Bitcoin Tech Talk #415
Interesting Stuff
Broken Libertarianism - I have my disagreements with Jeffrey Tucker, especially about Bitcoin, but he absolutely nails the analysis of COVID and how Libertarianism failed at the very moment where it was most needed. The conformity to the regime narrative and the capitulation of civil liberties was especially disconcerting and as he says, the movement totally and utterly failed the test. If there’s one criticism I have of the article, it’s that it comes off a bit too doomerish, which is understandable given that he believes that Bitcoin was compromised. I obviously disagree with him on that assessment and am significantly more optimistic and hopeful. Still, it’s an excellent and timely critique of the hypocrisy of a lot of libertarians.
Incomplete Religions - This article was an eye opener for me and explained what I always felt was a deep dissatisfaction with the secular handling of spiritual brokenness. Instead of the redemption that Christianity offers, the focus is on eliminating that brokenness through canceling or excommunication. And in that way, the reigning morality of the secular world ends with the anxiety ridden existence that we see today. What was clear to me was that the entire system of secular sins and atonements are held up by fiat money and the control that it gives to culture.
Cholesterol Mafia - Though it may not seem like a likely place, the lies about diet and nutrition really start here. The emphasis on cholesterol as a health marker and how it’s become a cash cow for the health care industry is why the food pyramid has grains as something “heart healthy” for example. The story is disturbing for how easily the giant corporations and government managed to deceive so many people. Most normies still think that cholesterol levels mean something, but looking closer at the literature, and using personal experience is sadly something they refuse to do. I blame the outsourcing of judgments via fiat money as the reason why our food choices have become so terrible.
End of Feminism - The article spells out what the game theory of feminism is likely to be. That is, it shows that the most feminist people in the population don’t have kids while the least feminist people do, meaning that feminism will naturally decline over time simply because it’s not genetically sustainable. The article points out that a significant part of what made feminism appealing was the boredom of the suburban housewives, which is no longer a problem due to the endless entertainment choices we now have. Cynically speaking, feminism was a way to get double the labor force for the same price.
What I'm up to
Raising Bitcoiners - I talked to Lisa and Ella Hough about parenting. Lisa has raised Ella and we talked about what she did to help Ella have such strong independence and tremendous agency. Lisa had a lot of great insight in not doing things the fiat way and Ella had some great stories on what helped her as she was growing up. If you’re raising kids or want to in the future, this is a good podcast to give you good ideas on parenting.
Ben Wehrman - We talked about fiat money, specifically about inflation, the connection to the National Debt, and hyperinflationary vicious cycles. I did a lot of ranting about various problems of previous moneys and how Bitcoin is much better. We also talked capital formation, benefits of saving and how this builds civilization. I also lamented the fact that most programmers work on getting a few more clicks and talked about the unnatural scale of things in fiat economies.
Understanding Money - I talked at the Young America’s Foundation gathering about money and how Bitcoin is sound money. I probably prepared way too much for the 30 minute talk and wish I had more time, but I had some pretty positive feedback on the talk and the college students in attendance asked some very good questions. This isn’t my normal audience, but they definitely seemed very open to Bitcoin.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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Bitcoin
Block Template Similarity - 0xB10C has a post analyzing which mining pools are using similar templates for mining. The analysis is meant to give some clue as to which mining pools are either run by the same entity or at least using the same software to construct blocks. As he notes, Poolin, BTC.com and AntPool seem to be sharing similar templates, as does Ultimus and Braiins. Ocean seems to be dissimilar from pretty much everyone else, as you might expect.
Ark TX - Ark seems to be coming along pretty rapidly, with a transaction that was demoed on mainnet this past week. They recorded with some well known personalities in the space, including Stephan Livera, Marty Bent, BitVM creator Robin Linus and Supertestnet, among others. They demoed paying within the network and outside of the network as well as a unilateral exit. The demo is pretty impressive for it being so early and I hope they continue developing this into a consumer L2.
ZKP of UTXO - This is an interesting project to prove that a user owns a UTXO without revealing which one. It needs to be a p2tr output which reveals a public key and through blinding and a UtreeXO root, you can prove that one of these UTXOs belongs to you but not which one. It’s an impressive feat, though you can’t know how much is in the UTXO, which would make it far more useful. I do wonder if the UTXOs in the UtreeXO root were ordered by amount, something a little more granular can be proved.
Lightning
Nodana - This is a service meant to be a one-click install of Lightning and Bitcoin with zero command line needed. This seems different than the typical node-in-a-box providers like Umbrel or Start9 in that it’s a service and doesn’t require your own hardware. But that also means that you’re having to trust their security and uptime, but that’s the tradeoff that you are getting.
SuperScalar - Zman has posted one of the longest posts on Delving that I’ve read and it’s on a new technique to make lightning channel factories. He’s appropriately named this SuperScalar for the tremendous scaling potential and as you might expect, it’s pretty complicated. The main change is that channels themselves have to be of a different construction (Decker-Wattenhofer) than what’s on the network now (Poon-Dryja). The advantage is that a single LSP can provide liquidity to many channels, though there are some concerns that Zman outlines.
LightStack - This is a self-custodial cloud stack that you can deploy to run your Lightning and Bitcoin nodes. You’ll need a domain and a VPS somewhere and you’ll have a lightning node up and running ready to go with Phoenixd. Given that this sort of scenario was what Phoenixd was designed for, this looks like an excellent project. I do wonder if the cost of running this could be reduced by using fewer resources especially for a Bitcoin node.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Proof of Reserves - River has published a proof-of-reserves for their exchange. This is a great step in making their exchange more trustworthy. Though it’s always difficult to know what all the liabilities are and it’s not exactly a proof, but it’s still very much transparent. The video embedded in the blog shows exactly how you can verify your amount being included. I wish more people that buy Bitcoin would care about this stuff, and automated tools to verify this should be in some independent apps.
ChainCheck - VanEck has published their analysis of Bitcoin from an investment perspective for 2024. The report is largely positive, focusing on the various regulatory and market participation metrics. I suspect that institutional investors is who this report is meant for and perhaps for them this is the kind of analysis that gets them to buy. For me, while I find some of the report informative (particularly around mining), the report doesn’t really do Bitcoin justice as a sound money and a savings vehicle.
SolarBit - This is a cool little project to use solar power to mine and distribute mining a little bit. As the costs are almost entirely in capital equipment with little recurring costs, the idea is to get Bitcoiners to buy these and deploy them all over the globe to make mining more distributed. I’m skeptical as to whether this will make that big a difference to mining as the big players will always be orders of magnitude more powerful, but as a hobbyist thing, it’s a cool project.
Quick Hits
$1B Convertible Note - MSTR keeps stacking, this time by using a 0.625% yield convertible note.
Trump at PubKey - The Donald paid for a bunch of burgers and drinks at this Bitcoin bar in New York.
15 year-old UTXO moved - This is a 50 BTC coinbase output from January 29, 2009, just 26 days after the network started which moved this past week.
Coordinate - This is a side chain project on Bitcoin which just started.
Fiat delenda est.