Month: July 2024

Caught up in the storm of price action and US politics, it’s easy to forget the Bitcoin technology landscape had its own breakout earlier this year. Now that things have cooled off over the summer, next week’s Open-Source Stage at Bitcoin Nashville is a good opportunity to survey the industry’s progress.

Looking at this agenda, this year’s stacked lineup should be able to provide some signal amidst the electoral chatter. To warm us up for what promises to be an absolute marathon of an event, I’ve highlighted a handful of topics and talks to keep an eye on.

Technical innovation

Bitcoin builders will be looking to pick up on the momentum generated around “Bitcoin Season 2” in Nashville as the focus will remain on efforts to unlock Bitcoin’s programmability.

I previously discussed the arms race over all things BitVM and other purported layer 2s. The level of excitement around Bitcoin script has never been so high. Progress enabled by previous soft forks like Taproot and SegWit has led to various experiments, most motivated by the Ordinals craze. Naturally, the conversation has started to revolve around what comes next.

Unlocking expressivity with OP_CAT

Friday, July 26. 9:30 AM

Base58’s founder and everyone’s favorite Bitcoin educator Niftynei (Lisa) will look to set the tone on Friday morning by chairing a panel on the popular soft fork proposal OP_CAT. The hype around the script improvement proposal has not subsided and Bitcoin developers have been increasingly vocal about their affinity for CAT and its superpowers.

I expect co-panelists Andrew Poelstra, Director of Research at Blockstream, and fellow developers Rjindel & Brandon Black to make a strong case for the versatile script improvement.

BitVM: Pushing innovation without a soft fork

Friday, July 26. 10:00 AM

It’s hard to overstate the sheer brain power assembled in this talk. There is a reason BitVM has been the talk of the town since developer Robin Linus brought it onto the stage last year. The proposal has managed to attract an impressive crowd of builders and thinkers fascinated by the prospect of bringing fraud-proofs to Bitcoin.

With no working implementation yet, it also feels like crunch time for many of its promoters who have been talking a big game about its potential. The star-studded group of developers should be able to update us on the progress here and perhaps cut through the hype a bit.

Privacy at stake

Bitcoin’s legal battle for privacy: Free Samourai

Friday, July 26. 2:00 PM

The arrest of developers Keonne Rodriguez and William Hill in April sent shockwaves through the Bitcoin industry. Fixtures of the community for nearly a decade, both had been ardent proponents of Bitcoin users’ rights to privacy. Now that the dust has settled, questions linger about the case’s implications for open-source developers worldwide.

Veteran attorney Tor Ekeland who represented Roman Sterlingov in the high-profile “Bitcoin fog” mixer case will be joined by other panelists to discuss the US Department of Justice’s “abusive crypto prosecutions and the blockchain surveillance state.”

Making Bitcoin more private with CISA

Friday, July 26. 1:30 PM

This one is a little more obscure but will likely warrant attention from the more technical-minded folks. Cross-input signature aggregation, or CISA, is a proposal that has been floated in Bitcoin circles for many years already and was once envisioned as part of the Taproot upgrade. 

The general idea is to allow transactions to combine signatures from multiple inputs into a single one, effectively reducing their overall weight, and therefore cost. The proposal surfaced back into public discourse a few months ago in the context of debates over much-needed privacy improvements to the Bitcoin protocol. Some have suggested that reducing the cost of collaborative, multi-input, transactions like coinjoin might incentivize further use of privacy tools.

Originally spearheaded by Blockstream Research, developer Fabian Jahr was recently awarded a grant by the Human Rights Foundation to research the topic further. He will be joined on stage by respected wallet developers Craig Raw of Sparrow Wallet and Jameson Lopp of Casa.

Bitcoin development

The state of Bitcoin Core development

Saturday, July 27. 11:00 AM

Bitcoin’s reference software implementation is the quiet giant of this industry. The diverse and diligent team of developers has historically preferred to remain out of the spotlight. Now that the technical space is heating up and the stakes are as high as ever, how are its contributors dealing with the increased attention?

Bitcoin Magazine’s own Aaron Van Wirdum will attempt to elucidate the inner workings of this tight-knit group and allow contributors like Ava Chow and Murch to share their thoughts on the project.

Bitcoin free banking

Ecash debate: what are the tradeoffs?

Saturday, July 27. 3:15 PM

I could not end this article without shilling at least one of the panels I will be involved in. Is it a replacement for centralized custodians? Is it a scaling solution? Nobody seems to agree on the role of ecash in the Bitcoin ecosystem but, if anything, it can’t be ignored anymore.

The rapid progress of projects like Fedi and the Cashu open-source implementation has garnered a significant amount of mindshare over the last year. Advocates celebrate its versatility and privacy gains while detractors claim it is no different than the banking system Bitcoin was built to obsolete.

Both sides will be represented on the panel which is shaping up to be an exciting conversation around the future of Bitcoin’s financial system.

There is a lot of excitement at the prospect of Bitcoin entering the big leagues but it’s hard to tell if the ecosystem is ready to accommodate this new influx of interest. Now that we are crossing the political chasm, it’s crucial to continue supporting the open-source culture that brought us here. Fortunately, the industry has never looked so ready to tackle this challenge. The diversity of initiatives on display at the conference is a testament to the maturing technical environment made possible by FOSS developers. 

The original article this piece is responding to: Reflections on Bitcoin Culture. 

Bitcoin changes our lives.

It’s an almost spiritual observation that we’ve all seen within ourselves. After acquiring some, learning how it works, and to various degrees delving into what this decentralized, uncensorable, proof-of-work money is, we’ve seen our lives change. It echoes history. Some people see god in it.

Bitcoiners have had their lives upended, their perspectives shifted, and their value systems altered. We see how our behavior changed from our pre-Bitcoin selves, our emphasis now squarely placed on real things, hard things, the long term, and the local. We look to our inner selves, and we look after ourselves. We see to our families. We set our own house in order before we criticize the world.

Bitcoin encourages higher-level thinking, of the dynamic kind that once characterized good economics. Once a Bitcoiner, we become less prone to believing commonly accepted just-so stories — more skeptical and interested in verifying rather than trusting.

Anyone who’s been in Bitcoin for a while can point to countless such examples in their own lives. It’s undeniable, therefore, that Bitcoin itself has a culture. It affects change in the people it welcomes; you don’t change Bitcoin, Bitcoin changes you.

The values embedded in it are rules that people who embrace this monetary revolution can’t help but internalize. Whether they understand it or not is unimportant. Bitcoin is for anyone, sure, but you don’t stay that same person after Bitcoin has changed your life; you’re a different “anyone” than when you first opened your fiat eyes.

Bitcoin allowed us to see much of the stupidity of the collective delusions at the base of the state, democracy, central banks, public health, public schooling — public anything, really. It’s the same realization that makes us put huge question marks on climate change worries or trans ideology.

In the world of fiat, anything goes. You can unverifiably feel oppressed, a man can unverifiably be a woman, anyone who’s sad or distracted can unverifiably feel autistic or depressed. If the lord of the printing press doesn’t feel like there’s enough money around, he makes more. Violently extorting productive members of society is held as a morally good thing and celebrated. The experts and fiat media voices say the world ends in twelve (or five) years, and if you disbelieve them or ask for verification, you’re on par with the Nazis.

In Bitcoin, this playbook doesn’t fly anymore. Identifying as receiving a block reward does nothing, political votes become irrelevant, nobody’s unverifiable feelings reign supreme, and cheating gets harder. UTXOs don’t have a sex. It all goes out the window, revealed and denuded for the nonsense it always was.

Thus, something doesn’t add up in Margot Paez’s recent article thrashing Bitcoin culture. She writes:

“…popular influencers who are often millennial men spending a lot of time taking photos of themselves flexing their muscles in front of a mirror. I really wonder how big those muscles have to get to protect the fragile ego buried beneath those muscular fibers.”

Big muscles are flexes because they’re unfakeable — like a hash under the difficulty target. A transaction is valid and confirmed or it isn’t. It’s right there, objective, and verifiable to anyone who cares to look.

Pull-ups are flexes because they display truth, regardless of what anyone else thinks about an invisible ego beneath. You can do them, or you can’t; they’re verifiable and undeniable. A muscle-up doesn’t ask for permission or tries to confuse you about nuances to an imagined reality.

This stands in contrast to the fiat, legacy world — of which trans ideology is merely one of the least material but verifiably stupid examples — where words are violence, invisible and unverifiable identities rule, fiat schools can’t teach people to read or count, Uber doesn’t have any cars, and the banks don’t have your money. It’s a broken culture, where the only thing running away faster than the deaths of despair are the deficits in a profligate Treasury, forever bound to send welfare checks to rent-seekers.

It’s a culture dominated by sensitivity instead of truth, that celebrates weakness instead of strength and responsibility and self-improvement, that encourages therapy even though it barely works and shoves you pharmacy-full of meds and injections at the first sign of trouble.

That’s why I’m not sold on this “Progressive Bitcoiner” ethos flying around. Progressives came to Bitcoin and carved out a niche for themselves, and for now that works well as a bridge over from the hyper-leftwing clown world to our world. But you won’t be a Bitcoiner and long remain a progressive; they’re mostly incompatible ideas.

Progressivism came to Bitcoin as a breath of fresh air, but it will ultimately die here.

Bitcoin strips a government of control over transactions and economic value. A progressive requires a large and invasive government to uphold and enact the many things they yearn for. If you still want those goodies, but not the violent organized crime syndicate we call government, you’re merely a libertarian with a strong social ethos. Congrats. I’ve said so before regarding Jason Maier’s A Progressive’s Case for Bitcoin, and I maintain that in time Bitcoin will change him too, like it has the rest of us.

Bitcoin sooner or later forces you into seeing the world of truth and acting in unfakeable ways, looking to what is rather than what’s voiced or recommended by “experts.” On the way there one usually complains loudly about the mean Bitcoiners not seeing the world you do.

It’s not a coincidence that so many Bitcoiners proudly and diligently consume steak. We saw that the nutritional guidelines were gunk (some might even say corrupt), and the people pushing them were obese, ill, and ugly. We ate a bunch of meat and felt better. Do I look unhealthy to you?! we ceremoniously ask.

The LGBTQ flags that Paez defends sit next to flags with “Free Palestine” — even though Palestinians aren’t exactly known for their pro-gay values — and “Slava Ukraini,” celebrating a country that scores among the worst on the Rainbow Europe index and routinely counts as Europe’s second most corrupt country (behind Russia). These are not serious people. You know something is rotten when originally peace-loving leftists celebrate the very warmongering people they should detest.

The ultimate shit-test is the clown world shitshow, not Bitcoiner culture. In fact, the truth and honesty in Bitcoin culture is the antidote.

Quit whining and go do some pull-ups.

This is a guest post by Joakim Book. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.