Interesting Stuff
Slow Death of College - This is a post-mortem of a liberal arts college by a former professor, talking about how the college system at the low end works. Among other revealing things from the article, they offer “partial scholarships” to mediocre athletes and even e-gaming hopefuls. The money line from the article is this one: “Does anyone else feel guilty about saddling these students with enormous debt and marginal skills just so we can play professor?” Increasingly, it’s not just professor, but administrator, dean and even grad student. The whole college experience at the low end is a rent-seeking game that saddles the “students” with debt.
The Future of Customer Service - Most people see AI as something that will take jobs away, or making inefficient processes a lot more efficient. This is a decidedly different take, about how it’s going to be a Kafka-esque hell of trying to find a human being. To be sure, this is not far from the experience most people have with customer service as even most human operators are not empowered to actually do anything about your problem and escalating the call is usually the only way to get something done, but imagine when these agents are AI’s who completely ossify the bureaucracy. In a sense, it will make the administrative state even more obtuse and difficult to get service out of.
What are Aliens? - This is one of the most out there but somehow still convincing long-reads I’ve enjoyed in a long time. The post is a long explanation of what the author thinks aliens are (spoiler: they’re some long-evolved branch of humans that live deep underwater) and comes up with some convincing evidence that they’re actually malicious and demon-like. The most interesting part for me was the speculation that they’re not necessarily technologically advanced as they are more advanced along a particular tech tree. The biblical references are intriguing, too, and it’s a genuinely different take on aliens than anything from the popular imagination.
MeToo, Silicon Valley - I have no idea if the allegations in this article are even remotely true, but it would not surprise me. The main allegation is that there’s a group of VCs that act more or less like casting directors in Hollywood, but with hopeful startup founders and not Hollywood actresses. I sense that these are the fiat dynamics of any near-monopolistic institution like Hollywood, Washington or Silicon Valley. Gatekeeping is an obvious bureaucratic function and it’s no surprise something like that gets used to advantage the people that gate keep.
Cholesterol Scam - If you’re “watching your cholesterol,” you really need to read this article. It’s a long and comprehensive take down of the “science” behind high-cholesterol-is-bad-for-your-heart orthodoxy. But not only does it take down the stupidity of statins, but it also shows the much better alternative explanation of blood vessel damage repair causing clots. These, in turn, are caused by inflammation and stress. Basically, the entire cholesterol-causes-heart-disease theory is wrong and pushed by bad incentives involving statins and drug companies. Fiat systems extend profitable lies at the expense of truth.
What I'm up to
Why Bitcoin Price Keeps Pumping - This is my talk from BTC Prague where I gave my take on what the valuation model for Bitcoin should be and how it’s very different than the valuation model of altcoins. It’s not a long talk, but it does seem to be pretty popular as it has many thousands of views already.
Thank God for Bitcoin Launch - This is part 1 of the interview I did with a Korean Economics podcast about the launch of the Korean translation of the book. We talked about orange-pilling moments, the Korean Bitcoin community and the speculative aspect vs the store-of-value aspect. Note that it starts in Korean, but after about 2 minutes, the interview is in English.
Tokyo Bitcoin Base - I will be at this meetup in Tokyo at the new Bitcoin Base on July 28, 7pm. There’s only a limited number of spots, so please register early!
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Explaining Mnemonics - bennet.org explains how BIP39 mnemonics work and how they are checksummed among other things. The visualization is especially useful for understanding just how much entropy goes into each 12-word mnemonic and for those that aren’t familiar with how the mnemonic phrases work, this is a great way to learn as it only uses a little bit of technical jargon.
Nostr Stealth Pubkeys - This is a slight modification to BIP47 (stealth public keys) which creates a new set of addresses for any payor, payee pair. The main drawback of BIP47 is the usage of OP_RETURN to help recipients recognize their payment, but this proposal is to use Nostr to do the same, leaving less on-chain data and using secure communication. The wallet would have to be Nostr-aware and be listening for any communications through it to figure out which outputs belong to it, but it is a very interesting wrinkle in a protocol that’s been around a decade.
Augur - This is a robust method of estimating fees in any given environment by using transaction inflow rates, current mempool state and block production probability. The result is an API that gets you confidence levels on how quickly your transaction will be included, based on the different probabilities of all three factors. Fee estimation has come a real long way since the days of using Core’s fees for the last N blocks metric.
Lightning
eSIM Market - If you do any traveling, you know that getting a data plan for the region you are in is an essential thing to arrange. Now there’s a marketplace to buy eSIMs in different areas of the world for sats, which naturally makes it more private. Think airalo or nomad but with Lightning. This is in contrast to something like silent.link, which has no expiration, but also costs a bit more per GB. Either way, we’re getting pretty close to a world where you can have cell phone service that’s paid ad-hoc with privacy.
BitAgent - You can now run an AI agent and give it some sats and have it pay for various services. This isn’t an executive assistant that can schedule your flights and book hotel rooms, but it’s not exactly miles away, either. I can see Bitcoin being the currency of choice here simply because there are much fewer restrictions on who can transact when, which is the bane of automating payments for almost any other system.
Skibidi Wallet - I’m too old to understand this meme but apparently, it’s a big thing among Gen Alpha. This is a lightning wallet with a mini video game to help users understand what backing up a seed phrase actually means. The project is the winner of a contest created specifically to address this demographic. If you have any Gen Alpha people in your life, maybe this will help them understand?
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
ATH - Bitcoin is now the highest in terms of dollars, though not in Euros. There’s a lot of speculation about what’s causing the current bull run, from regulatory clarity, corporate treasuries, price suppression and of course the 4 year cycle. Regardless, the good news is that we’re hitting this high with altcoins staying under their highs. Is this how the bull run starts? Or are we destined for disappointment? What we’re seeing as usual is that price run up definitely attracts mainstream attention like the article that’s linked.
Barefoot Mining Study - Bob Burnett has the data on why mining on OCEAN is way more profitable than on other pools. The stats are over a period of 18 months or so, and the equipment was essentially the same, so it’s about as definitive a study as to why OCEAN’s payout is more profitable. And miners seem to be noticing as their hash rate continues to increase past 10 Exahash/s. Despite the rhetoric that miners are all sticklers for even a tiny bit more profit, I think this study puts to bed the idea that miners are perfectly rational and optimized.
New Zealand Bitcoin ATM Ban - Bitcoin ATMs have been the tool of choice for poor people to acquire Bitcoin, which is why they tend to be at gas stations and such. New Zealand is banning them as an anti-money-laundering (AML) measure. This is a low key way for governments to contain Bitcoin as the people that need it most don’t tend to use exchanges and such. It’s a sad commentary that so few Bitcoiners are upset by this development.
Quick Hits
$4.2B - Another week, another financial vehicle utilized by Strategy to purchase more Bitcoin. It’s not in their coffers yet, but will be as they sell their shares into the market.
Spam Bug Reports - Apparently, there’s someone spamming open source projects with AI-customized bug reports that demoralize the developers.
Rumble Moonpay - Tether’s investment in the video platform is clearly having an effect as they’re integrating the creator-focused wallet onto the platform for payment.
Coinbase Holds MSTR’s BTC - Or so speculates this article. This single point of failure wouldn’t be exploited by someone, would it?
Fiat delenda est.