Interesting Stuff
LLM Fingerprints - AI writing has taken over a lot of writing, and this is a post by a long-time editor on the tells that LLMs have. A lot of people already know about the emdash and how it’s really only LLMs that use them, but there are other interesting tells. The one about having weasle-like tentative language was one that I’ve noticed in the past. Other ones, like the lack of specificity makes sense after you think about it. LLMs are very much like fiat money in that they take the form of real authored pieces without the soul. I suspect we’ll get better and better tells as time goes on, even as they play the cat and mouse game with people like this guy.
Real Numbers - To my knowledge, I have never posted anything in this section by a Bitcoin Core contributor, as their articles generally fit better in the lower section. But this one is about Real Numbers by Ethan Heilmann, whose conversations with Andrew Poelstra and Russell O’Conner apparently inspired this piece on reality and math. His argument is that anything in reality that works weirdly and is hard to accept is generally attributable to God and anything that works elegantly and intuitively is generally attributable to man. I would have believed this a few years ago, but since going down the rational trigonometry rabbit hole, I would say real numbers don’t exist and neither does the multitudes of infinities.
Giving People Money - Money is fungible so giving poor people money should create outcomes that are similar to people slightly richer, right? Turns out that almost every comprehensive study on universal basic income show that the money doesn’t change anything, even when it’s a substantial amount ($1000/month for 3 years). The article is written by someone that really wants UBI to work, so it’s a bit of a black pill for the author, but it does make sense that given money would be different than earned money. Despite the money being fungible, the way we get it matters, and at the core, this is something that the fiat monetary system refuses to acknowledge.
Housing Market Standoff - Mises.org points out that the current market where few houses are moving is directly the result of manipulated interest rates. The owners refuse to lower prices to the level where the buyers will bite, largely due to the low interest mortgages that they got in the zero-interest-rate-policy (ZIRP) era. So instead of selling, they’re taking their houses off the market, waiting out the correction rather than selling into it. This is a dynamic that we should get used to, because in a deflationary environment, this sort of thing happens a lot more often, where liquidity dries up. One of the “virtues” of fiat money is that almost anything and everything can be sold because of the infinite money.
Tattoos - I was thinking about tattoos recently because I was in Asia, where exposed tattoos will get you barred from gyms and bath houses, among other things. This article is a proposal to “end the tattoo epidemic.” There’s a lot in this article I didn’t know about tattoos, like the fact that the ink used can be pretty toxic or that removal is orders of magnitude more expensive than getting one. That said, I’m not a big fan of government intervention in this area (or really, any other area), but there definitely is something cultural about tattoos which correlates with bad outcomes.
What I'm up to
SoV vs MoE - As part of my vlog, I made my case for why the Store of Value function is primary and how Method of Payment is coming along nicely. Some people are just being a bit impatient.
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
EC OP BIP - Lalou from Lightning Labs has proposed a bunch of elliptic curve operations as OP codes in the BIP he’s written up. The main justification seems to be that combined with OP_CAT, these OP codes can make for more efficient covenants. This would be a soft fork as it re-purposes OP_SUCCESS codes within Taproot to be the new EC operations. As such, if it goes in at all, it’ll probably be as part of a big covenants soft fork.
Generalized Miniscript - Nunchuk has added generalized miniscript to their wallet, making, among other things, multisig timelocked addresses. What’s particularly notable is that they integrated a whole end-to-end messaging system for coordinating the signing of these transactions, which, to my knowledge hasn’t been done by any wallet. They’ve also managed hardware wallet integration, though it’s limited for Taproot miniscript and even more limited if using MuSig2. Hopefully, the degrading multisig (where less signatures are needed as time goes by), becomes a standard offering and I can’t wait for the Android release.
Unstoppable JPGs - The article from BitMex Research is about information theory and specifically, how fake addresses can essentially encode whatever data they want into the Bitcoin blockchain. Indeed, that’s exactly the proposal from Citrea (makers of BitVM) in an emergency that kicked off the process which ended with a merging of a change in the OP_RETURN limit (aka datacarriersize). They show that in order to stop this particular attack, that it would require a fundamental re-architect of Bitcoin, requiring proof that the private key to every address be known.
Lightning
Lightning as Treasury Strategy - A Canadian company with Bitcoin in their treasury started using the Lightning network as their method for generating yield on the Bitcoin they hold. According to the press release, they believe they can get something like a 24% APR in Bitcoin. That seems a bit high, and it’s based on their tests, so I would take the number with a grain of salt. As is true in most things, the profits don’t tend to scale linearly.
Papa Swap - If you want on-chain sats for your lightning sats while preserving privacy, submarine swaps have been your go-to. Think of Papa Swaps as submarine swaps 2.0. The main optimizations are that there’s only 1 transaction on-chain necessary, while using Taproot for byte efficiency and Nostr Wallet Connect for swap requests. The name, by the way, comes from Papa Class submarines, which were apparently, the fastest de-classified submarine made by the Soviet Union.
Routing as a Gentleman - Routing nodes are the backbone of the Lightning network and this post goes into what being a routing node as a matter of principle looks like. Much like mining, there are many different types of actors. Some are purely driven by profit, others by principle. A gentleman node is a bit of both and it describes what that would look like. Personally, I think this is closer to the economic reality than the homo economicus view of the world and the article is a good description of what other considerations someone might have.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
U of Chicago Endowment - Apparently, this Carnegie endowed institution lost a lot of money in the altcoin casino circa 2021. The article is about the performance of their endowment in general being poor compared both to the stock market and other college endowments, but stands out because of the large allocation to “crypto” markets from 2020-2022. They didn’t disclose much, but the allocation of 25% in 2020 to 20% in 2022 of alternative assets, which include crypto, hint at a shellacking. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Scaling Bitcoin Payments - Parker Lewis from Zaprite writes about how payments are so much more than a lightning invoice or a bitcoin address for any business as there are many more layers to the operations of any business. There’s a tendency of Bitcoiners to forget that for payments to be viable, there are lots of other business needs besides a fast and easy way to pay, including reports, records, auditability and the rest. The post is a good reminder that there are many more layers to build before Bitcoin payments become widespread.
Refurbished Nodes - If you’re not satisfied with the tech specs of the node-in-a-box providers, here’s an alternative. This site sells you older computers with the right specs that host a Bitcoin node. They are all Lenovo M900’s that have been repurposed and this seems like a reasonable way to repurpose older machines that come on the market. I know for myself that my node is running on an older computer that I used to have. As home lightning nodes and home mining becomes more attractive, these kinds of node solutions will become more popular.
Quick Hits
NPM Thief - A Node.js package impersonates a mailing program that actually maliciously manipulates crypto transactions.
Few Want Responsibility - Lyn Alden points out that the limitation is not in educating people on self-custody, it’s that so few people want to.
783 BTC - That’s how much someone lost in a social engineering scam.
Zucco on Filters - Giacomo gives a history lesson on where the spam filters first came from.
Fiat delenda est.