Bitcoin Tech Talk #417
Interesting Stuff
Zombie Companies - The article is about the management class that runs the large corporations of today and the stagnation that many of them face, and frankly, the lack of value creation. In other words, the article explains how so many large corporations these days have become zombies. Readers of my latest book know that I have a lot to say about this, but I liked many of the accurate observations in the article that indicate significant financialization. For example, the “portfolio” theory of the firm is quite a strange, and probably uncompetitive one in a sound money economy, but makes sense in a heavily financialized fiat economy.
Nihilism and Ironic Detachment - What an accurate and articulate analysis of the unfortunate dominance of irony in our culture! As the article argues, the pervasiveness of ironic detachment is ultimately a coping mechanism for nihilism. Without saying anything about fiat money, the author identifies the 70’s as the beginning of this cultural attitude, and sadly, this nihilism has resulted in a deeply callous and unfeeling people. The solutions presented at the end are reasonable suggestions, but in a sense, don’t get to the root of the problem. People don’t believe in anything because it pays not to in a political environment. It’s in a meritocracy that belief pays off. Hence, the turn toward merit is the real solution, and that begins with getting rid of the unfairest and least meritorious thing in the economy, fiat money.
The Value of Virtue - After reading this, I was ready to run through a brick wall. In contrast to the last story, it’s a manifesto on virtue and what those seeking virtue are willing to do and more importantly, not care about. The values of fiat tend to be status, money and power, which as the article points out, is not what virtue is about. Virtue on its own may lack the comforts of those other values, but what it lacks in safety, it more than makes up in stability and consistency. One of the subtle detriments of following a life that is not led by virtue is just how shifty it becomes, having been built on a sandy foundation. The takeaway for me was that there’s much more to pursue once fiat goals are cast aside.
Fraudulent Research Scandal - Given all the replication crises of the last few years, I doubt that most people fully trust scientific research anymore, but this one is at another level. The story is about the entire 25-year career of a researcher who since 2016 has been the head of a large department at a big research organization. Apparently, pretty much everything this researcher has published was blatantly fraudulent. Not get a couple of minor details wrong, but entire papers that were essentially made up. Is peer review worth anything if someone like this exists? As usual, the incentives of fiat money sadly predict the survival of rent-seekers like these.
What I'm up to
Product Development Part 1 - I’ve started a new series on my podcast with Will Cole actually developing a product. We’ll be going through the development of a product, following his Invariants series to do it. In the first part of the series, we cover the strategy portion, which he labels “Think, then Do.” The idea that we’re developing is one I’ve had for a while, which is to be a Bitcoin bank for my friends and family. There will be many parts of this series, so if you enjoyed it, please let me know what you’d like to see.
Bitcoin in Korea - WealthPotion has a video talking about the Seoul Bitcoin Conference from a few months ago. There’s a decent amount of what I was talking about in Korea, specifically that there’s a huge savings culture and that Bitcoin in many ways fits like a hand in glove. As he points out, the country has been very much indundated in past years around altcoin scams, so it was in many ways a breath of fresh air.
Plan B Forum - The Lugano, Switzerland conference is coming up in a few weeks and it should be a really good time. As usual, there will be a pretty heavy cypherpunk contingent, and if you’re in Europe, this will be a great event to hang out at.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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Bitcoin
Core 28.0 Release - The newest version of the Core software has been released! Notable changes include testnet4 support, BIP431 mempool handling for v3 transactions, pay-to-anchor (keyless output) as a standard output type and more. The uptake on testnet4 will be interesting to watch as will v3 transactions. Also interesting will be the fact that full-RBF is now enabled by default.
DATUM - Ocean has created an alternative to Stratum v2. Much like the still-in-development protocol, the main idea is to reduce variance through pooled mining, but give control of block construction to the individual miner. The main new thing is that the protocol coordinates with the pool rather than gets work from it, and submits shares to get the right payout in the coinbase itself. It remains to be seen whether miners will pick this rather than the traditional pools, but there are certainly great reasons to use it just on decentralizing mining terms.
BIP85 drama - This BIP for those that don’t remember, is a way to derive multiple seed phrases from the same BIP32 root xprv. The main idea being that you can have multiple wallets that can be recovered from the same backup. There was a change to the spec in the linked pull request which was incompatible with the current implementations, including the one at ColdCard. They reverted the pull request soon after this discovery.
Lightning
Diamond Hands - From Japan comes a new lightning wallet built on the Breez SDK. What’s interesting about this particular wallet is that you can earn sats actively by watching ads. This trade is one that most internet users do every day whether they know it or not through the viewing of ads on content. I’m curious whether this becomes a reason for people to use the wallet, given that opportunities to earn Bitcoin don’t exactly abound.
Voltage Lightning for Exchanges - I’ve been frustrated at the lack of lightning acceptance for both deposits and withdrawals at exchanges, but now Voltage is advertising directly to exchanges to integrate Lightning using their services. The services look like they come down to APIs SDKs and so on to integrate Voltage as an LSP. The primacy of lightning for amounts smaller than, say, $10,000 seem inevitable to me and I expect many exchanges to have integrated lightning by the next cycle.
LightningPiggy - This cool little device is meant to be a piggy bank for children, except instead of using coins, it uses sats and displays the balance digitally. The software uses LNBits under the hood to make LNURL payments possible to the piggy bank. Personally, I haven’t seen many Bitcoin applications that cater to kids and I’m glad that this type of product is starting to gain traction. Maybe it’ll become a default gift for all those Bitcoiners that are having babies?
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Bitcoin in El Salvador and Guatamala - Someone went to the circular economies of Guatamala and El Salvador and blogged about the experience in this series. The author goes to each place, tries to pay with Bitcoin to see what ensues. Generally, what seems to happen is that in less mature communities, Bitcoin isn’t used all that much, but in more mature communities, it’s making headway into even B2B payments. The impression I got is that adoption at the everyday transaction level is a years-long process and requires a lot of education.
Decoy Wallet - Nunchuk has added a decoy wallet feature to their product. This is a clever way to show a much lower balance in your wallet by putting in a different PIN, presumably in some sort of $5 wrench attack. Other wallets have had something like this for many years, where you could use a different 25th word, for example, to show a different wallet. It’s hard to know exactly how useful something like this would be given that the attack doesn’t happen all that often, but it’s good that it exists.
Decoding Bitcoin - This is a project that just started to gamify the learning of the Bitcoin protocol a bit. There’s only one module ready to go, which is the one on script. This is an excellent tool for learning some of these concepts and I hope that more people and even educational institutions start using these resources to motivate these creators.
Quick Hits
Diddy and SBF - They’re apparently sharing the same housing unit at the jail that they’re both at.
Len Sassaman - There’s an HBO documentary that’s going to claim he’s Nakamoto, so it’s worth learning a bit about the guy who died in 2013.
Speculation on Missing Blocks - The Patoshi coins that are speculated to be Nakamoto’s has some more intrigue after some analysis of the downtime in mining.
UAE no longer has taxes on crypto - The gulf country is trying very hard to attract Bitcoiners.
Fiat delenda est.