Bitcoin Tech Talk #394
Interesting Stuff
No Tech Is Inevitable - The article is about the Apple Vision Pro, but the bigger point that it’s making about how tech companies and media try to make something sound inevitable is the real nugget in the story. Essentially the Vision Pro got a lot of hype because of the reputation of Apple, but it’s turned out to be a big dud in the market and ultimately, it’s the consumers that determine the success of a product. In other words, markets win over hype. Every. Single. Time.
Nobody Knows How to Hang Out - This article is not your normal modern lament about cell phones and social media, it’s a more positive article about the art of hanging out and how it’s becoming lost. It’s written in a left-leaning mag, so there are the usual lefty tropes, but the sense I got from the article is that there really is something being lost. Much like how most people don’t really know how to have a long phone conversation anymore, the digital life is creeping into our relationships at such a rate that most people don’t know how to have a good time together.
Nobody Reads Books - For someone like me, who’s both an author and big reader, this is a depressing read. The trends in publishing are terrible. 90% of books sell less than 2000 copies in their lifetime. 50% sell less than 12. Big advances mostly go to celebrities, and even on those, the publishing houses often lose money. It’s really a few big hits that they rely on to make any money at all. All these trends are ultimately because there’s just fewer people that read books and that’s because far more people are entertained through video and podcasts. Sadly, I don’t think this is a trend that’ll get any better as AI makes production of these latter far easier.
Public Education vs Family - The article starts off with a challenge of the conventional wisdom that education is the key to lifting the poor out of poverty. As the article points out, the actual thing that correlates strongest with lifting the poor out of poverty is growing up in a household with a father. It’s an intact family that creates success, not 8 hours a day of being lectured at for 13+ years. In a sense, public education is a debased form of family and it’s produced some terrible results.
What I'm up to
Reason Interview - This is an older interview since no new ones got released this week, but it’s a good one with Reason Magazine. I talked about education, Christianity and a whole bunch of other things and relating them to Bitcoin. This is one of those interviews where I got to show how the free market really does improve things on stuff like education where we take the default way to be the right way.
AudioBook and eBook - You can now get my latest book, Fiat Ruins Everything on both audio and e-devices using Bitcoin! The Bitcoin Magazine store has upgraded their e-commerce and is selling these books to people around the world and if you’re interested in a circular economy, this is the place to use it.
Bitcoin Seoul - This conference is only 4 weeks away and it should be a banger! Lots of people like Saifedean coming to the conference and it will be one of the few Bitcoin-only conferences in Asia this year.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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Bitcoin
Practical Multisig - This is a new type of wallet being marketed by Nunchuk, but it’s also one of the first practical multi-sig setups that aren’t just collaborative custody. The product is called Finney and will allow you to have various configurations, like 2-of-3 or 3-of-5, but also, there’s the ability to have a blind co-signer, which is especially important with close relations. You don’t necessarily want your parents to know how much money you have, for example. I hope more wallets of this type emerge.
Migrating to Sparrow - For people that are concerned about privacy leaks due to Samourai Dev’s arrest (see below), this is a guide to migrate to another wallet. This is a pretty terrible decision on the part of Samourai’s devs when they collected xpubs on their servers, but at least that can now be mitigated by the use of this guide. The fighting between Samourai and Wasabi in particular has been damaging for plebs who honestly couldn’t tell the difference.
Verifiable Random Functions - This is an exciting paper where you can prove that the output of your PRNG was produced according to the same pseudo-random function. Nonce generation, of course, is a major attack vector for many signature algorithms, and particularly for the MuSig2/FROST multi-party signature aggregation, this looks like a promising way to eliminate a lot of foot guns.
Lightning
PhoenixWallet being removed - The developers of the wallet are removing themselves from the US in the Apple and Google app stores. This is probably in response to the Samourai Wallet developers’ arrest and the FBI warning below, but it’s still quite the drastic move. That said, I can see this making projects such as this increasingly move out of the US and get distribution through apks and such. Sadly, that probably means that Apple phone users will not have many options in the future.
LNAddrD - If you’re running LND and want your own Lightning Address, this is your tool to get one. Essentially, it hooks up to your LND node and generates invoices like any Lightning Address should. I like the philosophy of this tool as it’s much more like your typical linux command, which does one thing and does it well. Enough tools like this and you can build a pretty cool ecosystem.
Diverging LSP Market - This post by Alby brings to the forefront that lightning has many use cases and types of nodes which have different needs. While liquidity, particularly inbound remains the big thing that a lot of LSPs serve, the market that they serve matters greatly and we’re starting to see that the market for LSPs is specializing. That’s normal for any market as it matures, and as I’ve said oftentimes in this newsletter, node and software diversification in the Lightning Network is inevitable. But that also means that the services, particularly around inbound liquidity is going to specialize going forward as well.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Samourai Wallet Devs Arrested - The Southern District of New York, the creators of BitLicense and the people who arrested Virgil Griffith, have now arrested the Samourai Wallet developers. What’s particularly concerning about this arrest is that they are being charged under KYC laws, claiming that their service constituted money-laundering. Given that they didn’t ever take possession, this is a farcical charge, but given that this district is known for getting prosecutions, this is not going to be an easy case to fight.
3nm Miners - Block has been making some progress on their mining chips and they revealed this week that they’re using the bleeding edge 3nm process. This is not known to be a process that any other ASIC maker is using, so should in theory get the best economics once it comes to market. That said, there’s likely to be a large lead time given how long tape outs and such are. Still, the commoditization of mining is coming and should be here by the next halving or two.
FBI Warning - The FBI has put out a warning to people to “Beware of financial services that do not ask for KYC information” as an aside to the general warnings about cryptocurrency in general. We always knew that the altcoins scams would result in some sort of response, and the government being who they are, seem to be using the levers they know, namely the deputization of financial institutions for the sake of trying to stop these altcoin frauds. Unfortunately, that also seems to mean an assault on Bitcoin privacy as well.
Quick Hits
ViaBTC pool freezing - The monster fee block 840,000 with over 37 BTC in fees has been “frozen” by the ViaBTC pool and not distributed to its members pending some investigation.
Chivo Source code - Apparently, some code for the wallet has been released, making it available for hackers to find exploits.
Rare Sat Bidding - The first sat of the new mining era was sold for 33.3 BTC, which is honestly about as special as a particular oxygen molecule.
Dictator-proof Money - Alex Gladstein makes the argument that Bitcoin is dictator-proof.
Buy Bitcoin Sign sells - For 16 BTC, which is around $1M.
Fiat delenda est.