Bitcoin Tech Talk #402
Interesting Stuff
Writing is Upper Class - There's always been an equitable ideal where the proportion of every job is proportionally represented by every group in society. This is an economic fallacy from a rudimentary understanding of justice and fairness, and as this story shows, writers throughout history have almost always come from the upper classes, with some middle class exceptions. The story of literature is much like other status games, that is, there's an elite, which gets stale and gets replaced, but not by the lower classes, but by those at the fringe of the elites themselves. It's a pattern that we need to be aware of now as the world seems on the brink of one of these turnovers.
A Different Take on Patriarchy - Patriarchy is a dirty word in pop culture, with it being blamed for everything from inequality to stagnation. This is not one of those pieces. As the article explains, patriarchy is a reverence of the sacred, a piety, if you will, whose lack we feel in our bones every day. To oppose patriarchy practically means the denigration of a father in a child's life, whose lack correlates with all sorts of terrible outcomes, like drug addiction, prison, and poverty. For civilization to thrive, or even to slow in its destruction, we need more fathers, more patriarchy, not less.
Two Cultures of Academia - Pretty much every college student feels this, that the softer subjects have a very different way of determining facts than, say the hard sciences. Your grades, for one, are determined by how truth is determined, and the rules are very different in those two spheres. This article brings to light the big difference and how the two academic cultures diverged. What's not said is the role of fiat money that has untethered the soft sciences from market feedback, which unfortunately is penetrating the sciences as well.
Excel Championships - They really can make a competition about anything and people will watch. This article goes through the experience of one reporter/participant in the Excel World Championships which test each participants' ability to churn numbers. As a programmer, this competition struck me as the ultimate in nerd sniping, but in a sense, all competition comes down to small details like this. Given how many people are familiar with stuff like Excel, I imagine a programming competition would be at least as popular, though it'd be hard to design a contest that would play well on TV.
What I'm up to
Developer Safety - My panel from BTC Prague is up where we talked about the various threat to Bitcoin developers including lawfare, doxxing and the realism of pseudonymity in this day and age. The main conclusion we came to us is that we really need the moral highground to prevent the authorities from coming after developers, and hopefully you can appreciate what that means when you watch the panel.
Twitter Spaces - I'll be on the Store of Bitcoin Twitter Spaces this week to talk about Bitcoin. I'm not exactly sure what to expect, but it should be a good time.
Munich - Finally, I'm in Munich this week to check out the city. There's a pretty sizable Bitcoin community here and hopefully, I'll be doing some stuff with them. If you have any recommendations, please send them my way!
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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Bitcoin
DBCache Size - Jameson Lopp investigates the effect of DBCache size on block sync times for Bitcoin Core and interestingly, it does speed it up, but only marginally. The real danger seems to be if the node crashes during download there's a huge reindexing that can take a very long time. If you have a lot of RAM and don't anticipate any network problems, increasing this may make sense, but the failure mode seems to be much more painful than the speedu
Trezor 5 - This is the latest hardware wallet from Satoshi Labs and it's finally got a secure element on it. It hosts a bunch of other upgrades like gorilla glass, SD card port and pin wipe, much of which is marketing, but it's good to see that they've finally upgraded their game given the large amount of competition in the hardware wallet space. Now if they'd only put more effort into their Bitcoin only firmware…
Fee Reduction - BitGo's blog has an overview of what they've done to make sure they reduce fees for their clients as much as possible. They've recently transitioned to native segwit for their internal addresses and now offer MuSig2 for multisig for the most efficient on-chain multisig. As fees get higher, these sorts of optimizations will become more important, though enough companies don't seem to be feeling the brunt of these fees enough to transition to p2tr.
Lightning
LND 0.17 DoS Bug - There's a vulnerability in LND 0.17 and below which makes the lightning node run out of memory if a certain type of onion packets are sent to it. The software has been patched and you should definitely upgrade if you run something that's affected.
BOLT 12 Playground - Strike has released a BOLT12 playground for programmers to play with this standard. It's an alternative to LNURL which has been a widely implemented standard among other things and hopefully will make offers a bigger part of the ecosystem.
FewSats - This is a service to put a paywall behind any arbitrary data. I can see this being useful for various documents, particularly the kind that would embarrass certain people, though I'm not quite certain how popular it would be. Most negotiations in those types of situations are active, not passive like this sort of situation. Still, it's good to have a solution like this for stuff like ebooks, videos and music.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Bitcoin Historian - Pete Rizzo has started a newsletter about Bitcoin History with various stories from its early days starting with the story of Julian Assange's involvement. He was a cypherpunk and a journalist whose crime was embarrassing the US government. In a sense, the WikiLeaks embrace of Bitcoin really put it on the map in its early days. Having known Pete for years now, I can tell you confidently that he knows more about the early history of Bitcoin than pretty much anyone else.
BMM100 - This is a retail mining unit meant to run at home that costs $200, available now for pre-order. It's not clear how much hashing power it will have, but given the price point, it's meant for hobbyist mining. Similarly,
the Hushbox is supposed to significantly reduce the noise of a miner for home use. These machines are really loud so it'd be something of a miracle to see it be quiet for home use. If it works, I can see it being used for heating various things at home.
Politics of Bitcoin - Following Trump's new embrace of Bitcoin, a lot of left-leaning publications are instinctively saying bad things about Bitcoin. Despite the presence of progressive Bitcoiners, it really does look like Bitcoin is being championed far more on the right. What's frustrating is that there's not much distinction from either side about Bitcoin vs altcoins, but that's to be expected given that politicians are at least 5 years behind still talking about “Blockchain technology.”
Quick Hits
MSTR buys BTC - They bought $500M worth and the price moved down.
0.85 BTC - That's how much it cost someone to inscribe a ~4MB video.
$1M for Trump - It's actually 15 BTC or so, and it's being donated by one of the Winklevoss twins.
Michael Dell - The CEO who owns a majority of Dell is hinting at some Bitcoin friendliness.
Satonomics - This is a site of charts and stats about Bitcoin in an easy to digest form.
Fiat delenda est.