Bitcoin Tech Talk #471
Interesting Stuff
UN Waste - The multinational body that’s much better at creating bureaucratic sinecures than actually getting done isn’t just a gigantic waste of money, but something far more sinister. The article is about UN operations in Sierra Leone, the West African country that once was prosperous, but fell into civil war. As the article shows, the military intervention of the UN was worse than useless, and the soldiers supplied by the participating countries, also worse than useless. What’s particularly galling is that it’s usually governments from the west that have to intervene to fix the mess that the UN creates, and oftentimes, this is done through private military contractors like Blackwater. The whole thing is infuriating as much of the funding comes from fiat money, and thus stolen from dollar holders.
- has this thought-provoking essay about the reality of getting fiction published, distributed and read in a decentralized way. As he points out, centralization is at multiple levels, like gatekeeping, ideology, and privacy. But the most practical aspect is the discovery and distribution, which centralized platforms excel at, and decentralized platforms don’t really do well. As he points out, a permissive centralized platform like Substack is in that way more preferable than a decentralized one like Nostr simply because of the benefits like the minimization of friction. This is worth considering as we head toward a post-fiat subsidized world.
- has this article on the economics of nursing homes and how exploitive they are of the old people that populate them. There are tiers to these places, and nice ones apparently cost $10,000/month whereas the cheap ones are paid by Medicaid ($5000/month). As you might expect, the Medicaid nursing homes are far worse, even taking into account the price differential, and are minimalist operations where they cut as much cost as they can. Yet the nice ones aren’t much better as they essentially drain the accumulated wealth of the residents month by month, leaving very little for their heirs. The article compares these places to prisons, a disturbingly accurate comparison.
- has a long and insightful article about the current administration’s actions, which he calls Poastocracy, that is, rule by poasting. Right wing meme culture that he refers to, has, in a sense, grown up and found some traction in the Trump administration. As he notes, a lot of the ideas from the administration seem to be coming from few-thousand follower X accounts, which are boosted by more popular X accounts until it gets to Elon Musk or someone similarly higher up. There are many drawbacks and benefits to this approach as the article is quick to point out, but it is meritocratic, and perhaps an indicator of how politics will play out in the future.
Starting Strength - I recently discovered
and , a married couple who review various books and discuss them in a blog post format. The book they’re reviewing is a classic in the powerlifting world, which is Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength. But the review isn’t so much about powerlifting per se, but about the utility of strength. As they point out, there’s something fundamentally different about how you relate to the world when you’re strong versus when you’re weak. They get into not just the mental benefits of strength, but the general mismatch between what our bodies are designed to do versus what we actually end up doing. It’s a delightful review and if it gets you to lift, so much the better!
What I'm up to
Knots vs Core - I did two episodes over the week on Tone Vays’s channel about the OP_RETURN controversy, having Adam Back on the first episode and Mechanic/Luke Dashjr on the second. It was mostly asking the guests questions about their perspective. There’s about 5 hours total of video here, and what’s crazy is that we didn’t even get through the issue that thoroughly. Still, hearing from these guys definitely gives a better idea of where everyone’s at now that Core v30 is out. There will perhaps be more videos, with even more people so if you liked it, stay tuned.
Bitcoin Historico Spaces - I spoke with Stacy Herbert about the conference coming up on November 12-13. As I spoke about in the link, this is a very different conference than any others that I’ve been in. There are general Bitcoin conferences, altcoin conferences, technical conferences, financial conferences and even ones focused on moral and spiritual aspects (like Thank God for Bitcoin). But this one is focused on the long-term societal change, and the speakers will be talking about that. I’ll have a talk on noblesse oblige, particularly the moral obligation of the elite that Bitcoiners will become.
Lugano Plan B Forum - I’m traveling to Lugano this week for the conference on October 24-25. I will be doing a debate with Peter Todd about using filters for 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
Compact Block Relay Test - Really interesting test running a Knots node to see how much data came in with each peer. The test was to measure how many transactions would be necessary to request in a compact block relay reconstruction of a block, which turns out to not be that bad. But the much more interesting result is that connecting to Core 29.1 and Core 30.0 nodes used *much* more bandwidth (200+MB vs 10MB), as they were relaying a ton of sub 1 sat/vbyte transactions. This was necessary to get compact block relay reconstruction to work well, but having many such connected nodes is redundant for the node runner and only wastes a lot of bandwidth.
Anti-Large ScriptPubkey Soft Fork - This is a proposal from PortlandHODL about no longer allowing ScriptPubKeys that are greater than 520 bytes. The discussion has a lot of comments, including a proposal to make this soft fork time-limited, making it a one or two year experiment that can be renewed if it doesn’t harm anything. This is a consensus change largely to mitigate spam and seems to have a lot of support, though the details seem to be quite devilish.
Undead Dandelion - If you don’t remember Dandelion (BIP156) was a way to send Bitcoin transactions from a node and not reveal the origin, largely by probabilistically waiting some amount of hops before gossiping the transaction across the network. The idea was rejected largely due to the complexity, not just of implementation but of maintenance. What’s interesting about this particular implementation is that it was done on a Knots fork. Could features like this become a differentiator between implementations that make a difference?
Lightning
Labeled Lightning Visualization - If you like seeing the Lightning network as a visualization, this is one that I haven’t seen yet. The main interesting thing about it is that it has many of the known nodes labeled, and their type color coded. Particularly large channels (so-called Wumbo) are also highlighted and you can see who’s doing business with whom. I was surprised to see that stuff like yalls.org still exists and has a pretty decent capacity.
lndnotify - This is a project that you can run on your lightning node to inform you of various events, such as payment forwarding, channel opening, failed HTLCs and so on. Think of this as a monitor on your lightning node, especially if you’re using it for routing. As I’ve opined before, running a lightning node may not be really risking the funds in it, but it is a job and not a risk-free rate of return, and tools like this existing prove it.
Remote Running - Speaking of which, here is an article on the pitfalls of running a node remotely. As the article shows, there are a lot of different considerations, from hardware, software, security, remote access, backups and channel management which take a non-trivial amount of time. It’s all a bit too much for most people, and I wonder when running an effective and useful node will get easier and worth the headaches.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
127,000 BTC - That’s the amount the US government is attempting to take possession of from what they allege is a southeast Asian criminal network called The Prince Group. To be clear, it’s in a US Court’s custody after busting a Cambodian national in a joint operation by the US and the UK. Apparently this was a scam operation that’s racked up quite the haul, and if the US government keeps these coins, would amount to a significant increase in the Bitcoin reserve.
1M BTC - This is the total amount of Bitcoins being held by Bitcoin treasury companies, whose number has increased by 40% in just the last 3 months. Things are not all rosy, however, as many Bitcoin Treasury Companies (BTCTCs) are trading in the stock market under 1 mNAV, or below the value of the Bitcoin they hold. Several of these companies are trading below the price they sold their PIPEs at and there’s some talk that the Semler aquisition by Strive faces a shareholder revolt.
End of Petrodollar - This article puts out an intriguing possibility. Did the petrodollar system end in 2023? In a strict sense, it very well might have. Saudi Arabia, among others, started taking non-dollar currencies for oil in 2023. And if that’s really the lynch pin for dollar supremacy, that would mean that the great unwind of the reserve currency status has started. We wouldn’t expect everything to collapse really fast, but that there would be signs. Like central banks stockpiling gold and deleveraging of US treasuries. The US would experience more inflation even with tighter monetary policy because dollars would be in less demand. I hadn’t thought of the petrodollar ending this way, but this very well may be correct.
Quick Hits
Square Bitcoin - The ubiquitous point-of-sale terminal has Bitcoin integrated now.
Islamic Finance and Bitcoin - There’s a lot of restrictions on financial activity in Islam, and this post analyzes Bitcoin in that context.
More Liquidations - $800M this time in a couple hours. Not as much as the liquidation cascade the Friday before, but still significant.
$250k - Jack Dorsey gave Tether a hard time for their relatively small-ish donation to OpenSats.
SBF Whitewashing - The article is trash, trying to excuse SBF for his rugpull of FTX customers, but it does raise a question. Is there a pardon for him on the horizon?
Fiat delenda est.