Bitcoin Tech Talk #492
Interesting Stuff
Academic Panic - Tom Golden writes about an academic study that purports to map the right-wing “manosphere.” As he argues, this is one of those pieces that reveals more about the authors and their world view than anything about the actual thing they’re purporting to study. The way male and female preferences are presented is especially insightful, and what’s clear from even the tone of the paper is that it’s more propaganda piece than it is any kind of study. In a sense, this is the temperature being turned up, which is normal for online screeds, but for an academic paper, signals some panic. The gatekeepers/rent-seekers are losing and they’re pulling out all their big guns.
Contemporary Christian Music - Matt Whiteley writes about Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) and what it says about the evangelical churches where it’s popular. The author is a bit harsh, but there’s a lot of truth on what he’s saying about Christian music in that it’s a very limited genre, where there’s only a few acceptable kinds of songs. Which isn’t that different from hymns, of course, but hymns have a deep tradition and larger range of meaning. CCM is a little dated, and reflects the aging of the church in general. Something that was popular 20 years ago continues largely on momentum without the grounding of tradition. Perhaps a bit of rent-seeking going on, even in places you wouldn’t expect it.
BS Jobs - Yuri Bezmenov reflects on the seminal essay “Bullshit Jobs” in light of what’s going on with AI. The original essay became a book, and the concept has many synonyms now, such as “email jobs,” “meaningless work,” “managerial class” and my personal favorite “rent-seekers.” His analysis is that AI is an existential threat as such jobs are clearly uncompetitive in a free market and AI can do them a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper. Yet I don’t think he’s entirely correct in that analysis. Our system is not a free market and rent-seeking is ultimately a function of the monetary system and as long as the monetary system stays in place, much of the rent-seeking, the kind that has zero competitive pressure, will stick around.
Liberal Moms - Jane Psmith is at it again, reviewing another book as a way to discuss something bigger. In this case, it’s what she describes as the worst book that she’s ever finished, a book about raising boys written by a very liberal mom. As she points out, the author of the book views nearly every masculine behavior as a pathology and is clearly conflicted by the love she has for her sons and the ideology she holds. For me, such attitudes explain just why so many people on the left are so infertile. Not only are their ideologies against large populations, but they’re against what’s observably true in nature. The disconnect, is thus, much easier to avoid than to resolve.
Iranian Infertility - John Carter writes about the ongoing war in Iran and points out a few almost Girardian points about the conflict. Iran has low fertility, high female education, low youth employment, a large surveillance state and most importantly, a large generational divide, not unlike the one in the US between Boomers and those younger. Rene Girard would say that wars happen most between groups that are more similar than different and the problems that Iran has points to perhaps a similarity that’s hard to admit. Indeed, they both share the foundational thing and that’s the fiat monetary system.
What I'm up to
CoinJuice - I was on this podcast to talk about BIP110, the Knots vs. Core debate and what we can expect going forward. The host was a bit more on the “let’s use Bitcoin for interesting data” side, which made for some good discussion.
Max and Stacy Invitational Interview - This was a short interview I did at the Max and Stacy Invitational back in January, talking about how so many Bitcoiners start to take health seriously after they take care of their savings with Bitcoin.
BitBlockBoom - One of the oldest Bitcoin Conferences continues its run in Dallas, TX in a few weeks (April 7-11). I’ll be there to speak and it should be a fun one. There’s also a Thank God for Bitcoin conference and a few other side events I’ll be at.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Isogeny Cryptography - Isogeny-based cryptography (IBC) maps points between elliptic curves rather than relying on discrete logarithm problems, making it a candidate for post-quantum security since no efficient quantum algorithm is known to solve the Supersingular Isogeny Path Problem. SQIsign signatures are remarkably compact at 148-292 bytes (compared to 1,563 bytes for Falcon), and isogenies support “rerandomizable” public keys, potentially enabling post-quantum versions of BIP32 HD wallets, BIP341 key tweaking, and taproot compatibility.
Satoshi Dashboard - This is a nice open-source analytics tool for Bitcoin, not just with the typical node statistics, but also lots of financial data like price, Mayer Multiple and Lightning network statistics. If you don’t want to trust ClarkMoody or another stats dashboard, self-sovereign is the way everything is trending anyway, so it makes sense that this kind of tool is being announced now. I have no doubt that this will be iterated on by many AI agents.
RootScope - One of the frustrations with Taproot is that I think developers are a bit wary of the tree reconstruction. Keeping a separate file that has the entire Taproot script tree adds yet another thing you have to keep track of in a wallet and deterministic constructions are not standardized and fragile. RootScope is an open-source tool that deterministically reconstructs TapLeaf hashes, Merkle paths, tweaks, and output addresses from Taproot script-path witness data which can help. I’m not sure if this will encourage use of the Taproot MAST tree, which doesn’t seem to be used that much currently, but it’s a good step.
Lightning
Dracotel - This is a really useful product for self-sovereignty, where you can get data that doesn’t expire for your phone entirely through lightning. It works in lots of different countries and is priced on a per gigabyte basis after the initial eSim which is $19. Phone services are one of the easiest and efficient KYC methods for most places, and if you want to avoid signing up for a service, that can be a pain. Of course, you need a phone number to register in many places, and this service doesn’t provide anything yet for that, but perhaps there will be something in the future.
SatsInvaders - This is a throwback to the arcade where you can insert a quarter to play, except you pay a lightning invoice to get a life in a Space-Invaders like game. I’m not sure too many people will be using this given that there are plenty of games that are free, but the concept is useful to demonstrate sub-dollar payment mechanisms. What will be really interesting is if these services start getting things for you that people want, like movies, music or books, and doing so darknet style.
Gossip Observer - This is a cool tool to see how quickly messages spread over the lightning network. There’s a delving post about the state of the lightning network and what the observer has revealed about the network topology. One of the recommendations that came from this is that something like Erlay and minisketch instead of message flooding would significantly improve the network.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
FIPS - This is a project from Jonathan Corgan, who apparently came out of retirement to build this using some help from AI coding tools. The main idea is that you can now route traffic in a mesh network without a central controller. The internet itself can be an overlay, but it can also work over BlueTooth or radio or even serial links. It’s honestly closer to the original vision of the internet than the centralized walled garden internet we got. It apparently can work over LAN, meaning you should be able to use this on a network and have no routers (!) As Bitcoin showed that you can have decentralization and it can thrive, I expect something like this to become the norm in 10 years.
Talaas - This is one of the more innovative AI companies, which has essentially put AI model weights on silicon. The current AI systems almost all require significant RAM and GPUs because the components are too general and require loading of the weights and instructions. By making chips that do the same, the requirements are significantly lessened and the speed increases significantly. They basically have a 2-month turnaround, meaning that they can produce ASICs for AI. This will inevitably trickle down to Bitcoin at some point, perhaps making running a node not just fast, but cheap.
Bitcoin’s Moral Framework - I usually put academic papers in other sections of this newsletter, but this one is one written from a sociological perspective, examining what it calls “religious” characteristics of the community. Much like other academic papers in soft subjects, this is more propaganda than actual research, but it does signal that there’s some recognition in academia that what matters to Bitcoiners is sound money and that it gives us a framework by which to evaluate a lot of policy.
Quick Hits
Cashu Proof of Liabilities - As a mint, you can prove that you have a certain amount of coins you owe using this protocol.
PlebTV - Watch Bitcoin content, or produce it and charge sats.
Onboard for Sats - You can earn 1M sats per business onboarded to Bitcoin in Charlotte.
Payment Gateways - Want to take Bitcoin? There are 111 different ways to do that as a business and this site shows which ones have which features.
Fiat delenda est.