Bitcoin Tech Talk #406
Interesting Stuff
Quantum Error Correction - This is a paper that has one conclusion that is very, very interesting: “any quantum circuit for which error mitigation is efficient must be classically simulable.” Error correction is necessary for quantum computing, and it seems like that part is not doable in a way that's better than classical computing. This seems like a major theoretical limit on how good quantum computers can be, which I continue to believe is largely fraudulent.
Why Academic Research Sucks - The article is about the conventional explanation for why scientific breakthroughs are becoming less frequent, namely that there's so much to learn to get to the edges of scientific inquiry that it's difficult to even get to the scientific frontier, let alone discover something there. As the post points out, that's not the problem and the much more likely explanation is institutional decay. The author does note that there are bad incentives at play, but sadly doesn't connect it to fiat money.
Soul Decay - This is one of the best reflections on the effect that technology, and particularly social media has on the human soul. The author argues that the worst part of social media isn't that it's bad for mental health, the worst part is that it makes people self-centered. The usage of social media changes something in our character to make us more resentful, vain and in many ways inhuman. This is the real danger in that we learn to treat people as things and not as human beings. It's worth wondering how much technology replaces our morality as a result of the abstraction.
De-googling - A normie tries to de-Google for a year and this is the result. Essentially, she is successful in some things (protonmail instead of Gmail, for example) but unsuccessful in others (replacing Android). The article is very much the path that most of us have taken in extricating ourselves from fiat money. We'll need a lot of tools to do this and we're still very, very early.
What I'm up to
Blockware - I talked to Luke Broyles about the anti-halving of fiat money, Christian organizations' fragility because of fiat money, and why every government wants central banks. We talked about the Christian perspective on the role of government and how Christians have been affected by dependence on fiat money. Lastly we talked about anchoring bias and how that causes people to not buying Bitcoin.
Thank God for Bitcoin - I'll be at this conference on Wednesday to talk about financial holiness. It's a great way to meet some people before the zoo that is Bitcoin 2024. I highly encourage you to come if you can make it.
Bitcoin 2024 - I'll be speaking Thursday and signing books probably on Friday. It will be a zoo and given Trump is speaking, there will probably be lots of journalists as well as partisans and serious security.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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Bitcoin
Distributed Key Generation in FROST - FROST is very promising but unfortunately has suffered from a decent amount of complexity around the actual key generation. Unlike MuSig2 and other multisig protocols, you cannot just bring your own key to the multisig and have it work, the key must be cooperatively generated. This is a draft BIP for that key generation that hopefully avoids the many different pitfalls of private key generation.
Strange Behavior from AntPool - 0xB10C covers what have been a series of mini fork competitions between AntPool and other pools when they simultaneously find a block. As he observes, AntPool does not do the economically rational action of mining on their own block in those situations and instead mines on their competitor's block. The speculation is that they have some custom software that they either haven't updated or can't change due to some internal reason. It's hard to believe that they're doing so grossly incompetent, but this is now a fairly old company, and this is one of the indicators of rot.
Cluster Linearization - Pieter Wuille has posted on Delving Bitcoin about mempool clusters and how to keep the transactions within each cluster ordered so that they stay topologically sorted. As usual, Pieter writes very clearly and explains thoroughly to make the possibility of making clustered mempools much easier to reason about.
Lightning
Lightning.pub - This is a way to make Lightning more practical by using Nostr as the bridge for communication. As their readme states, the problem with lightning acceptance for a merchant is not the Lighting infrastructure, as those are more or less automated, it's the actual internet infrastructure setup like domain management and things of that nature. This is a project that obviates the need for those by using Nostr.
Novacard - This is a prepaid credit card that you can buy anonymously using Bitcoin or Lightning (and other crypto, yuck). It's an interesting concept and it's definitely better than using your own credit card in terms of privacy, but there are still lots of security holes, starting with this company. Whatever data they collect can potentially dox you later.
Phoenix Server UI - This is the UI portion of the Phoenix Server which is a lightning server that prides itself on making it easy to run. The UI portion helps you generate Bolt12 invoices and many other Lightning things. This is likely the direction that Lightning servers will go, which is to say, as something like BTCPay, but Lightning first.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Trump Backing a Bitcoin Play? - Mark Cuban thinks that the reason so many SV people are now backing Trump is because of their heavy Bitcoin bags. While I think there's some truth to this (not the least of all Mark), there's also the angle that many of these VCs still have altcoins that they need to make money on. They want euphoria in this coming year so they can dump their altcoin bags. There's also the fact that a lot of founders these days are much more right leaning and hate woke stuff.
Miners Going AI? - Financially struggling mining companies are apparently looking for deals with AI companies. If they're mining “crypto” instead of Bitcoin, this can make sense as many of them use GPUs and in a sense, AI services are a different form of mining. They also have minimized the energy cost of these things by being located in cheap energy locales. If AI gets bigger, I suspect they'll be commoditized and they'll have very similar dynamics as the mining industry.
Maelstrom - We have a lot of Bitcoin development grants in place from places like HRF, ChainCode, Brink, Block and OpenSats. Add one more from a fund founded by Arthur Hayes of BitMex fame. Applications are open and if you work on Bitcoin open source projects, this would be a good one to hit up.
Quick Hits
CSW notice - His website is following the court order telling people he's not Satoshi. I hope people like George Gilder finally own up to their stupidity.
Microsoft Crash - One of the biggest IT failures, perhaps, ever.
Putin on Mining - He's worried about blackouts as a result of crypto mining happening in his country. Could it also have anything to do with the fact that they can be used to get capital out of the country?
AT&T and Hackers - Apparently, almost 6 BTC was paid to the hackers who stole AT&T's customer data to simply delete it.
Fiat delenda est.