Bitcoin Tech Talk #455: Innovation, Pol Pot, Stagnation, Kayfabe++
Interesting Stuff
Innovation as a Dirty Word - This is an older article by the esteemed Rene Girard on innovation, imitation and how the modern world has reversed cause and effect. As he points out, until about 200 years ago, the word innovation had a decidedly negative connotation, despite mostly meaning the same thing as it does today. It was once associated with heresy and general wrongness, which has largely been removed in modern usage. The important idea here is that hardened things generally should get the benefit of the doubt and the new thing viewed with skepticism, instead of the other way around, which unfortunately led to stuff like Marxism, fiat money and critical theory.
On Pol Pot - It’s criminal that what Pol Pot did in Cambodia is still largely not known to most people around the world, which as the author notes, is largely due to the fiat intellectuals’ uncomfortable associations with Communist regimes. If you’re not familiar with how this dictator killed something like 1 in 4 Cambodians in a mere 4 years, you need to read this story and understand just how. brutal and crushing communism can be. While Mao and Stalin had larger absolute numbers, Pol Pot takes the cake for percentage, and sadly, this evil is not taught because of the academic affinity toward leftism in general and communism in particular.
Evidence of Stagnation - This is a pretty straightforward article about how almost everything is becoming more rinse-and-repeat of the same rather than anything original. Paired with the first story, it’s an interesting contrast about the mechanics of fiat stagnation, which conserves the wrong things and innovates where there is no need. As the author points out, the advent of AI makes this rinse-and-repeat much worse and unlike imitation which leads to creativity, it’s imitation that becomes slop, or more of the same that becomes very easy to tire of.
Lack of Empathy - For your future self, that is. The post is ostensibly about choosing a career and how it’s mostly an exercise in choosing what kind of high status someone wants, rather than the work and toil that’s required to get there. But as the article points out, there’s so little of the actual looking at what it takes, what’s done day-to-day and even what’s enjoyed by the person in question. In other words, we lack empathy for our future selves and what they’ll have to suffer to get to the career we “want” right now. I suspect much of this lack is due to the high time preference people generally have under fiat money, rather than the more realistic and long-term calculation required of sound money.
Kayfabe - This is an entertaining read about one of the WWF (as it was known back then) wrestlers of yesteryear, the Iron Sheik. But it’s not only about him, it’s also about the crossover between wrestling and politics (Trump, Linda McMahon, especially) about the whole concept of kayfabe (where breaking character is strictly forbidden) and whether we should wonder whether what just happened with Israel and Iran was real. Much like how professional wrestling started to break kayfabe back in the late 90’s we may very well be getting that in politics today. In a sense, this is the perfect time for it, as a significant number of people will cheer or boo on command with much more consideration for narrative than reality.
What I'm up to
Seoul - We will be having a meetup on July 5th somewhere and it will be in English. Come stop by. Details to come.
Tokyo - Similar story in Tokyo, though it’ll be later in the month. The location will be the new Tokyo Bitcoin Base.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
DoS - 0xB10C recalls what exactly happened back in May 2023 which was only disclosed much later. Essentially the BRC-20 mints caused a large flood of related transactions coming into nodes which then had to be sorted to decide which ones to send to peers. This sorting process started to take longer and longer, which caused the CPU usage of nodes to get to 100%, creating timeouts with connections, many dropping. It was a form of DoS, though clearly not with the intent to make nodes fail.
Schnorr Verification - BTrust blog goes into why Schnorr can be very useful for Batch validation and how the math on that works. The main idea is that you can find savings on validating all the Schnorr signatures of a block by doing point addition. The benefit is that you can save about 16.5% in validation time by doing batching, while on mixed ECDSA/Schnorr blocks, the savings is about 3%.
ADDR Fingerprinting - Interesting research showing how you can identify TOR and IPv4 nodes as being the same based on the responses they give to the network command for finding other nodes. This is an interesting way of figuring out who’s who, and given the Knots Ban List (see later story), identification of other nodes (especially if it has undesirable intentions) might become an important part of running your own node.
Lightning
Onion Overlay - Laolu of Lightning Labs has proposed a different type of onion messaging on the Lightning Network which decouples the onion messaging from the payment messaging and overlays it on the gossip network. The main benefit is that the onion messaging isn’t so fragile and allows for a lot more robust decentralized communication. The drawbacks are that there are new attack vectors and hardening the protocol against such attacks will take some time. Still, this is an ingenious way to make Lightning more robust while adding ways to use it for other purposes.
The Rack - Want more privacy for your lightning payments? This is the website to do that. The main idea is to take a lightning invoice and add lightning proxies in the route to make the payment more private. By adding 3-6 more lnproxies, there is less information for someone trying to de-anonymize your payment. The technique is called “stretching,” as in making the payment route longer, hence the humorous name. I would like to see lightning wallets add this as an option, though obviously, this will add more fees.
LNURL Tutorial - This is a tutorial to set up getting paid in lightning through LNURL using all the best practices so that the payments are private. LNURL, of course, makes it so that you send the payer to a URL that generates an invoice instead of a direct invoice, and setting one up can be a bit of a pain. The tutorial uses LNBits and Cloudflare for privacy and is useful for any kind of e-commerce.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Knots Ban List - And the client war continues. To recap, LibreRelay was relaying a lot of what Knots considered spam, so a fork of Knots was made called Garbageman to connect to LibreRelay nodes pretending to be LibreRelay to clog up their connections. But then LibreRelay tried to fight back using some heuristics about certain kinds of transactions, which become a cat and mouse game. Now they’ve just published a list of Knots nodes so they can avoid them altogether, making the transactions relayed on their part of the network more likely to propagate.
Texas Strategic Reserve - Governor Abbott has signed this bill into law, which allows for the comptroller to add cryptocurrencies with at least a $500B market capitalization over the past 12 months. Currently, that’s only Bitcoin and given how short alt-season tends to be, it’ll be a while for any other crypto to qualify. There are various provisions like publishing a report every couple of years, requiring cold storage and much more. It’s one of the first in the nation and if it works out well for Texas, a lot more states will be following suit.
Castle - This is an interesting service for small businesses to help convert their revenues into a Bitcoin treasury. Companies that have done this the past 15 years have done very well, but the software to manage this has been lacking and required a lot of hands-on management. This solution is a lot easier and already integrates with a lot of SMB workflows to make Bitcoin treasuries easier. Tools like this will move the needle far more than another business taking Bitcoin for payment.
Quick Hits
245 BTC - A pittance compared to the 10k+ acquired last week, but the more interesting part is that they used no ATM stock sales to fund this one.
Bitcoin Guide for Progressives - Progressive arguments for Bitcoin in a handy PDF.
Ashigaru - This Sparrow fork lets you participate in coinjoins through an implementation of Samurai’s Whirlpool.
Bitcoin Mortgages - The new rule for Fannie and Freddie mean more people will be able to leverage their crypto assets to get mortgages.
Fiat delenda est.