Bitcoin Tech Talk #398
Interesting Stuff
Emotional Savings - The story is about a Muslim woman who grew up in India and what the gold jewelry that was passed down to her means. In India and various parts of south Asia, gold jewelry has served as a store of value for many generations and many people still use it as such. What was remarkable about the article for me was how closely the emotions were when selling these savings vehicles/heirlooms compared to when I’ve sold Bitcoin. In a sense, the emotional attachment to a savings vehicle is a good indicator of its stickiness.
Hiding Conspiracies - The question conspiracy theorists get all the time is, if it’s such a big operation involving so many people, how come there are no whistleblowers? I’d like to submit this article to anyone who says that. The story is about a particular type of toxic chemical called PFOS which the 3M corporation developed many years ago. The journalist has been pursuing this story for many years and finally, she got one of the scientists to admit that the company knew the chemical was toxic and that it’s now in everyone’s bloodstream. From reading the story, I get the sense that most people are too cowardly, and the brave people willing to whistleblow are generally defamed or wracked by guilt to really do anything effective to overturn the institutional narrative.
Midlife Crisis Inversion - The article is about how the traditional Midlife Crisis has been turned upside down the past 30 years. What used to be married people with kids suddenly turning adolescent as they found the boundaries of family life too restrictive has turned into a crisis of unmarried people suddenly desiring to find meaning in family and kids. In a sense, the pendulum has swung way too far in the other direction as midlife is often a time of deep regret at wasting a lot of time chasing the wrong things for a lot of people. Perhaps this explains the more “trad” attitude among the younger people who are seeing many of their older colleagues at work go through these crises.
Economics of Sanctions - Doomberg goes into exactly why the sanctions against Russia have failed so badly. The assumption by the people that implemented the sanctions was that by limiting the markets, that Russia would suffer. Sadly, that’s not how markets work and because the supply side was constrained through the sanctions, the commodity prices of the things Russia had to sell, like oil and natural gas, went up. They argue in the article that if they really wanted to punish Russia, they would have turned on every oil well and natural gas mine to crash the commodity prices. Sanctions are cartel behavior, and unless you have everyone cooperating, they’re very unlikely to work. And with the BRICS alliance behind Russia, it was a doomed plan from the ecomically stupid bureaucrat’s playbook.
What I'm up to
Bitcoin Journeys - I was on this podcast to talk about what the early days of Bitcoin were like and how OGs had to deal with so many more things with little to no information. My general feeling when thinking about the old days is gratitude that I didn’t fall into the many different pit traps that so many of the OGs suffered from.
Wrong Lessons of Pizza Day - In honor of Pizza Day this past week, Bitcoin Magazine has released another excerpt from the book. This chapter is about how we’ve taken the wrong lessons, thinking that the key to personal sovereignty and prosperity is luck when it should really be about adding value. The person you should be imitating is not the guy that bought the Bitcoin for pizzas, but the Lazslo who made so much BTC in finding an innovative new way to mine.
Bitcoin Seoul - This week, I’m in Seoul for the biggest Maximalist conference ever to happen in Asia. If you’re at the conference, I’ll be around for the festivities, speaking and signing some books. My talks are on May 30th near the opening of the day and May 31st near the end of the day.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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Bitcoin
Conservation - ReardenCode takes issue with Lyn Alden’s characterization that not changing things in Bitcoin is the conservative and more secure thing. As an engineer, I sympathize with this view. The status quo is not likely to be the most secure configuration. But what the status quo has is hardening through time and that’s something no theoretical soft fork has. In a sense, both ReardenCode and Lyn have a point and there is much more exploration and scenario analysis before we can agree on a soft fork.
PushTX - If you’ve ever wanted to push out a transaction, but wanted some privacy about your node or the geolocation of your transaction, this is a lightweight tool to broadcast your transaction directly to the p2p network. This is in the tradition of unix tools, which is to do one job and do it very well. I hope that the developers take it all the way and make it an easy-to-use command-line program that broadcasts to the network with mmaximal privacy.
eCash DLCs - DLCs have been around a while and allow for settlement on-chain. But what if we could do DLCs with eCash? That would tradeoff the need for blockchain settlement for some centralization. This indeed is what the post describes using some clever elliptic curve cryptography. I’m not entirely certain that such things have a widespread use, but if it does’ this definitely adds a significant layer of privacy, in exchange for some trust placed in a mint.
Lightning
Pathfinding Reliability - In a dynamic and complex system like Lightning, figuring out whether a payment on a certain route will go through is not a simple calculation. As this post from Lightning Labs shows, there’s a lot of modeling that goes into figuring out which path is likely to be successful. One of the more interesting findings from the post is that there’s likely a particular network topology at present because of the unidirectional payment flows.
Lightning ATM - This only works with coins, but the idea is great. This is an offline (!) ATM that gives you lightning for your coins. I can easily imagine this being a very useful alternative to currency exchanges at airports, though for me, the other direction, of getting local currency for Bitcoin is more useful.
CLN Nostr Plugin - There’s now a C-Lightning plugin that uses the Nostr Wallet Connect standard, for easy and rapid zapping. For those of you running your own node, this should be a nice way to make your Nostr experience more pleasant. I suspect that this will become standard in node-in-a-box software like Umbrel, Start9 and others as Nostr becomes a bigger part of the ecosystem.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
China and USD - One of the biggest holders of the dollar is starting to divest, slowly but surely. There are two ways to interpret this, that the dollar is no longer the solid reserve currency of the world that it once was, or that China has some serious internal problems that require selling of their USD position. There’s some truth to both, as neither country has managed their currency or their economy very well the last 4 years. As usual, the meddling of governments makes for chaotic markets.
Samourai Responds - Following the arrest of two of their developers, their blog post is something to read. It seems they view the arrest as illegitimate and a deep overreach by the DoJ. As they point out, practically speaking, the server where they hosted their code has been seized, so they’ve stopped all development. This is certainly a big shot across the bow for Bitcoin devs, particularly those working on privacy tech, and there will be some consequences based on the outcomes of this case.
CSW judgment - This is a pretty brutal ruling from the judge in the COPA case, hopefully ending the years long lawfare against Bitcoin developers. The sheer magnitude of his fraud is pretty remarkable as that amount of forging and lying is not easy to keep track of. I do wonder how someone spends that much time defrauding people when the same energy, even directed at flipping burgers would have yielded measurable value to society.
Quick Hits
GBTC Turmoil - This bankruptcy is looking like it’ll drag out a la Mt. Gox. Their CEO (not Barry) just stepped down, and it’s unclear exactly what the reason is.
ETH ETF Approved - This rather sudden turnaround by the SEC seems very politically driven. We’ll see if that means more ETFs for other altcoins.
FTX Bankruptcy Details - The gory details of FTX’s behavior are documented here, summarizing the 230-page report.
Venezuela bans mining - Not especially surprising given that they’ve been giving electricity away for free.
Fiat delenda est.