Interesting Stuff
Burger Age Collapse - Prester John Andrews argues that when the Bronze Age collapsed around 1200 BC, it wasn't one thing that broke but everything at once. This was because civilizations built on interlocking complexity had no graceful way to fail. He likens that collapse to modern America by way of the humble hamburger. The $1 McDouble and the gourmet burger joint both vanished because the same globalized supply chain that made them possible turns out to be one giant fragile system that got destroyed with shocks. Of course, these supply chains wouldn’t be so fragile if they weren’t built on fiat debt and fiat theft, which I suspect was a factor in the Bronze Age collapse as well.
Excusing of Killer Mothers - Janice Fiamengo documents 250 years of Western courts going soft on mothers who murder their own children with the Lindsay Clancy case being just the latest. Her supporters have raised a million dollars and pointed the finger at the husband and this fits perfectly into this long-term pattern. The argument is an uncomfortable truth. Western legal systems treat female perpetrators as victims-of-circumstance by default and have for a long time. The uncomfortable fact is that accountability continues to be gendered, perhaps at a biological level.
Manufacturing Guilt - Daniel Strand interviews Tou Thao, the officer convicted for doing crowd control while never touching George Floyd. He gives his account, and it is a damning portrait of a prosecution driven by the need for blood during a turbulent political season. The original prosecutors walked off the case calling the charges unethical, and medical examiners reportedly faced pressure to adjust their findings. His Christian faith framing is genuine and worth taking seriously as he describes enduring imprisonment by fixing his eyes on a justice that transcends whatever verdict a politicized court renders. The broader lesson is one that readers of Girard know. When institutions are captured by political incentives, they will manufacture a scapegoat the moment requires. It is Christianity that holds this injustice at bay.
Private Equity in Travel Sports - Aaron M. Renn writes about how private equity moved into youth sports and has consolidated everything. This includes teams, tournaments, hotels and media to turn what used to be volunteer-run community leagues into money extraction machines. This has priced out working-class families creating essentially a class and wealth-based sports system. This has obviously made the interaction of people of different economic classes in sports more difficult, and the institutions themselves feel much more commercial. Financialization has eaten yet another domain that used to function on duty and community, leaving a pay-to-play system where wealth determines the opportunities at least as much as talent.
Male College Enrollment - Celeste Davis cites veterinary school data for why male college enrollment is set to accelerate. As female enrollment climbed from 11% to 78%, male enrollment collapsed. Researchers quantified this by putting it this way: one additional female applicant deterred male applicants more than a $1,000 tuition hike would. The same pattern has played out in teaching, nursing, biology, and now the broader university system. Despite the obvious reason that men don’t like to be in female-dominated spaces, most analyses of this phenomenon completely miss it. Yet if you understand the incentives, it’s not surprising. There’s a taboo around the most explanatory variable and every expert only looks around at the approved list of causes, and the problem gets worse while the experts collect their grants.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
BIP SHRINCS - SHRINCS (Shrunken SPHINCS) is a draft Bitcoin Improvement Proposal for post-quantum signatures built entirely on SHA256. Because SHA256 is well tested and remains unbroken even in theory, the security assumptions around this scheme require no new cryptographic leaps of faith. The stateful variant produces signatures as small as 548 bytes, roughly 10x smaller than the stateless option. The tradeoff is that stateful signing will nuke your security if you ever reuse a key leaf. It's conservative, practical, and SHA256-only, or something that looks a lot more attractive than the lattice-based approaches.
Manual Seed Generation - This tool walks you through generating a Bitcoin seed phrase using physical entropy sources. You can use a die, a single deck of cards, or two decks. The idea is that your seed phrase is generated without any trusted device. That said, the weakness here is that you have to use some sort of computer to turn those dice-rolls or card shuffles into actual seed words. A printed chart is easier to verify as the computer doing the converting may be compromised, even in offline mode. That said, you can audit the code and verify that way, which may be more comfortable for some people.
Experimenting with Covenants - covenants.diy is a browser-based visual environment for designing and testing Bitcoin covenant scripts. The site supports opcodes like CTV, CSFS, CAT, and VAULT with automatic tapscript generation and step-through script execution. The whole thing is in WebAssembly and no server is needed. Covenants are one of the most hotly debated topics in Bitcoin development right now because we don’t know how useful they’ll be for the end user. I’ve heard the argument that had covenants existed, the ColdCard disaster wouldn’t have happened. I disagree. Multisig is hard enough and most people are using single-sig. How much harder would a UX around covenants be? That said, if there’s ever a place to prove this out at a user level, it’s using tools like this.
Lightning
Upgrade Eclair - Eclair v0.14.2 is a patch release the ACINQ team is strongly urging everyone to apply because some of the bugs it fixes can be actively exploited by malicious nodes on the Lightning Network. It was a bit of a strange release as they only released the binary and kept the source closed, meaning people had to trust the developers that the bug was severe enough that this was a necessary precaution. The release also formalizes a security requirement that bitcoind must either run on the same machine as your Eclair node or be connected via an encrypted, authenticated tunnel.
Iceberg - This is a cryptographic scheme that lets one participant in a Lightning channel replace their single key with a threshold of keys. You can have m-of-n security on a channel that looks like a normal 2-of-2 MuSig output from the outside, adding institutional-grade custody to Lightning without sacrificing privacy or on-chain footprint. The clever engineering uses Verifiable Pseudorandom Secret Sharing to keep overhead manageable, adding only 4–17 milliseconds per payment. That’s roughly $0.07 per 100,000 payments in compute cost.
SATS Routing - SATS Routing is a new backend service in the Boltz ecosystem. After the shutdown of their swap service, especially after the warrant canary disappearance, the new routing backend should draw a lot more scrutiny, even if it means more redundancy, better liquidity, and faster swaps for users.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Prediction Markets on Ark - Developer ekzyis is building what could be the first truly non-custodial Bitcoin prediction market by combining Ark's virtual UTXOs with Discreet Log Contracts and adaptor signatures. The genuinely clever stack lets users bet without handing custody to anyone. The key insight is using Schnorr adaptor signatures tied to oracle attestations inside a TapLeaf, so winnings can only be claimed by whoever the oracle says won, with a unilateral exit path if the operator goes rogue. It's still early MVP territory, and obviously still requires an oracle, but it’s less requiring of trust than the typical prediction marketplace, who have been known to cheat their customers.
Ocean and Luke-jr - Luke Dashjr has parted ways with OCEAN mining pool as he resigns as Chairman, CTO, and director with his equity bought out. They apparently have different visions for Bitcoin mining following recent BIP110 saga, which is a polite way of saying they disagreed on which chain is Bitcoin. Dashjr is now launching Convoy, a new venture continuing his mission to decentralize Bitcoin mining, while Ocean carries on as a non-custodial transparent pool.
The Social Value of Prediction Markets - The piece argues that prediction markets generate enormous positive externalities even though individual trades are zero-sum. The price signals created benefit everyone, not just the traders, because capital-backed forecasts are far more honest than pundit opinions that carry no personal cost when wrong. The insight is that systems requiring real skin in the game produce better information than systems that let experts fail upward forever, which is essentially the same reason proof-of-work beats proof-of-authority. Money helps make better predictions, much like price does.
Quick Hits
BitGo Acquires NYDIG’s Institutional Trading Business - BitGo did this to deepen its suite of services for institutional Bitcoin holders.
Bitcoin Supply Check - BitMex Research built a real-time monitor that verifies Bitcoin’s total supply against its expected inflation schedule.
Weak Seed Sweeper - Someone has been running a mempool-watching bot that sweeps Bitcoin wallets derived from embarrassingly weak seeds.
Tether in Uruguay - Tether's grand Uruguayan ambitions have quietly collapsed.
Fiat delenda est.