Bitcoin Tech Talk #405
Interesting Stuff
The War Against Boys - The article puts into perspective the deep bias and discrimination against boys in the education system. One of the reasons why boys are so discouraged is that some of their interests offend their female teachers. The obvious bias in the education system is also prevalent in politics and corporations these days. Sadly, the fiat system doesn't punish what's suboptimal, inefficient behavior.
Lack of Progress - The article reads as an apology for why biology hasn't progressed that much and indeed, it's really a bunch of bureaucratic excuses for why. The straw man of not enough math people being in the field is debunked, but not the real fiat ills, like tenure positions, publish or perish, the dominance of politics and not merit. The tone deafness is all too familiar as it's the sign of people that have been living in an echo chamber, convinced that they're smarter than everyone else.
Unintended Consequences - The article is making the case for political neutrality in matters instead of being forced to choose a side, but the more interesting thing is the stupidity of laws that don't take incentives into account. Specifically, there's the case of rhino horns, which, once banned, caused the death of way more rhinos. The case shouldn't about staying politically neutral, but about being market neutral as intervention rarely works well.
Conman Goes to Prison - The article is about a guy that's been locked in solitary permanently, where he’s confined to his cell for 23 hours a day. The reason is because he keeps scamming people, sometimes for millions of dollars as he’s an amazing conman. The story is fascinating for how they’ve chosen to deal with this guy because he’s so good at social manipulation. For me, it explains a lot of the psychology behind CSW, down to the weird lawfare and fake documents.
What I'm up to
Why Architecture Sucks - This is a mini documentary that I participated in about why modern architecture has a different character because fiat money. The argument I make is that because it's now a store of value, there's much more demand for real estate, leading to degrading quality. Every builder just wants to get acceptable housing out there instead of creating something beautiful.
Bitcoin 2024 - My agenda is out and I'm doing two things for this conference. I'll be on a panel about Making Bitcoin in America Great Again with Ben Askren, Luke Rudkowski and Bruce Fenton. I'll also be signing some books at some point.
Thank God for Bitcoin - I'll be talking about Financial Holiness. What does following God in financial matters look like?
X Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Unchained Capital is a sponsor of this newsletter. I am an advisor and proud to be a part of a company that’s enhancing security for Bitcoin holders. If you need multisig, collaborative custody or bitcoin native financial services, learn more here.
Bitcoin
Wasabi Security Incident - The post is something to behold. It looks like there were there separate attacks against the coinjoin provider, including coordinators, their supply chain that's used for building their software and against specific users. Somebody really wants to shut this thing down.
satsto.me - This is a BIP353 resolver, which is to say, that it gives you a normal Bitcoin URI for BOLT12, Silent Payments and normal onchain addresses for a given BIP353 address, which is DNS-based. They use DNSSEC to make sure you don't get MITM'd and it's a way to make BIP353 a little more backwards compatible. Time will tell if this along with BOLT12 and Silent Payments are standards wallets implement.
Mempool Accelerator - There's now a service for getting your stuck transactions through. This has always existed for specific pools, where generally you had to pay with a credit card, but with this service, any participating pool will accept your fee, and it can be paid via Cash App or Lightning. This will have some consequences for the ecosystem, though it's hard to know exactly how that will evolve. One thing's for sure, this is a path of monetization for the popular block explorer.
Lightning
LND Neutrino Fix - Compact block filters are a big part of how light Lightning nodes operate and it turns out that high latency nodes would be unusable for these filters due to some bad default settings. This patch fixes this and given LND is a dominant client in the ecosystem, this should make the network much better.
Private Lightning Payment Guide - This is a guide to make your lightning payment more private by using TOR and obscuring your IP by tunnelling it through a VPN using Wireguard. It's unclear how much lightning payments are surveiled at this point, but as they say, only the paranoid survive. If you're using Lightning for payments where your privacy matters, this sort of thing is a good thing to do in advance of what may come later.
Multiparty Submarine Swaps - Submarine swaps are already pretty good for privacy, as they require a lot of data coordination to figure out, but can they be even better? That's the question this article asks, and the solution they come up with is a multi-party submarine swap, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's like coinjoin and submarine swaps had a baby. I can see this becoming a default way of making coins much less traceable.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
SEC Rule Backtrack - On the heels of the overturn of Chevron deference, there's some noise about the SEC's rule SAB 121 which makes it costly for banks to custody crypto for clients. This would essentially be skirted or even rolled back and allow institutions to hold these assets for clients directly. This would obviate the need for ETFs and possibly make banks more like exchanges.
China’s Story - On the heels of the German government selling its stash of Bitcoins, there's this story of what happened with China's over 190,000 BTC that they seized in the PayCoin scam. It seems there may still be Bitcoin that hasn't been sold into the market. Government seizures from scams is not new and given how many scams there are and continue to be, government sales will be a reality for the foreseeable future.
eCash ecosystem - This is a helpful graphic of all the projects that are implementing some sort of Bitcoin eCash. I honestly had no idea the ecosystem was so big. Perhaps one of them will figure out the use case where small trusted communities can bank each other.
Quick Hits
MicroStrategy Stock Split - 10-for-1, which should give more divisibility to the plebs that want to own this as a leveraged Bitcoin bet.
Worldcoin is a Failure - Missed their goal by 99.4%
Suriname Politician - After the success of Bukele, there were bound to be imitators. We have one in Suriname.
Trump Still Speaking - In Nashville. Should be interesting, even if we all get strip searched.
Fiat delenda est.