Bitcoin Tech Talk #470
Interesting Stuff
- has this story of the Superintendent from Des Moines that was arrested by ICE for having been an illegal immigrant for 30 years is really something to behold. It seems the guy has been rent-seeking the entire time, flitting from sinecure to sinecure, misrepresenting his credentials and failing upward for years on end. What’s surprising is not that he’s been in the US for 30 years and working various jobs in public education, but that he’s been so sloppy yet wasn’t caught. This guy wasn’t some brilliant mastermind that managed to evade authorities for years through cunning and wit, but an utter mediocrity that played the system like an amateur and still succeeded for 30 years.
- has a fascinating analysis of the reality of many children of “the elite” finding themselves falling behind not just their parents’ achievements but often their peers that don’t come from such privileged backgrounds. The main idea is that these are the people that constitute a bulk of the Democratic party nowadays, the people that want Mamdani in office in NYC and are flirting with socialism as a way to get the power and riches that they think they deserve. It’s frankly a class thing, and in a fiat money system, the downward mobility does tend to foment resentment. This article on the class system in the US is a useful compendium to this article, though great in its own right.
Power of Reddit - This is a frightening story of how one moderator of a subreddit basically destroyed a company. The company is named CodeSmith and they are a coding bootcamp, which have been a very popular way to enter the programming industry. A competitor CEO managed to become a moderator of the subreddit that talks about coding bootcamps and badmouthed them at every turn. Not only were a lot of people turned away from CodeSmith through this direct assault, but because search engines (and LLMs by extension) rely so much on Reddit content, their business started slipping rapidly. This is the power of centralization. Though not obvious, it looks like Reddit becoming a trusted authority for a bunch of topics has given too much power to moderators, which can then be exploited.
Rethinking Dead Poet’s Society -
writes about Dead Poet’s Society, a beautiful movie from 1989 which almost every teacher, particularly of humanities, loves. But as this review suggests, the movie in many ways debased the humanities by subtly making the whole thing about feelings, and not about the art. As the article points out, the ripping up of the introduction to the book about poetry is celebrated in the movie, but is never replaced with anything but vague, general feelings. As with any field of study, there are disputes and arguments and rigor and confusion. It’s in examining, pursuing, contemplating that the art is unlocked. That’s something the movie completely failed to convey and in many ways played into the stereotype of the humanities: a bunch of fluff that’s not to be taken seriously.Slave Revolts - We tend to have a romantic view of slave rebellions, that they were driven by slaves that were sick of getting beaten, of being abused, being forced to work and so on. But as this article shows, abuse is actually not what drives rebellion, but the prospect for a better situation. It’s a bit jarring to read, but many slave rebellions in the Americas during the 1700-1850 era were not led by field slaves sick of getting bad treatment, but rather by the more favored slaves that were treated relatively better. Like most revolutions, they are not led by the lowest of the low, but usually by someone more in the middle, striving to get higher.
What I'm up to
Bitcoin Builder’s Club - I apologize in advance for the audio, but this was a conversation I had with Car Gonzalez a few weeks ago about startups, datacarriersize, where the opportunities are and many other things. As I said, the audio isn’t great, but you should still be able to hear most of what I’m saying.
Bitcoin Historico - I will be in San Salvador Nov 12-13 to talk about Noblesse Oblige. This one-of-a-kind event is not your typical Bitcoin conference. The vision is much grander, more historically aware and more enlightening than your typical conference with altcoiners and associated scams. Set in the historic center of San Salvador, this conference really will be something else. I’ll be giving a talk on Noblesse Oblige. Use code CROWN to get 10% off.
Lugano Plan B Forum - In a little over a week on October 24-25, I will be in Lugano for the Plan B Forum. I will be doing a debate with Peter Todd about OP_RETURN/spam mitigation. I will not, however, be doing a workshop as originally planned. There will be some books that I will bring for you to purchase if you’d like a signed copy.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Header-Only SPV - SuperTestnet has a proposal for a dead-simple light client that prunes the UTXO set. The main insight is that not every peer is going to lie by omission when asked for proof that a certain UTXO is spent, so invalid blocks could be figured out quickly by asking peers for UTXO spent proofs in a previous block. This way, the UTXO set can be kept a constant size (say, 1GB) and any other UTXO queried by other nodes. It’s a very interesting proposal because it keeps at least the disk space required constant, in exchange for more CPU time validating.
Core v30 - Is now out, along with the controversial datacarriersize changes, there are a bunch of RPC and indexing changes as well. Controversially, there are some suggestions that there are as-yet undocumented security fixes. I say controversial because if they exist, they should be disclosed at least, to forks of Bitcoin Core, like Knots, but apparently, they are being hidden. If they don’t exist, that would be even worse, as that would be a way to deceitfully blackmail users into using the Core client. Whatever the case may be, I’ll be watching for network adoption of the client to see if it gets above the percolation threshold.
Bullish Decoder - This is a useful tool to decode any payment string, like a BOLT12 offer, Cashu token, Lightning invoice and the like. If you’re developing any of these things, or better yet, multiple of these protocols, then this will be a nice tool to have for debugging.
Lightning
Sparkscan - Wallet of Satoshi made some news this week, by launching a more self-custodial wallet using Spark as the backend. This isn’t as good as it seems, as the aforementioned link allows you to look up balances of any lightning wallet supplied by them. It just requires any BOLT11 invoice and a tool to decode what the lightning address is. Not only that, but they’re not exactly self-custodial, either.
BLFS - The acronym stands for Bitcoin Lightning for Shopify and is exactly like what it sounds, which is a backend for Shopify merchants to take lightning payments. It uses Nostr Wallet Connect and has a very interesting architecture. You can, for example, use multiple backends for redundancy and decentralization should one provider of the BLFS service goes down. A single backend can also serve multiple merchants, meaning that both the merchant and backend provider are not stuck with each other.
Turning a Profit - This is a blog post from a Lightning routing node operator, going through his 4-year journey on making his node profitable. The node is finally making money, after a lot of trial and error. What’s notable is just how difficult it is, despite the decent-sized channel (0.48 BTC) and how competitive routing really must be for him to make so little money (on the order of a few dollars every month). As I’ve opined before, lightning operations is not a risk-free rate of return, but a job like any other, which requires a good deal of work.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Signal + Cashu - If you’re a fan of Signal, but not a fan of their altcoin (MobileCoin), this will be a project of interest. It’s a fork of Signal that retains the MobileCoin UI, but substitutes it with Cashu, the Bitcoin eCash protocol. Given that Cashu has a similar profile as Signal in that it’s centralized but private, this should be a pretty good match for those seeking privacy. It’s a great strategy to get a lot more people onto Cashu.
Mt Gox Revelations - Mark Karpeles has this post on X about an engineer he’s convinced was some sort of evil agent during the Mt Gox bankruptcy from 12 years ago. It’s a bit of a strange story, and I suspect we’ll get more details over time about what exactly happened as he gets more comfortable telling these stories. That said, it’s odd that he chooses not to talk about what caused the hack and instead focuses on an employee that he clearly didn’t trust.
Ver Deal - Roger Ver agreed to settle his tax problems with the IRS for a cool $48M. Given that this is around 400 BTC now and he managed to save something like 20,000 BTC by not following the letter of the law when he renounced his US citizenship, it’s probably a good deal for him in the end. I only say probably because I have no idea how much of the Bitcoin he kept and how much he spent on ventures like Bitcoin Cash.
Quick Hits
Luxembourg buys Bitcoin - They are the first EU country that we know of to have done so.
Square Stacking - The Bitcoin aligned Point-of-Sale company will have live Bitcoin payments on their terminals starting Nov 10.
Nobel Peace Prize Winner - Is a Bitcoin fan and has been for a while. Not a surprise given she’s Venezuelan.
OP_RETURN2 - BitMexResearch has some details on what OP_RETURN2 would entail, though it’s probably already a dead idea at this point.
Fiat delenda est.