Bitcoin Tech Talk #482
Interesting Stuff
Fertility Incentives - f0xr writes the second of a two-part series on Amish fertility. The first is an analysis of Amish families, what their world view is and how they manage some of the highest fertility rates. This article argues that the incentives of the modern world are ultimately what cause less marriages, and in the end less babies. For me, the most important point he makes is that the consequences of not having children have gotten a lot more indirect as a result of welfare and pension systems. Both are notably absent in the Amish community and both are Ponzi schemes upheld by fiat money.
Losing Culture - Russell Walter writes about why Conservatives can’t seem to capture status. The quote of the article is “feelings don’t care about your facts,” which in context means that the desire to be high status will rationalize almost any belief. The history of how artists and culture more broadly became so liberal and even Marxist shows that liberalism and coolness need not go together. Indeed, the current situation came about as a reaction to bourgeoisie culture which itself was a reaction to aristocrat culture. He concludes that the way for Conservatives to capture culture and status again is to reject the materialism and economic efficiency that they get from fiat money.
CRA Destruction - The American Tribune writes about the fall of Detroit, particularly after the Civil Rights Act in 1964. It’s hard to imagine now, but Detroit was one of the wealthiest cities, not just in America, but the world back in 1963. Yet by the early 70’s the city was already well on its way to a wasteland. So how did the Civil Rights Act change the city? The act deeply undermined property rights by the non-enforcement of crime. The riots of 1967 were a case in point. All the investment people had made into their city neighborhoods went up in smoke, and they weren’t protected by the authorities. At a deep level, this has led to high time preference architecture and neighborhoods and less investment in communities.
Bias of History - HISTORICAL INSIGHTS writes about history and the various biases that are inherent in the subject. First, there’s a huge survivorship bias, in that there are many civilizations that simply didn’t survive because they either didn’t write anything down or they did on materials that are easily destroyed. Second, there’s the fact that most written sources are from a particular perspective, and it’s hard to know how much of it is accurate given the story that they want to tell rather than what actually happened. It reminded me that almost all information propagation is subject to significant propaganda.
Sympathy for Boomers - J. Daniel Sawyer has yet another take on Jacob Savage’s article about the Lost Generation, arguing that the anti-white-male bias has been in full bloom for at least 60 years. The part that I was struck by is the analysis of how Boomers are really the result of a relentless attack on them from the propaganda regime. They got captured, in other words, after a long and difficult resistance to the program from the intelligence agencies, philanthropic orgs and the managerial state. Ultimately, they got captured by the money, which other generations didn’t take nearly as long in succumbing to.
2025 Favorite Talks
Christian Freedom - (apologies for the low audio) I gave this talk at the Thank God for Bitcoin meetup in Las Vegas before the Bitcoin Conference. I argued that Christians should be looking to suffer more and be more responsible as we get wealthier with Bitcoin.
Noblesse Oblige - I gave this talk in El Salvador’s Bitcoin Historico. I made the argument that sound money is what allows for noblesse oblige and that Bitcoin will bring it back.
Why Price Keeps Pumping - I gave this talk at BTC Prague with a little bit of a clickbait-y title. I argued that the pricing model for Bitcoin is not understood by most people and that’s why Bitcoin is still underpriced.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
JoinMarket NG - This is a “next generation” implementation of the JoinMarket protocol. The main improvements over the reference implementation are that it’s stateless, does not require a full node and uses a Python async stack. You can also play multiple roles simultaneously (maker/taker) which should make it a lot easier to participate. It’s difficult to know how much of the lack of coinjoining is due to UX and how much is to due to cost, but implementations like this will help us to better understand the market demand as UX improves.
Ark as Payment - Rene Pickhardt writes in this Delving post about how Ark should be understood better as a Lightning channel factory that supplements Lightning rather than as a payment tool in of itself. He’s a lightning developer, so take this with a grain of salt, but the points he makes are solid and the main idea here is that Ark acts as something akin to a Lightning Service provider to reduce the “last mile” which reduces the liquidity requirements substantially.
Node Performance - Jameson Lopp has his annual node performance tests of various node implementations. As you might expect Bitcoin Core did the best by validating the entire Bitcoin blockchain in about 11 hours. GoCoin was a little slower (12 hours), though crashed a bit before finishing, libbitcoin took ~21 hours, Mako took ~42 hours, and btcd ~83 hours, weirdly following an exponential distribution. It was sad to find that a bunch of node implementations have been abandoned, like bcoin, Blockcore, Floresta, Parity BTC and Zebra BTC.
Lightning
Satdoku - This is a gamified version of Sudoku where you can purchase more lives in the game with sats. There’s a tutor to teach you how to reason about the game, which for sudoku is much easier, than say, chess, but it’s an intriguing way to add more consequences to learning. I would imagine the additional payment you would have to make motivates you to learn each lesson much more than if you got the typical all-you-can-play type SaaS offering. If this works, I can imagine learning chess, go, or even programming languages can be gamified in a very interesting way.
phoenixd Dashboard - This is a dashboard that works with your lightning node so you can produce everything that you might want like invoices, history, and currency. What’s more there’s a way to hook in TailScale to access the node remotely without too much setup. Lightning nodes typically need some maintenance, so tools like this to help maintain it are key if we want consumer level adoption of lightning nodes.
Satoshi Send - Sending large files can be a pain, and most people are used to using free tools such as Dropbox or Google drive. Yet at a certain size, it gets very difficult to find providers willing to host that much without some sort of payment. If you want to send something big and require some storage space, this is the service that lets you pay some sats to store the files until they’re retrieved. I’ve been around long enough to remember that there are no less than 10 altcoins that used this problem as an excuse to print their own money, so it’s gratifying to see that a solution doesn’t need a blockchain or a token, just common sense UX.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Venezuela Bitcoin - Apologies for the paywall in this article. But apparently, Maduro set up some sort of Bitcoin treasury to avoid sanctions. His regime may have amassed as much as $60B in Bitcoin, and there’s apparently a DEA informant that was at the center of setting up the security for the Bitcoin. It’s a strange story and one that may be the key to setting up the oil infrastructure investment required to extract their abundant reserves.
Attack Scenarios - DSHR, historically a critic of Bitcoin writes this rebuttal of yet another academic declaring that Bitcoin will be dead because of game theory. The paper in question talks about some sort of block reorg attack and the author of this piece goes through how getting miners, energy, data center space and appropriate short positions will be difficult if not impossible. I’ve written similar rebuttals in the past, but this is notable for how it comes from a Bitcoin critic. Even non-Bitcoiners recognize the strength of Bitcoin’s decentralization.
Bitcoin Taxes - If you’re interested in donating to charity, there may be some tax advantages to doing so with Bitcoin. This article goes through where you may want to donate, and if a qualified organization takes Bitcoin donations directly, you can avoid the capital gains taxes that typically get triggered with a sale. It’s probably too late for the 2025 tax season, but something to keep in mind for the future.
Quick Hits
OpenSats Grants - The open source foundation has a new set of grants.
SSB Playground - supertestnet has a tool to play with the sighash single bug.
1229 BTC - Saylor adds to his stack after his USD stacking the week before.
Lichtenstein Free - Razzlekahn’s hubby, better known as the Bitfinex hacker, is out of prison.
Fiat delenda est.
Aye.