Bitcoin Tech Talk #441
Interesting Stuff
Tate and Alternative Masculinity - The article is about the conservative right’s condemnation of Andrew Tate, despite the young men that he appeals to now being a large part of its base. In particular, older Christian pastors use the Tates as a punching bag and this article explains why that’s so frustrating. What stood out to me was that much of the generational divide here between younger Christian men and the older Christian men is a monetary one. The older generation own homes which the younger ones can’t afford. And the societal punching bag that young men have become in today’s culture, represented in some ways by how much the Tates are scorned indicates a scapegoating which isn’t deserved. The money is broken and young men have no obligation to perpetuate a system that keeps blaming them.
AI Job Applicants - The story is about a company that is hiring for a remote coding role and found that some of the applicants were AI respondents. The first interviewee did very well in the technical interview and almost was given an offer. The second, they captured everything they could because their suspicions were high. This was a real life Turing test with real consequences. But I have to wonder, if the remote employee could do this well on the job interview process, would a company be able to tell the difference once the employee did real work?
Demonic Machines - It’s a given at this point that doom-scrolling, porn and the attention economy are bad for us. The resulting digital system, with all its incentives, in a sense has a mind of its own, what Jacque Ellul would call technique. What this article does is it puts all of the online activities into a spiritual and moral context and speculates on their wickedness as a manifestation of demonic power. The overall suggestion is that technology without a moral compass to guide it degenerates. This was, for me, an insightful way to look at other areas like money, government and education.
Love of Nation - The article’s starting point are the comments from Vivek Ramiswamy and Elon Musk about the H1B visa program and how that reflected a corporatist view of people, as something to be changed on whim should it be able to add a bit more efficiency. The real offense here was the lack of love or loyalty to the nation itself, to the people that currently reside there. In other words, a homo economicus view of the world and not one that real people are concerned with like love, hope and relationships. In other words, the humanity of the discourse around nationhood is missing from this world view. Nationalism is on the rise all over the world, and the forces of faceless technocracy will be overcome.
Rent-Seekers’ Children - College admission these days is insanely competitive because as happens in well-worn paths to success, the road is crowded, and narrows precipitously. This is a symptom of the problem that the rent-seeking class faces, which is that it’s not so easy to impart to your children the advantages you’ve earned. A lawyer cannot leave a practice to his child without the child first going through a grueling course of credential-earning. Neither can a banker or a politician. In a sense, they don’t have any true capital to really bequeath to their children, and it’s another existential angst to make their lives even more meaningless.
What I'm up to
Financial Holiness - I gave this talk last year at the Thank God for Bitcoin conference in Nashville, and it’s finally live! I argued that there are temptations that are made much worse by fiat money in work, money and good deeds and that we can find deliverance from these sins through Christ. The talk was a fun one to give, one that was directed at the specific audience that I had, so if you’re part of that audience, I hope it encourages you. If not, I hope it encourages you anyway!
Talks at Colleges - I’ll be speaking at Florida Atlantic University on Wednesday and Palm Beach Atlantic University on Thursday as part of my speaking engagements at colleges as part of the Young America’s Foundation.
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
Ark on Signet - Ark is nearing launch and they’ve released on signet for testing. I’ve been surprised at how quickly this project has come together from a theoretical idea that required a soft fork, to a fleshed out layer-2 without a soft fork. There’s a lot for the public to learn, including refreshes, rounds and expiry, which even for the seasoned Bitcoiner is going to take a bit of getting used to. What will be the most exciting is the integration with Lightning, to hopefully get many of the positive aspects of both L2s for the benefit of the user.
CISA Paper - Fabian Jahr has delivered on the Cross-Input Signature Aggregation report for HRF after they funded him to do a study. The main thing to be learned in the report is that there are multiple modes for CISA, whether it’s half or full aggregation, and transaction-wide or block-wide. The normalization of transaction construction collaboration for privacy enhancement is the part that’s perhaps the most exciting, but also the part that’s going to need the most UX fleshing out.
Versioned Storage Service - Spiral is launching a new service, which let apps store data in a robust way, with the idea that a robust storage mechanism is a useful primitive for Bitcoin wallets of all kinds. In particular, having robust Lightning channel backups will make development of Lightning wallets much easier. The API supports client-side encryption, so the payload isn’t meaningful to the storage provider. Hopefully, this sort of infrastructure piece becomes standard as we get more adoption.
Lightning
KaleidoSwap - This is a trustless exchange for lightning assets based on the RGB protocol. One of the promises of lightning was the ability to do atomic swaps, but that required other assets that were recognized. Clearly, this is a product trying to gain traction for RGB as the main protocol for trading. They’re a desktop-only client for now and it’s not clear how much liquidity these assets other than Bitcoin have, but it’s an interesting use of Lightning and it will no doubt spur similar projects on the competing colored coin protocols on Bitcoin.
Galaxy L2 Report - Galaxy Digital has a new report out on the prospects of Lightning going forward. The main use case they seem to see are like the above story, assets on Bitcoin that are traded in a DeFi fashion. I thought most of their analysis reeked of hopium, not recognizing that most of these supposed use cases died years ago due to the many different rug pulls. Personally, I think the main use case for Lightning will be fast transactions and perhaps some trading back and forth into stablecoins.
Bitcoin Adoption Hack - Which brings us to this blog post from Blink which suggests that Lightning is the main way to get significant adoption. As they show in real examples of Bitcoin circular economies, this is a growing movement and much more sustainable and based in reality than Galaxy’s hope of a new DeFi scambrian explosion in Bitcoin. The real uses, in other words, are always about the functions of money, and not scams by another name.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Nostr Evolution - Aleks Svetski has some controversial opinions on Nostr itself and how the ideals it started with are not what the network has evolved into. As he says, it’s not the only alternative to censorship anymore, and in many ways the builders took too literally the suggestion that Nostr is to Social Media what Bitcoin is to money. There are parallels, to be sure, but the differences are significant and the analogy unhelpful or even harmful in many contexts. The pragmatic approach he advocates seems sensible to me and a little realism here seems warranted.
Cashu as Free Banking - The free banking era was a fascinating study of what federated banking looked like and the post explores the parallels between what happened back then and the Cashu ecosystem to come. E-cash mints occupy an in-between space where some trust is required, but the mint doesn’t know about your activities. It’s hard to know how popular this product will be, but the analogy to free banking is spot on along with a lot of the attendant dangers and dynamics.
Physical Security Guide - Casa has a guide on physical security as $5 wrench attacks seem to be increasing. Much of the advice is sensible, like keeping a low profile and having reasonable defense mechanisms at home. The one part that’s controversial is the idea of decoy and duress wallets not being all that useful in such a scenario. We don’t really have enough data points to know whether they’d work, but I suspect there’s value in at least having such things.
Quick Hits
130 BTC - Strategy adds more to their treasury. Not as large as previous weeks, but you can’t hit home runs every time you go to bat.
Ledger helping Trezor - The hardware wallet company helped patch a potential physical supply chain attack.
Blockstream Block Explorer API - Blockstream is offering a self-service API with a dashboard now.
Dojobay - You can find public Samurai Dojo instances through this site.
Fiat delenda est.