Interesting Stuff
The Origin of Noblesse Oblige - This is a long read on the virtue of humility and what the implications of it are at a society wide scale. What was insightful was how opposed humility is to the equality doctrine, which essentially says anyone can do anything if they just put in enough effort. As anyone really good at anything knows, most people simply don’t have the tools to be a world class basketball player, or concert pianist, or mathematician. Yet the lie persists to make people feel better and it’s had some disastrous effects. Among other things, it’s destroyed the noblesse oblige of the people at the top because they believe they earned everything. It’s a fiat lie that keeps poor people down and makes exploitation much easier.
Don’t Trust LLMs - Apparently, there’s a way to integrate Claude so that it has access to your Stripe account and handle customer complaints and so on. These guys figured out a way to trick it to hand out $50,000 coupons. The problem is that the LLMs can’t tell when a user is trying to trick it to be from the actual owner of the business. As a software engineer, this is frightening because the attack surface is just so huge. As such, I expect that this is not a one-off, and as LLMs become a bigger part of the consumer experience, hacks like this are going to become more commonplace, which will lead to them being nerfed and eventually, you’ll need people again.
Current State of Middle School - This is a hilarious and frightening observation by a middle school dad about what he saw in a middle school classroom in California. As he states, it’s a middle school that has banned phones, but as he shows, the real problem in the classroom are the chromebook laptops that every kid has been issued. They are all watching videos, playing games and switching tabs when the teacher walks by. As the author notes, the bringing in of technology in the classroom may be the mistake. Unfortunately, given that we’re in a fiat system, the mistake is likely not going to be acknowledged until it’s hurt a lot more kids.
One Room Schoolhouse - Contrasting with the last story is this one about what used to be normal, the one-room schoolhouse in rural America. As the name implies, there was literally just one room for a bunch of kids from 5 to 16 in a community and a single teacher. You would think that such a setup wouldn’t work, but it actually worked very well. The article references a 1924 Texas study which compared one-room schools to more modern ones with age-based cohorts. The one-room schools had better outcomes. As usual in a fiat system, more money just means more bureaucracy and not better outcomes.
On Microcultures - This is an insightful read on how cultures differ as human groups grow. There’s a useful taxonomy of group sizes starting from a tribe, then a village, then a city and finally a nation. The thrust of the article is that each stage has different dynamics and different trust levels and the final level requires a monoculture to be sustainable. At least until the advent of the internet, the monoculture was possible due to the same mass media and shared cultural touchstones. But now, because of the internet, we have much smaller microcultures, but without the geographic proximity that those used to rely on. Hence we have people of many different microcultures living in close proximity that really have little in common. As the article implies, at some point, we’re going to get smaller geographic communities that support these microcultures, which for Bitcoin sounds a lot like those citadels.
What I'm up to
Long Term Security Budget - The debate I had with Knut against Peter Todd is now up. We discussed whether miners control Bitcoin or have significant influence, whether taxation is theft, whether there are social costs to re-orgs and so on. It was a lively debate and a bit unfortunate that Peter had to defend his position on his own. Still, it was fun to do and hopefully gives you a better idea of how economic analysis can be different given different assumptions.
Brian Paik - The second part of my interview with Brian is up, where we discussed a lot of the contemporary concerns around Bitcoin, including treasury companies, Knots vs Core, quantum computing and a bunch of other things. The Bitcoin maximalist community is really growing and content like this is finding an audience in Korea.
YAF - I’ll be speaking at this conservative college student conference about Bitcoin and the evil of fiat money, central banking and everything else around it. This is a growing group and generally battle-hardened, given how liberal colleges tend to be, so this will be a fun group to orange pill.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Shielded CSV - Client-Side Validation has been a hot topic for some time, but this is the first post that really describes what’s going on under the hood pretty well. The main idea is that you can have a full zero-knowledge transfer protocol on top of Bitcoin by publishing 64-byte nullifiers which prevent double spending on the protocol. As it is, it’s a different protocol than Bitcoin and thus needs bridges to and from Bitcoin to work, which generally will require trust somewhere. Still, the prospect of zero-knowledge private transfers is pretty intriguing, even at that cost, and perhaps this may be the killer app for BitVM.
Proof of SafeGCD - Andrew Poelstra and Russell O’Conner have formally verified the correctness of one of the optimizations made in secp256k1, an extension of the greatest common divisor algorithm first made by Euclid. The main algorithm is called safegcd, which does not terminate early and thwarts various timing attacks. They proved that this version of gcd is correct through proof assistants. Given that the original algorithm was published by Donald J Bernstein, they are standing on some giant shoulders indeed.
bitcoinisdata - This is pretty much every kind of graph that can be reasonably calculated from the blockchain in a beautiful UI with minimalistic graphs. There are lots of visualizations of Bitcoin, some being more useful than others, and this is a great way to discover some patterns. I only wish it was open source and installable on your own node so you can do your own analysis. They at least have an API, though, and it shouldn’t be too difficult to incorporate it into your own project.
Lightning
Thor - Want a lightning address but don’t want to run a Lightning node? No problem! Using Nostr Wallet Connect you, too can have a lightning address that comes from your own domain and self-host the entire thing, without the overhead of a lightning node, which can be significant. This is a clever way to get what is very convenient for users, that of lightning addresses. Now if there was a way to prevent messages to the corresponding email address without some payment to the same address…
Blink Donation Button - Want to collect Bitcoin donations but don’t want to deal with the hassle of setting up invoicing and so on? Blink now has a button that you can deploy to your website that lets you collect donations in Lightning. For a long time, Bitcoin donation addresses were standard, but they’re not really practical for small amounts, so this is a better way. Of course, zaps are still a thing and Nostr makes collecting money much easier if you’re already connected, but perhaps this can be an app for those that are on Lightning but not Nostr.
NimbleNode - Running a lightning node doesn’t have to be expensive, though it certainly can be if you have a full Bitcoin node running behind it. NimbleNode is a project to remove that full node requirement with all the storage, CPU and bandwidth required. The main idea is that you connect to nodes via Neutrino and validate transactions using compact filters. Currently, the whole thing only runs using a domain name, which basically makes running this on a phone unrealistic, but perhaps it can get further optimized for phone use.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Regulations for Bitcoin - Block writes up a wish list of good legislation that would unlock Bitcoin’s use case for payments. The context is the US, mostly, and the main issues are around taxes, licensing and money transmission. The lack of clarity around these issues has meant less method-of-payment use cases than would otherwise be, though I suspect that even with a lot of clarity, the method of payment use case would still lag behind savings.
Ancient Supply Metric - This is a metric I hadn’t heard of before, called the Ancient Supply, which measures how many Bitcoins haven’t moved in 10 years. As you might expect, the supply of Bitcoins that haven’t moved in that long is constantly changing, and according to the article, it’s growing at about 550+ BTC/day. This is in contrast to the amount of new Bitcoin coming online through miners, which tells you that from a practical perspective, we may be entering deflation. Though 10 years seems a bit arbitrary, this is a metric to keep an eye on.
Global Bitcoin Adoption Study - Cornell has started a 2-year Bitcoin adoption study, with some interesting rolling insights blog. The current blog post focuses on who actually owns Bitcoin, with data from 25 different countries. Among other surprising findings, 72% of Salvadorans have owned Bitcoin at some point, whereas only 8% of Japanese currently do. The other thing I found surprising is that adoption is led by lower-income, lower-educated individuals in most countries. Perhaps this reflects the fact that these people are the least ruined by fiat money.
Quick Hits
6220 BTC - A huge stack for Strategy, but they are not the only ones stacking. Oh, and they also raised $2.5B to buy more Bitcoin.
Bitcoin on the Brink of Bailout for Banks - The UK is thinking about using some of their Bitcoin to plug a budget deficit.
FBI Drops Case - Against Jesse Powell, founder of Kraken.
TWIC - Nice new newsletter by BTC++ aptly named “This Week in Core.”
Fiat delenda est.