Bitcoin Tech Talk #411
Interesting Stuff
Ozempic - This is an article that probably will tell you way more than you ever wanted to know about this new drug. Among other things, I learned that it's a drug that somehow curbs your desire for not just food, but other addictions, like alcoholism or even shopping. The way the drug works is by curbing your appetite through your brain, and not through the stomach, which seems to affect these other behaviors. It seems poised to change things, at the very least superficially, but probably more substantively going forward.
Calvin, Frustrated Boy in Effeminized Society - Insightful article about the meaning behind the comic, Calvin and Hobbes. I used to enjoy this comic back when I was a kid, and reading this article helped me to understand that it's really about the frustration of boys trying to fit into a society that's effectively been effeminized. Having few outlets for the creative destruction that boys enjoy due to fiat money, the comic is about how he uses his imagination to escape.
MKUltra - This is a long article about the secret CIA program on mind control during the Cold War. The details are truly horrific (essentially breaking minds) and deeply immoral (doing these things to unwitting people!). If you've ever wondered about what the CIA does and how it does it, this article helps put their role into context. Programs like this show for me just how twisted things get with little to no accountability under a fiat money system.
China the Good guy? - Pax Americana has been the world order since the end of WWII. As the article speculates, this is on its way out and the question is, what will replace it? The article is hopeful that China will be the power that bases its power on trade instead of monetary domination as the US has done. While I don't agree with that premise, the main idea that the US domination has overstepped its bounds and is starting to fall apart is definitely correct. Should we get a Pax Sino, I suspect they'd abuse their monetary powers and gut their industrial base much as the US has the last 80 years.
What I'm up to
The Bitcoin Group - I used to be on this weekly show by the World Crypto Network often back in 2017-18 and I finally made it back! We talked about Coinbase, ETFs, Mark Cuban and a whole bunch of other topics. If you want to know my hot takes on each of these, please take a look.
The Power of Ownership - I wrote this piece during the week (along with a few more on Stacker News) about how owning things changes people's behavior. My thesis is that the people that ruin things are generally the people that don't have stuff and that civilization gets built when people own things and have the room to create with them.
JFK and the Unspeakable - I finished this book this week after having it on my to-read list for at least half a year. There are lots of JFK assassination books out there, but this one looks at not just the events that led to his assassination, but also his spiritual development (through a Catholic lens and Thomas Merton) as a leader for peace. I had no idea, for example, that he and Kruschev had such a long correspondence, and that in many ways they were more allied to each other than their respective militaries. It reads a bit like a hagiography, in that much of the book is very positive about what JFK was trying to do. But it's still a great read about what happened with him and the military industrial complex his predecessor warned him about.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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Bitcoin
Anti-Exfiltration - A post on Delving Bitcoin describes an Anti-Exfiltration protocol on the heels of the Dark Skippy exploit. The solution is essentially to have a round of communication to verify that the nonce was generated honestly, similar to MuSig2. While it's good that such a protocol exists, I really can't see too many wallets implementing it due to the extra round of communication involved. That said, the elliptic curve math is pretty cool.
Floresta - This is a UtreeXO based full node that just announced a big release. It only requires about 800MB of hard drive space and 300MB of RAM, which is a far cry from even a pruned node. The tradeoff is that you need a lot more data coming into the node, but if you have the bandwidth, then the software apparently can be run on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W.
Ark Release - Ark is making progress with a new release, this one notable for the fact that it's got a covenant-less version for use on the Bitcoin network now. It's hard to know whether some form of covenants will make it into the protocol anytime soon, so a step like this makes sense. The main benefit, like most L2 protocols is the possibility of an off chain payment.
Lightning
Force Closure via Fee - This is an excellent explanation of what happened to some lightning channels when fees spiked (more on that below). Lightning channels when they disagree on the current fees have as a default behavior a force closure. Obviously, this isn't a good user experience and the post goes through the mitigations that are coming in light of what happened.
Bisq 2.1 - Supports lightning! The peer-to-peer trading software is perfect for lightning and I'm surprised it took them this long to integrate it, but engineering is hard, I get it. What will be really interesting is when we get atomic swaps on Lightning at which point, we will see even better user experiences.
Feel the Breez - The wallet company now has a lightning focused newsletter. The first issue here is about how Lightning is the language of Bitcoin in that L2's all speak it to transfer value. Lightning is a glue for all the other layers, in other words. I look forward to other iterations of this newsletter.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Coinbase Ripoff - Jameson Lopp amusingly goes through what happened with him trying to buy and withdraw $100 worth of BTC from Coinbase. It looks like they're using a terrible fee estimator and charged him significantly more for withdrawing his Bitcoin. This has never been a great engineering company and sadly, their altcoin focus has led to terrible user experiences like this. That said, the core software doesn't have very good fee estimation after temporary big fee events like we saw this past week.
Africa and Mining - The Blink blog highlights some interesting projects around mining in Africa, including a national park in Congo whose hydro-electric plant is being used to mine in lieu of the tourism that's essentially stopped, and something called Trojan Mining in Kenya, where locals are using some of the free electricity they received for mining. It looks like the permissionless nature of Bitcoin mining is leading to these sort of “unofficial” ways to monetize electricity, and if this situation holds, we should get more electricity coming into these places.
Tron Shenanigans - I stopped highlighting altcoin rugpulls in this newsletter a while back because there were just too many to report. I'm making an exception for this one, because it's so much money. Justin Sun apparently has taken 12,000 BTC or about $750M worth as of this writing, from a supposed DAO. The BTC was supposed to be for a Terra Luna copycat on Tron, whose plans have since been scuttled. I can't see any of these people escaping prison over the next few years.
Quick Hits
Why fees went up - Some weird proof-of-stake protocol called Babylon had a limited number of slots which caused a temporary spike in fees.
Durov Arrested - The founder of Telegram has been arrested in France.
Mixer Trouble - The guy that made Bitcoin Fog, a mixer, is facing up to 30 years if convicted.
Democrats not pro-Bitcoin - The DNC just happened and it looks like they Democrats are not interested in pulling in Bitcoiners.
Treasury Rule - There's a proposed rule that expands the definition of money to make banks report more on cryptocurrency transactions.
Fiat delenda est.