Bitcoin Tech Talk #434
Interesting Stuff
Mediocre People - The article starts with Vivek Ramiswamy’s rant on why America is unsuccessful, particularly taking umbrage at his view that what we need are more tiger moms. As the essay poignantly asserts, credentials are not results but the focus on the former has led to a belief that more credentials are what we need for prosperity. Such is obviously a fiat mindset, though it takes a little uncovering of the belief system to see it that way. For people that have been successful in the fiat world, the utter lack of seeing the bigger picture, being essentially a technocrat, is a feature not a bug.
Land Management - Joel Salatin is a regenerative farmer and is quite well known in that space, having written lots of books on it. So when he says that both federal and private management of land is often hideous, he’s not lying. As such, the debate between letting government take care of land vs let private entrepreneurs misses the point. They both do badly because they have terrible economic incentives. For the private farmer, they have a lot of debt, so they’re incentivized to exploit the land as much as possible for short-term profit. For the federal government, the people in charge generally aren’t held accountable. It’s a great example of how fiat money makes pretty much every choice bad for civilization.
Meaningless Love - The essay is about what it means to love our neighbor, and is written from a Christian perspective. What was surprising to me in this mini-study is that there is a spatial component to love that is a requirement for the word itself. The kind of love that gets talked about in pop culture is meaningless precisely because it has such a vague target. Real love means doing a specific good for the people we encounter, rather than this feelings-based definition. Unfortunately, the vague kind of love is the justification for all kinds of stupid fiat programs, and enjoys a positive reputation despite its ineffective results.
Propaganda as Economy - I’ve been studying propaganda since I read Jacque Ellul’s book by the same name. It’s a strange practice and what’s particularly weird is how good governments are at it. This is rather strange, given how bad it is at almost everything, but this essay helped me understand what’s going on. The most insightful idea here is that the apparatus of propaganda is itself an economy. That is, there are incentives and propaganda is essentially aligning those incentives to get the public opinion you want. Under sound money, such manipulation has a significant cost, but under fiat money, that same cost can be laid to the very people whose opinion you are manipulating. There’s much more than this, including why Travis Kelce is now so popular and so on, but that was the big “a-ha” moment for me.
Why Everything Sucks - This was obviously written by someone having a bad day, but it makes a good point. Lots of things suck because the people that created them didn’t care. What’s missed is that their not caring is due to not having the right incentives (the author dismisses incentives with a handwave). I would call most of these people that don’t care rent-seekers, and they’re the reason that goods and services no longer satisfy the customer, but the bureaucrat who is made just a tiny bit more comfortable by their having to do a little less work.
What I'm up to
Roxom - I’m guessing this was not what the interviewer was expecting, but I was on a brand new crypto show to talk about Bitcoin. I told him what I usually tell “crypto” shows that Bitcoin is the only thing that matters that altcoins are going to zero and that they should focus on Bitcoin if they hope to survive. Indeed, much of what I told him is what I think has given me staying power in this fast changing industry and Bitcoin is the only solid ground in a dark and dangerous swamp.
Programming Blockchain - The final edition of my 2-day seminar will take place March 31 and April 1 in Austin, TX. I will *not* be teaching this anymore after this and will leave the work of teaching to other very capable people. But if you want to get in on this class, which I’ve taught to over 700 people, this is your final opportunity. There are alumni in most Bitcoin companies and many have gone on to become core developers. Apply today!
Fiat Ruins Everything Audiobook - The audiobook has been entirely reproduced with a much better voice! I used AI to produce this book and personally, I like it a lot better than the one that went out when the book was with Bitcoin Magazine. The bad news is that AI produced audiobooks are not allowed on audible.com, but is allowed on Google Play. I’ve dropped the price to $12.99 to incentivize those of you that like the audiobook format.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Shell Game on-chain - This paper describes how Alice and Bob can play a fair shell game where neither player can cheat. The shell game, of course, is where the dealer hides a ball under one of N shells and the guesser guesses one of the shells and wins only if the ball is under the shell. But instead of mixing and sleight of hand, we can use cryptography to make this work. In essence, the paper creates something like OP_RAND to reward to one or the other. It’s clever and doesn’t require a trusted entity, though it’s in practice probably would not be as popular as centralized services like Satoshi Dice used to be.
Kibo - If you like data like glassnode, but want to generate similar data using your own node’s data, here is your project. Most of these services charge money for their data so it’s great that there’s on open source alternative. The visualizations are really nice and the API should allow you to make your own graphs. I’m excited to see what data enthusiasts can do with this framework and hope that it becomes a part of the node-box vendors’ (like Umbrel, Start9 and mynodebtc) software suites.
Human Readable Address Proposals - One of the more annoying parts of Bitcoin is the existence of addresses, and in lightning invoices. There have been many proposals to make addresses a lot easier to say over the phone, for example, and this blog post is a UX discussion of what the different proposals are and how they may make Bitcoin a lot more usable. Using something that looks like an email address is probably the way to go, though there’s a lot of privacy loss. There’s also the fact that the server hosting these addresses becomes a huge attack target, which is why this is such a difficult problem to solve robustly.
Lightning
Tether on Lightning - The very profitable stablecoin company has yet another transfer method in Lightning via Taproot assets. This is in addition to the Omni network, Ethereum, Liquid and of course, Tron. What’s interesting about this particular implementation is that it’s instant as it uses Lightning and in addition allows merchants to issue a Lightning Bitcoin invoice and receive USD Tether. This is the inverse of the service Strike offers where users pay in USD and merchants receive in BTC. There are many possibilities here, particularly with respect to atomic swaps on Lightning, which should make both Bitcoin and Tether a bit more liquid.
ZK Gossip Lightning - One of the problems of Lightning is that if you know the channel capacity, you can figure out what UTXO may correspond to it, making for some privacy loss. This is a different way to advertise channels that uses zero-knowledge proofs to advertise. The main trick is that there’s an inclusion proof in the UTXO set to show that the channel is in the UTXO set, just no information about exactly which one it is. It’s a clever way to show that two parties have a channel, and with some interesting merkle trees, you can prove it even has a certain capacity.
Rizful - There are a lot of lightning node as a service providers, but this one advertises as the fastest one to set up. I’m not sure if speed of onboarding is a big consideration for lightning node runners, but it’s good to know they’re pushing the UX forward. I can see this service being particularly useful for testing, and indeed, that seems to be a part of their pitch. They also have Taproot Assets integration, which I haven’t seen in lightning node services, so that’s another plus.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Czech Central Bank wants BTC - While many government entities are talking about a Strategic Reserve, this is the first one, to my knowledge, of a central bank doing so. The difference is important because Central Banks typically don’t need legislative, executive or judicial approval as they’re supposed to be independent entities. As such, they can pretty much unilaterally buy and if enough people on the Czech Central Bank’s board of governors votes to buy, it will happen. I suspect if the US does do a strategic reserve, that other central banks will follow suit.
Bounties Work - Two summers ago, HRF created a bounty program for specific features that their activists wanted. These are not exactly super tech-savvy people, but they are all almost universally financially oppressed so they were very much a good market to test features against. 11 bounties were offered and all 11 have been claimed, mostly by wallet providers, though there were others that were not. I’ve always thought that the wallet development ecosystem funding was tricky because there wasn’t a clear way to make money, but as this program has shown, there can definitely be some reasonable ways to fund these projects.
Garlinghouse, the Heel - Turns out the Ripple founder and owner of a significant percentage of the premine has been working behind the scenes to nuke the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve in favor of his own token. As if his Greenpeace “Change the Code” initiative wasn’t enough, his attempting to conflate Bitcoin and crypto in this instance is particularly galling. He’s been throwing a lot of money around, which is what you can do when you printed your own money, but at least initially, it looks like his efforts are increasingly futile.
Quick Hits
10107 BTC - The infinite money glitch continues for MSTR.
Bitcoin Laws in US States - Check out which states are doing what with respect to Bitcoin. Particularly interesting is the progress tracker for Strategic Reserves.
Priorities for Coin Center - The Crypto lobbying group has released their list of priorities for 2025.
Ross Ulbricht pwned by MEV bot - Apparently, Ulbricht was airdropped tokens and sold them too low, which a bot managed to insta-buy and sell for a nice profit.
Fiat delenda est.
The Everything Sucks article ...needs to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance