Bitcoin Tech Talk #465
Interesting Stuff
AI Productivity Lies - This is a sober look at the supposed productivity boost of AI, specifically for programmers and comes to the conclusion that it hinders, rather than boosts the productivity of coders. The author definitely does his homework and shows various charts around programmer productivity that clearly are staying flat or even decreasing a bit with the advent of AI. As he notes, if AI were this super productive tool, we would see some sort of bump in new apps, new video games, new github projects and even more domain registrations (for vibe-coded websites). But as he shows, these are not going up. It’s time to consider the possibility that AI productivity is exaggerated, or even non-existent.
Pity for the Disney Adult - This is a sad tale of a lower-middle class family that struggled, scrimped and saved to go to Disney World, spending something like 15% of their annual income after taxes to go and have what was decidedly a mediocre time. As the author notes, Disney World used to be $20 to get in, but now it’s easily in the 4 digit territory, especially if you add all the stuff like park guides, who let you get into the rides faster. This is an obvious case of inflation and skimpflation where the service not only costs more, but the stuff that used to come with the park ticket are now in a premium tier. Las Vegas is well known for doing the same thing, and unsurprisingly, their revenue is significantly down.
Nation vs People - This is something I’ve been thinking about, learning a bit of Greek for some Bible study. The Greek word that’s translated into nation is ἔθνη (ethne) and closely related to a particular ethnic group. This article argues that America is actually a people, an ἔθνη and not the “nation of immigrants” which it argues was an invention post 1965. The drift between ἔθνη and nation is correlated with fiat money and nearly every western nation is currently struggling because of the lack of ethnic identity in the migration crises. For me, the most insightful part was the process that creates a new ethnic identity.
Self-Handicapping - This is a wonderful article about the human capacity for caring and how that’s outrun our feelings of agency, which has led to a hopelessness about the problems in the world that we face. The article has a positive message and accurately examines the plight of the normie. The most interesting part for me was this idea of self-handicapping, or people that guarantee failure for themselves in some way. It’s a fiat phenomenon borne of hopelessness, in many ways because the problems of the world seem so intractable given the monolithic entities that caused it. The article made me grateful for the Bitcoin community, which is a much more hopeful one than the one in which most people reside.
Vegan Psychopaths - An intriguing study about the personality types of vegans really made me think. Do some vegans become vegans to get the moral highground? The article looks at the case study of Greta Thunberg, with little tidbits about her relationship to her parents which sound a lot like moral blackmailing. I’m not saying that this is the definitive reason for people becoming vegan, but I suspect there’s at least some minority that become vegan, or trans or animal rights activists for this reason. In a fiat world, moral highgrounds matter and unfortunately, people will waste a lot of their time, effort and resources to get it.
What I'm up to
Bitfluencers - These guys have been on a bit of a break the last 4 months, and I was their guest for their new episode. We talked about Core vs Knots, covenants proposals, what I expect fees to be and much more. It was nice to talk about some stuff from both a technical and economics angle as a lot of podcasts ignore one or the other.
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
Dorier on OP_RETURN - Nicolas Dorier opines on the OP_RETURN controversy, making the argument that the OP_RETURN change will reduce the growth of the UTXO set, which his project BTCPay relies on being manageably small. The argument rests on OP_RETURN actually shrinking the UTXO set, which to my knowledge has no real data behind it other than perhaps the remarks of the Citrea CTO. This seems to be the crux of the argument for the OP_RETURN/datacarriersize change, which is that the UTXO set will not be abused if more space were available on OP_RETURN.
Codex32 using BIP85 - Codex32 is defined in BIP93 as a way to backup a master seed using Shamir’s Secret Sharing. BIP85 is a way to derive entropy from a single master seed for applications, such as more HD wallets, passwords and so on. This pull request suggests that we can use BIP85 as a way to create Shamir Shares for BIP93. It’s a clever use of deterministic entropy to create shares without risking bad random number generators and should be useful for enterprise setups.
BTCD CVE - A bug in the btcd (a full node implementation written in Go) that would have caused a chain fork was revealed recently. Apparently, there’s a very quirky way in which it handled the signature within a data push which would have caused btcd to reject a transaction as invalid, but would have been valid for Bitcoin Core. The issue was reported over a year ago and only disclosed now. It’s a reminder that completely new implementations of Bitcoin node software is very difficult.
Lightning
Bullish Invoice - This is a neat little tool to make a Lightning Invoice into a real human-readable paper invoice with a LN invoice embedded in it. This can potentially be very useful for people that want to get paid in Lightning from a company or business and I expect tools like this to get more popular as Bitcoin payments becomes more popular.
Core Lightning 25.09 - The lightning node implementation now has bookkeeper, the popular accounting plugin into the core software, making it standard as well as faster for users. This should be a great way to enhance the experience for node runners as the data around channel states and so on are more easily accessible.
pkgzap - You can now embed a lightning address to your npm package and get zapped sats. The idea is to have supporters of various open source npm packages tip the developers without any of the overhead that typical payment systems use. I don’t know how many npm package developers are lightning users, but this is at least a good start to making open source software more value-for-value.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Bitcoin for the Global South - This is an article written for a progressive audience, distilling the usefulness of Bitcoin for people like the Burmese author. The article calls out the leftists against Bitcoin for not recognizing the harm they are inflicting and calls out their blind rage against Bitcoin as a right-wing thing. As the author notes, it’s a human rights tool and to be against it is to be against the people of the Global South that need it the most. This is a great article to send to your progressive friends.
Bitcoin Treasury Companies’ Future - This is a fresh take on where Bitcoin Treasury companies are headed, namely as Bitcoin banks/VCs of the future. It makes sense as the mNAV needs some justification, and lending out Bitcoin could generate the yield to justify the premium. Will they is the big question, as their own operations will likely not justify the additional value. For me, if BTC Treasury companies go down this road, they’ll be significantly more fragile and vulnerable to shock, and given that the world is used to fiat loans, will not be able to demand the interest rates required to justify high mNAVs.
Business Adoption Report - River has put out a report showing how businesses are driving the current Bitcoin run. They note the growth of Bitcoin Treasury companies and ETFs, but also, surprisingly, just normal businesses using Bitcoin as a treasury asset. What’s more surprising is that most of these companies (over 60%) are planning to hold the Bitcoin indefinitely and accumulate, much like Strategy.
Quick Hits
400 BTC House - Grant Cardone has sold his house for Bitcoin, a mansion in South Florida.
Ark Riga - Apparently, every lightning payment on the backend at the Riga conference was actually an Ark payment.
4048 BTC - The winner this week in the Treasury Bitcoin acquisition sweepstakes. Metaplanet also added over 1000 BTC.
Simplicity on Liquid - The alternative to Script is now live on the federated sidechain.
Fiat delenda est.