used to watching TV, as you can tell by the commercial breaks, and hopefully, this kind of interview helps people to understand Bitcoin.
BitBlockBoom - The annual conference is coming up soon and they’re nearly sold out! Come out to Dallas for this Bitcoin Maximalist conference to hang out and enjoy the prelude to the halvening!
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Arctic - FROST is amazing in that you can get aggregatable t-of-n threshold signatures that look like a single signature on-chain. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of state that you have to keep around and the nonce generation is very tricky. This new paper has a protocol that’s t-of-n, deterministic and stateless and appropriately is more “frosty” than FROST.
Consensus Cleanup Proposal - The post goes into the various known attack vectors that need some cleaning up. The ones discussed include the Time-warp attack, which lets miners use a post-dated timestamp on the difficulty adjustment block to minimize difficulty, block validation attack which make validating blocks CPU-intensive enough to create an unfair advantage, Merkle Tree attacks which can fool light clients. It’s a good idea to fix a lot of this stuff, though I’m sure there will be a good deal of discussion about what will and will not make it in.
BitVM2 - Fresh on the heels of BitVM, Robin Linus has posted a new proposal to go from two-party verification to multi-party verification. What’s particularly interesting about this protocol is that anyone can come in with a challenge outside the intial group of verifiers. The assumptions are pretty minimal, in that only one honest verifier has to exist for the whole smart contract execution to go through honestly.
Lightning
hedgehog - This proposal by supertestnet is a kind of evolution of lightning in that it uses a lot of the same concepts, but uses different primitives to give us a very useful feature. Specifically, you don’t need the back and forth that you need on lightning to update the state of the channel and thus can be done semi-asychronously. That is, the sender can send, go offline, the receiver can then come online and then accept. Only then is the state of the channel updated. The payment experience is thus a lot more like ecash protocols or even something like PayPal, but without a central controller. There’s also a federated network called Burrow, that builds on this idea.
Lightning Batch Payments - Batch Payments have long been useful onchain for all kinds of stuff, especially payroll, distribution of dividends and other places where mass payment is needed. Lightning, however has been a bit of a problem because it’s all bilateral and doing it individually is a pain in the neck. This isn’t exactly a Lightning native solution, but it’s getting close and shows just how much Lightning is being used that a feature like this is in it. I think a similar feature native on Lightning would do very well.
Onion Routing - Elle Mouton has a great post on how onion routing works in Lightning and how it is that nodes have so much privacy. The main message is wrapped in multiple layers which get unwrapped by the nodes in the route to the recipient. This process is described in detail, including all the technical details like the HMAC and Diffie-Hellman Key exchange and so on. Definitely worth reading to learn the details of Lightning communication.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
SEC v. Coinbase - SEC has won in a court case about Coinbase. The money line in the judgment is “The Court finds that the SEC adequately alleges that Coinbase, through its Staking Program, engaged in the unregistered offer and sale of securities.” I suspect that this will be the main way in which a lot of altcoins get destroyed, as there’s no real good defense against this reasoning. Since they are centralized entities, I don’t see how they can survive long term from this sort of government attack.
Not Knowing - Nicolas Dorier points out that most devs are actually not that knowledgeable about projects outside the projects they work on. Unfortunately, too many people think every developer knows everything about every new thing and want opinions from them. The hard truth is that tech takes a while to study and understand and people that want devs to do the thinking for them have a bit of a security hole in their thinking.
BitKey Review - This post from Nunchuk goes over the pros and cons of the new hardware wallet by Block. As they point out, it’s not your traditional hardware wallet as there’s a lot of online backups, with the bias being toward making sure that users can recover their coins. The backups do add a lot more attack vectors, but given that they’re split across many different services, perhaps the security is cumulatively higher than the typical single-sig scenario. I don’t think multi-factor security risks have been studied enough to really know, but there’s good reason to think they have found an interesting and useful compromise between complete secrecy and recoverability.
Quick Hits
orionwl coming back? - Long time Core maintainer is considering coming back after CSW’s defeat in court.
SBF’s Sentence - 25 years for losing billions in consumer funds. Also, SBF’s Mom sent a pretty tone deaf request to the court to get leniency for her son. Honestly, she should be facing charges as well given how much she benefited economically from his fraud.
NFT Crash - Kevin Hart lost 80% on his NFT “investment,” but that’s relatively good compared to most which have lost 100% due to there being no liquidity.
Long BTC/Short MSTR - A hedge fund explains their reasoning for their bet that the MSTR premium will come down.
Fiat delenda est.
Ah yes another refreshing read