Bitcoin Tech Talk #412
Interesting Stuff
What Turned Art - The article is about architecture and modern art and why they seem so ugly to the common person. There are many theories put forward and each is examined in turn. Ultimately, the author concludes that there are incentives at play to either cravenly submit to public tastes or to condemn them altogether by the experts and that either one is reinforcing. The experts that condemn public taste is what causes so much ugliness, and the resulting system is one that can only be described as lacking external input, and indeed this is exactly what fiat money does.
Nobody Wants Happiness - The article is a bit irreverent and callous out the self deception of people that say they just want to be happy. As the article points out, if that were the case, people would be behaving very differently. Happiness, in other words, is not the primary driver of human action and that far more base needs like survival and reproduction are the real goals. The main truth of the article, for me, is that most people actually don't want to be happy and can't get themselves to admit that they want other things (like dominating other people) more.
Home Ownership in Singapore - The article is about real estate ownership in the deliberately designed country of Singapore. The country has a shockingly high percentage of home ownership, 90% and it's part of what has made the country so successful. Because the residents own stuff, they're naturally a lot more conservative and are much less tolerant of crime, for example. There's a tendency to label such governments as authoritarian, with the idea that it's similar to Soviet Russia, but as this article shows, the two are qualitatively different. There's a natural defense of private property that results in more surveillance, for example, than the desire to control people that might be criticizing the ruling party. The former is in spirit more decentralized.
How Sports News Has Changed - News has struggled to make money since the advent of the internet, and indeed, the number of people subscribing to magazines, sports cable channels and such have been dwindling ever since. Sports News sites have understandably changed their models, to one where the user is the product that they're selling to gambling websites. It's a bit of a sad commentary, but the same thing has been happening elsewhere. Cable news is selling their viewers to propagandists at this point. This is the debasement endemic to “free.”
What I'm up to
The Mandibles, A Review - I finished this economic dystopian story, but was pretty disappointed. I would love to see more economically built out fiction, which unfortunately I haven’t seen much of. You can click through to get the full review.
Rogue Food Conference - I'll be attending this conference in November 8-9. I'm not speaking or anything, but will be going to learn more about our food. Joel Salatin and John Moody are the main people organizing this conference and John has spoken at the Thank God for Bitcoin conference. If you're interested, use SONG10 for a discount.
Young America's Foundation - I'll be speaking at this event on September 21 and will be talking about Bitcoin to a bunch of conservative high school and college students. This is not my normal audience, so it should be interesting.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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Bitcoin
FROST DKG - This blog post from Blockstream describes what distributed key generation is and why it's necessary for the k-of-n aggregated signature protocol. The big hurdle in distributed key generation is that you need secure communication between the parties generating the keys. As such, the post describes their DKG protocol called ChillDKG, which does a lot of the communication stuff inside the protocol. This is an important step to get FROST implemented as a standard will help in making this more implementable for developers.
Lava Loans - This is an interesting use of DLCs to make loans available for Bitcoin. Instead of trusting the company, you end up trusting the oracle to give the right information on the Bitcoin price, essentially. What you get is a stablecoin loan for your Bitcoin and it’s done in a transparent way on-chain rather than with some adjudicator. In a sense, this is the spirit of smart contracts in that the agreement is laid out beforehand and there’s no real room for fudging things later.
Cool Keys - Casa introduced using Yubikeys for signing and there’s more detail on how that works in this blog post. They’re calling this “cool keys” in the sense that it’s not exactly hot or cold, but something in between, given that the key stays on the device. The main tradeoff is that the signing is done on another device, but can’t be done without the yubikey being plugged in. I’m not convinced that this is necessarily the right tradeoff, but in a multisig environment, perhaps this can come in handy.
Lightning
Lightning Bounties - Open source developers famously volunteer their time and don’t get paid. This is a project to pay them in Lightning. Similar efforts have been done before, with bounties based on the difficulty of the project, but perhaps they were a bit early and the UX wasn’t great. The devs don’t do open source for the money, but it is a nice way to show some appreciation.
MPP Simulator - Multi-path payments are hard and this is a good gauge of which payments are likely to succeed on the network given the paths that exist. Obviously, this isn’t going to be 100% accurate, but it’s a good reference to see where the bottlenecks are and how much is reasonable to expect to go through in a payment. What was surprising to me was how long some of the paths are, particularly for small payments.
Innovations - Blink has a good overview of the different lightning innovations that have been happening on Lightning. The protocol section is the most interesting, with stuff like the aforementioned multi-path payments and wumbo channels. Many of these things take a long time as the Lightning Network is decentralized and not every node will update to the bleeding edge. Send altcoiners this when they tell you that Bitcoin isn’t innovating.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
The Rise of Pig Butchering - The link is a report by Chainalysis showing how scamming has taken a bit more of a personal turn. As altcoins continue to disappoint both in fulfilling promises and exciting pumps, it seems that scammers are going more direct, using direct connections with targets to rug pull them. This is what they call “pig butchering" and it's a darker turn. As Bitcoin grows in price, I suspect that physical attacks are probably next.
Academic Bitcoin - A fiat economist professor writes a long article justifying teaching Bitcoin. I would think the fact that it’s a major asset globally and that students are very interested in learning about it would be good enough reasons, but no, this professor has to go through a painful rationalization in fiat academic terms about exactly why Bitcoin is interesting. What’s infuriating is that he brings the typical academic attitude of thinking he knows better than what’s worked including changing the supply schedule. Let’s just say I don’t think that his students are going to come out enthused and that there’s probably a ProfessorCoin in the future.
Economist Hit Piece - Anyone that knows anything about Bitcoin mining will spot a whole slew of misleading statements in this article, including that Riot earned $32M from “not mining” Bitcoin. The fact that they bought energy and sold it back to the grid is not explained at all. But such is trafficking in clickbait, which unfortunately is the state of journalism these days.
Quick Hits
IMF about BTC in El Salvador - They say thatt Bitcoin's risks “haven't been realized.” They're likely to be more stubborn than Peter Schiff in admitting they were wrong about Bitcoin.
Don't be a man in crypto - Apparently women find this very unattractive. The fact that the survey doesn't make a distinction between Bitcoin and crypto is a tell of itself.
SMLR buys BTC - Apparently this company has over 1000 BTC now. BTC not just for MSTR anymore!
Margo Paez vs BHB - Apparently, there was some flare up over Margo’s talk “Jeff Booth is a Communist” at Baltic Honeybadger.
Fiat delenda est.