Bitcoin Tech Talk #463
Interesting Stuff
Tribal Conformity - We are all social creatures, and it is very difficult for most people to go against not just the crowd, but their own tribe. That’s what this article is about, which are the consequences of tribal conformity. Specifically, we start to lose a distinction between what we believe and what the tribe believes, and ultimately lose ourselves in the tribe. Ultimately, this means we become a little less ourselves and a little more a generic member of the tribe, which while avoiding conflict, degrades your ability to respond to reality. This is particularly prevalent in political and corporate contexts, which unsurprisingly are some of the most fiat institutions.
Bureactratic Tyranny - This is the story about a greenhouse that someone was building in a small Colorado town. After reading through the laws and regulations, the builders determined that they didn’t need a permit. The town disagreed, and after what looks like bureaucratic tyranny on the part of the town, the owners are being sued so that the greenhouse be taken down. What’s notable is that there’s no racial or class tension here. It’s a small town with mostly white residents. But the bureaucratic flavor is the same, that of petty power games and harassment. Sadly, rent-seeking turns people this way, and of course, rent-seeking is almost exclusively paid for by fiat money.
Fairy Tale Politics - This post is at the crossroads between cultural narratives and politics, specifically, a view of the world that is shaped by stuff like TV, books and movies that find its way into politics. For example, the war in Ukraine is seen by the interventionists as something that’s solved as soon as Putin is killed. This is a naive, reading-too-much-fiction way of looking at things, as if destroying the leader would destroy the entire country. Sadly, the fairy-tale/Hollywood way of resolving difficult conflicts is what a lot of people unversed in real life conflict think is the way to go. In a sense, too many people have too little real experience with conflict.
NK Birth Rates - A city in North Korea is, shall we say, “incentivizing” their unmarried 28-year old women to get married as a way to increase birth rates. South Korea, of course, is known now the world over as the place with the lowest birth rates, but North Korea (1.8 births per woman) isn’t doing so hot, either. In characteristic fashion, they’re putting women that don’t get married on lists for hard labor, and admonishing them to have babies as part of their “socialist duty.” It’s easy to deride this obvious intrusion into the lives of these people, but are the more “capitalist” methods (time off, bonuses, discounts, etc) any better? Maybe it’s all the other government intervention that has created the problem in the first place.
People Pleasing Christian Boys - Christianity and the culture that’s grown up around it are two separate things. They’re related, for sure, as the tenets of the faith shape a lot of the culture, but as the article points out, combined with modern sensibilities, what Christianity has produced are essentially directed much more toward the feminine and has resulted in people-pleasing boys. Sadly, I neglected this article for a couple of weeks and it’s now behind a paywall, but I think most Christians can identify how the feminization of the church has had a bad effect on the boys.
What I'm up to
Hostility - I made this video about the latest revelations in the Core vs Knots node war. Though I think what Portland.Hodl did was nasty, arrogant and malicious, I believe that ultimately, the hardening of nodes that happen through actions like this will be good for Bitcoin.
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. I’ll speak about the trucker protests as a launching point for embracing non-governmental, politically neutral money.
Lugano Plan B Forum - A few weeks later October 24-25, I will be in Lugano for the Plan B Forum. It looks like I may be doing a debate and running a workshop for my open source project, the family Bitcoin banking app.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Recovery Keys - Wizardonline describes timelocked alternative spend paths as “recovery keys” in an article that presents a clear and unambiguous use case. So fare it looks like only Liana wallet supports this, but this could theoretically be something every wallet can implement, particularly in a hidden tapscript output, perhaps without even the key holder knowing. Unfortunately, this is a long-term planning feature and one that’s not likely to bite people until years after a security incident or lost keys happen. Still, it’s a good idea which I hope will become more normal going forward.
Garbled Locks Paper - This is a paper about Garbled Locks, which are a form of a fraud proof for BitVM, where instead of providing a large payload to prove that a program didn’t execute correctly, there’s instead a secret that gets leaked when the corresponding Garbled Circuits are not executed correctly. That secret can be used to create a signature which can then become a proof of incorrect execution. The BitVM-style smart contracts are making a lot of headway in reducing the on-chain footprint, and this is one of the many ways in which researchers are finding optimizations.
One-time Signature Vulnerability - Here’s an unexpected vulnerability that corresponds to the previous story about BitVM-style smart contracts. One of the assumptions is that the pre-image is relatively small, but if that size is larger, we can get into a situation where the transactions become too big for relay! An attacker can potentially reveal the pre-image but make it hard for the verifier to get the transaction into the block for their justice transaction by making the transaction not conform to node filtering rules.
Lightning
Castle of Glass - The article argues that Lightning has had a lot of technical debt to pay off from the early days and the security vulnerabilities that have been found over the years proves it. The call to action is a more sustainable and adversarial mentality toward building so that the network isn’t so fragile. I thought the article was exaggerating the consequences a bit, but the general sentiment is correct.
How Far LN has come - It’s easy to forget that Lightning really wasn’t a thing until, say, 5 years ago. And in that time, the usage has gone parabolic. This newsletter from Lightning Labs points out just how far we’ve come (1000x in transaction volume!) and where we’re likely to go, given the stablecoin rails being built. A lot of people decry the lack of method of payment adoption, but I’d say that lightning is the real canary in the coal mine and an explosion in payments has already happened and will continue.
Lightning Piggy - Want your kids to save but not in fiat? Here’s a cool little project that lets them see how much they’ve saved in sats using lightning. As you might expect, it’s a lot of little electronic parts and 3d printing that make it up. I think a usable product like this will be a hit among the many Bitcoin parents out there.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Javier Milei, Fake Libertarian - Saifedean makes the case that Javier Milei is ruining the country and not turning it into the Libertarian place that he promised. He shows his work and reveals that Lebanon is actually doing better than Argentina, without any sort of Libertarian at the helm. The most obvious indicator, as he points out, is that Milei did not shut down the central bank, which he promised to do. Instead, Milei has doubled down on IMF loans and the like, creating even more debt and continuing Argentina’s history of monetary debasement.
NAKA’s first purchase - 5744 BTC is what this heavily marketed, BM-associated Bitcoin treasury company has acquired. That’s obviously a lot and they took over a micro-cap stock called Kindly MD to do it. Their stated goal is to get to 1 million Bitcoin, which I don’t think is realistic, but it’s good to have goals, I suppose. Along with Strategy, 21, Metaplanet and others, the space is looking a bit crowded and I don’t think the appetite for these stocks is infinite.
Transparent Currency - Mises.org has written on the supposed benefits of CBDCs which is that they’re transparent. This could be useful if the government were bound by the transparency, as we could see, for example where the tax dollars are going and would be a good way to expose corruption. But instead, it’s mostly used for surveillance, starting with “bad guys” and slowly expanding until it’s pretty much everyone. As the article notes, Bitcoin is not exactly private, but is in strong contrast to what CBDCs will supposedly do.
Quick Hits
11% - That’s how much Steak and Shake says their revenue increased as a result of adopting Bitcoin payments.
Harvard - Apparently their endowment has invested $1.9B in Bitcoin ETFs.
Bo Hines - The former Trump crypto council executive director has joined Tether.
CKPool Policy - The pool decided no longer to mine sub 1 sat/vbyte transactions.
Fiat delenda est.