Bitcoin Tech Talk #490
Rothchild SAT, Agentic AI, LobsterClaw, Rootedness, Roundup
Interesting Stuff
Rothchild Privilege - Christopher Brunet writes about one of the revelations of the Epstein emails, which is that an 8th generation Rothchild got a 1070 on the SAT yet got admitted to NYU. That’s not quite as bad a score as the article makes it out to be, but it is pretty terrible for anyone aspiring to go into higher education. Or at least it should be. But as we’re finding out about universities, particularly in the US, they’re rigged systems not just with special privileges for the wealthy, but through DEI, much more political. Fiat debases credentials as much as any other thing.
Agentic Coding - This article is about how so many things are about to change as a result of AI agents. I’ve been playing with Claude Code for the past 10 days or so, and I can attest to the validity of the alarms being given in this article. As you’ll read later, one of my projects was a complete website redesign, something that would normally take at least a week, probably 3 or more for the complexity of not just the website code but the collecting of all the data. Yet Claude did it in about 2 hours of compute time. As the article says, agentic coding can do some truly remarkable things in a very short amount of time, and if you haven’t tried it, I really encourage you to at least try.
Robot Masters - Speaking of agentic coding, Nik Pash writes about an OpenClaw project where he funded an AI with $50,000 and told it to do whatever it pleased to see what would happen. It’s amusing, if not nihilistic and sad, but armed with an X account and the pattern matching skills that LLMs have, it managed to get quite a following by first giving away money, then getting gifted some Solana memecoins by enthusiastic followers, and then giving away even more money. At one point, it lost $450,000 because of a wallet mishap. The really weird part is what it made people do to get that money. Let’s just say this was not on my bingo card for this decade.
Rootedness - A.M. Hickman has this long read on what coastal elites get and don’t get about “flyover country.” He’s surprisingly in agreement with a lot of their analysis, that a lot of flyover country is desolate and has a low quality of life. What’s missing in their analysis is that the quality of life in coastal areas and cities are also not that great unless you have a lot of money. The big tradeoff being that you’re close to your community in flyover country, but you have more access to interesting things on the coasts. The entire thing is worth reading, particularly about geographic determinism, and how most of america neither lives in coastal elite places or flyover country, but in suburbs of one kind or another.
Roundup - Joel Salatin writes about the executive order that Trump this week, which essentially makes glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup and a pretty terrible chemical linked to all sorts of diseases and conditions, national security status. Particularly surprising was the statement put out by RFK Jr, a known opponent of the chemical, especially given that the order essentially gives immunity to producers from lawsuits. Between this and the US actions in Iran, it’s been a pretty disappointing week for libertarians.
What I'm up to
Bitcoin Sports Network - This is from my talk with Max Keiser at the Golf Invitational back in early January. We talked about the fiatization of the world and the comparative reversal being found in El Salvador, the helicopter ride we went on, the black demographic that loves Max Keiser, property rights and a bunch of other things.
jimmysong.org - This is my new website, which I launched with the help of Claude this past week. You can now buy signed copies of my book shipped to you, as well as subscriptions to this newsletter if you’re so inclined using Zaprite. I’ll have next week’s paid edition available in various more Lightning-native forms, such as zapping on the Nostr post that announces the newsletter and a L402 gateway to look at a complete individual issue.
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
Binohash - Robin Linus has a paper on how you can use Bitcoin’s Script system to introspect using a very creative method. It’s using OP_CHECKMULTISIG’s find and delete property, which means that the locking script can embed a bunch of dummy signatures. The scheme essentially allows for BitVM (his other creation) to verify that a transaction pays out to the correct address within Script. This is yet another example of extreme developer creativity making up for lack of desired primitives.
BIP110 Guide - Jameson Lopp makes the argument that BIP110 is reckless and doomed to fail. He’s been on the Core side of the debate the entire time and the article shows his bias. That said, his concerns around freezing legitimate transactions have merit, and some of the other stuff as well. His main point that this is not a technical battle but a cultural one is what I think will be the biggest takeaway, no matter how this resolves.
Stale Block Data - Stale blocks suck for miners. They spend all the hashing power hoping to get the reward and then get rugged on it when a competing block wins over them. As such, reducing these is a goal for miners and we now have a list of stale blocks. Examining these will hopefully lead to better understanding of when these happen and what makes one block win over another, which game theoretically could help miners make better decisions.
Lightning
Agent Payments - Matt Corallo argues that this is the golden moment for Lightning as AI agents can’t really use Credit Cards. The reasons are many, but the main one he points out is that the chargeback risk is simply too much for the network to handle without upsetting the entire ecosystem they’ve built. Lightning (and Bitcoin)’s finality of settlement then becomes a feature and not a bug. I do think that Lightning is well suited to do this, but I also suspect that there are lots of fiat rails being prepared for this very thing, not the least of which is stablecoins.
Numo - This is a point-of-sale ecash terminal for merchants that is a Lightning wallet underneath. The advantage of using ecash is that you can get true tap-to-pay, instead of the lightning invoice dance and ultimately, the whole thing settles to Lightning. It’s a cool project and if ecash takes off, then it can really become a layer-3 that significantly increases throughput. There’s a spectrum of tradeoffs as merchants regarding reliability of payment versus self-custody/finality of payment, and this may very well become one that’s acceptable given that settlement can be done fairly often.
Nostr-Core - If you want to build some NIP-47 (Nostr Wallet Connect) integration, this is about the simplest and mimalist library on which to build a lightning wallet. A lot of other libraries try to be more full featured, but as we get into more agentic coding, pieces like this, like linux commands, will be far more useful overall. A large codebase is harder for agents to integrate and simpler codebases cost fewer tokens.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
FATF vs Hosted Wallets - The Mexican government may soon be targeting “unhosted wallets,” which are, of course, just self-custodied coins. The main arguments are so familiar as to be completely trite. Bad people might use it and the government won’t have the option of shutting their finances down. 6102-style attacks like these are inevitable, and this is in a long line of governments thinking that they can legislate centralization. We’ll see if they can.
MagicalTux Proposes Hard Fork - The founder of Mt. Gox, the guy who managed to lose a very large number of coins to a hack (though to be fair, the coins may have been lost by the previous owner, Jed McCaleb), wants a hard fork to pay back everyone that lost money at Mt. Gox. This is a dead-on-arrival proposal, but the fact that he’s trying tells you that he’s probably not done with this industry. My guess is that he launches an altcoin where the Mt. Gox creditors are made whole in Bitcoin terms or something similar.
KYC ATMs - The manufacturer of 8000 Bitcoin ATMs in the US will soon require IDs to transact. This is a big problem with public transactions, or transactions that are easy for governments to stop. ATMs are regulated and can be shut down by regulators, so they exercise significant control over them. In this case the company, Bitcoin Depot, is doing this pre-emptively, saving the regulators the trouble of enforcement. In a sense, all public facing things become a regulatory attack surface.
Quick Hits
FIBRE rebuttal - The story about using FIBRE to decentralize mining has a rebuttal.
Meta Stablecoin - The Libra currency that was supposed to revolutionize Facebook ran into too many regulatory hurdles, but now that they’re cleared, Meta is trying again.
P2Q - A proposal from the Ordinals creator on a quantum-safe outputs.
First BIP110 Block - The first signaling block was mined by Barefoot Mining.
Fiat delenda est.