Bitcoin Tech Talk #401
Interesting Stuff
High Agency Policies - There's much to be said about walking a mile in another's shoes or seeing the world through the lens of other people, but this is the first time I remember thinking that freedom is not something people can handle. I am a freedom maximalist, but as the article points out, it may be due, in some significant way to the fact that I have characteristics that also gives me high agency. That is, I am for freedom policies because I can handle them, whereas a lot of people can't and thus prefer not to. Despite the insight found in the article, I'm not quite convinced that leaving people in a state of perpetual adolescence is a good thing.
Unserious - Escaping rent-seeking is hard and this article points out why. For the people that don't care about providing value, rent-seeking existences are fine, but for those that want to achieve more, the carrot of doing something meaningful is continuously held over them just over the horizon. The post captures beautifully that moment when you think “if I only do this one more thing, I can finally do the serious thing that I want to do” and finding out that, actually, you need to get to the next level, or the next rung to finally do what you really want. Truth is that every level is the same and that you really do need to stop the fiat pursuits to do what you really want.
What's Missing in Stories - This article names something that I've always found unsatisfying about stories, which is that they're always a little too tidy, a little too neat and close loops a little too well. There's none of the weird ambiguity, none of the mundane, the boredom or just plain messiness of life. And in a sense, our love for stories has led to some expectation that life will turn out to be a bit more like the stories we've read, when reality is far more dirty with much less closure. I consider this as one of the reasons why so many people don't understand the current monetary system because it's evil in a banal way that's not like any stories we know.
Hyperinflation and Chaos - The rise of dictators is a fascinating topic, especially if they came into power through democratic means, and this article from Mises.org is an excellent analysis of how Hitler came to power. The main point of analysis is that the failure of the Weimar Republic was entirely monetary, and that in turn caused chaos which led people to demand a command economy. Specifically, it was the moral failure of fiat money that ultimately brought into being a very authoritarian government. Sadly, this seems to be playing out right now where the inflationary pressures are giving politicians more excuses to grab more power.
What I'm up to
Korea Interview - I did an interview with a Korean YouTuber about my message to the young people in Korea that are starting to look at Bitcoin. It's unfortunately a society where young people have very little hope of a decent life these days and I place the blame where it squarely belongs, fiat money and the selfishness of the older generation.
Slovakia - I'm in Slovakia for part of this week to hang out with some Austrian economics folks to talk about Bitcoin. I'm not exactly familiar with the country, but if you have recommendations, I'd love to hear them, particularly in Valca and Bratislava.
Budapest and Munich - The two destinations after this week are Budapest and Munich. I've contacted some Munich Bitcoiners to arrange some sort of meetup, so stay tuned to find out when and where I'll be speaking.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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Bitcoin
Quantum Resistance BIP - I happen to think Quantum Computing is mostly BS, but in case it does come to pass, this is a BIP that goes through the possible different signature algorithms that would make Bitcoin more quantum resistant. The main thing to note is that all the resulting signatures are significantly longer than Schnorr or ECDSA. That said, this is a decent way to refute the MBA types that bring up quantum as an attack vector on Bitcoin as if they know something.
Stratum.work - This is a way to visualize what each mining pool’s work looks like. There's a lot of stats, from the headers that each pool is mining on to the first non-coinbase transaction they are including. It's the first time I've been able to see what they're trying to do, at least publicly, and it would be interesting to see if the blocks mined differ from the work they give to their pool members.
Tx Fees using Machine Learning - An academic paper analyzes the current fee estimation methods and comes up with a brand new proposal to learn what the most effective fee for a given moment would be. The essential idea is that strictly analytical approaches like looking at the mempool or historical fees are not enough and that some degree of machine learning is necessary to predict market behavior. I don't know how practical such methods would be on most nodes, but services that can run these models would have some use in the future.
Lightning
Daily Wallet - The Bitcoin Design Guide has this very handy reference implementation of what a daily Bitcoin wallet should be. The focus is what you'd expect in that it's easy to get up and running, is lightning-first and doesn't load the user with Bitcoin-specific jargon. I'm impressed with the level of detail and hope more products that embody these UX principles can come to market.
Direct LN Payments - Wavlake has a feature for artists to add their LN address for direct payment. This is just one example, but there's a tremendous amount of services where payment is a big problem, often being batched every two weeks or a month. As we get more inflation around the world, this kind of frequent payment will be very important for workers.
Common Language - The Breez blog has a very interesting and important insight into the nature of Lightning, namely that it has become a common language. That is, a lot of different layers are now communicating via lightning to transfer value, including, for example, Liquid, Cashu and in the future Statechains, Ark and so on. This is an interesting phenomenon, especially in the decentralized context we have and will give us insight into how systems like this evolve.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Realities of BTC Payments - This is a blog of someone that's been living off of Bitcoin for years, and it's a bit sobering to see that direct merchant transactions are getting harder, not easier. As the post shows, a lot of merchants have stopped taking Bitcoin, the giftcards and ATMs have more regulatory hurdles, with many requiring lots of KYC and living on Bitcoin as a method of payment is just hard. I've seen this before, with the companies that started taking Bitcoin for payments in 2014, and I suspect that until Bitcoin has become a bigger part of the world's savings this will continue to be the case.
Bitcoin Endowment - University of Austin now has a Bitcoin Endowment, thanks to Joe Kelly, the CEO of Unchained, who has started the campaign with a 2 BTC donation. The performance of the endowment should be very interesting to watch as it'll be competing against the very large endowments of other US universities. Could a strong performance by the U of Austin endowment cause some of these larger endowments to allocate to Bitcoin? There's got to be a tremendous cost to these universities in the active management that they have to be engaged in.
Swan to sponsor Tucker - I'm sure the people that don't like Tucker Carlson will not like this move, but he definitely gets a lot of views and his audience is more open to Bitcoin than most. Sadly, the left-leaning shows aren't as interested and the conversion rates on those shows are probably much lower than the right-leaning ones. Despite the progressive Bitcoiners writing books and making their case, it really does seem that the right is a much more receptive audience at this point in time.
Quick Hits
Another Note - MSTR continues to issue more debt in a bid to up their BTC treasury, this time to the tune of $500M.
Japanese Co Too - They're not the only ones, as Metaplanet (a Japanese Company) acquired $1.8M worth of BTC.
Memorize your seed - I can't attest to the effectiveness, but it does seem easier than 12 random words.
Hedge Funds Love BTC ETF - Apparently, over half of the top hedge funds have some Bitcoin ETF exposure.
Fiat delenda est.