Bitcoin Tech Talk #443
Interesting Stuff
Information and Morality - This is a fantastic long-read and has a deep personal investigation into not just what information is, but what it means. The most useful part for me was when the author lays out the 2x2 matrix of true/false and good/bad. There are good truths, bad truths, good falsehoods and bad falsehoods. As he points out, we are fed a lot of corrupting truths, or what I would call propaganda. In a sense, corrupting truths are a deeper malady than obvious falsehoods as they sneak past our rational filter. We also need a moral filter so that we don’t become scoundrels.
Coders aren’t Valued for Code - A bit of a sobering article for me reading just how replaceable coders actually are. Despite the high salaries and crazy benefits many coders receive, the article correctly points out that most of what they do is actually not valued by the people in charge. On the one hand, this is understandable as ultimately, something has to bring in revenue, which database migrations and architecture refactors don’t directly affect. On the other hand, code that sucks is not a pleasant environment to work in. Open source is a more pleasant work environment for that reason.
Practical Virtue - The article starts off thinking about the shopping cart test, which is from 4chan as a way to tell who’s a good person or not. It’s a silly test, but a lot more practical than the trolley problems or the lifeboat dilemmas. As such, it’s not so much a good person/bad person thing, as much as it is a chance to practice virtue in everyday settings. Virtue doesn’t have to be grand shows of martyrdom and seldom is. The author points out several more opportunities to practice being good in everyday life and in many ways, this is how we build up character.
How Sierra Died - If you grew up in the 80’s and early 90’s and had a computer, like I did, you might remember this brand from its many games like King’s Quest, Quest for Glory, and Phantasmagoria. This article is about how the company died, essentially getting acquired by CUC, a company whose operations and revenue were unclear at best. What struck me about the article is how taken in the founder of Sierra was by a slick-talking Harvard MBA. But fiat money lets charlatans extract value from good companies until they’ve been sucked dry, and in many ways, this is why we can’t have nice things.
Death to DEI - John Carter writes a well-penned analysis of the dilemma many research groups are facing because of the change in the academic-grant-making regime. Academic research used to be solely considered on the merits of the research itself, until DEI came along and started demanding diversity statements, which trickled down to academic positions. But now that a new regime is in charge, the same DEI-optimized research groups are finding that their funding is in danger. The centralized nature of academic grants is the reason for this flip flop back and forth according to the winds of political fashion. A decentralized academy will be a lot more stable and committed to truth.
What I'm up to
Block Rewards - I was on this podcast to talk about how Fiat Ruins Everything and my Bitcoin origin story among other things. We talked about how the Bitcoin space really enables all kinds of different careers on the frontier, how Bitcoin had different narratives during its lifetime and how we’ve as a community converged on the truths of the Austrian economic view of money, which Saifedean laid out in his book.
Audience Q&A - This was a short panel at the Thank God for Bitcoin conference at the end of the day where we took some audience questions. In particular, I answered a question about debt and how Christians should think about not having any, which may ruffle some feathers.
TGFB Friends and Family BBQ - Speaking of which, I am going to be at the Las Vegas F&F BBQ on May 27th. Tickets are going fast, so sign up for this if you want to fellowship with Christians before the main conference.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Wallet Poisoning Attack - Jameson Lopp describes an interesting attack onchain where a transaction that spends to a particular address has a source address that looks extremely similar. The main idea is to trick the user into sending to the source address instead of the destination and to sweep the funds to it. There are apparently 48,000 addresses that have been poisoned this way, and Jameson estimates about 0.3 BTC spent on dust and fees in total for a return of 0.1 BTC in the one user that seems to have been fooled. And this isn’t counting the resources spent grinding for 48,000 addresses that looked similar.
Fidelity Bond Calculator - This is a tool to figure out how your participation in JoinMarket will be affected by the value of your fidelity bond is. Selection criteria in the decentralized coinjoin protocol is proportional to the value of your bond, but then the bond value is locked while you operate with it, so there’s opportunity cost to consider. It’s a cool way to figure out what the amount you should lock is and the amount of profit you can expect based on the popularity of JoinMarket during the locking term of your fidelity bond. You can look at the current JoinMarket here.
Cashu as Mints - There are at least two different eCash protocols that issue Bitcoin eCash, Fedimint and Cashu. The article here points out what makes Cashu different. Essentially, the Cashu model lets each mint determine its own level of risk, allowing for example, fractional reserve banking and issuing more Cashu eCash than the mint holds onchain. This would theoretically allow for more coins to be around in the economy, but would also discount the eCash from the mint as rumors got out. Exchanges have the same abilities today, except with eCash you get the privacy benefits.
Lightning
Liquidity Freezing Attack - The idea described in this blog post is what happens if some large inbound channel floods your channels with payments, draining all the outbound liquidity, essentially only giving its own outbound path as an option? If in addition, this node has high fees, you may not get any transactions routed through, in which case you wouldn’t make much more money after that. This seems like a problem but in a way, the attacker paid you to execute it and you can close the channel that’s causing problems and rebalance after. That said, it’s something like a corporate takeover where they buy all your wares so they can charge more.
Misty Breez - As with many SDKs where developers have a hard time knowing all the different features available, Breez has built a reference app to showcase all that their API can do. More importantly, they have as a goal to show what some of the best practices are for UX and UI in reference to lightning applications, which are often very difficult to build the first time around. For lightning wallet developers, studying code like this can be a good way to do due diligence on an SDK before using it.
LNBoard - Another board like the 1 million pixel website from back in the day, but payable in Lightning. I believe this isn’t even the first such Lightning website, but it’s always fun to look at these. I do wonder why more people don’t do them for their own website. It doesn’t have to be pixels, exactly, but surely, offering space on your X profile, for example, ought not to be that hard.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Reality of Bitcoin Conferences - This read is long and probably very accurate about the feel of these conferences and the type of people you will meet there. As with most things, it’s a mixed bag and you may meet some really cool people, some really scammy people and all sorts of people in between, and the economics of the conference don’t really favor the pleb as the article points out. About the only thing that the article didn’t touch on are the sponsors and their economic incentives, which honestly aren’t that great either. Still, it’s the few cool people you meet that make it worthwhile.
HRF Grants - The Human Rights Foundation donated another 1 Billion Satoshis (10 BTC) to various organizations around the world to various Bitcoin and Nostr projects, as they did last summer. Many recipients are familiar names like BTCPay Server and Base58 Labs, but there are also many new ones like TollGate and Bitsacco. Many of these organizations are in the global south which often lacks the VC infrastructure to fund these types of startups, so it’s great to see HRF fill in the gap.
Gamestop $1.5B Convertible Notes - The one-time memestock has completed its sale of convertible notes that it plans to use to purchase Bitcoin. They are obviously following Strategy’s (MSTR) playbook and will be holding a significant amount of Bitcoin very soon. The Bitcoinization of the entire securities industry seems to be playing out as this offering was oversubscribed by $200M, suggesting that there’s a lot more market demand to come.
Quick Hits
22048 BTC - Another week, another huge buy by Strategy (MSTR).
Mailing List Drama - The Bitcoin Dev mailing list was booted off of Google and then restored after some brutal comments on X.
8888 BTC - That’s how much Tether bought.
Monero Losing Darknet Share - Apparently its on-chain activity is half of what it was a year ago.
696 BTC - This is how much the Japanese company MetaPlanet acquired this week, apparently funded by the 2 billion yen bond offering.
Fiat delenda est.