Bitcoin Tech Talk #391
Interesting Stuff
Self vs the Mob - This rather long read is motivated by the question, what is the main struggle of the 21st century? The author goes through the concept of Hegelian dialectic and the defining conflict of the 20th century, which was capitalism vs. communism. The author argues that the internet has been the technology that has brought forth the conflict of the 21st century, which is self-sovereignty over the mob. He even writes a little about Bitcoin, though I find his understanding rather shallow. But his point that this is the century where it’s the individual vs. the group is very much an insightful one.
The Abortion Pill - I really didn’t know very much about this pill until I read this article, but it was eye-opening to say the least. Much like with vaccines and birth conntrol, there’s definitely an ideological bias toward calling all things related to it safe, even if it isn’t. Most hospitals will code abortion pill related complications as miscarriages, despite them being quite different circumstances. The article just goes to show how political even things like health become when infused with ideology of the authorities.
Headed toward Totalitarianism - This is another of many different people from former communist countries that are sounding the alarm about how western democracies are headed in that direction. The author is the daughter of a prominent Czech journalist who fought communism and she calls out the censorship of the press and many show trials that clearly are meant to frighten the people that would protest. Yeonmi Park has a book out which similarly compares western democracies with North Korean communism.
Wonks - One of the concepts I return to over and over in my writing is that of rent-seekers and this is an interesting, more positive perspective on the type of people that become rent-seekers. The article traces the modern “wonk” which is essentially a manager/bureaucrat emerging from the large-scale businesses emerging from the industrial revolution. But even with the positive view of these people, the author recognizes that there’s a significant loss by making these positions so gate-kept and credentialed. Fiat money has degraded even the quality of the rent-seekers over time.
What I'm up to
Block Insider - I talked with these guys from Brazil about Bitcoin’s origins. I talked with them about the pre-history of Bitcoin, including Wei Dai’s b-money, Hal Finney’s Reusable Proof-of-Work, Chaum’s e-cash and the Cypherpunk mailing list. We talked a bit about the nature of software and Bitcoin and how it’s more a money than a technology. I also ranted about the stupidity of ordinals and NFTs and how they’re not going to last. Finally, we talked about future scalability.
Bit Block Boom - The annual Texas conference is finally here! Tickets are sold out from what I hear, but there are enough side events that there should be opportunities to hang out with fellow Bitcoiners. I’ll be there Friday and Saturday, selling some books and giving some talks. Come by for some steak and Bitcoin!
Oslo Freedom Forum - I will be at this annual conference on June 3-5 in Oslo to talk about human freedom, particularly monetary freedom. The conference is always a great exploration into what’s actually going on in the world and not just what the mainstream media tells about. If you want to learn how Bitcoin helps the fighters for human rights, this is the conference to go to.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
SigOp Limit - 0xB10C goes into two invalid blocks created by F2Pool from a year ago. Essentially, the custom patch they put in their software incorrectly counted the number of signature operations allowed in a block and were over the limit by 3. Obviously, the mistake cost the pool lots of money, but it did shed some light on the ability of pool participants to sometimes specify what address they’re being paid to in the Coinbase output, which explains why they don’t allow pay-to-bare-multisig outputs.
SHA-2 Collision - This paper has been making the rounds where there are now some questions about the security of the SHA-2 family. The paper has figured out a practical 39-steps of the 64-step SHA-256 function using a meet-in-the-middle (MITM) attack to find a collision. To compromise the function would require all 64 steps to have a collision, though even using something like that is not at all clear for an attack on Bitcoin since most functions use two rounds of SHA-256.
BitVM Bridge Flaw - The design proposed for bridging between Bitcoin and a layer 2 using BitVM has some flaws. The main mechanism that breaks seems to be the funds locked in the bridge and how to disperse it. Apparently, because the design of BitVM, either the prover gets the money locked in the BitVM contract or it goes to the miners or some combination. As such, the people on the other side of the bridge may not be able to get the coins they are due on layer 1.
Lightning
LNCast - This is a tool to send messages to a bunch of Lightning addresses. At least that’s the purpose, though you can easily just send them an equal amount of sats, because that’s what’s required to send a message. The idea is that if you want to broadcast messages to a bunch of these lightning addresses at the same time, you can now, by using this tool. It’s obviously got built-in spam protection as every node needs to receive *something* and there’s all the routing fees to pay. Perhaps this will replace what Earn (bought by Coinbase) became.
Nostr-ifying Lightning - Mutiny has a big UX makeover and as their blog post explains, it’s meant to be a lot more people-centric. One of the priorities in Bitcoin has been pseudonymity and that’s unfortunately made every address not very user friendly. The direction of the app is refreshing specifically because the people you transact with are not derived from some centralized server, but because they’re already in a sense curated by you. Instead of labeling addresses with people, they’re labeling people with addresses. It wouldn’t surprise me to see something like this become more prominent as lightning evolves.
Monetizing APIs - Voltage has an article on using Lightning as a way to monetize existing APIs. This has been something that people have been talking about for years, even before the launch of the Lightning Network as a way to make what are likely to be microtransactions. The economics have changed a bit as routing has cost and if the payor and payee are too far away from each other, the fees may take up too much of the money, but at least direct channels may be able to solve this.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Satoshi’s Email Hack - Back in 2014, there were a few known email addresses of Satoshi’s that were compromised. The BitMex blog goes through exactly what seems to have happened, which emails were shown there and the several different ways the hackers tried to “monetize” the account. Thankfully, there wasn’t anything in there that really helped any of these hackers, and there’s also some possibility that the “I am not Dorian Nakamoto” in early 2014 may have really been from Satoshi.
Argentinian BTC Registration - The shine on Milei is beginning to wear off a little bit as crypto service providers will now be required to register to a government entity. While many of the reforms from his administration have been well received, this one is one that’s clearly going in the wrong direction as it increases government control and surveillance. While this act is quite disappointing, there are other opportunities to show his libertarian bona fides. If he can shut down the Argentinian central bank, I’d consider it a wash.
Electrifying Africa - Developing countries have lots of problems with energy production and sadly, it’s a huge bottleneck for their development. This article looks at how the bureaucratic, dollar dominated African countries fail in electrifying their countries and how private markets are doing a better job. In particular, because of the availability of Bitcoin to take excess electricity, the electrification of Africa is finally progressing. One can only hope this opens them up for more fossil fuel exploration so they can develop.
Quick Hits
US Gov’t selling 30170 BTC? - It’s been moved to Coinbase, does it mean they’re selling or have already sold?
50M sats for CISA research - Cross-Input Signature Aggregation is a really cool concept but requires some research and this is a grant by HRF to make that happen. Applicants will be given 50M sats to answer some basic research questions.
Zimbabwe Currency Gold-Backed - In a bit of a drastic move, they’ve introduced their 6th currency since 2008 called the ZiG and it’s backed by gold and foreign currency.
BTCPay Documentary - Appropriately named “My Trust in You is Broken,” it’s scheduled to premiere on April 19, which should be very near the halving.
Fiat delenda est.