Bitcoin Tech Talk #489
Californication, SEC Schools, Agency, Canada and Bad Psych
Interesting Stuff
Californication - Aaron M. Renn writes about how Californication of Colorado is mostly complete, no longer the red or even purple state that it was in the 90’s, but now a solidly blue state with solidly blue policies. With large regulatory burdens, high housing prices and liberal drug policies, it’s resulted in many companies moving out along with their jobs, and of course, the productive people. I knew the state was not in a good place, but the downfall is especially sad given how awesome the natural beauty of the place is.
SEC Prestige - Christopher Sandbatch has this take on the increasing popularity of SEC schools, particularly among out-of-state students. The increase in popularity of SEC schools is undeniable in much the same way that the Californication of Colorado is. And though these schools are mostly in red states and have some of that aesthetic which appeals to conservative or even moderate potential students, the shift is a bigger one about what actually is valued about college education. In a shallow way, you could argue that the entertainment value of attending an SEC school, with its flourishing Greek life, party atmosphere and of course, football, is a lot more aligned with what college degrees have become. In a deeper way, they’re becoming more popular because the south is where all the growth is.
On Agency - Johann Kurtz writes about how our elite, particularly those that are on the left, are pretty low agency. The irony is that many elites are pretty obsessed with that word, yet as Johann points out, they very rarely try to solve any problems not in their specific domain. In other words, they tend to “stay in their lane.” This speaks to a cowardice that I’ve observed in fiat-captured people. It’s an ingrained instinct from years of playing within a system that it’s unthinkable to even try to change a small part of the system. The two exceptions he shows are Elon and Trump, who for all their bluster, are not shy about trying things. Fiat money has this effect of serving the system rather than changing it.
Canada - The Library of Celaeno has a similar thing to say about Canadian rightists who are now complaining, like much of Europe that they would be winning in their country if it were not for Trump. As he points out, Trump is a convenient scapegoat. Of course there’s some shenanigans going on in these countries to silence the political right. But the reason why the rightward movement isn’t more popular in Canada is because Canadians are, ironically, conservative. Their natural instinct is to preserve what they have, even when it’s not worth preserving. In that sense, the labels of liberal and conservative have completely reversed and what right parties want is in a sense, revolution from the liberal world order.
Bad Psych - Adam Mastroianni writes about a bunch of psych experiments that have failed replication. The idea that cognitive dissonance is a common trait is challenged, as are studies about the man who mistook his wife for a hat and the Stanford prison experiment. The study “proving” that memory of eye witnesses being terrible also didn’t replicate and the “choice overload” effect was also shown to be questionable. The article was a reminder for me that our cultural narrative is inundated with questionable “facts” and that we really need to get better at verifying these assumed truths.
What I'm up to
Pleb Underground - I was on this show with Phil and Ulric. We talked about ossification, how I define it and why I support it. We dove a little deeper and talked about the incentives for new primitives and why people advocate for them and the costs of new primitives to the entire ecosystem. We talked about the path of hardware resources needed to run a Bitcoin node and the development that we’re getting in that direction.
Claude Code 4.6 - I’ve spent way too much time this week making web and android apps using this tool. As a developer, I now understand that the developer job is never going to be the same again. I’m planning to make an app a day for a month to see its capabilities.
BitBlockBoom - I’ll be in Dallas for this conference on April 9-12th. There’s also Thank God for Bitcoin conference beforehand that I’ll also speak at.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Quantum Freeze Recovery - BitMex Research has this post on how a potential quantum threat could be handled through 1. a freeze of any UTXOs that are vulnerable to a quantum attack and 2. a hash commitment transaction that would allow for the recovery of the frozen coins. It requires a soft fork to execute and would make use of OP_RETURN, interestingly enough, for the hash commitment. I don’t believe that quantum is a threat, but the scheme outlined is clever and should be one of many reasons that quantum is not worth worrying about.
FIBRE Resurrected - localhost research has this post on resurrecting the almost 10-year old project FIBRE (Fast Internet Bitcoin Relay Engine). It was originally conceived as a way to relay blocks quickly to nodes as to reduce the stale block percentage, and as the blog explains, they’ve resurrected the project as a way to reduce the potential stale block risk from the decentralization of mining. The reason that the project was abandoned was that the maintenance of the fork of Core was too much to maintain for the author, Matt Corallo. Alternate implementations may do well and perhaps differentiate themselves by implementing this relatively small change set.
On-Chain Backup - BitcoinerLab has this interesting method of backing up a wallet onchain using a large OP_RETURN. The main idea is that whatever wallet data you need would be there on chain whenever you wanted it, just encrypted to a key you control. Of course, this is exactly what a private key is, but the advantage here is that you can embed other data like the descriptor to the wallet. There’s also a very simple vault used in this construction where a temporary setup key is thrown out, which is the first instance I know of where a generic covenant is used.
Lightning
L402 Apps - If you’ve been using agentic coding like I have, any really difficult thing that requires some paid API becomes a pain. HTTP Status 402, Payment Required, was originally conceived as a way to make that less painful, but due to on-line payment systems being so fiat driven, these were not naturally adopted. Lightning brought back this idea, and this website shows which API endpoints can be accessed for what data using lightning to pay for the calls.
Nostr-Core - If the existing Nostr-Wallet-Connect (NIP-47) tools are too heavy for you, this is your chance to use something a lot more lightweight. It’s a Nostr-based lightning interaction client that works with JavaScript. I always appreciate projects like this which try to distill something to its essence instead of trying to be all things to all people. Especially with more coding agent usage, I suspect packages like this will become more popular.
LN History - It’s hard to believe but Lightning is 8 years old! This is a great visual of how the Lightning Network has grown since 2018. The site explains how this graph was made and is generally very educational about the Lightning Network and its history.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Nakamoto - Justin Bechler goes into the treasury company’s recent transaction acquiring BTC Inc, the Bitcoin Magazine publisher and the organizer of the Bitcoin conferences around the world. The most interesting bits are the debt games that Nakamoto played, leading to some significant refinancing costs. It looks to me that the BTC Inc acquisition terms were pretty generous at the PIPE price ($1.12) but look relatively fair at the current share price ($0.24). Still, this isn’t the first time the biggest Bitcoin conference was associated with a stock symbol and the first one didn’t go so well.
Core Wallet Discussion - The Bitcoin Core Wallet GUI has been there from the beginning and was for many OGs their first wallet. Unfortunately, it has not been maintained that well and the Core developers are discussing whether to deprecate it entirely. The main reason for the discussion is that there aren’t that many developers on the wallet itself and most people these days use something other than the Core wallet. Yet there are a lot of people that have Core wallets from the old days and ending support for the GUI has brought in a lot of end-of-life product lifecycle topics. It’s worth reading in full if you have any product that you help develop.
Incorruptible Money - BPI makes the case that Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency (oh how I hate that term) that is not corruptible. The main argument is the one that you would expect. That is, Bitcoin is decentralized so there’s no central entity that can get corrupted. This is contrasted with altcoins which have central entities and have become very corrupt. I mostly agree with the article, but there are a lot of trusted L2s like exchanges, treasury companies and ETFs which can be corrupted and can do significant damage like fractional reserve banks during the gold standard era.
Quick Hits
Dakar - Want to de-anonymize coinjoins? This is your tool.
$1B - That’s how much was transacted on Lightning in the past month.
Akasha - Live and travel on Bitcoin everywhere.
Stale Blocks - You can go check out historical stale blocks here.
Fiat delenda est.