Interesting Stuff
Why George R.R. Martin Won’t Finish Game of Thrones - If you’ve watched the HBO series or read the books, you’re familiar with the author’s nihilism and many shocking turns which mainly kill off characters that you’ve become attached to. It’s both the best and worst part of this series and the whole ethical framework is examined in this article. The main thesis is that you really can’t “finish” a book based on such a depraved morality simply because there’s no satisfying conclusion possible. So instead of going out with a bang, the book ends in a whimper, with books that won’t and can’t be written. If this sounds familiar, it should, because fiat money has the same ethical basis and ends much in the same way, not with anything planned, but through self-contradiction.
Every Marriage is a Mistake - Believe it or not, a quote from Tolkien of all people, whose marriage lasted 55 years until his wife died. The main idea from the article is that it’s impossible to find “the one” because we are all imperfect human beings and that we have too much sin to be capable of being that for someone else. Which, in a strange way, is a comfort, at least for Christians, because the bond of marriage is not then held up by compatibility, or even hard work, but by grace. It’s a radically different message than the idea of soulmates, which is an Enlightenment era idea, and contains a deeper wisdom than the conventional high-time preference attitudes of being happy right now.
Relating to AI - The complaints about AI are many. It hallucinates too much. It acts evil when the guardrails are gone. It can’t do certain types of very basic tasks. Yet, as this article shows, most of these complaints are due to our attitude toward AI and not the other way around. We have humanized AI and expect ethical and moral behavior that we expect from humans, which is why we get upset when it lies to us or praises Hitler. As the article argues, we have the wrong metaphor. We shouldn’t think of AI as some sort of intelligence but as a “bag of words.” That way, we can see it for what it really is, which is a tool, and not a sovereign being with purpose, which is how we seem to be judging it.
Mamdani, PMC Candidate - If you’re not aware, Mamdani is the Democratic candidate for mayor of NYC, whose socialist stances are getting some national attention. You would think that with views like city-run grocery shops in poor neighborhoods, that he would be a darling of the lower class Democrats, but he was not. He’s also looking to heavily tax Wall Street, so the upper class Democrats don’t like him, either and also voted for his rival. So who voted for him? Mostly white, liberal middle class Democrats making somewhere between $70k-$160k/year. Many of these people are employed by the government or in very liberal industries (book publishing, media, academia, etc), though clearly not at the top of these hierarchies. In other words, it’s the professional management class, or the rent-seekers that are bringing him to power.
Progressivism’s Ideological Contradictions - This is an analysis from a right-wing writer about what changed in 2024 with Progressivism. I find it a little too much wishful thinking, but there are some excellent points made in this long-read. As he points out, Progressivism has always been a coalition of disparate groups whose ideologies often contradict one another and as one side of the contradiction defeats another, more and more people from that coalition end up leaving. Yet trying to win them back while clinging to the belief that alienated them in the first place turns out to be an exercise in rhetorical futility. It reminded me that fiat money has very similar dynamics, as inflation alienates a lot of people, who, once won to Bitcoin won’t turn back.
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
Compact Block Relay and Below Min Fee TXs - Compact Block Relay allows nodes to reconstruct blocks from a minimal set of information by using mempool transactions that got in. For all other transactions nodes request them from their peers to reconstruct the blocks. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work very well when most nodes don’t have these transactions, as is shown by this 0xB10C post on delving. Compact blocks basically requires that nodes have substantially similar mempools as the miners, but because nodes are being cut out of the transmission to miners with <1 sat/vbyte transactions recently, this has become a problem.
UtreeXO BIPs - The BIPs for the UtreeXO project are up, though no numbers have yet been assigned. There are three BIPs for the project, one for the accumulator, or the several kilobytes of data that represent the entire UTXO set, one for inclusion proofs, and finally one for validating blocks and transactions using the accumulator and inclusion proofs. The main tradeoff is that instead of storing the entire UTXO set, you can store just a few kilobytes in return for using up more bandwidth and CPU. This makes sense in certain contexts and I look forward to its usage on the network.
Proof-of-Non-Spam - This is a proof-of-concept for showing that a public key, hash pre-image, Taproot Scripts and Merkle Roots actually correspond to their respective private keys, hashes, actual scripts and legitimate Merkle Leafs respectively. The main idea is that you can design a mempool policy or even a consensus rule using these as to prevent unwanted and data-heavy transactions (aka spam).
Lightning
Layerz - What looks like on the surface like an in-browser lightning wallet is actually a Spark API (statechains protocol) underneath. I think they’re stretching the definition of “self-custodial” a bit there since it’s using statechains, but regardless, the fact that you can run something like this on your own server and have a lightning address included is pretty cool.
Openpleb - Banking QRs are a popular way to pay in China, India and many southeast Asian countries. This project matches people that can pay the Banking QRs in fiat currency with people that can pay via Lightning. The main benefit is that you don’t have to keep fiat around for payments like this and if the liquidity on these is high, it will make being on a Bitcoin standard easier.
Circuitbreaker - Lightning nodes have some vulnerabilities as in-flight HTLCs can be used to drain liquidity and DoS them. This is a way to mitigate against malicious HTLCs by rate-limiting them on your node. As the project README notes, circuitbreaker is like a firewall for your lightning node. Security around your lightning node like this will become more and more necessary as lightning gets more popular.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Spending Bitcoin in Lugano - KiraCoCo goes to Lugano for a few hours to spend some Bitcoin in the many shops that advertise accepting it. McDonalds and an ice cream shop worked, a cafe did not. Having seen this play out many, many times, the problems are almost always the same. The PoS system doesn’t integrate Bitcoin natively, so they have to use something else which few of the staff are familiar with, and too few people pay in Bitcoin for them to really get familiar with it. It’s no surprise then that the one place where it was easiest (McDonalds) required no staff, but were done on a touchscreen. That seems to be the best way for most businesses.
sat.watch - This is a useful tool to monitor your Bitcoin addresses as this will run in the background on your own node and send you a notification of some kind if there’s a transaction in or out. It’s basically like a watch-only wallet but not running in the background of your phone and offloads that watching to a server, which tends to be better at that sort of thing.
Positioning for the Bitcoin Boom - Adamant Research has updated its 2019 paper on positioning for the Bitcoin Boom. The older report was prescient in seeing the price rise that Bitcoin has undergone in the last 6 years, though obviously, it had no idea that something like the global COVID lockdowns would occur. The new report is as bullish as ever and worth going over, especially if you’re of the camp that we’ve already peaked this cycle.
Quick Hits
Expiring Money - Keynesian fantasies are coming to life in Australia with a digital money that expires getting some consideration.
Coinbase Ad Banned in UK - Apparently they don’t want you to question the fiat system in the UK, at least on TV.
127,426 BTC - This is the alleged amount stolen from LuBian, the Chinese and Iranian miner back in 2020. It was worth $3.5B then, now worth $14.5B.
Bitcoin Bank in El Salvador - El Salvador’s Bitcoin Office has announced what will be the first of its kind if implemented.
Fiat delenda est.