Bitcoin Tech Talk #460
Interesting Stuff
California High Speed Grift - For most of the country the California High Speed rail project is a complete laughingstock, which has wasted $15B already with just a small, less than a mile track laid down. As the article notes, there’s a tremendous amount of grifting involved in this project from endless environmental reviews and consultants doing who-knows-what. It’s truly astounding how much money has been wasted for so little output, but when you look at it from the bureaucracy’s perspective, it starts making more sense. The project, like many other big government projects, isn’t a way to make useful public works, but to create more opportunities for rent-seeking. The longer such projects drag out, the more rent-seekers get paid, which naturally means that they almost never finish on time or come under budget. Of course, fiscal reckoning happens sooner or later and it looks like the cutoff of federal funds might be the beginning of the end for this boondoggle.
Wasting Money - The article is about airline wait times and how much of a tax it is on society. The main argument is that the three hours of buffer you need before and the hour or two buffer after a flight are essentially time taxes, which if you calculate as productivity loss ends up being something like $83B in lost productivity just in the United States. For domestic flights, this is largely TSA screenings and such, and for international, this also includes passport controls and customs. As the article points out this industry simply has had very little incentive to correct this or make this more efficient, robbing travelers. Of course, this is just one of the more visible manifestations of the cost of government regulation, but if you look around, there are many such cases all over the fiat economy.
Effect and Cause - I’m rarely astounded by theological articles, but this one really made an impression on me. The premise is that most Christians are actually living with a materialist mindset instead of a Christian one. That’s not to say that Christians disbelieve God but that the practical actions Christians take are from a materialist perspective, with certain causes leading to certain effects, being “masters” of our own destiny. As the author argues, this is not really a Christian mentality at all and that the actual biblical Christian perspective is the opposite, where God’s promises, or effects result in causes. For all the talk of self-sovereignty, it’s a good reminder for Christians that grace really does mean a form of surrender.
There is no “Control” - Nearly every academic study involving people requires something like a control group. This is how you can measure the effects of a medicine, product or life situations. Sometimes, instead of a control group, studies try to negate whatever the biases might be through some statistical manipulation. Yet as the article points out, trying to “control” for certain biases ends up being mostly fictions in the end. The problem, as usual, is that there are way too many researchers trying to create headlines instead of investigating the truth, which is why we get so much bad science. The replication crisis and the state of research in general is directly a result of the bad incentives created by fiat money.
Math and the Soul - This is a review of a book on mathematics which takes on a teleological tone. If you ask engineers or physicists what math is good for, they’ll tell you that it has practical relevance and can help us understand physical reality. Ask a mathematician and they’ll tell you about the beauty it has on its own, even if it has zero practical use. The article and the book it reviews has more of the latter assessment of mathematics and how it satisfies something more than just practical reality. The article reminded me that there are purposes for things other than the obvious and the great discoveries often take place in that space of enjoyment, which bureaucrats unfortunately almost never acknowledge.
What I'm up to
Young America’s Foundation Road to Freedom - I will be speaking at this conference in Raston VA (alongside Yeonmi Park and EJ Antoni) to a bunch of college students October 3-4.
Lugano Plan B Forum - A few weeks later October 24-25, I will be in Lugano for the Plan B Forum. There’s probably going to be some sort of Thank God for Bitcoin meetup at the conference as well.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Peer Observer - 0xB10C describes his peer observer infrastructure, ostensibly to see what sort of attacks are going on in the network. The initial impetus was the ADDR message flooding which was reported in a CVE some time ago. It’s a useful tool and something that is minimally invasive to the network because he’s running a bunch of well-behaved nodes to observe. I hope more observations of this kind are deployed, particularly by public companies as a way to monitor possible nefarious actions.
Simplicity Launch - The Liquid Network has now activated Simplicity, the non-Turing Complete language useful for expressing finite smart contracts. The low level language can be proven to be safe, and there’s a higher level Rust-like language called SimplicityHL (rebranded from Simfony) which compiles to Simplicity. I’m really curious what people make with this building block as all sorts of things like DEXes should be possible.
Synchronized Labels using Nostr - Bitcoin Safe wallet has an interesting feature which lets you sync labels for transactions and addresses using Nostr. This is particularly useful for watch-only wallets as they can be made aware of what particular transactions were for. Using Nostr to sync data makes sense, though you need some other private key for encrypted transport.
Lightning
RGB Yellow Paper - The details of how RGB works is out and it’s a pretty long and involved read. This lightning-compatible colored coins protocol has some interesting features like client-side validation, which avoids blockchain bloat and a Turing-complete execution environment called Alonzo Virtual Machine (AlVM). There’s a lot of detail involved like commitments, anchoring and much more, which you can read in the paper.
Bitcoin-MCP - You can now create an AI agent that has access to Lightning. The main use is to do what a lot of wallets automatically do, which is to validate transactions, create private keys and so on. Having the context allows the AI to give more relevant answers, which in the context of lightning may be useful for making your node more profitable and efficient.
Conditional Payments - Alby has a practical introduction to hold invoices and how you can use them for conditional payments. It’s a form of escrow that you can use to do something closer to an atomic swap of payment for a good or service. It certainly makes payments a little less risky for the customer, which is often missing in Bitcoin payment scenarios.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Bitcoin ETF In-Kind Redemptions - Bitcoin ETF redemptions will no longer be cash-settled but allow for in-kind redemptions, meaning that the redeemer will presumably get on-chain BTC. This is a welcome development and once it goes into effect, should assuage some of the fears around paper-Bitcoin accusations. This can also be an effective way for whales to get a hold of large amounts of Bitcoin, for amounts too large for OTC and can be quietly accumulated.
Blockstream Local - If you’re introducing Bitcoin to people and get them to download a wallet app, one of the more annoying things is the setup and having to backup the seed phrase and so on. The app from Blockstream makes it so that the app is ideal for f2f interactions of orange-pilling situations. Specifically designed for the demands of meetups where people are learning how to secure their own Bitcoin, the app is the first that I’ve heard to specifically address this use-case. If you have a meetup, perhaps this is a good one to try for newbies.
Christie’s Real Estate in BTC - The luxury real estate brokerage is launching a $1B division to appeal specifically to Bitcoin holders. This is an understandable move given that Bitcoiners are getting much richer, and I’m sure they’ll get more than a few bites, but I suspect it’s not going to be the thriving business they’re hoping it to be. High end real estate has beaten monetary expansion for some time now and that’s been a major use case for the truly rich to protect their wealth. But Bitcoiners have a much better vehicle, so such a use case won’t necessarily appeal to them.
Quick Hits
21021 BTC - Big week for Bitcoin treasuries, but Strategy is by far the biggest.
Samourai Devs Plead Guilty - Apparently they won’t avoid jail time, but they’ll get a much lighter sentence and all they had to do was admit that they were unlicensed money transmitters.
Satoshi Statue Vandalized - The statue in Lugano was dumped into a lake and then recovered.
Bukele 2029 - The constitution of El Salvador has been amended to allow Bukele to stay president indefinitely.
Fiat delenda est.
All my trading algorithms are based on math, as well