Bitcoin Tech Talk #444
Interesting Stuff
The Right and Feeling - Gen Z is remarkable in many ways, not the least of which is the deep gender divide. Gen Z men are right leaning and the women are left leaning, which shows up in stats like church attendance. Freya India writes this insightful essay to explain why she thinks the right is not appealing to her generation of women, which is that the right does not address the feelings of conflict and confusion that are common to women like her. I honestly can’t tell if what she’s remarking on is cause or effect, but the point stands that Gen Z single women have a hard time finding their place on the right. I suspect the political divide is a symptom of a deeper pathology caused by the debasement of family the past few generations.
Tariff Doomerism - One of the remarkable things I’ve witnessed the past week is the degree to which everyone was condemning the Trump tariffs as disastrous. As this article points out, that sentiment is not new, and we should be a little wary of the doomsayers given what happened last time Trump had a trade war with China. All the doom and gloom they predicted didn’t come to pass and meant remarkably little to the average American. Remarkably, the same commentators are making the same prediction, which, given past experience should give us pause. As with predictions of Bitcoin’s doom and everything related to COVID, these are great opportunities to tune out the people that turn out to be wrong, particularly if they don’t admit to having been wrong before.
Utilitarianism’s Flaw - The article is self-described as a screed against effective altruism, and it is indeed quite the takedown. What was enlightening to me was the insight that utilitarianism needs measurements and suffers from all systems whose goodness isn’t captured in numbers, which is that the numbers may be good while the actual system as experienced by people as bad, or even terrible. Essentially, all forms of utilitarianism suffer from Goodhart’s Law, where the measurement once adopted to measure utility quickly ceases to be a good measure as people game the number rather than make the system better. It’s a common problem in any centralized system, particularly fiat ones, and effective altruism is just the latest misguided philosophy that suffers from this.
The Identity of Shakespeare - Though it’s no longer kosher to praise Shakespeare in academia anymore, there seems to be a really good candidate for the mysterious, pseudonymous writer. The article makes the case for Thomas North to be the writer of original plays which Shakespeare later adapted. It’s a long article and there’s a lot of evidence to sift through, but it’s definitely one of the only plausible explanations for Shakespeare. Of course, we, in Bitcoin have just as interesting a mystery. Will it take 400 years to figure out who Satoshi is/was?
Signal Hacking - This is a long article on how education has become almost entirely about signaling and not about knowledge. As with the earlier observation about utilitarianism, Goodhart’s Law operates in education, perhaps more than any other realm. Asians are particularly known for gaming these signals, like standardized tests. What was surprising to me was that Asians are less skilled than whites in situations where there’s no incentive to game the signal (like college entrance exams) whereas in situations where there are incentives, Asians do better. Women and men have a similar dynamic. Which suggests that women and Asians are more motivated by status enhancing games.
What I'm up to
Why Bitcoin Matters - My talk to college students for Young America’s Foundation is live. I started the talk with the history of money and moved to the monetary system we currently have. Then I explained Bitcoin using that framework and showed how Bitcoin is better than everything that came before it. It’s not the most technical talk, and given that my audience was largely conservative college students, that was the level that I needed to keep it at. What was amusing for me was that the security guards came up to ask questions after the talk along with the students, showing that Bitcoin really is for everyone.
Tariffs as Pragmatic Compromise - This is an article I wrote on Stacker News about my thoughts on how tariffs are not as bad as some people are making them out to be. It spurred something of a discussion, and to be quite frank, I’m surprised at the vehement reaction to them among Austrian economists specifically, given that it’s the least intrusive form of taxation.
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
SwiftSync - Ruben Somsen has published a fascinating way to validate the blockchain without having to sequentially traverse it in its entirety, which is the current way that Bitcoin Core (and other node software) does it. The main idea is to process each transaction in parallel, keeping track of the inputs and outputs that need to match (spent transaction outputs) and the outputs that don’t have a match (unspent transaction outputs). This requires some hint as to which transaction outputs will be unspent, but that’s very little data, on the order of 1 bit per transaction output, or less than 100MB for the entire chain. The result is that the validation is significantly faster (5x speedup with a rudimentary implementation).
BitcoinKernel - This is a description from Spiral about what this project is and why it’s important. Essentially, the BitcoinKernel library isolates the consensus logic into an easy-to-bootstrap library that other programs can use. Among other things, this means you can write node software in any language that can call C-libraries like Rust and Python. The consensus logic is very C-specific and oftentimes quite finicky, so getting this right can be near impossible, which is why a lot of non-Core implementations were not trusted for a long time. This library can finally make these other implementations easier to trust.
Nostr-Enabled PSBT Coordination - As part of a bigger integration with Nostr, Electrum has added, among other things, PSBT signing coordination over Nostr. Transporting private data is surprisingly difficult, despite the cryptography having been around for over 30 years now, and Nostr is one of the few places where the end-to-end privacy is the norm due to the use of public key cryptography as a base layer. For multisig, this seems like the ideal way to coordinate signing, and we’ll hopefully see more integrations like this from wallet software and hardware.
Lightning
Phoenix Back in US - The excellent lightning wallet is once again available in the US. Their return is due to the recent memo from the US Department of Justice which is titled “Ending Regulation By Prosecution.” Regulatory attacks don’t work on the Bitcoin network, but unfortunately, they do have some effect on wallets like Phoenix. I’m not sure how malicious prosecution like the previous administration engaged in will be prevented in the future, but this is good news for the time being.
Sati.pro - The website is in Spanish and it’s not entirely clear how the service works, but this is a service that lets you transfer money to other users using WhatsApp. WhatsApp is by far the most popular messaging app outside the US (way more so than Telegram or Signal) and this does seem like an excellent crowd to service. The transfer of money is enabled by Lightning, which makes the payment system a lot more resilient and less vulnerable to single points of failure.
BitGo - The institutional Bitcoin custodian company now supports lightning. They have partnered with Voltage to make this integration happen. It’s good to see them finally integrate lightning into their service as so much of what they’ve been doing was to enable Bitcoin trading on altcoin platforms with stuff like Wrapped Bitcoin. As these altcoin platforms continue to lose users, this is a good way to get some of that business back with the trading that’s expected to occur on the Lightning Network through the various colored coins protocols.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Once-in-a-Species - This article explains a genuinely new theory of how humans evolved and how the desire for scarce things is deeply advantageous to human coordination. Taking a cue from Nick Szabo’s classic article Shelling Out, the author makes the intriguing argument that homo sapiens overtook the closely related Neanderthals through the use of money. The article captures one of the important ingredients of coordination, which is that there needs to be some sort of common durable and scarce thing we value for that coordination to work. There’s a nice callout of Bitcoin at the end, perhaps explaining the almost fanatical devotion that many Bitcoiners have.
Nations Settling in BTC - VanEck has a very long report on the impact of tariffs and there’s one tidbit that’s of great interest. Specifically, this sentence: “China and Russia have reportedly begun settling some energy transactions in Bitcoin and other digital assets.” Individuals and businesses have been doing this for some time, this is the first incidence that I’m aware of where two nation-states are settling in Bitcoin. Given the uncertainty around the role of the dollar, I’m sure this won’t be the last time Bitcoin is used for international trade settlements.
Bitcoin Bond Company - Pierre Rochard has announced that he’s starting a new Bitcoin company. This is one of the most innovative Bitcoin companies to start in many years, and it’s almost entirely financial! The main idea is to give different returns to different constituencies depending on their risk tolerance. So for example, there will be a very low risk bond that will rarely go down in price, but doesn’t have as much upside as well as a very high risk bond that will go down in price faster than Bitcoin when Bitcoin’s price drops, but will also go up faster than Bitcoin. Much of this is the role that Strategy and its various options and bonds have been offering, but this is much more purely tied to Bitcoin. Expect products like this to become very popular as pensions and many other large investments need to make up for their shortfall over the years.
Quick Hits
90-day pause - Tariffs are now paused for 90 days while negotiations continue, except for China.
Block Dashboard - Block has released a dashboard for corporations using Bitcoin as a treasury asset.
DoJ Scaling Back Crypto Prosecutions - Not surprising given that the current administration took a lot of money from Crypto companies.
Catallax - This is a new protocol for contracting and hiring contractors using Nostr and Bitcoin.
Fiat delenda est.