Bitcoin Tech Talk #419

Oct 21, 2024

What I'm up to

What is Money - I was on Robert Breedlove’s podcast to talk about the problem of political authority, specifically the moral justification of government actions. We talked about social contract theory, mimetic desire’s intersection with fiat money, status games in a fiat economy and the alignment of rhetoric and dialectic. As is usual on his podcast we talked a good deal of philosophy, morals and God and it was a really interesting conversation.

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Silent Payment Considerations - This post goes into detail about how silent payments changes the nature of hardware wallets. As silent payments require the sender’s private key to know where to send the payment, the transaction outputs cannot be created outside the hardware wallet. Thus, either the entire transaction creation process has to be done on the hardware wallet or the coordinator must create and then verify that the output is correct.

Bitcoin-Backed Credit Cards - It's very difficult to get merchants, especially merchants that don't really “get" Bitcoin to integrate them into PoS systems let alone customers to start using Bitcoin as their main payment method. But this idea has a chance. If you have some Bitcoin collateral a bank can lend you dollars based on that collateral that settles once a month. This is a form of a speculative attack on the dollar through spending, which reduces the natural smell pressure of using actual Bitcoin for payment.

Fiat delenda est.