Bitcoin Tech Talk #495
Interesting Stuff
California Fraud - If you thought the Minnesota Fraud was bad, wait until this expose by Christopher F. Rufo. The fraud is staggering in its breadth and depth, which exceeds $180B, but the real story is just how little politicians in the state care that such fraud exists. You might even say that they welcome the fraud as it seems to be an easy way for them to buy votes. Sadly, this is all too common when liberal governments get into power as the rhetoric is always about spending money to help the less fortunate, but the reality, whether purposeful or not, is massive corruption. If it’s purposeful, it’s malice. If it’s not purposeful, it’s incompetence. The reality of fiat money printing is that neither are punished.
Lindy West - Dave Greene writes this very thoughtful reflection on the 2010’s and relates it to the current dissident right movement. Lindy West features prominently in the article and if you are like me and had no idea who she is or was, then suffice it to say that she was a feminist progressive (the shout your abortion, proud of obesity type) who in attempting to live out her ideology, ran smack into the wall of reality. The big insight of the article for me was that much of internet fighting is academic, that is, argued in theory and with little evidence that it applies to reality. She had a bad time trying to fit her ideology to a reality that was hostile.
Make Films Great Again - Joseph Holmes writes this post about the movie “Project Hail Mary" and why he thinks it has connected with so many audiences. His argument is that the film is a portrayal of positive masculinity which is in contrast to the Netflix documentary “Into the Manosphere.” As he notes, problem-solving is a masculine trait which has been cast as a flaw in Hollywood for the last 15 years and this film is one of the few that counters that trend. I watched the movie before reading the article and strangely, I thought the main character was very un-masculine, largely due to his cowardice shown over and over again in the movie. In a sense, the article reminded me that bravery is not the only masculine trait and that I had become blind to them because I’m so seldom exposed to them in popular culture.
Homeschooling Reality - Lane Scott has this very honest article about the difficulty of homeschooling and how it requires a tremendous amount of virtue. There are many reasons, not the least of which is the lack of support structures, but her main contention is that self-governing is the most difficult thing to teach to children, especially if the teacher is also lacking in that department. In other words, discipline is very difficult. Perhaps it’s because I come from a male perspective in homeschooling, but I think this is where a father’s presence is absolutely needed. The offloading of that responsibility to schools, I think, is the source of many societal ills.
Midwit Helpers - Adam Mastroianni writes this essay about his AI anxiety. As he reveals, the more you actually play with AI, the more its limitations become plain and while it can do a lot of objectively impressive things, there are still lots of things it can’t do which are subjective and require a human touch. I think he hits on something pretty important here. There’s a difference between intelligence and wisdom, and while AI may be good at the former, it lacks the latter, because there isn’t experience or even the context window to learn wisdom from.
What I'm up to
Bit Block Boom - Coming up this week is my presentation on “The Third Way” at Bit Block Boom in Dallas on April 11th. If you haven’t been to the conference, it’s a fun one with a lot of Bitcoiners in a more intimate setting than the giant conferences.
Claude-based Tutorials - I’ve been experimenting with some education material that’s embedded in Claude. I’m looking for coders that are interested in trying them out. Please reply to this newsletter if you would like to learn some Bitcoin stuff and provide feedback.
Seventy-Two - I wrote a science fiction short story.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Network Topology - If you’re curious about different node types, not in terms of software, but in terms of the role they play in the network as connectors, this is a really good analysis of what they are. The post makes clear the difference between reachable and unreachable nodes, how they’re connected and the roles of archival, pruned, blocks-only and light nodes. There’s a great analysis of the various networks, like TOR, I2P and plain IPv4 and how they interact with bridge nodes as well.
bip54.org - The website is a clear explanation of what the BIP54 Connsensus Cleanup proposal will do. The main things that it is fixing are the timewarp attack, per-transaction limits of sigops, SPV vulnerability fix and the duplicate transaction fix by requiring a different locktime instead of the BIP30 fix. For me, the SPV thing is probably the most unnecessary, but they’re all reasonable fixes to be making, though it’s unclear exactly what risks they introduce.
SHRIMPS - Quantum FUD is in full swing after Scott Aaronson’s blog post. The quantum computing cheerleader has recommended that Bitcoin move to a quantum-proof algorithm. Given that quantum computing has even factored a small number like 6 without significant cheating, I don’t think quantum is anywhere near threatening Bitcoin, but SHRIMPS is one of the more efficient quantum signature schemes, with about 2500 bytes per signature.
Lightning
Square Merchants - The Jack Dorsey company has enabled Bitcoin on their ubiquitous Point-of-Sale machines, making it possible for millions of merchants to take Bitcoin and Lightning as payment. The most attractive part for the merchant is that there are 0% processing fees, which definitely isn’t the case with credit cards. Though I expect the adoption among these merchants to be slow as they’re not likely to value Bitcoin very much, the infrastructure being there is likely to be much more important in the future.
utreexod - If you want a full node that takes a lot less space on your hard drive, this is your project. This is based off of btcd and BDK to implement the entire utreexo idea, which is a form of a pruned node, except that the entire utxo set is merkelized. This means that there’s very little space required, but a much larger bandwidth as each UTXO spend requires a merkle proof. As hard drive prices keep going up, this trade off keeps looking better, and needless to say, this is likely going to be very useful for lightning nodes.
Lexe - This is a self-custodial lightning wallet with some interesting features. First, there’s the human Bitcoin addresses (BIP353) front and center, which acts a lot like a CashApp or Venmo ID. There’s also SDKs for Python and Rust which makes building on it a lot easier. In the age of AI, I suspect robust extension tools like this will be important.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
DoJ going after Crypto Fraud - It seems like the days of crypto pardons are over, at least for non-US citizens as this announcement from the Department of Justice shows. They are going after Crypto fraudsters, particularly around market manipulation, which is a little strange given that the ponzi-schemes are much more prominent. But then maybe prosecuting those would mean too many that donated to the Trump campaign would get caught.
opreturn.social - There’s now some sort of social media platform built on OP_RETURN outputs, where users can post and interact using those outputs. For now it’s like the original Facebook Wall except not in any way limited to a single person. You can shore and repost certain ones, but using Bitcoin’s blockchain, making it a lot more expensive. I really don’t think this will be popular and it’s a strange project when I can’t tell which side created this thing.
Paper Bitcoin - John Carvalho makes the argument that all the paper Bitcoin essentially destroyed the bull market. This is not a new argument, but the framing was intriguing as well as all the statistics. The statistics are pretty straightforward. There was a lot of debt that was taken out to buy Bitcoin by many treasury companies done in ways that weren’t necessarily sustainable. The framing is that all the additional debt that Strategy took out to service dividends was money that didn’t go into Bitcoin and is the “cost” of paper Bitcoins.
Quick Hits
Huge Node Increase - A large number of nodes apparently appeared on 03/31.
txrush.com - Fun way to visualize the current mempool and what’s getting through.
bitcoin-takeover Arcade - You can play a bunch of classic arcade games in 10 minutes to become a champion.
PayNym Gateway - BIP47 privacy has its fans and this is a good place to go find resources for it.
Fiat delenda est.