Bitcoin Tech Talk #440
Interesting Stuff
Women and Commitment - Freya is a conservative young woman who comments on the current culture among young single women. This is an excerpt of an interview where she discusses how commitment is looked down upon by young women. Gone are the days when it was the men that had the reputation for not wanting to commit, now it’s young women who are discouraged from all sides. The article gave me perspective on the fertility crisis as so few people are pairing up due to this dynamic. I suspect that the anti-commitment default is a consequence of fourth wave feminism, which I don’t think would exist without the welfare state.
Quality of Leisure - This is an essay on what leisure is classically and how it’s been debased to what we have now. When we think of leisure, we usually think of movies or sleeping or watching sports. In reality, leisure classically meant stuff life reflection, contemplation and academic pursuits. The Greek word for leisure is σχολή, which is transliterated “schole” or school. Leisure was seen as something that required discipline and commitment, not just a time to rest and goof off. As the article says, the quality of our leisure has debased along with the quality of our work. That is to say, as work has gotten more meaningless, leisure has as well.
Degradation of the Word - This is a long and thoughtful essay, written by an exceptional writer. The starting point is the reverence for reading whose reputation is a bit hard to identify. As the author asks, what information from a book isn’t more easily conveyable through a YouTube video or a podcast? Something essential has been lost in the high status we give to books and that becomes the anchor for a deep analysis of our culture and how it’s developed the last 50 years. There’s a cultural debasement, a shallowness, a spiritual illiteracy that the author identifies which is obvious in books. Read the whole thing to find out what fiat books and fiat minds have become.
Covenantal Capitalism - The main idea here is that there are two kinds of capitalism. One that satisfies a person at a shallow level and one that does so at a deeper one. The contrast that begins the essay is between Universal Studios and Disney World, the latter which bends over backwards to give the visitors a magical experience. I suspect that what the author is complaining about is the lack of humanness in a lot of fiat goods and services, a consequence of massive scaling. But it is worth thinking about whether capitalism as currently conceived, of treating each individual like homo economicus, is missing something about the deeper relational desires of humanity.
SpaceX Dominance - One of the more intriguing ideas in military warfare is explored in this essay. I have no idea whether such a system is possible, but the author thinks the starships that SpaceX is building can essentially move troops and supplies from one supply area to anywhere in the world in a couple of hours for a reasonable cost as these ships can be re-used. As most of warfare is logistics of moving stuff, this obviously has enormous implications militarily. But more than that, the ability to move things and people that quickly will obviously have even bigger consequences economically. I have no idea how viable this is, but if you have any expertise here, I’d love to hear from you.
What I'm up to
Fiat Ruins Church - I don’t have any new podcast appearances to share, so I’m reposting one of my favorites, my talk on how fiat money has ruined the church. Sadly, real estate has become the primary savings vehicle for not only most congregants but churches themselves as well. It’s no wonder churches are most identified with their buildings rather than people.
Programming Blockchain - My course running March 31-April 1 in Austin is still taking applications! This is your final opportunity to take the class that has launched hundreds of Bitcoin developer careers.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Chain Analysis Basics - The post from Spiral goes through the very basic ways in which you can tell addresses are owned by the same user. The main one, of course, is that the inputs are spent together in the same transaction, but apparently there are other heuristics that they will discuss in future blog posts.
Invalid Mining Jobs - 0xB10C observes that some of the templates sent from AntPool and others have coinbase reward values greater than the 3.125 BTC allowed, which is quite strange given that the block is automatically invalid. The culprit is probably some glitchy templating code, but the waste of hash power is not insignificant and just shows how much inefficiency there still is in the mining pool world, despite the cut-throat nature of Bitcoin mining.
Quantum Burn - Jameson Lopp makes the case for burning all the coins that are quantum vulnerable should an exploit be found. It’s a pretty drastic step, and is meant to protect the current owners of Bitcoin from inflationary dilution, as opposed to the current state which would allow quantum algorithms to keep what they find. I personally don’t think quantum is anywhere near being able to crack ECDSA or Schnorr and I don’t take it as a given that it will progress, but his argument is compelling and as he points out, how we think about this issue reflects on what we think Bitcoin is.
Lightning
LN Pathfinding - This is a paper formalizing the pathfinding algorithm and the considerations that people normally have for them. The different strategies are analyzed and scored according to reliability of the payment succeeding. The authors suggest that incorporating historical data along with fine-tuning liquidity seem to be the ways that success could be improved further than the strategies studied.
Formal Verification - This is a paper that formally proves that for honest actors, the Lightning Network safeguards their funds. This has been assumed for some time given the property of being able to exit on-chain, but getting formal verification of that assumption is great, especially for further research purposes. Oftentimes, these sort of proofs give direction for other formal proofs of more unintuitive or complex results.
TicketBot - You can now issue tickets and users can pay for the tickets using zaps on Nostr. The tickets get delivered via DMs on Nostr. It’s a proof-of-concept at the moment, but something like this can obviate the need for Ticketmaster, Eventbrite or Meetup. Direct transactions and privacy is a great way to expand the universe of ticketed events and I hope this is the beginning of something much more interesting with Lightning’s intersection with the real world.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
21 Billion Perpetual Strike Preferred Stock - This is a program by MicroStrategy to essentially create a fixed income security that has Bitcoin upside. The 8% dividend is pretty generous for a fixed income security, and should be popular as the conversion option to MSTR common is always an option. Thus, the Bitcoin upside is kept while the downside protection of the 8% dividend is always there. I’m surprised that the dividend had to be so high.
The Bitcoin Act - Senator Lummis has introduced, with 5 co-sponsors (all Republican), a bill that would have the US Treasury accumulate 1M Bitcoin over the next 5 years, then hold it for 20 more years, to pay down the deficit. This is the real Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Bill as it’s an act of Congress and there are house members who are looking at passing that as well. As is usual in these things, the President has an executive order that changes things for the time being, but Congress needs to make it permanent.
Self-Custody Rights Bill - In another vein, the Kentucky Legislature is making sure that Bitcoiners will always have a right to custody their own coins. Not that this was even necessary, but it’s a nice gesture. This may be a good way for the politicians to test whether they get rewarded for passing Bitcoin-related bills, which in turn would mean more meaningful bills, like a Kentucky Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
Quick Hits
Puerto Rico - A resident of this US territory is refusing a court order to send 120 BTC from his wallet to the court’s.
Rumble Buys BTC - The YouTube competitor which got some significant investment from Tether has announced a buy of 188 BTC for their treasury.
749 BTC Frozen - 12 years after the shutdown of The Silk Road, the authorities are still chasing some of the dealers including someone they traced to allegedly have made that amount back then.
BMAX - This is a new ETF that tracks a basket of Bitcoin Company Convertible Bonds.
Fiat delenda est.