Bitcoin Tech Talk #494
Interesting Stuff
The Five Seas Theory - The Duke Report™️ writes about this very interesting geo-political framework. That the Middle East is not just important for its oil production, but because of the quirks of earth’s geography, will always have a big place in world events. This is a theory from 1904 that points to the area as where 5 seas meet (Mediterranean, Red, Black, Caspian, and the Persian Gulf) which is where land and sea power collide and also happen to be the key to controlling the Eurasian heartland. It’s a pretty prescient theory given the number of wars we’ve had in that region since 1904, and does point more to how geography plays way more into historical events than we admit.
Fertility and Spirituality - This is a First Things essay that responds to the provocative post by Bronze Age Pervert. The main idea of BAP’s essay is that if society wants to increase fertility society has to bring back the fertility cult. The response essay was more interesting to me because it correctly identified the current fertility crisis as a spiritual one where the practical costs are apparent, but the abstract benefits are not. The abstract benefits being some of the most meaningful things we can have in our lives. In a sense, the current calculation that people make regarding fertility is from a nihilistic metaphysic, which naturally denies the abstract benefits. The real return requires admission of real value and meaning to abstract things.
Property and Caring - Michael Foster writes about property rights from a very Christian perspective and asserts that not owning, or renting constantly, has consequences for the soul. He argues that lack of ownership, rather than making us focus on heaven, actually makes us more flighty and unattached. It’s ownership, having property that creates incentives for deeper relationships to other people and to our communities. Perhaps our lack of attachment to our communities is exactly that. We literally aren’t invested in our communities. Ownership, furthermore, teaches us about commitment, about taking care of something and understanding the consequences of the lack of those. This is one of the subtler ways by which fiat money debases community.
AI Power - This is a bit of an AI doomer article and I don’t take most of it that seriously. That said, there’s a whole lot of truth in there about how much of the AI buildout, particularly data center capacity and power generation, is hype and will be written off as significant malinvestments. I did not realize just how crazy things had gotten in the AI data-center buildout space, and reading this, it sounds like we’ve definitely reached the “pets.com” stage of the AI hype. Fiat money has a tendency to do this as the quality of investments naturally goes down as more money is poured in. And since the money is easy, the investments inevitably get to scam level. It sounds like we’re at that point, and that sound you hear is an AI-driven recession (no catchy name yet like Dot Bomb or Housing Crash) on the horizon.
Boomer Manichaeanism - Chivalry Guild has this very insightful piece on the idea that “it’s what’s on the inside that counts.” As the essay explains, this was a Boomer-era aphorism which subsequent generations have grown up with, that amounts to something like Manichaeanism, or the belief that everything spiritual is good and everything fleshly is bad. This is, of course, nonsense, and physical fitness and spiritual fitness are very often correlated as one helps the other. The irony of the phrase is that it’s as shallow as what they’re accusing others of being. Unfortunately, it’s created a generation of ugly, lazy people that think they’re virtuous who suffer over a long period of time because they can borrow indefinitely against the future.
What I'm up to
The Case for a Conservative Bitcoin Client - I wrote this essay on the heels of announcing ProductionReady, the 501(c)(3) non-profit that we launched last week. We want to make node software that preserves the sound money properties of Bitcoin and in this post I explain exactly how we plan to do that.
Power of Bitcoin - I was on this podcast to talk about the OP_RETURN controversy, its origins, BIP110, and how it might play out. This was notably recorded before the launch of ProductionReady so we did not discuss that, but we did discuss some of the technical realities of the game theory on BIP110.
BitBlockBoom - My talk is scheduled to be at 10:40am on Saturday, April 11 and the title of the talk is “The Third Way,” which you might have guessed is about what we’re planning to do at ProductionReady.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Two-block Reorg - There was a rare two-block reorg on-chain this week, which strangely, nobody on DATUM saw. One-block competitions are normal as every once in a while, two miners find a block at the same time. Two is very rare because the chances of that happening twice in a row with both miners building on different blocks is exceedingly unlikely. What’s worrisome about this particular reorg is that the same mining pool didn’t just mine the two blocks before and the one block after, but mined seven blocks in a row, and as the DATUM people say, it wasn’t seen by anybody else until it overtook the two blocks. Could this be the dreaded selfish-mining attack in action?
BIP110 Node Info - This is a great little dashboard to see how many of what kind the nodes on the network currently are, which are likely to be fake and so on. In particular, there’s a huge clustering of BIP110-supporting nodes around a specific IP range, suggesting that they’re all being spun up by the same entity. This notably inflates the BIP110-supporting node count above the previously most popular client, Bitcoin Core 30.2. One other bit of trivial you can get from it is that there are 234 nodes currently advertising their software as “ILoveGlozow:30.0.2.”
libsecp256k1-zkp - This Blockstream post goes into what the zkp library is, how it’s different than the non-zkp version and what they’ve been working on for the last 2.5 years. The libsecp256k1 library has been a mainstay of Bitcoin Core for years now and is the basis of the cryptography required to make Bitcoin work. What the zkp version of the library does is to add some interesting primitives like adapter signatures, Pedersen commitments and range proofs. These are not part of Bitcoin (at least not yet) but do have interesting use cases in Liquid for example. Students of cryptography should study this library.
Lightning
Channel Splicing BOLT Merged - Channel splicing is where you can add funds to a channel without closing it and it’s been in development for years. It finally got merged into the repository this week. It’s a bit strange since many lightning wallets already support splicing, but it’s good to get some standard out there merged so that new entrants can use it. Apparently it supports full-RBF.
lndk-pav - This is a BOLT12/lightning address/LNURL server for your node with Nostr identity and zaps all rolled into one in a product called BOLT12 Pay. There are quite a few standards as to how to pay people in lightning and this tries to make all of them work. Fragmented standards tend to go in this direction where someone will make something that is compatible with everything else and that get adopted as the standard. It’s definitely trying to fulfill that role and we’ll see if it succeeds.
LLM402.ai - You can pay to access any of the 30 different AI models by asking a question and paying the invoice. It’s a cool proof of concept, and the fact that it has many models is obviously a plus. Yet I can’t help but think about what it doesn’t give me, which is privacy. Yea, the endpoints might not know about me, but the website certainly does. Payment has this property where whoever does the collecting usually knows a lot more about you than you might feel comfortable with.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
The Network - hodlonaut documents what has happened to the Core developer group the past 7 years or so, in light of the OP_RETURN change. The story is part 1 of a 4-part series and it drops some bombs. Among other things, the accusation is that Core gave strong preference to two female developers as part of its presumably DEI push. The developer pipeline, the article alleges, ran through Chaincode Labs in New York, and unsurprisingly led to a political alignment that reflected the more liberal values of the city. In particular it selected for younger developers that could pack up and go to New York for anywhere between a few months to a few years.
Hong Kong Unlock Law - There’s a new law in Hong Kong that punishes people with up to a year in prison for not providing law enforcement passwords to your devices. The link is to a US Consulate advisory website where they suggest you contact the consulate in case you are so detained. This can, \of course, apply to your Bitcoin wallets both software and hardware, which means that they can, whenever they choose, threaten you with prison time if you don’t turn over your passwords to the coins. Be very careful with your devices when going to Hong Kong!
Fiat Money Made Iran - This post goes through how Iran is really a country that was created from fiat money, starting in 1953 when a democratically elected prime minister was overthrown for wanting more money for the oil BP was extracting from its lands, to 1970’s inflation from the de-linking of the dollar to gold and the establishment of the petrodollar and the chaos which eventually ended in the revolution in 1979 and the hostage crisis which made Iran an enemy of the US to this day. It’s a lot of dominoes, and most of them fell because of fiat money in some way, shape or form.
Quick Hits
CoinCenter Lawsuit Dismissed - The lobbying organization sued to get clarity on non-custodial wallets being subject to AML laws, but the case was dismissed for lack of standing.
Private Credit Squeeze - There are reports like this everywhere these days that it’s harder and harder to get credit. The Fed tightening is being felt by an economy used to getting easy money.
FrostyCashuWallet - You can now restrict Cashu spends to multisig, at least experimentally.
SplitSig - You can do a Diffie-Hellman key exchange over lightning to do secure communication.
Fiat delenda est.