Bitcoin Tech Talk #456
Interesting Stuff
We Are All Gay Now - The title of the article is intriguing, especially given that it’s an article in a well-respected Christian publication, and it doesn’t disappoint. The main idea is that sex is treated culturally as a hedonistic end and not a reproductive one. Gay sex, of course, does not lead to reproduction, and in many ways, the hedonistic view of sex is now dominant among heterosexuals, with birth control giving free reign to pure hedonistic sex. The prioritization of hedonistic pleasure aspect of sex has surely had enormous knock-on effects, much like fiat money.
Naming is Shaming - Phones are addictive. We all know this but keep doom-scrolling anyway, even in the middle of spending time with other people. This article is about how to stop that through naming exactly why you are doing on your phone. It’s one thing to pick up your phone to order an Uber to get there on time for an appointment. It’s another to pick up your phone to look for a good dunking of someone that disagrees with you politically. There’s shame in identifying the stupid things that we take pleasure in and it’s often a good way to get started in dealing with our addictions.
Pathologizing Personality - The article is about how every personality trait has now become some sort of psychological disorder according to conventional wisdom. That is, what used to be accepted as normal differences between people has now been pathologized and made into a flaw. Doing this is the opposite of tolerance and it’s an obvious security hole for anxious people wanting to fit in. A cynical and darker interpretation would be that the pathologizing of personality is really a way to preempt independent thought. Such is the way of propaganda, which is necessary for authoritarian governance.
Christian Zionism - Dispensationalism, or the belief that the state of Israel has a “special dispensation” for the end times by God has been a popular, if not dominant view among evangelical Christians over the past 60 years. I know for myself that I grew up with this belief as part of cultural Christianity and didn’t really examine it closely until recently. This article is an excellent distillation into why Christians should reconsider Dispensationalism as it presents an obvious attack surface by which political agendas seep into the church.
On Threads - For men, and nerdy men in particular, much of what we wear is of minimal importance. This is not the normal type of piece that I share here as it’s a bit of a denser and satirical read. The main idea here, though, is about how what we wear reflects something of the groups that we are a part of, and particularly the people that we lead. External appearances are one of the only ways in which we can let form reflect substance, and hence, wardrobe becomes a method of communication. Dressing like a slob, in other words, makes communication, particularly as a leader, much harder, and I suspect a fiat phenomenon.
What I'm up to
Tokyo - I will be speaking at a meetup there on July 28th at Bitcoin Base. We’re still working out the details like the time, but we should have something soon.
Osaka, Kyoto - I will be in both these cities. If you know of Bitcoin meetups in that area, please let me know!
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Building a Wallet from Scratch - Tristan Bietsch writes about what he learned after building a wallet from scratch over 4 months. As you might expect, there are a lot of lessons about product development that were learned. Do you build or use a library? What library do you choose? Which features do you implement? How polished do you make the thing? It’s worth reading because this really is like what product development is like and going through something like this is not just useful to learn, but also to grow as a developer.
Airgap Security Analysis - BitBox writes a long and involved article on the supposed benefits of air-gapped hardware wallets. They go through what the benefits are supposed to be and how they are implemented in practice. They also go through all the different hardware security issues the past 5 years and conclude that none of them were prevented by having an air-gap. I thought the article was an interesting perspective, though I’m not convinced air-gaps are quite as useless as they make it out to be from a security perspective. It’s worth studying and thinking about as these are different perspectives than from other vendors.
BTCRecover - Password and seed loss are all too common in the Bitcoin world and this tool aims to help people recover them. If you’re ever stuck trying to figure out what a missing seed word might be, or have a password for various types of wallets that you need to keep trying, this is a good open source tool to be using.
Lightning
CLINK - Common Lightning Interface for Nostr Keys (CLINK), is a way to communicate lightning stuff over Nostr using the Nostr protocol. This is an alternative to using p2p onion messages like BOLT12 or LNURL (which relies on DNS). The link goes to a proof-of-concept for the communication that’s required to give buyers their invoices and such. Is Nostr the right communication layer for sending invoices? I would like to see the UX, at least.
Edge Nodes - This is an interesting concept from Lightning Labs of nodes that essentially swaps Bitcoin for a Taproot Asset. Presumably, these are the market makers of the Taproot Asset decentralized exchange. It’s a cool way to make the prices synced as anyone can ask for swap rates for any asset from any edge, so for in-demand assets, this makes sense. But the question has to be asked. Are there any actual assets that are going to be useful than maybe stablecoins?
SortedWallet - If you live in the Western world, or have some means, it’s hard to remember that for most of the world, an iPhone is about as unaffordable as a Ferrari might be for you. KaiOS is a linux derivative phone operating system that runs 130 million phones world-wide with very basic app support. SortedWallet is a lightning wallet made to serve these people, the ones in Africa and India that can’t afford the latest smartphones. It’s an important segment, and I suspect a growing one as even westerners will be wanting to step back from the omnipresent phone ecosystems.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Basalto - You can now invest in a Bitcoin VC fund (ego death) while qualifying for EU citizenship through this organization. They are taking advantage of the rule in Portugal that allows you a path to citizenship through 500k EUR investment. The structure of the fund is a bit complicated, but it’s not a bad way to get EU residency or even citizenship while investing in the Bitcoin ecosystem. We’ll see if this results in a lot more LPs for ego death.
Vora - Security around self-custody is something Bitcoiners are always looking to improve and it’s good to see a brand new type of product for this express purpose. They’ve taken the self-custody thing a step further by adding basic vaults, a lot of different security features like biometrics, a full node and encrypted recovery. It’s supposed to be a full system rather than something like a hardware wallet in a multisig environment. I don’t know if this particular company will succeed, but I suspect that as Bitcoiner wealth gets bigger, wallet systems that are a bit more feature-packed like this will become more popular.
FrostSnap - You can now pre-order the Taproot/Schnorr based multisig wallet, which allows for k-of-n signatures. The setup is very different than traditional or even MuSig2 multisig and requires some communication between the devices holding the keys. What’s nice is that the on-chain footprint is small as it looks like any normal taproot address and spending is likewise a single keypath spend, giving you the security of multisig without even revealing what the conditions for unlocking were. You can see the demo video here.
Quick Hits
4980 BTC - Strategy does this week-in, week-out but it’s still crazy that this is more Bitcoin than is brought into circulation by miners every week (3125 BTC).
Jon Atack Detained in El Salvador - He was released an hour later, but scary to think that you can get arrested because some random woman accuses you of being violent against women without evidence.
Formal Verification Grant - This is a call for applications for grants to formally verify Bitcoin’s C++ core implementation.
Sleeping Beauty - An old wallet from 2011 containing something like 80,000 BTC have moved recently, surprising people since there weren’t many wallets in that era.
Fiat delenda est.