Bitcoin Tech Talk #468
Interesting Stuff
The Strength of Forgiveness - This is a moving essay from a really good writer about Charlie Kirk, the response of his wife, now widow and the emptiness of an ideology without redemption. It’s a long essay, but the point that stood out to me was that the unforgiving nature of leftist cancellation scare many, but in a sense makes the entire ideology and the power it yields fragile. The fear builds resentment, which builds resistance and eventually hits an inflection point where the whole thing may crumble. Indeed, that’s the main point of the essay, that the murder of Kirk may really be that inflection point.
Group Madness - It’s easy to think that smart people, at least as a collective, know what they’re doing. But as this article shows, that’s far from the truth. The article reminds us of ridiculous proposals that were very popular for a time, like distributed manufacturing, paperless office and even object oriented programming. Smart people are just as susceptible to groupthink, rationalizations, wishful thinking and motivated reasoning. Perhaps more so, because their intellect, and perhaps the fiat money it attracts, lets them continue in their folly.
Civil War Origins - Don’t worry that the latter half of the article is behind the paywall, the first half is interesting enough. The normie conception of the Civil War is that it was a fight over slavery. The more historically knowledgeable conception is about whether newly admitted states would do so as slave states or free states. This article gives more context to the cultural influences at the time, which definitely played a role, but is not really mentioned in history books. Namely, one John Brown, and what happened in Haiti. The defiance that the South showed in Abraham Lincoln’s election was largely due to the strange, perhaps glory-seeking man and the spin the supporters of abolition put on his death. I won’t spoil what happened, please go read the whole thing.
Theranos - The story of Theranos is supposedly a pretty open and shut case of corporate fraud… or is it? The article argues that the kind of people involved, particularly on its board and the crazy heights that the company hit before its fall suggests that something much more foul was afoot. It’s the first of a 3-part series written in 2021, and suggests that given the unusual number of military people involved and the relative lack of medical people, that this was a government operation the whole time. Much like the Epstein story, I suspect there’s a lot more here than a simple fraud story.
IQ and War - I honestly hadn’t considered the effect of IQ on war, as I had thought that so much of the inequality of war was mostly negated through more and more powerful weapons. Yet the argument presented here makes sense and the evidence pretty powerful. Of particular note was the experiment in Vietnam that’s referred to in the piece, Project 100, derisively called McNamara’s Morons, which was an attempt to use lower IQ soldiers which the US military hadn’t used before in war. The results of that experiment really speak for themselves.
What I'm up to
Treasury Orange - I talked on this podcast about Bitcoin Treasury companies, why I don’t invest in them, specifically why I don’t think they’re moral for me to d so. We talked a good deal not just about that but about the OP_RETURN controversy and a bunch of other topics.
Young America’s Foundation Road to Freedom - Later this week, 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, moral money.
Lugano Plan B Forum - In a few weeks, on October 24-25, I will be in Lugano for the Plan B Forum. It looks like I will be doing a debate with Peter Todd about the OP_RETURN controversy and running a workshop for my open source project, the family Bitcoin banking app.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Luke Drama - The Rage, the on-line privacy mag, unironically published a bunch of private messages (yes, really) from Luke Dashjr with an unnamed person. The confused author concluded that Luke wanted to hard fork Bitcoin, which has not only been denied by Luke, but corroborated by a more technical analysis of the messages. This wasn’t the only direct attack on Luke this week. Things definitely seem to be coming to a head as the October release of Core v30 approaches.
Undeprecation PR - In the meantime, Mike Schmidt has opened a pull request to un-deprecate the datacarrier and datacarriersize options. As you might expect, there’s a good deal of commentary about the pull request, whether it’s giving in too much to the naysayers or that it doesn’t go far enough in reversing the damage of the changes. The one comment I made was answered by the author of the pull request which got merged. I have never seen such a use case and can’t really think of situations where that would even be considered useful. Alas, that explanation seems good enough for the people considering the PR. The PR is being considered for v30, though, as of publication time, not yet merged.
Misbehaving Nodes - Antoine Poinsot, refreshingly has something unrelated to the OP_RETURN controversy in this blog post about nodes which connected with some weird version messages. Specifically, the timestamp was off by 3.5 days and he goes through what he did to figure out the culprit, which turned out to be nodes that were misconfigured by bitprojects. The thought process and tools he used are worth looking at should you get some odd behavior from connected nodes.
Lightning
Eclair 0.11 Exploit - Matt Morehouse shows how Eclair 0.11 can be taken advantage of by using a flushed HTLC. The code unfortunately only watches the current list of HTLCs which means that older hashes can be used by counterparties to take money unfairly from the channel. 0.12 does not have this vulnerability so please upgrade if you’re running this Lightning Node software.
Telegram Lightning - There are a whole host of bots that can be used in Telegram channels for tipping and other things with Lightning. This convenient blog post goes through the options, how to set them up and what features each bot has. This is one of those things that sound a little more useful than it actually is in my experience. I suppose if you were paying for information, this would make more sense, but given how most info is free, it’s a difficult sell.
phoenixd Dashboard - The popular lightning node management software has a nice dashboard open source project. You can create invoices directly, add support for LNURL in a nice-looking UX. How long until node-in-a-box provider adds this to their suite?
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
StableCoin Inflation - The article is from Mises.org and is clearly from a goldbug, who doesn’t seem to understand that a stablecoin backed by gold is a gold substitute, but a stablecoin backed by Bitcoin is unnecessary as that’s just Bitcoin. Still, the article is a more mainstream understanding of what stablecoins allow, which is inflation through consumer, not central bank, demand. The latter is mostly gone and actually negative lately, and in a sense, stablecoins are a method of spreading out the inflation much more evenly to countries with more local inflation.
Strive Acquires Semler - The Ramaswamy created Bitcoin Treasury company has bought the medical equipment manufacturer/Bitcoin Treasury company, whose mNAV was trading below 1. It looks like a pretty straightforward discounted way to buy Bitcoin using stock and honestly must feel like buying dollars for fifty cents. The consolidation of Bitcoin treasury companies is inevitable because of this dynamic, but more importantly, if a company has a good cash position and wants to be acquired, is buying Bitcoin going to become a viable strategy?
eCash Advancements - There are a whole bunch of eCash projects with Bitcoin, and this post from OpenSats goes through all the different projects and the progress that they’re making. I’m still disappointed that no stablecoin provider is using this technology as it’s much more private than using blockchains. Of course, the reason is probably not technical, but political as eCash mints are centralized.
Quick Hits
Pay Ohio State Services in BTC - This is sort of a reverse of legal tender laws, where the government gives the option of getting paid in sound money instead of fiat.
10GW for OpenAI - That’s how much power they’re using. Bitcoin uses roughly 22GW.
Kevin Durant and Coinbase - Apparently, he can’t access his Coinbase account, which, presumably has lots of Bitcoin from 10 years ago.
Miniscript Studio - You can play with different policies in this neat website.
Fiat delenda est.