Bitcoin Tech Talk #491
Interesting Stuff
Defensive Signaling - David Pinsof writes about the nature of status and the many layers of signaling that we engage in. As one study purports, something like 60% of human behavior is signaling to others about status. It would be a much simpler game were it not for the fact that we have the ability to see from other perspectives, and thus, we try very hard to hide our signaling, though that, too, becomes a signal given enough iterations. The most insightful part of the article was the concept of defensive signaling, where people signal that they are (of the right political opinion, for example) as a way to not get picked on or isolated. I suspect that this is one of the most exploitable vulnerabilities that propagandists take advantage of.
Iran War - Frank Wright has this piece on what is happening in Iran, including reports that the Iranian leadership offered to give up all its enriched uranium and submit to nuclear inspections. The attack on Iran was also going to happen with or without the US, according to Rubio, and the plans were apparently agreed to way ahead of time, making the actual peace talks complete theater. The war so far is very unpopular, especially with Trump’s base, which makes you wonder, why do it then? And this is where the Epstein connection comes in. There’s a lot of blackmail material and the managerial class are not as unaccountable as we thought. They’re just accountable to the people that hold the blackmail material.
Sexual Deviance and Decline - One of the truly odd results of empires throughout history is that as they peak, they also become more and more sexually deviant. This article is about the reasons why, looking at the Hellenistic period of Greece, the Abbasid Caliphate of Bagdad and of course Rome. The main reason, as argued by the article is simply boredom. The affluent become more selfish and hedonistic over time and much like the mice of mouse utopia, instincts go haywire as struggle is removed. The behaviors trickle down to the middle class and eventually the lower, resulting in very low birth rates. What’s particularly noxious about the current moment is that the trickling down is happening far faster than any of these other empires.
Aristocratic Duty - Johann Kurtz writes about fertility crisis’s real cure. The jumping off point is this story, which is about a construction company billionaire in Korea offering $75,000 per child for his workers. As he points out the offer by the billionaire is very different than government policy, where it’s a political payoff for votes. The act is one of aristocratic duty, solving problems by putting where his mouth is. The 84-year-old is being extremely generous, backdating the benefit, so that employees who already have children can still get the bonus, and also offering college tuition, medical expenses and for 3+ children, housing. The fiat world is so used to everything having to be a political solution that people have forgotten. You can just do things.
The VC Crisis - Will Manidis writes about the current VC crisis which nobody is talking about. The VCs are running out of exits. They used to be able to exit when companies were acquired by bigger ones, or when they could IPO, but due to the proliferation and sheer size of these funds, and the crazy amounts that subsequently have to get deployed whether these are good places to invest or not, have resulted in stratospheric valuations which can’t reasonably be absorbed by public markets or public companies. It’s not unlike Toronto real estate, many properties which sit empty because of the high property prices. Loans of one type or another fund the grand game of pretend, and there’s no reckoning, or even price drops, until the whole thing collapses. Such is the pattern of fiat money.
What I'm up to
Arctic - I was seriously impressed with Claude when it one-shotted a threshold signature scheme based on just the research paper. For those that are curious, Arctic is like FROST in that k-of-n signatures are required to generate an aggregated Schnorr signature, except that unlike FROST, the nonces for Arctic are deterministic and can be proved as such by each member. This prevents the key-recovery attack, for example. If you haven’t played with Claude Code or something similar, I would strongly suggest you try.
Latin Study Tool - I’m a big fan of Lingua Latina per se Illustrata, and this is a companion tool to study much of what’s in the book. Again, this was created with Claude and covers the first 15 chapters. There are obviously some flaws, but it’s truly impressive how quickly you can take ideas to working software.
Newsletter Payment Bot - You can now get this newsletter via Nostr Zap! For a limited time, you can zap the Nostr post that promotes this newsletter for 2000 sats and you will get a copy of the whole newsletter in your Nostr DM. The formatting isn’t great because of the expressiveness of markdown (or your Nostr client’s lack of rendering it), but you do get the content.
Nostr Note of the Week
