Bitcoin Tech Talk #422
Interesting Stuff
Lions and Foxes - The article is about the current political situation in the UK, but the much more interesting is the Machiavellian framing around the issues at play, that of lions and foxes. The idea is that there are two types of statesmen, lions being the warriors and the foxes being the sly political players. Lions generally found nations and thrive under instability, but hate the boring and stable societies. Foxes thrive under stability but don’t do well under unstable societies. Ironically lions create stability and foxes instability. It’s a useful way to think about the cyclical nature of politics and revolutions, and yes, fiat money is definitely a fox creation.
Conversations - I love having great conversations with people, ones where some inspiration or insight emerges. This article is about different ways to ruin great conversations, and it’s a good reminder that conversations can go sideways many different ways. The one I thought was most surprising was the one about therapeutic self disclosure being a substitute for an actual good discussion. Conversing is a bit of a lost art, given how much we interact online these days, and I hope as we move to a Bitcoin standard that the art of conversation elevates.
Kuwait Biometric Law - Kuwait has some very invasive ID laws in commerce now and this article is about the various deadlines they’ve set to force. their citizens toward it. Given just how dystopian the scheme is, I was surprised to find that this was the first time I had heard about it. You can understand the logic as the government is moving toward this to increase tax revenue. We’ll see if this type of scheme will increase Bitcoin adoption.
Liquid Careers - Giving future employers a degree of certainty about you is obviously a very important part of getting a job. This article tries to define that concept a bit more precisely by combining it with the financial concept of liquidity. Certain jobs give employers a lot more predictability about your skillset. Indeed, you could argue colleges essentially do the same thing. Essentially, the fiat system encourages a certain amount of liquidity in your skills so that the parts of the corporate machine can be easily found. It makes me wonder how different a more entrepreneurial system would be.
What I'm up to
Ossification Debate - My debate with Jameson Lopp at the Lugano Plan B Forum is finally up! The main issue, in my view is that this is really a balancing money vs tech properties of Bitcoin. I’ve found that technologists make economic errors, economists make technologist errors and fiat people making both. To paraphrase Breedlove’s podcast, the question of “What is Money?” indeed the question that we need to answer first before considering new soft forks. You can read more of Jameson’s Perspective here.
Supporting Palestinian Christians - The link is to a new catalog of olive wood nativity sets and other carved items from Bethlehem. You would be buying directly from my contact in the West Bank (he was my tour guide and AirBnB host when I visited in 2022). Please email me if you’re interested in ordering and I’ll give you the contact info.
Graveyard of Demons - I don’t read that much fiction, but this is one of my favorite series. The latest is linked and it came out on election day. Lots of sword fighting, a few guns, lots of magic and politics. If you’re looking for something fun to read, this is a good series to get into.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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Bitcoin
Javascript libsecp256k1 Vulnerability - There’s a JS library implementing the secp256k1 curve which inadvertantly leaks the private key because it doesn’t check that the x-coordinate is on the curve when establishing an ECDH session. Apparently, the attack can work with as few as 11 ECDH key exchange sessions. Another reminder that you should be very careful with cryptography libraries.
Hindered Block Propagation - There was a Bitcoin Core vulnerability prior to 25.1 which delays block propagation. Basically, a node connecting and requesting a block will wait 10 minutes to receive a reply. Repeated over many nodes, this can clog the block propagation on the network. This isn’t a big vulnerability, but it’s good to remember that asynchronous network communication is tricky and designing to handle error cases is an important part of security.
DLC DevKit - Discrete Log Contracts have been a thing for a while, but coding something with it is pretty tricky as there’s a lot of ways in which you can screw up. Enter DLC DevKit to help make that process of developing a DLC project much easier. It uses rust-dlc under the hood and cleverly abstracts out the various parts of a DLC with the Oracle, Storage and Transport traits. Worth looking into if you’re wanting to make some DLC app.
Lightning
Lightning Privacy Pros and Cons - This article goes through all the various reasons why Lightning is good for privacy and why it is not. The main pros are that the payments are ephemeral and not stored on chain and the onion routing makes it hard to know for routing nodes where the origin and destination are. On the other hand, the amount is still known by everyone that routes, there is an onchain footprint of the channel opens and closes, and channel announcements among others. It’s a good thing to review, especially if you’re looking to solve one of these as a product.
SatsQueue - This is an interesting project to put prices for cutting in line… sort of. The way it’s done is that there’s a probability that you will be next selected and you can increase that by paying more sats. So even a small sat payment results in some probability. If this sounds familiar, it should, it’s not unlike the proof-of-work mechanism. Usually people spend time instead of money for lines, so this is a different paradigm that shortens the time for some money. It’ll be interesting to see if anyone starts using this.
Cafe21 - Another project that converts a Phillips coffee machine into a lightning powered coffee vendor. Beware, though, you need several hardware pieces besides the coffee machine itself and a good deal of software that needs installing to make it work, but this is such an interesting use of Lightning. You can, in a sense, turn almost any internet-connected device into a vending machine through lightning. Maybe this is the real internet of things.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
12 Years for Bitcoin Fog Creator - Roman Sterlingov was sentenced to 12.5 years for money laundering. He has to give up, among other things, the $106M in Bitcoin that he had gotten as part of running the coin mixing service. While I think this is horribly unjust, there is something to be said for making decentralized protocols precisely because of this kind of targeting that governments engage in.
Casa Treasury - With more public companies and even governments interested in holding Bitcoin, Casa is offering a product to help them. As the article points out, the way most companies (like Bitcoin ETF providers) hold Bitcoin is through a custodian, but Casa’s offering is to empower enterprises to self-custody. I suspect that this sort of product will need to expand over time as it becomes a bigger part of the accounting process of corporations as we get more on a Bitcoin standard.
DATUM and Decentralization - This article goes through why the current mining scene is mostly miners being hashers, and not real partners in mining blocks and how DATUM is a different way to share in the rewards. As the article points out, the desire for variance reduction has resulted in paying strictly for hash rate instead of sharing in block rewards which it turn created the centralized mining pool situation we have today. DATUM brings back decentralization through real sharing of rewards. As the protocol gives more value to the miner and not the pool, I can’t imagine how the current pools will last over the long term.
Quick Hits
TBD Shut Down - The Block subsidiary focused on Web5 was shuttered, probably due to Jack Dorsey’s growing interest in Nostr.
BitUps - In Brazil, you can organize meetups with Bitcoiners for the newbies to come in the upcoming bull market.
Government doesn’t like C++ - Bitcoin Core is now officially “discouraged”
Lowery Recommendations - Jason P Lowery (Space Force) has some recommendations for the president-elect.
Fiat delenda est.