Bitcoin Tech Talk #413
Interesting Stuff
The Need for Challenge - This is a fairly long article that tries to figure out human motivation and what makes tasks worthwhile or interesting. The easy answer is that it helps with our social standing in some way (aka status game) but as the author explores, this isn't enough of an explanation. There's a more fundamental need for challenges and growth. The article reminded me of the Mouse Utopia experiment and it explains why the colony died out. In a sense, fiat money is used to fulfill the wrong thing.
Symbols and Desire - This was for me a deeply satisfying read about how we perceived the world, the role of symbols and why so many people seem trapped in a simulation of their own design. The read is long and starts with a couple of articles about how people are not hanging out and are unsatisfied and proceeds to analyze the problem from a different angle. I won't spoil the article for you because it's worth reading in full, but the most interesting part that I picked up on was the brain's use of symbols as a means to shortcut decisions, and how that's led to many unsatisfying outcomes, particularly with respect to desire. It reminded me of fiat money in that it began life as a symbol of something real, before spiraling out of control into the monster it has become.
Science Fiction Confession of Faith - The article is about the role of God in science fiction, which at first glance seems like a contradiction. After all, SF is all about technological progress and the interesting situations characters get into as a result. Yet looking a layer deeper, the article looks at how SF rejects the Christian God and substitutes its own meaning and in varying ways fails to satisfy. The result is an implied ethic or moral system that's more than a little discombobulated and self-contradictory, though still making for fun stories.
Cultural Revival - The article is about how there's been more Christian influence in culture lately, and it's a trend that I've observed as well, especially among Gen-Z and Millenial men. What's particularly noteworthy is how so many former atheists have at least turned culturally to Christianity. It's no longer an intellectual sideshow, it's coming on the main stage. As a Christian, that's encouraging to see.
What I'm up to
CreateTailWind - I was on this podcast to talk about two of my books, Thank God for Bitcoin and Fiat Ruins Everything. We discussed the role of fiat money at all levels, including individual, corporate, national and global, and how the money is used to control everything from our attitudes to nation-state compliance. The audience here trends a bit older so I had to keep things a bit more basic, but it was still a good interview packed with a lot of good questions.
Why are we Bullish - I was also on this show with Ben Perrin (BTCSessions) and Peter Todd to talk about covenants, privacy technologies, L2, soft forks, Fed policy, cash and a whole bunch of other things. The conversation definitely went to a lot of different places and I was surprised at how much we covered in an hour and a half.
Virtue and Vice - I will be releasing an episode of Bitcoin Fixes This this week with Aleks Svetski talking about his new book coming out and a lot about morality, virtue and vice. I got a chance to read his book and let's just say that there were disagreements and interesting threads that we went off on with respect to morals and God.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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Bitcoin
L2 Review - Peter Todd goes through the various L2 proposals and how they're related to the covenants proposals, including what depends on what. This is a long article touching on almost everything that's been talked about the last couple of years, including Ark, BitVM, Eltoo and much more. What was most interesting to me is the calculation that Bitcoin can support 470M channel splices per year, which may very much be enough for the world, given the expected decreasing population.
Silent Payments - Bitbox has an excellent explanation of Silent Payments, including the elliptic curve math required to make it all work. The initial proposal had some problems with hardware wallets, which are contrained by memory and couldn't do the calculations necessary. Thankfully, the BIP process allowed them to come up with a solution which wasn't as memory intensive which BitBox has now implemented.
Case for OP_CAT - Bedlam Research has a long overview of the OP_CAT proposal, what it enables and why so many people are excited by it. You wouldn't think a simple concatenation operation would be enough to enable covenants, but it is and it's one of the most unintuitive and surprising results of the SCRIPT system. The post goes into CatVM among other things. The part on the Merkle Tree verification is worth reading as well.
Lightning
Strike adds BOLT12 - Slowly and surely, the offers protocol is being adopted by the major players in Lightning as it seems to replace some of the stop-gap solutions like LNURL. Hopefully, when it's all in place, we can see more interesting uses of Offers be developed.
Phoenixd Tutorial - This is a tutorial for those that want to set up their own Lightning stack on a Debian machine. Note that it requires a domain and the ability to point the domain to the machine, which is a major barrier to most people (hence the importance of the previous story). Still, Phoenix is an excellent wallet and does support BOLT12, which will hopefully get more traction.
Zaprite PoS - One of the reasons why merchant adoption of Bitcoin has been so agonizingly slow has been the separate apps to take Bitcoin payments. Zaprite now has a solution that integrates not just on-chain and lightning payments, but also credit cards, which making the UX for the merchant much easier. Now all we need are Bitcoin businesses that use these PoS systems.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Duress Wallets - Casa has a blog post on Duress wallets and wonders if they would actually work. As they point out, the physical security arrangement is such that it depends on your ability to convince the attacker that what they got is indeed your stash, and hence not a guarantor of your funds. It is, however another layer of security that may merit some consideration in some scenarios.
Spaces Protocol - This is a decentralized identity protocol that uses UTXOs as identifiers. This is a natural way to make it so that identities can be revoked and new ones issued. The ability to have human readable names associated with the identity is a plus, though who knows if this gets traction in the market.
Stratum v2 Fee sharing - This Delving post goes into how a Stratum v2 extension can allow miners to verify the payouts of the pools. Mining is unfortunately a bit of a cesspool in terms of pools getting the high fees that pop up once in a while, and this system is eminently more fair and verifiable than the off-chain fees that these pools often collect. Perhaps we will get to a place where mining becomes much less dependent on these pools with a protocol like this.
Quick Hits
North Korean Hack Warning - The FBI says that the North Koreans are using social engineering attacks against various crypto entities.
Mercury Layer Disclosure - Multiple vulnerabilities in the state chains protocol are exposed here.
OP_CAT wtf - Amusing website to learn about the covenants proposal.
El Salvador BTC - Website tracks the BTC that El Salvador has. Amusingly, it's named Nayib Tracker.
Fiat delenda est.