Bitcoin Tech Talk #433
Interesting Stuff
Against Over-Optimization - We all want to squeeze a little more juice out of our life, and unfortunately, this has led to the phenomenon of optimizing. Much of that is good, of course, but there’s a point at which where we get to over-optimizing, where there’s no slack left in the system. As the article points out, optimizing is often just really boring and the quest for better numbers as soulless as homo economicus. The relentless pressure of inflation makes it so that debt-ridden entities cannot survive without optimizing as much as possible, but it unfortunately also causes a deep fragility throughout the system, which, when broken, lead to the bailouts that ultimately worsen the inflation which started it.
Why We Don’t Have Revolution - Young men have been doing pretty badly lately, and in any society where this happens, you get many of them causing a lot of trouble, often leading to revolution. This is particularly the case when they have no prospects for work, marriage and children, which for a lot of young men is certainly the case. So why don’t we have revolution yet? As this post points out, it’s video games and porn that’s acted like a digital version of fentanyl to essentially render them harmless. Bread and circuses are funded by fiat money, and it’s an effective way to keep declining instead of reforming.
Effeminacy - Speaking of which, this is an article about how Thomas Aquinas defined effeminacy, specifically, a lack of willingness to suffer because of an attachment to comfort. The aforementioned porn and video games are two ways in which many men get attached to comfort, but the main three in the article are surprising. They are all status-related and speak to an unwillingness to challenge, which is, of course, a traditionally masculine trait. What’s particularly difficult in these fiat-driven times is that reputation and status figure so deeply into how people make money, and in that sense, there’s a natural drift toward effeminacy.
FenBen and Ivermectin for Cancer - This is one of those stories that makes my blood boil. What seems to be at worst a promising research avenue to at best an effective cure for cancer has more or less been shut out of the medical community because there’s no money to be made with it. As you might be aware from COVID, Ivermectin is an out-of-patent anti-parasitic drug that’s been shown to be effective against a lot of different ailments. FenBen is similar. What’s crazy is that they’ve been used by many cancer patients over the years and have been effective. Yet because there’s almost no money to be made for pharmaceutical companies, little is known about it among most oncologists. While I do blame Big Pharma to a degree, the real villian is the monetary incentives of the screwed up health care system.
The Case for Inheritances - The topic of how much to leave to my children is something I’ve been pondering for some time. I’ve been convinced that leaving large amounts of highly liquid assets is probably not a good idea as the possibility of it being squandered looms large. But as the article points out, giving to charity is not a great idea either, and in a sense, doing so is a cop-out for your failure to raise your kids properly. The argument in the article is to leave them something like land that they can be attached to and generate income from. For hundreds of years, this was how the rich passed down their wealth. I suspect fiat money has devalued real estate in weird ways (inheritance tax, real estate tax, inflation) where this is no longer the preferred path, but it may become so again under a Bitcoin standard.
What I'm up to
Building a Product - After a bit of a break, I’m back with the next in the series of building a product. Will takes us through what we did in making the family bank app and why we made the decisions we did. Largely, we cut down the scope of the product to make it easy to launch and took out features that we didn’t think would be that useful. The fact that we did this without having written any permanent code was the important thing.
Plan B Forum San Salvador - I’ll be speaking at this conference later this week. I’ll also be at Bitcoin Office event on the 29th with Max and Stacy. Come hang out if you’re in town and learn about how El Salvador is Bitcoin-only.
Programming Blockchain - I will be running the 2-day seminar for the final time on March 31 - April 1 2025, or in about 2 months. I will not be teaching in this format going forward, so this will be your last chance. The cost is $4000, but you can get a $1000 discount if you apply a month ahead of time. Seats are limited, and you will need to pass a coding test to get in.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Ark Wallet SDK - Ark was proposed about a year ago and already, we have not just a wallet but a whole software development kit around it. The speed of development has been impressive, especially since it was thought that a new op code would have to be soft forked in before it could launch. Yet it did and you can play with it right now. We don’t know yet how popular this layer-2 will be, but given how fast it’s come, I wouldn’t doubt significant progress in the next 12 months.
Foundry Danger - Bitcoin Mechanic is sounding the alarm about how the Foundry USA pool now has 40% of the mining hash rate. What’s particularly dangerous is that the pool members are not being economically rational, given that they could be making more money using a pool like Ocean, which has a payout system that fairly pays out the fees. His contention is that the pool members do so to stay compliant in some way. While I suspect that this is a big reason, the other big reason may be that they’re in a lot of debt and need consistent payments rather than big scores.
NUMS BIP - Sometimes, it can be useful to have a provably unspendable point for the purposes of Taproot. For example, the key-spend path may sometimes not be used, in which case it’s useful to have it be unspendable. The BIP gives a way to generate the NUMS (nothing up my sleeve) point that’s provably unspendable by virtue of the fact that the private key is unknown to anyone, but is also not obviously unspendable to anyone just observing the spending transaction.
Lightning
Client-Side Validation on Lightning - Peter Todd argues that the power of client-side validation hasn’t been fully harnessed yet on Lightning. Specifically, he mentions *virtual* channels, which are routes that may or may not exist on the Lightning network. The incentives of the network are such that the end nodes don’t particularly care about the route the payment took as long as they get theirs. Indeed, this opens up a lot of possibilities, where mid-route lightning nodes may use other forms of settlement than on-chain. Some already do this by using Liquid to settle, for example, but imagine what we could have if some routing nodes used an e-cash mint or Ark or even an exchange.
New Lightning Wallet Considerations - Lightning wallets have more or less expected complete lightning-only experiences for their users for everything in the past. But as the last few years have shown, lightning wallets need a lot more than that, including on-chain transactions, to make them usable for normal users. The post goes through all the considerations that new wallets need to address, especially about liquidity and perhaps the hardest part, Dollar-Cost-Averaging. I think the author is a bit more pessimistic, but many of the features should definitely be considered.
Streaming Payments - Continuous streaming payments were one of the earliest use-cases of lightning, but it really hasn’t been seen other than Breez which had a podcast payment every minute or so. This is an Alby blog post which showed how one music performance in Austin used their API to continuously pay for the show. There are some interesting use cases here, especially for per-time services, and I’ve been surprised that this hasn’t been a bigger focus with lightning entrepreneurs.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Scambling - Cory Klippsten writes on an old practice, but new concept. As he points out, the entire “crypto” space exists in a murky legal area and essentially takes advantage of the middle and lower class desire to gamble. And that desire to gamble comes from the fact that it’s become nearly impossible for them to save in a fiat system. Bitcoin is so clearly separate from the corrupt “crypto” ecosystem and this may be the silver lining to the current hype around the TRUMP memecoin.
Executive Order - Trump has issued an executive order essentially stopping CBDCs and attempting to retain the “crypto” stockpile. Obviously, the altcoiners are very eager to get into the strategic reserve but it’ll be very difficult for the administration to draw the line anywhere past Bitcoin. There’s a lot here, including essentially the acknowledgement that we have a right to self-custody. We’ll see if this gets the momentum started for a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, but the attention it’s getting has to be something politicians are now looking at.
Altcoins are Currencies - Parker Lewis has a great analysis of the age-old question, what the heck are altcoins? Are the securities? Are they play things? Parker argues that they are what they seem to be, that is, they’re all centralized digital currencies and they need to be treated as such. For policymakers, it is for this reason that they shouldn’t be considered for government acquisition, since they’re not in any way politically neutral. I really hope this framing helps shape the narrative around Crypto.
Quick Hits
11,000 BTC - A bit more than the last few weeks, and ramping up with the price and general interest. Scary to think what they might acquire in the fever pitch of the bull market.
Signal 0-Click Deanonymization Attack - Apparently, you can use a CDN to figure out roughly where a user is.
Ledger Co-Founder Kidnapped - The story is gruesome and not for the faint of heart. Exercise good security practices everyone!
Ross is Free - The creator of the darknet trading site got a full and unconditional pardon from the new president.
SAB 121 Rescinded - The controversial SEC rule has been rescinded under the new administration, which opens the way for banks to custody Bitcoin for their customers.
Working Group on Digital Asset Markets - One of the many executive orders now has a working group to figure out which “crypto” assets to hold.
Fiat delenda est.