Bitcoin Tech Talk #473
Interesting Stuff
- examines what he calls the decline of deviance in contemporary society, particularly with respect to other eras. As he shows by many different metrics, the current generation is more conventional and therefore more stagnant than ever and the intellectually deviant people few and far between. There has been a cultural conformity seen in all manner of art and a general derisking of nearly everything. I suspect this is a consequence of financialization from fiat money, rather than the desire to live longer as he concludes, but the statistical observations are quite startling.
Manichaeism - Another article from the male half of my favorite book reviewers
. Manichaeism is one of those religions that had a huge effect on history but very few people realize or understand. The article is a review of a book on this very subject, tracing the origins of this dualist Christian heresy from Gnosticism to Marcionism to Marichaeism and, as the author implies, Calvinism. There’s more than just the religious uptake, but also the north vs south divide that is surprisingly prevalent, the political situation of France at the time of Manichaeism’s flourishing and Pope Innocent III’s crusade which resulted.- reflects on the current political violence and brings us back to what the conditions were like before the Civil War. As he notes, there were 40 years of compromises before the conflagration of hostilities, and there were many hints of its coming, particularly in Congress. Indeed, the title of the essay is about a brawl that included 30-50 Congressmen duking it out with fists over the question of whether Kansas should be a slave state or a free state. The most pertinent part of the essay is the conclusion. Some debates can’t be settled by debate and lead to war. Do we currently have such a divide and are we at such a juncture?
H1B Abuse - The story is about FedEx, the company who famously succeeded with a business model that got a C in business school. What had been a family oriented, competent and profitable company has become, according to this article, something of a train wreck. The big turning point is the retirement of its founder and CEO Fred Smith who was replaced by Raj Subramaniam. Since then, the company has hired a lot of Indian H1B’s, outsourced a lot of operational things to Indian subcontractors and hired a lot more ethnically Indian workers at all levels. If you read between the lines, the implication is that there’s way more rent-seeking as a result of ethno-nepotism and a reduction in the service’s quality. I suspect there’s something about a position not being merit-based that increases rent-seeking behavior, something that exacerbates under fiat money.
- writes about what Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aka Food Stamps and what it purports to be vs what it really is. The perception is that SNAP is feeding the hungry, the people that would otherwise get no food and is something like Christian charity. But of course, the political reality is much different and it’s much closer to an entitlement for the 12% of the population that uses the EBT system. As the benefits are about to stop as part of the month-long government shutdown, we’re about to find out if SNAP is a benevolent program, the bread of bread and circuses, or the tribute the government pays to the poor to keep them from rioting.
What I'm up to
Tone Vays Show Part III - We talked to Bob Burnett to get the miner perspective on this whole debate and found out a few things. For one, public miners actually don’t really want to make their own templates because it gives them plausible deniability with respect to OFAC lists and so on. His main use case for Knots wasn’t necessarily this recent OP_RETURN default change, but rather the ability to tune the block templates which he wanted for his mining operation.
Bitcoin Historico - I will be in San Salvador on November 12-13. 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 failure of fiat elites and the moral obligation of Bitcoiners in the world to come.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
BIP444 - This is a soft fork proposal to limit OP_PUSHDATA to 256 bytes among other things. The main idea is that this soft fork does at a consensus level what the Knots proponents have wanted done at the policy level, as was requested by many Core devs. Indeed, the original idea came from Portland HODL but his was changing scriptPubKeys to be limited to 520 bytes. Among other interesting innovations is the idea of a temporary soft fork, where this consensus limit would exist for some amount of time at first (2 years or so) and revert by default after a certain block height. Of course the network can choose to extend this. Anyway, the proposal has been infected a bit with over-the-top rhetoric, but continues to be considered.
Arkash - Supertestnet has this very interesting conglomeration of a couple different concepts, merging Ark and ecash to come up with this mixture. Why would you want this? Normal lightning payment require an invoice and a normal on-chain payment requires a Bitcoin address. With Arkash the recipient does not need to provide the sender with anything, which is similar to the ecash interface. The sender gets the payment on Ark, which isn’t as private as ecash, but also doesn’t require trusting the ecash mint as you can unilaterally exit on-chain.
CoinJoin Privacy - Spiral has this very useful post on the various forms of Bitcoin anonymization, including coinjoin, payjoin, coinswap and even lightning. The article is slightly mathematical and describes a lot of the theoretical heuristics for determining the same owner for different UTXOs. Privacy is a pretty difficult topic in a UTXO-based system and the various techniques are probably under-analyzed for various weaknesses. This is a good step in more analysis so the best privacy solutions can emerge.
Lightning
Routing Details - What makes Lightning decentralized is the fact that the nodes connect peer-to-peer. Of course, this makes payment a lot more complicated as there’s no central entity to route through, so it’s important to understand how routing works in Lightning and this post delivers. The post is technical as you might expect and there’s a good amount of detail about path discovery, topology and onion routing.
Macadamia Wallet - This is one of those hybrid wallets that take advantage of the Lightning Network for settlement, but use ecash behind the scenes. The name of the wallet is a play on cashu/cashew and as they explain, you can pay lightning invoices with it by “melting” ecash tokens. The wallet works like a normal Bitcoin/Lightning wallet in that there’s a 12-word seed phrase to back up everything, with the additional benefit of ecash privacy.
Bitcoin Postcards - You can send a postcard to many places around the world for just $3 in Lightning. The key to the postcard is that you can upload whatever pic for the postcard itself. I love services like this, that do something in the real world for some Lightning payment. Non-time sensitive services seem like a good fit for Lightning, leveraging the instant payment, but allowing scalable fulfillment. The payment up front is what makes the service work.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Russia Bitcoin Settlement - Russia has authorized Bitcoin settlement for foreign trade. This is not a surprise given their access to SWIFT has been restricted since their invasion of Ukraine. Bitcoin is part of a bigger initiative to settle international payments in something other than the dollar. Russia does do a good deal of international business, so this will have some impact, but the much bigger deal would be the economically strongest member of BRICS, China.
OP_RETURN Attack Surface - The website is really just a small demo to show that the OP_RETURN field is treated differently enough that it can be considered as more like a public gallery than the more obfuscated data in the witness field for inscriptions, for example. I actually don’t agree with this logic, but the demonstration is clear and simple and understandable.
KYC-not-KYC - Bull Bitcoin and Coinkite have partnered to make one of the more interesting ways to buy Bitcoin with KYC but end up with coin that’s private. The Bitcoin is bought via KYC through Bull Bitcoin, but as Liquid BTC. Once a threshold is reached, the Liquid BTC is atomically swapped to mainchain BTC, making it private. One of the more clever setups, and apparently really fast and ideal for DCA in Canada.
Quick Hits
HRF Quantum - The report from the Human Rights Foundation focuses on what threats quantum computing poses for Bitcoin.
Bessent on White Paper - The current Treasury Secretary posted about Satoshi and Bitcoin on Whitepaper day.
Mining Pool Review - 99Bitcoins does a review of various pools and what they offer.
Razzlekahn Early Release - The Bitfinex social hacker and cringe rapper is now out thanks to Trump.
Fiat delenda est.