Bitcoin Tech Talk #486
Interesting Stuff
The Case for Corruption - Copernican makes the case that people should be engaging in more corruption, not less. This is not as bad as it sounds, as he’s advocating more for nepotism and favoritism toward your own community since meritocracy lies mostly dead, bludgeoned by DEI, HR and managerialism. I don’t think I would have agreed with this take a couple of months ago, but given how much corruption we’ve seen come out of just Minnesota, the hope for real reform based on meritocracy looks bleak indeed. Perhaps there’s merit in fighting fire with fire.
Dating as an End - Elisabeth Stone writes about the modern conception of dating is mostly now an end in itself. Instead of dating to get married, people date, ostensibly, to feel good, and in reality prepare to break up. Getting used to dating, they then find that marriage is extremely difficult as the option of breaking up is taken away. The article reminded me of school, and how the same reversal of ends and means have taken place, where people don’t go to school to become a professional, but as a way to stall.
Esotericism - Jane Psmith and John Psmith have written yet another book review, this one about philosophy and the hidden meanings behind it. As usual, they go beyond the topic of the book and get into deeper questions. The main claim of the book, though, is fascinating. Philosophers had to hide the most subversive suggestions within the texts, in such a way that a normal reading wouldn’t reveal their hidden message. This sounds like trying to find meaning in randomness, but this was apparently common practice as being too blunt led to getting killed. I do get frustrated with a lot of older authors, particularly ones that can’t ever seem to say things clearly. Perhaps the clarity of prose that we enjoy today wasn’t that common in the past due to this risk.
Graying Congregations - Ryan Burge has this analysis of church populations, particularly of Protestant denominations and their graying out. Churches literally dying out has been a common way for many of them to end, but the upcoming transition looks especially fraught. It used to be that it was mostly liberal denominations that had this problem, but due to the demographic dominance of Boomers, among other things, a lot of churches look set to greatly reduce, and perhaps die off in the next 10 years.
Fiat Street Repair - This story is about how LA is no longer fixing roads, but patching them due to the cost of ADA-compliant curb ramps. Apparently, the Americans with Disabilities act requires that when a city repaves a road, the sidewalks, and curbs in particular have to be brought into compliance. Apparently, a single curb ramp costs $50,000, of which 4 are required for any intersection. So to avoid those expenses, the city has decided just to do patchwork. The $50,000 per curb ramp is clearly a ridiculous number, and I suspect it’s bloated by bureaucratic incompetence and grift, but this is how civilizations crumble. One street at a time.
What I'm up to
Angela McArdle - I interviewed the former chairman of the Libertarian Party about the deal she struck to get Trump to pardon Ross Ulbricht, what being chairman is like, and the role of Bitcoin in the party. She also is now advocating for more pardons, particularly of the Samourai devs and is asking for help from the Bitcoin community.
Peter Schiff Podcast - It’s Peter’s podcast but somehow, I ended up doing most of the questioning and getting Peter to talk about his views on gold. What I found was that his views on gold are similar to Bitcoiners’ views on Bitcoin. He doesn’t like debasement, sees the importance of self custody and recognizes the threat of government.
Core v. Knots X - We interviewed Johnny Bier, who is a Core supporter, and we discussed the history of librerelay, starting with the full RBF flag, going through the MARA slipstream’s appearance and how that changed the incentives of non-standard transactions, and the scenarios around BIP-110.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Bithoven - Bitcoin Script is notoriously difficult to reason about, and the expressiveness is particularly hard to take advantage of because of the financial consequences involved should there be any bugs. Miniscript is a great way to mitigate some of the risk, but this paper takes miniscript to the next level with type safety and developer friendliness. The GitHub repo has more details and of course, an implementation of the concept.
Hornet UTXO - This is a written-from-scratch node implementation with a very interesting property for the UTXO database. Operations on it can be executed in parallel without any locks, meaning that the re-indexing and re-validation can be an order of magnitude faster. It’s written in C++ so in theory, this could use the libconsensus module to do the consensus validation while optimizing other parts of the system in ways that the Core codebase cannot practically because of the large refactor required.
BLISK - Threshold signatures are k-of-n, which combined with the ability to aggregate pubkeys and signatures give a great deal of privacy. That said, the flexibility of the scheme is severely wanting as the controls are not composable beyond picking k and n. This is a scheme to aggregate pubkeys and signatures using multiple OR/AND in very miniscript like ways to produce a single signature and pubkey. The concept is theoretical, and there’s a lot of tooling that would need to be built, but it’s a fascinating method of having more composability even in a single pubkey output.
Programming Bitcoin in Spanish - My book has been translated into Spanish! At least the first two chapters and it’s online in this attractive UI. Though I took four years of Spanish in high school, my retention of that was pretty poor, so if you’re a native Spanish speaker with some technical chops, I would love to hear whether this helped you.
Lightning
Connector Swap - There are several ways to swap Lightning for on-chain coin and in this post, supertestnet discusses the pros and cons of the two main approaches that are in use today: splices and swaps. Swaps offer higher capacity and batching, while splices have the advantage that only one on-chain transaction is required. Supertestnet has this alternative called Connector swaps which give the capacity and batching of swaps, but the single-transaction cost of splices, with the tradeoff that a lightning channel now needs to be connector-aware.
Block Reorg Vulnerability - Apparently, there has been an LND bug, which creates a vulnerability in block reorganization scenarios where the closing transaction was in one of the block reorgs. This bug was patched this week after being reported 10 years ago. That’s pretty impressive that a bug like this went unpatched this long, but I suppose there haven’t been enough block reorgs to really test scenarios like this.
Orange - This is a b2b product aimed at reducing remittance cost by using Lightning. This sort of business pops up every few years, and usually struggles not just with reducing cost, but with UX, but this looks a bit different in that it’s aimed at b2b remittances and utilizes lightning. The hard part is making enough margin to make this worthwhile, and being a startup doesn’t inspire confidence for a lot of people that want a service like this as you can go broke at any time. Still, handling the rails like this can possibly make a business like this work, and perhaps it will.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Stolen Bitcoin? - Theft of Bitcoin happens all the time, but this one is unique because it seems to have been done on a wallet that was controlled by the US government. ZachXBT alleges that the son of a contractor for the US Marshall service stole a bunch of Bitcoin belonging to the US government. Apparently, the guy was in a telegram dispute about who held more Bitcoin and livestreamed a transaction showing he was in control. Some blockchain analysis linked the funds right back to Bitcoin seized by the US government.
Helix Verdict - Helix was a darknet Bitcoin mixing service from 2014, whose assets the US government finally got recently. There are apparently $400M worth of assets, some of which might be Bitcoin, which is an incredible amount of money given that at the time they operated they mixed about $311M worth. The Bitcoin that they earned in those mixes has since grown so much that it’s worth more in dollars than the equivalent amount in dollars they mixed!
AI Following Bitcoin - This article is about how AI enthusiasts go through a similar enthusiasm curve as Bitcoiners, starting from skeptic to complete native. The suggestion, of course, is that the technological adoption progresses in a similar way. While I do think there’s some truth to this, there’s also the fact that the benefits of each are very different and that the landscape in AI is changing so quickly. Still, it’s a useful way of modeling how you might feel about AI as it grows.
Quick Hits
Gold Top - The very hot commodity had a blow-off top at $5600 or so, which has since retreated under $5000.
Clever Malware - This particular form of malware uses both social engineering and a clever URL that looks like Zoom to get you to execute an executable that looks for Bitcoin wallets on your machine.
Hash rate drop - There was an 8% drop in hash rate, probably due to the winter storms in the US, which rerouted a lot of that energy out of mining.
Tether Freeze? - There’s $182M of Tether supposedly belonging to Venezuela that may just have been frozen on Tron.
Fiat delenda est.
Thanks for the shoutout. Personally, I'm getting very nervous about AI systems. Moltbook is particularly dangerous IMO.
Clever malware. Scary!!! Damn scammers.