I am exhausted though, and my brain feels fuzzy. I have so many things that I need and want to be doing, and I can’t figure out how to spend my time on them. I think I’m almost there, at the breaking point. The point where the decisions that get made in a short period of time are the ones that determine, in large strokes, the shape of what happens next.

There’s an odd sensation I’m having, where I feel disconnected and outside of the conversation everyone else is having. That outsideness makes me wonder if I should stop, if the position I’m holding is not just untenable, but undesired.

When I bare to look, there’s so many unread messages in my Signal chat. It’s no surprise to me that I feel disconnected. I need a moment to gather my energy to respond to them all. The effort of actively seeking out messages I haven’t replied to feels like too much.

Which leads me back to the question. Am I actually disconnected, or am I burnt out?

Instead of communicating with people, I spend my time talking to the AI about the systems I want it to build for me. I half finish other projects, like pulling out my build computer that stopped responding a month ago and carrying it, the heavy beast, to the bitcoin++ office, where there’s a monitor and a keyboard. I hope I can debug what’s wrong quickly and get back to work with it.

There’s so many things I want to get done in a day, and I’m not sure if it’s possible any more. Maybe I’ve actually hit my limit. I don’t even feel like I’ve started trying, in a lot of ways.

I tell myself that small habits are the start of something big as I remember to stand up and do ten squats this hour. There’s a rumor on the internet that if you do ten squats every forty-five minutes it’s the same as walking ten thousand steps in a day. Not to say that I don’t also go for walks. When I lay down in my bed at night, my legs feel tired. I can’t figure out if it’s from lack of use or from over use. Is confusion a part of burnout?

I’ve pushed myself and my team harder in the last four months than in any prior time. Somethings broke. Others leveled up.

I’m in disbelief now but I was excited about doing it at the time I signed up for it.

Trying this hard was a good experiment to run, for me, personally. Something about myself and my understanding of the world has qualitatively changed in the last few months. I couldn’t tell you what, or how, but I know there’s no going back.

I don’t feel like I know who I am anymore. On the other hand, my actions and behaviors feel much more malleable and observable than ever before. I don’t know how to explain it, but it feels like I’ve got a real opportunity now to live a different life than the one I had been living. It’s not even an opportunity. It just is.

I don’t feel like I know who I am anymore, but it also deeply does not seem to matter so much. Whoever I am, I’m largely ok with it. Sometimes I wish I had become this non-person person earlier in my life. I wish that I had pushed myself this hard, in the particular direction that I have been pushing the last few months, at some point before now.

I didn’t. I am where I am now, not then. I’m ok with that. The timeline doesn’t really seem to matter.

The weirdest part is the voice in my head is very different now than it was even just three months ago.

Perhaps that’s what I’m really referring to when I say “I don’t know who I am anymore” — the voice in my head is someone else’s. It wants something from me now, it wants me to keep shipping. It wants me to finish the tasks that I have outlined for myself for the day. It gets annoyed when I am not working on things.

I’ve spent the last two hours writing because writing is the thing that I need to be doing.

For a long time, the voice in my head wasn’t nearly so helpful. Honestly, I’m not so sure how I made it as far as I have with such an actively unhelpful voice in my head. It doesn’t always tell me the same thing, and in fact you can probably trace some amount of personal growth the changes in what it says to me. It stopped telling me what I should do during COVID. This summer it stopped telling me that it wanted to die.

We all live with our demons.

Now mine is telling me to keep going.

I started writing this post on April 13th but got distracted by a few things, namely: the bitcoin++ event at the Hoover Dam, April 23+24th; the Bitcoin Conference in Vegas, the week after; and then vibe-coding for my life to ship some much-needed automation for the the bitcoin++ universe. It’s insane to say it, but most of my desired updates to the website are mostly shipped now. I’ve got a long tail of updates and improvements to make, but the core functionality for sending out talk acceptances, reviewing the talks, and promoting information onto the website (talks, speakers, sponsors) is much much easier and automated now.

Using Claude Code to ship a monstrous amount of code in a very compressed timeline has been really incredible. The bright spots are really bright. It made doing data migrations an absolute joy. I migrated a lot of the data for bitcoin++ from being checked-in to Github or uploaded to Notion to instead living on an S3 bucket.* Data migrations are really annoying, because they require writing a lot of code that essentially ends up as throw away, one time runs. Claude would write one off programs in minutes, read all the pieces it needed from other configs, and then run it with a dry-run, figure out what needed to be changed, update the code, and re-run it. It’d print out reports about what had been migrated successfully, and what failed. LLMs are so good at moving data around, it’s really impressive. I was able to port all of my backend to the cloud in minutes, not days.

*technically it’s living on the Digital Ocean Spaces, but it’s the exact same service API.

I also did a schema migration, blowing the talks table out into a bunch of different ones, to make it easier to send invitations to prospective speakers.

I wired in our social post generation into our Buffer client, which pipes out updates about talks and speakers and sponsors to four different social platforms.

We generated a lot of images to back-fill missing images for all historical bitcoin++ events.

I made an entire user dashboard, that allows for any bitcoin++ volunteer, speaker, or ticket holder to login and see their shifts, re-download their tickets, view or edit their talks, invite a friend to join them for their workshop.

I also added button to help auto-send calendar invites for scheduled talks, volunteer shifts; you can add a talk from the agenda to your own personal calendar.

I did all of this in less than a month, while also running one event and attending another. We’re living in really incredible times, and I can’t wait to finish what’s left on my ‘wishlist’ for the bitcoin++ universe this… week?

The thing I’m the most excited about is a new affiliate links program: anyone who’s been to at least one bitcoin++ before can setup their own discount code to share with their friends, or community. Every discount code is worth 20% off, but the person setting up the code gets to decide where that 20% ends up: in their own pocket, as a discount for the ticket buyer, or some split between them.

They’re valid for any current bitcoin++ event. So set it once and you don’t have to update it ever again.

Claude’s not great at everything. The code it writes is pretty heinous. But it works, and it’s quite capable of translating complex requirements into working code, quickly. It’s been an absolute game changer for bitcoin++, and I can’t wait to run our first event off the updated platform, using auto-generated runs of shows, automated speaker posts, and easier speaker communications.

I’ve never shipped so much, so quickly in my life, and I can’t wait to get to the next set of what, honestly, up until this point, was mostly a wishlist. I don’t have any prior experience with shipping an entire platform for a project that has users and revenue. I’m very curious to see how having a platform for the bitcoin++ conference series helps the event bring more people together over the next six months. I also can’t wait to see what else I’ll be able to build in the next few weeks.

Probably worth mentioning I’m using the 5x, $100 a month subscription to Claude, in the terminal to get things done, and that’s about it. I’ve heard a lot about other setups, but the bottleneck isn’t the code generation, it’s been manually verifying all the work.

Anyways, it’s been a huge pleasure to be able to finally realize software dreams, even if the UI looks a bit like it was cobbled together by a kindergartener, and I’m not entirely sure about the state of the codebase at this point.

Give the updated bitcoin++ website a look, try logging into the dashboard or applying to give a talk or volunteer. Here’s to digital proficiency being more accessible, more quickly than ever before.

Until next time~

~nifty

Saturday, April 4th was the first day that I told someone my brain has become consumed with the coming energy crisis, and they expressed interest in my panic shopping list. I sent it to them, immediately, via Signal. It’s the first (and now only) thing in our chat history.

I talk about the ‘pending crisis’ with almost anyone that I have an audience with. It’s become my new fixation. On the way to a wedding with my boyfriend and a long-time work colleague it’s all I can talk about — neither of them seem to know what the latest is on the Situation. My panic list included a bunch of soap. No one has bought more soap than me. I keep trying to make jokes about the pending return of the “unwashed masses”, how I’m well positioned for it. No one has enough context for my joke to land. They don’t realize how ahead of their reality I am. I hope it remains a joke, but I doubt it.

It used to be that, back in the day, smelling like anything other than sweat and body odor was a luxury. As were new clothes, and general ownership of objects. I don’t think we really understand how the proliferation of oil+gas allowed for the creation of more stuff, at a greater scale. Petrochemicals, more than anything else in the last 100 years, created abundance. We live in world of abundance that was engineered on the back of hydrocarbons.

We’re about to find out, in a big way, what a world without an abundance of hydrocarbons is like. I suspect that the biggest industry that petrochemicals replaced is animal products. Soap used to be made from lye, which I think came from animal fat. Our clothing, polyester now, used to be made out of ‘natural fibers’ like cotton and wool. Now might not be a bad time to own a sheep farm. I don’t even know how you make deodorant, but I’m assuming it uses petrochemicals.

I wonder what humans did to smell not bad before oil was discovered at Spindletop in 1901.

Other things that I anticipate being a luxury: travel, of any form. New electronics. Seafood, as it consumes massive amounts of diesel to power the ships that go out to get fetch it from the deeps. Washing your hands. Being able to buy things for cheap on the internet and have them arrive at your door within minutes to hours, not days to weeks. All the gadgets and bits and bobs that goes in to modern healthcare. Syringes, masks, gloves.

Scrolling twitter is where I get the majority of my new information about the developing catastrophe. This week was the first week I started seeing new posts from others that are locked-in about how difficult it has been to communicate the size of the coming problem to other people in their lives.

I felt that one.

Or did, rather, until Saturday at the wedding reception when a friend asked to see The List. The set of things that I considered worth investing in buying. I sent it to her, and then immediately started really panicking. It’s one thing to invest your own money into a set of items that may or may not turn into a boondoggle. It’s quite another to encourage someone else to do the same.

I don’t mind being the one that’s more informed than the other Smart People in my life; I do really mind being the one that’s influencing others to make decisions based on my retelling alone.

In case you’re wondering, my List is:

• dish soap

• sponges

• towels*

• sheets*

• laundry detergent

• dishwashing soap

• hand soap

• body soap

• hair soap?

• sponges 🧽

• cleaning supplies

• toothpaste

• toothbrushes

• deodorant

*denotes things I already feel like I have enough of

Anyway, hope you’re all enjoying a lovely spring wherever you are in the world. More missives coming soon (I hope).

~nifty

Panicked is a big word. I’m not really the panicking type. There is an energy that overcomes me when I’m moving in a direction that’s unfamiliar. I’d describe it as more ‘manic’ or ‘unhinged’.

I’ve found that moving in unfamiliar directions, in the modern age, involves spending money in novel ways. It’s when the credit card numbers start adding up on something that’s not like you that the unhinged feeling really starts to hit. I’ve done this so many times in my life now, and each time was important in retrospect. At the moment of it happening I feel unmoored, like I’m throwing myself down into a pit from which there may be no bottom, or off a ledge with a wing that maybe won’t work. Maybe I’ll crash.

I don’t remember exactly how things started with the “War in Iran” but I seem to remember it starting around the first of March, 2026. The energy that week was really off: mine, the world’s. Dad’s sister’s husband, my uncle, shot himself on February 28th, right around the time everything started falling apart, into pieces. What did he know about the world and where we’re going that none of us do? It was surreal to see family again, many of whom I haven’t seen since our mid or even early twenties. The whole family was there, we all came. Everyone looks middle aged now, or creeping into elderly. My uncle was 71 when he passed. He was married to my father’s older sister. My own father turns 70 next month.

That was almost four weeks ago now. We’ve been watching things unfold in the Middle East for years, really, but I don’t think most people in America really grasp the depth of the conflict, how deeply ancient humanity is tied up in people throwing bombs and fighting each other that space is.

Maybe things would have been different this era, in modernity, if the Arab states weren’t also the home of so much hydrocarbon wealth. Generally I don’t pay attention to Conflict in the Middle East. This is different, the US finally got involved in a ‘direct proxy war’ between itself and China vis-a-vis Iran. Rumor had it Russia was fighting the US and NATO vis-a-vis Ukraine. That was all well and good — the United States had no expectation of sending men. Russians and Ukrainians were dying over access to bodies of strategic water and farmland. The United States was sending weapons and maybe intel? Who knows.

This time it’s different because the energy infrastructure of the Middle East is coming down. I’ve never lived through shortages before. My grandparents went through World War II, they had to collect coupons for butter and rubber and nylons. Or so I’ve been told. Or maybe I read that, on the Internet. The systems of administration of the government that is required to synchronize the production and consumption of resources both for war and so that everyone can continue to survive isn’t something that we’ve seen in almost one hundred years.

I have no idea what will happen in the next 90 days, but it’s not something that I’m excited about leaving to chance.

I placed an order on Amazon dot com for my first “emergency food” bid on March 11th. That was 18 days ago. I’m not really what you’d call a prepper, but reports on twitter were talking about how some 40% of fertilizer precursors come from the Middle East. Worse comes to worse, it’s good to have food on hand. I assume that there will be some food available when shit begins to hit the fan, but maybe not in the quantities or at the price point that I’m accustomed to. The biggest advantage of having ‘reserves’ of food on hand is to be able to ride out shortages and price shocks with a release valve that makes you not a customer at the moment when it feels like monopoly or panic pricing is in effect. I’m not looking to survive independently, without additional supplies for years. The goal is to have a buffer that smooths out shocks over a six to twelve month period. At least, this is the design goal I’m aiming for, and the first item that popped above the ‘panic line’ was long term food stocks.

This week was different. I started to really think about what it means for energy prices to go up, for helium to be in short supply, for natural gas and petrochemical by-products to become harder to get.

There was one post on twitter that spurred me to action: a short report that Dutch fisherman weren’t heading out to sea because the diesel to run their ships was too expensive, and would be more than they could expect to get at market for the fish they were going to catch.

What about this post was particularly ‘panic’ inducing? It was a reminder that collecting food requires energy, and that while to be the guy with fish in a market when no one has any will drive the prices up, producers aren’t always able to meet the first price-wave of increased costs of fuel to continue operating. In other words: fisherman may simply not have the money on hand to buy more fuel for their ships at more expensive prices, which means they can’t go fishing.

Ok so where do we go from here. What’s worth investing my (limited) money into?

This is the week I really started reaching out to family and friends to see what they’re worried about, and posting about shortages in group chats or bringing it up on work calls. No one seems to be as well informed as I am about the situation. I admit that this is probably a sign to stop scrolling Twitter as much. One of my friends is busy with a newborn, so she had her husband get in touch with me to chat about what he’s doing to prepare. It sounded like he had mostly been working on equity plays, trying to figure out how to preserve wealth and maybe even make the next leg up with the right choices. I haven’t been doing this. We didn’t seem to have much in common in that regard.

Instead of stock markets, I’m thinking about infrastructure.

I live in Texas. We have a local city grid that someone provides power to. In Austin, the city I live in, that city grid is run and managed by a monopoly utility called Austin Energy or somesuch. Austin Energy, much to my surprise, owns power plants which power the local grid. They’re mainly natural gas powered plants. As long as those plants continue to have power, the lights will stay on and my phones and computers will stay charged. Crucially, my electric stove will work. What do the power plants need to continue to function? They need Natural Gas. Where do they buy natural gas from? A network of pipelines that originate in the wells of West Texas and bring the gas directly to power plants in Central Texas.

Power prices might go up but the lights will likely stay on here in Austin. If the lights stay on, the water and cell networks are also likely to stay on. I probably don’t need to worry about access to clean water (unless the equipment breaks or we have a Weather Event) but those aren’t much within my control. We’re just doing ‘first line of comfortable and affordable survival in a regime of shortages’ here.

What is going to get harder to get? Well, I’d presume that anything that travels to America on boat will get harder to come by and more expensive. Food that’s produced locally in Texas or Mexico will likely continue to exist and show up at stores. We have enough domestic production of diesel and gasoline that local farmers and herdsmen will be able to continue production largely without any serious impacts.

Electronics are going to get scarce(r). Helium is required for making chips. Chips are a critical component of cars, cell towers, computers, and cell phones. I’m sure there’s more things I haven’t thought of that I’ll wish I had in six to eight months. I bought more USB cables and an extra travel charger yesterday. I’m holding onto my back up cellphones and trying to find a good ‘just-in-case’ replacement iphone on eBay for a reasonable price. Just today, an SD card manufacturer out of South Korean announced they won’t be delivering the memory cards they had promised.

It’s possible that we’ll have a soap crisis. Most industrial soap is made using petrochemicals. I don’t know how much of local supply gets made from USA sourced hydrocarbons. It’s possible that the entire soap industry will be completely fine. I’m still worried though — running out of dish soap or laundry detergent would be quite miserable.

I spent some time talking to Claude.ai to figure out where non-petrochemical soap ingredients come from. It’s largely palm oil that’s produced in Indonesia or Malaysia. I don’t know enough about the production of palm oil or global shipping to have any idea about how badly the palm oil industry will be impacted, or how the cost of diesel to ship palm oil from the East Indies to America will be. I’m worried about soap, and shampoo, and detergent.

The other item I went ahead and restocked on is vitamins. If I took meds, I’d be looking to get extras of those as well, but I’m lucky and not on any medications. Instead, I made sure I had enough vitamin K and zinc — things that I eat when I’m feeling sick or like I’ve come down with something that might be COVID again. It’s funny how the last crisis informs the current one. I didn’t buy any masks or gloves this time though. Maybe I should.

Amazon is such an incredible service. It was possible to have a moment of worry, search on the app, and then have the item on its way to my doorstep and arrive 45 minutes later all from the comfort of my couch. I wonder how much of that kind of service delivery will be available in three months.

I probably spent well over a thousand dollars prepping for the next few months in the last 48 hours. Pre-buying enough deodorant and toothpaste and vitamins to last me for three to six to maybe even twelve months.

It’s possible that this all blows over quickly and we get back to ‘normal’ very soon. That’s not a risk I’m particularly interested in running to be honest.

I’m too used to being comfortable, and prepared.

~nifty

You know the saying: if at first you don’t succeed, try. Try again.

There’s no sayings for what if if at first you do succeed and you take the castle. Only to discover that your princess isn’t in that castle. Do you give up and go find another castle?

I guess it depends on your understanding of success. If taking the castle was the goal, then you’re likely to stop at the first castle that you conquer.

If your goal is to rescue the princess, however, to find a deeper purpose that feels like you’re actually bringing yourself home, it’s time to go and look for the next castle.

To continue taking castles requires a persistent faith that eventually there will be a princess in the castle.

You know it’s funny. You would think, “wow, why don’t you phone ahead and figure out if there’s a princess in the castle before you try to take it?”. You’d be right, that seems like a reasonable way to save yourself a lot of time not conquering castles that don’t have princesses in them. The thing is, I don’t really know how to tell if there’s a princess in a castle when I start working on a new skill. To some extent I think I’m just interested in seeing where the castle takes me.

I feel like I’ve gotten to a point in my career though where I’d like to really find the castle with the princess in it. I think I know what direction the castle lies in. I’ve gotten a good idea of what a castle without a princess looks like, and am doing a much better job at avoiding them, despite the allure of castle hunting.

Still don’t feel like I’ve found the princess yet, but I can’t help but wonder if maybe that’s because I’m scared of trying that castle in particular. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to find inside of it, or what happens after the princess is found.

The whole time, I was battling some almost guilt about the messages I wasn’t responding to, the “internet work” that I needed to be doing (updating the website! Writing content! Clipping videos! Solving internet organization!)

What I found myself contemplating as I did tasks was this new concept, the idea of immanence.

Immanence is an old word, but not once that is much used nowadays. It doesn’t make much sense on its own. That’s because it is one half of a duality. The other side of it is much better known. In fact, if you’re like me, you probably encountered it in high school as “Transcendentalism”alongside the Romantic movement in English class.

I came across it a few months ago on an X post, if I remember correctly on a owencyclops post. Immanence is the being, the existing in space. The internet dictionary uses the word “dwelling”. Transcendence, its opposite is the pushing beyond. Transcendence and immanence, surprisingly to me, has a history deep in Western mysticism.

We don’t have many dualities in Christianity. The Greeks had Diana and Apollo. Eastern philosophy has the yin and yang. Ancients, the sun and the moon. Instead Christians have one god made in three parts, not two: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

If you dig into the Wikipedia article on Immanence, there’s a specific section on Christianity. In there, I found something of an illumination. God may exist in three, but the duality of immanence and transcendence are the explanatory lines which creates the triumvirate.

The Father is transcendent. He is omnipresent and omniscient. His knowledge knows no bounds, there is nothing that can contain him. He is transcendence in its purest essence.

The Holy Spirit is immanent. It is the existence or the dwelling of the Lord in a single space. He takes up residence and vibes in the world somewhere. That localization, the defining of a location, is the immanence of the Lord.

The Son is the Lord made flesh. He is transcendence made immanent as man. He defies the boundaries of man, death, and yet he is here and takes up space. He walks the earth. He is what happens when the transcendent, the ability to push beyond into the next reality comes to life as an individual. He is a revolutionary.

Men are all transcendent. Their focus is on the horizon. They spend their time discussing philosophy which transcends being into Forms. The write code that is perfect abstractions. This is the best explanation I think one can ever hope to have of the existence of r/malelivingspaces. They do not spend time in the dwelling, that is not in their view.

I am not transcendent this week. I am organizing space, and configuring the vibes of a dwelling. There is energy in me, but it’s focused on realizing in real space a calmness that I will only be able to find in harmonic order of the colors and the clutter. Existing in what is occupies my time, shaping that to be fully comfortable and streamlined, establishing processes and places for all of the objects is my work this week. It is work, it is reification of vibes.

I promise myself that I’ll go back to transcending tomorrow. I’ll be transcending from a space that has more focus ingrained within it, that is properly built for being dwelled in. In a space that has immanence, has spirit, has myself.

A while back someone asked me if I was ‘burned out’. It’s not burnout, it’s more like self-loathing? It comes from a place of wanting to have a character or self-attributes that I don’t, currently (like discipline or more compassion towards others). A desire to be making the things that I committed to making happen in the world a few days or weeks or months ago actually come into being, but instead watching myself painfully do a million other things than execution.

I’ve been struggling the last few days. Part of it is a string of personal disappointments, hearing about how other’s think about things or are choosing to move forward with their perspectives and money in ways that aren’t supportive. Part of it is knowing that I have had the luxury of time and resources but feeling as though I’m not really putting them to use. I’m squandering them out of self-pity, or something. Part of it is knowing that some of the tasks I’ve set out to do are ambitious and not feeling particularly up to the task. Part of it is having said I would do a thing and then just not doing it, day after day after day.

One example is that Base58 is a nonprofit. We have a board, and quarterly board meetings. I missed the last board meeting which was back in September (or October?) and said that I would send a written update to the other board members. I never sent the written update, and now I’ve forgotten what I’ve been working on or what the todo list is. There’s plenty of things to do but I’m running away from it.

I feel like my character is being tested lately, and I’m failing the standard that I’d like to live up to. That’s a standard of communicating with others in a timely manner, if nothing else. It’s also as simple as doing what you said you would do. I don’t do what I’ve set out to do, and then as a result I don’t communicate with others because there’s nothing to communicate that I’m proud of. I think that’s the root of the pain: I have an image of who I’d like to be, or what I’d want my life to be like and I feel like I’ve fallen short and am unable to do the work necessary to bridge the gap.

It’s interesting that this is similar to how depression works, at least in my experience of it. I spent a good amount of time in my twenties in an emotional rut that I would describe as some form of depressed. The worst bit of being depressed is that talking to friends or family becomes a sharp reminder of who you’re not, and how painful your life feels at the current time. I would stop wanting to talk to friends, and ignore people’s phone calls because talking about problems or hearing about their life didn’t seem like something appealing to do. It goes on for days or weeks or months and then you just don’t really have a life anymore. You have an embarrassment at all the television you’ve watched or the number of posts you’ve read on the internet. There’s not much to tell other people, nothing has changed in your life. You still feel bad about yourself and your relationship to the rest of the world.

It’s hard to get out of ruts, even when you know you’re in them and which direction small progress could be achieved.

What Happened The Last Month or So

• I gave a talk at LABITCONF and Satsconf about how introspection opcodes work. I re-recorded it in English this week, you can check it out here (English) or here (Spanish). I also did it in Portuguese at Satsconf but I don’t think the recording is out yet.

• My friend Isabel is launching a podcast all about Bitcoin Layer-2s. She was super gracious enough to invite me on as her first guest! You can watch it on X.com here.

• I posted almost daily travel vlogs as I went through a bunch of events and countries! I stopped when I had a private trip through Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil with some friends and also quit when I went home for Thanksgiving two weeks ago. You can follow along on my journeys on Tiktok or X.com or nostr.

• I was a mentor for the Bitcoin 4 Open Source (#B4OS) project that Libreria de Satoshi held in Buenos Aires for two weeks in early November. I was there for the second week, and gave a lecture on how lightning works along with an informal conversation about the process of applying for grant applications in the bitcoin ecosystem.

• Julie did some amazing work getting bitcoin++ talk and workshop videos posted! You can check out her work on YouTube. I’m really excited about the shorts format that we got together to help feature all the people that talked at our events over the last year.

• Made plans for bitcoin++’s upcoming 2025 year and put together a pitch deck for our upcoming events. Hoping it share it next week. We’re looking at something like 6 events on five continents next year.

• I attended the Bitcoin Research Day at Chaincode Labs last month, and hung out with friends (old and new) in NYC for a week. It was really interesting to see Matt Corallo of Spiral’s work on routing lightning payments using replayable data from his node (blog post here), and getting an update on the state of MuSig2 and FROST integration into libsecp256k1. Congrats to Jonas, Chelsea, and the rest of their collaborators for their work on the MuSig2 paper, BIP, and implementation.

• Went home to Houston to celebrate Thanksgiving with friends and family.

Things I Could Use Some Help With

• I’m looking for sponsors for the upcoming bitcoin++ events in Brazil and Austin! Stay tuned for more information about how to get involved. I’ll also be sending out some volunteer signup information. Finding and managing sponsors is legitimately the most stressful part of running a successful event series, and I’m grateful to all the people that have reached out to help out the last few days/weeks/months.

From Around the Web

• The CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot in NYC this/last week. They’ve been hunting for the guy who did it, and just pulled in a man named Luigi Mangione. His mugshot got released. I dunno ya’ll, this photo of him at booking and the picture taken from the night of the shooting show the shooter missing the unibrow. Can you grow one back in a few days?

• Britney went all the way to Nairobi, Kenya and made a Base58 LARP happen for the Africa Bitcoin Conference this year. Really stoked to see her pulling it off!

• Long-ish Twitter thread about the five pairs of ruby slippers that were made for the Wizard of Oz, and where they ended up in the world all these years later.

Alright, that’s all for me. Feels like a mistake to have let this drop off for so long. I’m looking forward to sending the next update!

Lisa

Traveling means learning more about the people that inhabit new places. What they care about, how they make sense of the world, what will catch their attention. Kyoto is an ancient city of Japanese culture, which means theaters and more costumes and more shrines. The streets of Gion, the district where the geisha called home for ages, are run alongside running canals, draped with cherry trees. I got Inari shrine pilled by accident in Tokyo on my first day in Japan; I spent my last day in the country hiking the 5km trail that leads to the top of Mount Inari, the headquarters of the Inari sect of Shinto-ism. I was expecting a short walk in the woods through thousands of torii gates; instead I ended up on a medium strenuous climb to the top of a local peak through thousands of torii gates. The torii gates were beautiful; I can’t lie, the surprise of the journey made it that much more appreciated.

Being surprised by a visit to a shrine actually being a long walk on a beautifully paved trail, surrounded by quiet forest and an endless path decorated with red torii gates felt exactly like what you would expect of a city full of hidden surprises; where there is substance behind the gloss, embedded in a deep sense of traditionalism. The realness of the city is there, but you have to dig for it. I joked to one of my friends that it was the most INFP city I’ve ever visited, but to be honest I don’t think it is much of a joke.

If you’re going to Japan, I hit upon a pretty great exploratory itinerary, mostly by accident. Here it is in its entirety, in case you’re planning a trip sometime soon.

• Tokyo, six days. Stay in Shinjuku or Shibuya.

• Take the train to Takayama, but go through Toyama. This means catching the Shinkansen (fast long-haul bullet train) to Toyama from Tokyo station. Then getting the Takayama train at Toyama. You could stay in Toyama for a night and explore the Sea of Japan, but there’s not really a lot to do here. Online guides suggest checking out the sake bar across the street from the train station.

• Stay in Takayama, at an onsen. That’s somewhere that has hot baths. I was in Takayama for 4 nights, and stayed at an older hotel called Takayama Ouan. I was a bit disappointed at first at how old the hotel was, but after my first night in the baths I was sold. The traditional breakfast is really an experience worth showing up for, and though I didn’t eat any they server free ramen from 9.30-10.30p at night. Perfect for an after bath snack? You can stay nicer places that are more central to the

• Take the train to Kyoto. Stay for 3-5 days. On the one hand, I wish I had had a bit more time in Kyoto; but I was also getting tired of being in Kyoto when I left. I stayed on the northern side of Gion, at a ladies-only hostel that happened to be right on top of a subway station. I loved the location, but if I went back might stay much closer to my favorite coffee and sweets shop, cafe marble Bukkoji. While you’re in the city, please don’t pass up the opportunity to eat at what was the best katsudon place I’ve ever had the pleasure to try: Kyoto Tonkatsu Katsuta Shijo Kawaramachi.

• Fly home out of Osaka. There’s an express train direct from Kyoto station to Kansai airport. You can also book a round trip ticket through Tokyo and take a train back to the city on the Pacific side of Japan. If I had more time I probably would have done this and taken a day or two explore the hot springs near Mt. Fuji.

What Happened The Last Two Weeks

• Worked on getting last minute things checked off for bitcoin++ ecash edition which is already coming up next week! I’m relying on friends more this time and as the event gets closer I’m really feeling the lack of coordination between myself and others causing some stress. I can’t pay for things directly, I have to ask a friend who’s local to do it but they’ve also been traveling. So a volunteer who’s helping me get something ordered is then stuck waiting for me to get the invoice to the paying person. It really is faster to get things done yourself in some cases. Scaling is hard, it’s not for lack of trying.

• Kept up with the daily vlog practice. It’s been pretty wild how many friends I’ve met on my trip who have told me they’re watching them. It doesn’t feel like there’s many views, but I guess it’s a core group of good friends? You can check them out on my X, nostr, or Tiktok. Really should probably start posting them to YouTube.

• Spent three days in Kyoto, exploring the shopping, food and shine situation.

• Traveled from Kyoto, Japan to Prague, Czech Republic. Next update should have some notes about what’s going on in Prague.

• Attended the first day of Hacker’s Congress Paralelni Polis on Friday. They hold the conference the first weekend in October every year, though this is the last year. The event has run since 2014 and is focused on privacy and the anarchist tech movement. I’ve been enjoying being at an event where I have no responsibility; it’s been fun to check-in with people and make new friends.

Things I Could Use Some Help With

• I’m still looking for an assistant in and around Austin to help with Base58 things occasionally. Hit me up at hello at base58.school!

• If you’re a German speaker and want to help me practice by reading storybooks over video calls, I’m definitely interested in finding a tutor.

From Around the Web

• I’m going to be speaking at LABITCONF in Buenos Aires in a few weeks. No idea what I’ll be talking about yet, but hopefully my Spanish isn’t so far out of date that I can’t use it.

• Casey Rodarmor, of Ordinals + Runes and `just` fame just dropped a new project: `filepack`. It’s a utility to help you take a set of files and create a hash of them, with an optional signature. This is really useful for committing to a set of files for a software project release, for example, or for sharing a set of documents/data via a distributed network. The signatures give you an assurance that what you’re getting is what the original author intended to publish. Really cool to see some new projects in this space.

That’s all for me for now! Headed over to Paralelni Polis for the last day of #HCPP2024 and then hopping on a train to Berlin. Will catch you all next week, when bitcoin++ ecash edition will be in full swing.

~lisa

For example, I unintentionally picked out a character to try to recognize on signs: の. The English alphabet spelling for it is “no”. An example would be “hida no sato” which translates to “Hida Village”. It’s a preposition that loosely translates to ‘of’. It shows up in lots of written statements and signs, so it’s a fun one to try to spot. No idea what any of it means, but I recognizing it all over the place is my idea of high entertainment.

I’ve really been enjoying trying to recognize different Japanese characters as I travel. The characters for Tokyo are 東京; the neighborhood I stayed in in Tokyo was Shibuya or these guys 渋谷. It’s helpful to be able to recognize the neighborhood you’re in on train signs! In Tokyo, they occassionally add this character 区 on all the maps to say “Shibuya City” or 渋谷 区. The English they write is “city” but in reality it’s more of a ‘neighborhood’ designation. I haven’t quite internalized the Kyoto ones yet, which are 京都.

Kyoto feels like it’s a bit more presentation focused than Tokyo is culturally. It makes sense when you consider the history: Kyoto is more known as the ancient capital, where geishas were far more common. There’s a lot more theaters that are easy to spot in the Gion district (where I’m staying). I’m also close to one of the famous geisha streets, full of tea houses and dining spots. Geishas are considered artists, who specialize in the art of the femme (fans, fashion, flirtation). Kyoto also feels more romantic with lots of little bridges over flowing water, small alleyways full of enticing restaurants and shops, and lots of paper lanterns. The vintage shopping is very good, provided you’re on the smaller side. Kyoto is a center for silk production, so I’m going to be spending the next day or so looking for silk shirts and dresses to bring home. And looking for another suitcase.

I haven’t really said much about Tokyo or Takayama, a small town in Japan I stayed in last week. I particularly enjoyed visiting Takayama and the open air museum of old farmhouses near there. It really helped explain why there’s so much pickled veggies in Japanese cuisine (hard winters in the mountains meant they’d pickle veggies to eat when the mountains were covered in snow). It’s insane to think about how up until the 1950s these types of poorly insulated farmhouses were the norm for a lot of remote Japan. Electrification and modernization really changed the landscape. It was cool to get to see how it used to be. If you come to Japan, I’d recommend the Takayama train route from Toyama to the Nagoya area. It’s pretty accessible to get to and makes for an easy-ish detour between Tokyo and Kyoto. I really struggled with figuring out what to do for a week in Japan, but so far have been really happy with my itinerary. Highly recommend the onsen hotel experience, and visiting Takayama. They have a Autumn festival that’s probably worth aiming for if you can make it fit into your schedule.

What Happened The Last Two Weeks

• I traveled to Taipei, Taiwan; Tokyo, and Takayama, Japan. I’ve been pretty good about making a daily vlog about the experience. You can check them out on my X, nostr, or Tiktok. I’ve never done a regular video making project. It’s pretty challenging to find time to do the edits and voiceovers while also still having time to explore and get work done, but they’re a fun thing to do while on the train. Though I definitely missed some great shots yesterday while editing on the train. Oops.

• Did my first Base58 workshop in Tokyo, ahead of the Japan Bitcoin Conference. We talked about wallets and had people setup their first multisig wallets. It went really well, and people had a really good time. It was my first time doing a ‘non-native English speaking’ event. I had some really great support from a local Bitcoin dev Joe Miyamoto who did live translation for it. It went great! We also had two volunteers from Base58 fly in to teach the Bitcoin LARP. They crushed it. You can see some short glimpses of this day in this vlog post.

• Participated in my 5th Lightning spec summit last week in Tokyo! Lightning is an open protocol for making bitcoin payments faster. We have almost yearly meetings to talk about updates and current progress on each implementation of different new proposals for how Lightning should work. I’ve been a maintainer on the core-lightning project since 2018, and been participating since then. I’ve personally had spec proposals introduced in 2018 in Adelaide (liquidity ads + dual-funding) and in 2022 in Oakland (fee ratecards). To date, just dual-funding is considered fully part of the lightning spec, though with any luck liquidity ads will be included, pending some work on my part. In case you’re curious, here’s a list of past Lightning spec summits. I’ve participated in every one except the Milan one in 2016.

  • Milan, 2016

  • Adelaide, 2018

  • Zurich, 2021

  • Oakland, 2022

  • New York City, 2023

  • Tokyo, 2024

• Worked on getting last minute things checked off for bitcoin++ ecash edition which is already coming up next week! I took a real gamble with doing three weeks of travel ahead of this event. This is the first time I’ve tried traveling and attending other events and summits ahead of an event I’m running. I’m not sure I’d recommend it, it’s been stressful. You can get as much as possible done before an event starts, but the nature of herding people is that there’s always last minute changes and communications that pop up and need to be dealt with. It’s going to be a great event, but I’m tired ya’ll.

Things I Could Use Some Help With

• Thanks to everyone that volunteered to help out with bitcoin++ next week in Berlin! We were able to fill up our volunteer roster and have lots of help.

• I’m still looking for an assistant in and around Austin to help with Base58 things occasionally. Hit me up at hello at base58.school!

• If you’re a German speaker and want to help me practice by reading storybooks over video calls, I’m definitely interested in finding a tutor! (see below about acquisition of languages vs learning).

From Around the Web

• A big hurricane blew through the Southern USA and wiped out tons of roads in Appalachia from flashflooding (along with decimating parts of the Florida coastline). I’m not sure what the best way to help out is, but it’s something I’ve been keeping an eye on this week. Here’s a link to a search for “helene updates” on X.

• @jack posted a really amazing YouTube video that really nicely encapsulates how I think about learning languages: acquiring them, not learning them. I’ve been complaining for a while about how ineffective I find most apps for languages. I really want to try this story-telling exercise they suggest in the video, with German.

Will be writing you all from Prague next time, hope to see you at Paralini Polis for HCPP24.

~nifty

I’m going to be gone from Texas for a whole month, so there was a lot of errand running and last minute preparing to do before I left. I’m happy with the work that I got done before I left, but I am noticing that there’s a severe lack of progress being made on my ‘deep work’ projects. It’s hard to coordinate and ship at the same time, and frankly I’m a little delusional for thinking it’s possible to do everything.

I’m also coming to terms with the fact that one reason that frequent travel works so well for me is that I’m very deadline motivated. Having a trip planned is a built-in deadline to get clothes mended, clean the apartment, and finish up whatever not fun administrative tasks I’ve been avoiding. I like coming back to an apartment that has fresh sheets, washed laundry, and a sparkling kitchen. This does mean leaving for a trip is particularly laborious but the net benefit of having that work done when I arrive is really hard to overstate.

Having gotten through the 22-hours of international travel and work that it took to pack for a month, I’m happy. It’s been an amazing trip so far and I’m only three days into it. Here’s to another action packed week!

What Happened This Week

• I attended the bi-monthly Lightning Spec meeting. I’ve been really quiet at these the last few months, as I’m really more doing background maintenance stuff. One of the highlights is that splicing is getting worked on across pretty much all implementations, which is exciting. That means the protocols I worked on for dual-funding will be in every lightning implementation at some point.

• I did some reviews for Core Lightning; one of the PR’s was about what’s changed in the Lightning specs since the last release so I wrote up a blog version of it for giggles here.

• Ordered more stuff for the Pleb Print Shop so we can finish the stuff for bitcoin++ in Berlin; started making some speaker gifts for the next event!

• Got some more yes’s from sponsors for upcoming bitcoin++ events! I just need to follow up on them now, which is definitely a weak point for me. I also found a local friend who’s going to run the volunteers for Bitcoin++ this year. One challenge I’ve given myself is to get better at delegating, and I think I’m doing ok so far with this conference.

• Had a great call with a local Austin bitcoiner about some cool ideas for how we can make the bitcoin++ in Austin next May really good. Part of organizing events is figuring out how to involve institutions in the local community. I’m excited to have one of our long time supporters involved in planning even earlier this year; and even more excited about the idea they had of how to get another institution involved. Hopefully it works out!

• Started putting the pieces together for a potential side event for bitcoin++/Base58 in Buenos Aires around Labitconf in collaboration with La Crypta. I talked to a couple ‘stakeholders’ about the project (the conference, La Crypta, the incredible waxwing who’s helping me craft some content for it). It’s going to happen, we just need to figure out the when and where.

• Had some great calls with Dustin Dettmer about splicing projects and life stuff. One thing he suggested is trying to call “Base58” as “base-five-eight” instead of “base-fifty-eight”. So if you hear me saying this differently, you’ll know why!

• Flew to Taipei in Taiwan! I’m here for five days ahead of the Japan Bitcoin Conference in Tokyo this week. I’ve been making a video blog of my adventures, you can follow along on Twitter or Nostr. Here’s the first video blog I made! You can check it out on X or Nostr. Oh my god does it take a lot of time to edit videos. The trip has been really amazing so far. I do wish I had more time!

Things I Could Use Some Help With

• Bitcoin++ in Berlin just opened up our call for volunteers for the event next month. You can sign up to volunteer here.

• I’m still looking for an assistant in and around Austin to help with Base58 things occasionally. Hit me up at hello at base58.school!

From Around the Web

• t-bast, the lead developer and CTO at ACINQ’s, made the first zero-fee lightning commitment transaction using the new package relay primitives that are now in Bitcoin Core. Very exciting for lightning usability and a huge potential improvement to force close vectors (as well as other problems).

• I love Peter Todd’s Libre Relay project, which is a fork of bitcoin-core with different mempool relay rules (more relaxed/permissive). He just kicked off a fundraiser project for it on Geyser fund, check it out here.

• If you need a new backpack, I can’t recommend the Hajo series from ucon acrobatics enough. I’ve had one for over a decade and it’s just incredible for traveling. Holds lots of stuff, is compact, very difficult to pick-pocket. Check out their current offerings here. And no this isn’t a paid placement, I’m just traveling and realized how much I love it.

~nifty

I really understand why people make and write and share planning docs now. So much so that I wrote one for the upcoming bitcoin++ event to share with the venue hosts and another one for an as yet unannounced project I’m working on for LaBitConf. I realized that I needed to get three different groups onboard for it, and that the best way to help everyone understand the vision was to ‘pitch’ it to them via a planning doc. It’s all the information in one place! It gives structure and outline to what’s coming up! People can read through it instead of trying to remember where the ten pages of notes and text messages I sent about it are.

Planning docs feel like coins of the realm in the inter-organizational ecosystem of non-coders. If you want something to happen, or people to invest in you, or other people to feel like they’re onboard and have some semblance of control in what you’re planning or proposing: you need a planning doc. As a style note: the swaggest way to send a planning doc is in Notion.

I wrote two planning docs and a press release and shared them with stakeholders this week, just to stunt on the concept.

What Happened This Week

Here’s a short list of things I spent time on this week.

• Socializing! I went to a karaoke party, a brunch with some new and old friends, my first ever ‘singles mixer’ for a friend’s new startup, met up with an old college friend, and hosted my last ice cream party of the summer (next bullet). Traveling a lot makes it hard to keep up with friends, which means I feel obligated to go to events while I am in town. I also made a new in town acquaintance who’s also an AIESEC graduate! It’s been a really long time since I’ve met someone who’s life was also profoundly shaped by their AIESEC experience. Really something special.

• Had my final “ice cream” party of the summer. It was really great to get to catch up with friends and make some new ones before the weather gets cool. I got a Ninja Creami at the beginning of the summer, and have been having a lot of fun making ice creams for friends. This week I made a passionfruit ice cream, a pluot ice cream, and a guava one. I think the pluot was my favorite, not the least for having used heavy cream. Gave it a really nice buttery after taste.

• Started making swag for the upcoming bitcoin++ event in Berlin! We make a lot of things in house at the Pleb Print Shop. For the upcoming conference we’re going to have t-shirts, bags, and some super special speaker gifts. I’ve been working with Jana my co-worker on making stuff for conferences since May now, and it’s fun to have her pitching in to help get things done before the event starts in a few weeks. We have to ship it to Germany, here’s hoping we can navigate customs without too many hitches.

• Connected with the bitcoin++ venue about logistics and catering and got a new contact for food etc. I also made my first planning doc for a bitcoin++ event. (Yes, we are on event number seven).

• Forgot to post from last week: managed to debug and fix a problem with my nix package manager on Mac! Github tracking of me solving the issue here. I’m really proud of this fix, as it required digging into some pretty deep system internals stuff and manually munging the nix install scripts until I got it to work. I’m pretty sure it’s a consequence of being on the Developer Beta release of MacOSX. Feels good to know that I’ve “earned” the ability to exist on the Developer Beta and also troubleshoot problems that comes up with it. Like ok, yeah I’m a Developer Beta Tester with some chops now.

• Made some new friends about projects! I put out a call about STEM programs and ended up having an intro call with a very cool homeschooling STEM focused nonprofit out in Dripping Springs, Texas. We’re going to figure out how to get them doing the Base58 Bitcoin LARP for their students and communities (soon, I hope).

• Had a great call with an independent journalist down in Buenos Aires. We chatted about PR for conferences, writing, what my goals are for bitcoin++ and Base58. It was a really inspiring call, and it got me to write up my first ever Press Release for bitcoin++.

• I’m on the board of OpenSats and we had our Q3 board meeting call this week. It was more lively than most conversations we had. It seems like there’s a lot of things going on at the organization. We’re a non-profit that works to fund the open source ecosystem of privacy and bitcoin related projects. We’re probably one of the biggest non-profit treasuries in the space. I’m pretty proud of the projects and builders we’ve supported!

• I’ve been doing more tech deep dives for Ego Death Capital around some prospective projects and investments they’re looking at. It was really fun to get a chance to dig into some protocols I wouldn’t have taken the time to look at. I also finally started reading Andrew Poelstra’s much discussed OP_CAT tricks blogpost. It’s really fun, but incredibly difficult to grok. Putting an intention out there to try making a video about it soon!

• Our first ever bitcoin++ news letter went out this week! I brought on Frederick, an ex-Coindesk writer to help me ship a twice-a-month newsletter about what’s going on in the bitcoin++ universe to readers and devs etcetera. I feel a bit weird taking on more projects when the existing bunch feel like they’re dragging, but having Frederick on board makes me hopeful that it’ll be sustainable. Having buddies on projects has been a nice unlock for me!

• Had some more calls with potential sponsors and supporters for upcoming bitcoin++ events. We’re getting closer to closing out our available sponsorship tiers!! I’m really grateful for everyone that’s supporting me and the bitcoin++ conference universe. That being said, it’s not too late to jump in on the bitcoin++ Berlin train, check out my Soundcloud sponsor’s deck here.

• I got a broken laptop back from the computer store! The USB ports on my Thinkpad Carbon X1 stopped charging back in early June. I dropped it off at a repair store on August 24th, and finally got it back this week. It’s charging and works great. I’m pretty excited about having it back, especially since there’s some important configuration files for a remote server on here. No, I haven’t made a copy of them yet. Why do you ask?

• Reviewed some edited videos from past bitcoin++ events. Looking forward to getting these posted to YouTube soon. In a past newsletter I talked about hiring a video editing crew; I finally sat down and reviewed their work. Hopefully we’ll have some postable videos soon. Watch this space.

• Went to Hack+Tell at PlebLab in Austin! I didn’t have anything to show, as I haven’t had a lot of time to hack lately but it was really cool to see other’s projects. I think I finally grokked what’s cool and unusual about nostr’s protocol permeability. Maybe I’ll have something to say about it in next week’s post.

• I took an online IQ test and ended up with an insane verbal score, very respectable memory and spatial scores. I think this is an accurate representation of my relative skills strengths, and rarity, so good job to whoever made it. I really had fun doing the spatial test that was figuring out the centrality of a series of blocks. If someone made that into a game I would play the shit out of it. My excitement about this task makes me think that my spatial might be a tad higher than I scored, but not by much.

  

Things I Could Use Some Help With

• I’m still looking for an assistant in and around Austin to help with Base58 things occasionally. Hit me up!

• I’m still looking for a dog sitter (also in Austin) for some time in October and November. Let me know if this is you!

From Around the Web

• Student at Waterloo used ChatGPT and built himself a small nuclear reactor.

• In case you finish the first Andrew Poelstra OP_CAT post, here’s the second one.

Here’s to another great week!

~nifty

I think one failing in my personal life is the lack of a strong line between what is “hobby” and what is “work”. I meet new people every once in a while. New people want to get to know you. They ask “what do you do for work?”, followed up by “what do you do for hobbies?”. I don’t know how to answer these questions. I know people are looking for things they can relate to, flashes of someone else’s life that they can see themselves reflected in.

I have interests, these interests come and go. They consume my time. Sometimes my interests involve getting paid. Sometimes they don’t. What I’m currently interested in has a way of being all consuming. The internet makes it such that you don’t have to pick a singular interest, you can pick ten. Some days it’s movies that starred a particular actor. Other days it’s a tweet someone puts out or new information that I come across that sparks new digging. There’s an endless amount of information or projects to get interested in in the world. Sometimes this search for new interests becomes a trap, one that keeps me from getting ‘to the next level’ in the interests I’ve already invested time into.

One way to try to get more done (instead of following new interests) is to ask others to help out. I’ve been trying to do more of this lately. It feels like I’ve had mixed success. Getting others involved always takes a lot more energy and communication than I’m used to outputting, and to some extent you’re trying to figure out what they’re interested in. There’s a format that people expect information in, and a way to communicate timelines and work to be done. Getting better at communicating is a work in progress; it’s not something I’m particularly excited about. I suppose that makes it work?

What Happened This Week

Here’s a short list of things that happened this week.

• Got the website for bitcoin++ updated with all the speakers and two side-events and finalized the schedule. You can see the speakers listed here now; working on getting the schedule details confirmed + uploaded, along with talk images.

• Had some more emails with the venue about logistics, feels like we’re finally settled into a groove here. Started working on catering plans and for t-shirts and bags for attendees. We’re going to get a local bakery to drop off croissants for the event, and trying to figure out what to do for lunch for three days. We’ll probably do something lightweight like lunch boxes! Really just need to figure out where we’re getting coffee from at this point.

• Tried to sketch out a new website plans for Base58, but failed at getting any work done on it. Seems to be a theme lately of having trouble getting into ‘coding’ work. Oh well.

• Dug into a protocol to help a friend understand how it works. Hopefully will have a post or explainer out on it soon!

• Sent out a bunch of cold-call-like emails about sponsoring bitcoin++! We’ve got some really amazing sponsors already, but it’d be great to have as many people involved as possible. It’s fun running a pretty “independent” conference but it also means a lot of asking people to help pay for the events.

• Went to the Thompson Hotel’s pool on Wednesday evening to catch some last summer sunshine. I really like the pool and ‘ambiance’ here, but the music is too loud and the drinks and service strike me as pretty mediocre.

• Spent more time this week on the phone with friends and potential collaborators and contractors! Some highlights were talking to a bookkeeper, a video editing team, and a writer for a new newsletter project (to be announced soon?). A friend and I are talking about starting up a new project, so we met with a potential collaborator that might be interested in helping out.

• I hired Edit Crew to help me with getting videos edited and posted from past bitcoin++ events. I was really unhappy with the quality of the recording footage from both our Buenos Aires event as well as the past Austin one, so I started looking into updates/upgrades for our video recording setup. We use Mevos for making recordings, but the Mevo Starts that we have are grainy in low light settings. They have a new Mevo Core camera offering that you have to buy separate lens for. I ordered one to try out! I’m not sure it’s a great idea for me to be trying to figure out how to make video cameras work but I’m doing it anyway. I also uploaded all of the videos for the Austin 2024 bitcoin++ event for the Edit Crew to start working on — I’m excited about having these edited, so I can post them to YouTube etc soon!

• My dad came to Austin to visit for the long weekend! He spent some of the time investigating boat slips on Lake Travis and visiting a country club where he has “visiting privileges”. I also heard a lot about his recent trip up to Sturges, and his gambling wins at Lake Charles. We went out to get a nice steak dinner at Perry’s and he did a lot of cooking here at the house.

• Finalized some upcoming travel plans. I’m really excited to be heading to some new places, but also nervous about going somewhere that is legitimately foreign for the first time in a very long time. It’s also incredible how much time planning a vacation takes. I’m a little annoyed at how much time I spent on it, but talking to some others about Japan lately has convinced me that spending some time doing the planning work up front is absolutely necessary, as places tend to book up.
  

Things I Could Use Some Help With

• If you or anyone you know is interested in sponsoring technical bitcoin events with bitcoin++, give me a holler. We’ve got some really great events coming up and would love to have more people involved!

• If you’re local to Austin and know anyone that needs a part-time job, I’m looking to get someone to help manage day-to-day operations around the Base58 Bitcoin LARP. Bonus points if you have an interest in learning how to run a commercial printer.

• A member of La Crypta reached out to me about doing a bitcoin++ sponsored capture the flag for Labitconf in Buenos Aires this November. I’d love to get some help designing a script-oriented capture the flag project, in conjunction with the La Crypta crew.

• I go back and forth on this but I think it is a good idea to get some help designing an update to the Base58 website. I’m particularly fond of 8-bit style webpages, and have collected a set of styles and examples that I’d like to copy. Bonus points if you’re a designer that knows CSS/tailwind. Please reach out to me via email, Signal (niftynei.99) or telegram (@niftynei) if this is you!

From Around The Web

• The MOMA Design Store is one of my favorite places for gifts. I’m getting ahead of Christmas gift shopping with some cute paper beetles and bees for my nieces.

• “Onsen ryoken” are traditional Japanese hotels that also have hot spring facilities for guests. I had a lot of fun looking at all the options available on Benjamin’s Guide to the Best Ryokens & Onsens in Japan

• Here’s a pretty cool discovery: gold nuggets form in quartz because of earthquakes (article)! The pressure on the quartz creates electricity which draws the gold atoms out of nearby wet spots in the earth. Over time, nuggets form.

Til next time nifty’s readers!

~nifty

The technical blog server recently fell offline due to a bad server update that locked me out of the remote VM where it’s stored. I’ve been meaning to get it back online but now the laptop that holds the nix configs for the new remote VM that I setup to replace the borked update one has a bad USB charging port. So long story short it’s not really possible to update until/unless I get access to the laptop’s hard drive one way or another. The preferred way would be by charging the laptop up.

I need to figure out how to recharge the laptop. I’ve located the repair shop I want to drop the computer off at, but haven’t made the move to take it there yet. They open at 10am tomorrow. Let’s hope I make it out of my house tomorrow. Speaking of things to drop off at the <workshop>, I’ve also got a Miyabi 5000FCD kitchen knife that desperately needs sharpening sitting on the table beside me. The chinks in the blade are embarrassing me. It’s sitting on a stack of EFTPS papers and a pile of receipts from travel from the last year. Sitting next to it is a stack of notices from the state about LLC’s I’ve registered but forgotten to submit the yearly franchise tax paperwork for. Nearby there’s an empty milk glass that needs to get taken back to the grocery store next time I go, and a stack of tupperware lids that belong to bottoms buried somewhere in the storage unit I need to rent a truck to unpack at some point over the next weekend or two. At least before I take off for my next round of trips. They’re raising rates again on the unit and while my book collection is fairly rare and expensive, its definitely a better idea to keep it at home than paying for hot space in a garage somewhere. Much easier to read them when they’re here anyway! I’ve got three different dresses that need mending or alterations or to be donated draped over the backs of the dining room chairs. There’s a stack of still-in-packaging Stephen Biesty books that I impulse purchased in a fit of desire to re-discover the ancient pyramids of Egypt sitting directly behind my laptop screen.

This week feels like its been a week of delayed/deferred maintenance work finally making its way up to the surface. I finally sent the accountant some details about transactions for taxes I owed two years ago. Oops. I figured out a way to get some data I wanted out of a service I’ve been running on a home server for years now, data that will likely let me finally move some other payments infrastructure in-house, and hopefully vastly simplify my accounting for some of the business projects I’ve got going.

(Counting computers in the cloud as well as at home, I own/run/manage something like 8-9 different machines, all in various states of disorganization and deferred maintenance.) Sometimes I think it’d be nice to declare a ‘computer jubilee’ but then one of them will go down/fall over and I’ll realize what important piece of infrastructure it was running.

Speaking of home infrastructure, I setup a home github repo today, so I can sync code between my stable of computers without needing github to be up and working. (In case you’re wondering, this is the article that I followed.) It’s crazy how fast you can do something so empowering as having a private self-hosted repo if you understand how computers work. Or something. At least the “user interface” portion of them (where ‘user interface’ is a fungible token).

Its been a while since I’ve typed things out, so I thought it would be fun to start keeping a log of what I’ve been up to. Both for myself, as well as an attempt to try to be a bit more visible around “what’s going on in nifty’s life”. I do a lot but I think it ends up buried under the way my brain forgets whats already been done, in pursuit of what’s still left to do.

What Happened This Week

So here’s a short list of things that happened this week:

• My wonderful friend Tomas is helping me do outreach about bitcoin++ sponsorships! We’ve got two conferences coming up very soon, and I’m embarrassingly behind on doing outreach about them. We did end up signing a sponsor for the highest tier this week, effectively closing it out!! If you want to sponsor/get a ticket/give a talk or workshop at an upcoming event, let me know!

• We got a Satoshi level sponsor for bitcoin++ Berlin!! Yay!!!

• I met with the venue for the upcoming bitcoin++ Berlin; we’re going to have to make some schedule changes due to the venue’s calendar. Nothing major major, but annoying. Announcement coming next week!

• Finally finished some very very overdue tax accounting tasks!! I have one more set of things to do before I’m “done” with this. The trick turned out to be hiring an accountant. You could say I’ve got someone to be ‘accountable’ to here.

• I did two livestreams while working on core-lightning, the open source lightning implementation that I spent a number of years working on at Blockstream. I still work on it one day a week. This week was more than normal.

  • One with Dusty, working on trying to figure out why sometimes Core Lightning was spending a UTXO its not supposed to. We didn’t quite figure it out during the stream, but I woke up the next day and tracked it down. PR for the fix and some other things is here. It ran into some problems in the tests and I might try fixing it a different way, but it definitely feels like we found the problem.

  • One with Michael J Evans where we added two new RPCs to the Core Lightning bookkeeper, so you can update descriptions of events in your books after they’ve happened. PR for code we wrote here.

• Walker interviewed me on his podcast, THE Bitcoin Podcast! I really really enjoyed our conversation on this one! You can find it on YouTube here.

• Had a good call with one of our flagship sponsors for bitcoin++, who’s going to help me wrangle the troops for having a great hackathon at the event!

• Made a whole in-depth excel sheet about hotel pools with day passes and cabana rentals in Austin based off of ResortPass website data. Yes, I spent a good chunk of a Saturday afternoon putting this together. As a reward I went to check out of two of them! In case you’re wondering, the cheapest option is to get the Premium Cabana for 15 people at Hotel Van Zandt down in the Rainey district of Austin. I went to check it out on Sunday and really enjoyed it. Music was at a not terrible level, and the drink I got was really good! The pool’s also saltwater which I was pleasantly surprised by how nice it was.

• I got really into reading up about Japanese knives, which led to a rabbithole around different types of steel! I’m planning my first ever trip to Japan in three weeks, and have been doing some occasional research into things to see and do while I’m there. I really want to learn more about knife sharpening while I’m there, and probably pick up a nice kitchen knife as a souvenir to mail home.

• I made some more mango + saffron ice cream. It tastes amazing. I got a Ninja Creami back in April but didn’t start using it until late June. I’m a big believer in having homemade ice cream or popsicle treats during the summer, and it seems like this summer’s tool of choice is Ninja Creami concoctions. I kinda made up the recipe as I go based off of one I made a few months ago from an actual recipe. Tried to re-create it here. I already ate an entire one of the pints a few days ago.

• I also made two new batches of beef jerky! I actually did write the recipes down for these on a notepad I got expressly for that purpose. I’m trying to get better about taking notes about what I’m doing (hehehe). With jerky this is so I can make the same things again later! Or share it with people if they like what I’ve made. I splurged on a 15-minute vacuum tumbler marinator back before the bitcoin conference in July and I’ve been very very happy with how fast it lets me get a new batch of jerky going in the dehydrator! Currently saving my sats up for a counter top Beef Jerky Slicer. In case you’re wondering where all my spare cash goes, it’s into tools for new projects. Or maintenance! Types of jerky I tried making this week:

  • Chinese 5 Spices. Apple cider vinegar base. No sweetener. Salt, Prague Powder #1 cure. Really tasty but lacking a bit of depth of flavor. Probably needs a bit of a sweetener. I ate it all already, RIP.

  • Fresh ground black pepper. Apple cider vinegar base. Honey to sweeten. Salt, Celery Salt cure. Delicious. The vinegar cure comes through a bit much in the late chew but the honey and pepper are absolutely great. Over dried it though, it’s a bit too stiff.

• Took the car to the shop to get the transmission updated and the normal 30k mile service items taken care of. I ended up renting a car to get around while it was in the shop, and was really happy with the rate I ended up with through this website I happened across! Check it out next time you need a car rental?

Things I Could Use Some Help With

• I’d love to hire someone to do a twice-a-month newsletter for bitcoin++. Willing to pay a decent amount for this, since I think it’d be an enormous value add to the project. If you or someone you know are looking for a freelance bitcoin-technical writing gig, send me a note!

• If you’re local to Austin and know anyone that needs a part-time job, I’m looking to get someone to help manage day-to-day operations around the Base58 Bitcoin LARP. Bonus points if you know Golang or have an interest in learning how to run a commercial printer.

• I’m toying with the idea of moving myself and my dogs to Buenos Aires for a few months at the end of the year, but need a buddy to fly down/back up with us so that I can bring both of them on-board as carry ons. Let me know if you’re interested in a trip to Buenos Aires in late October or mid-January. We’d be flying out of Austin most likely (the other option is Houston). It’s not 100% certain that this is going to happen but figured I’d at least see if I can get volunteers.

• A member of La Crypta reached out to me about doing a bitcoin++ sponsored capture the flag for Labitconf in Buenos Aires this November. I’d love to get some help designing a script-oriented capture the flag project, in conjunction with the La Crypta crew.

From Around the Web

Here’s a few things I found this week that I thought were fun/cool.

• Stardew Valley is one of my all-time favorite video games. I just found out they made a cookbook for the game’s recipes! They look extremely detailed so I’m holding off until I’ve gotten a few projects off my plate.

• I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but really looking forward to this paper on What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory.

• This Knife Japan website is a really great resource for different types of knives and steels that they’re made out of! Based on my digging, Tamahagane is the most premium/handmade steel available. It’s what high quality samourai swords were made from. Here’s an old YouTube video of a master blacksmith making a tamahagne knife.

Til next time nifty’s readers!

~nifty

The summer I was there was a really big one for nascent LLMs. This was the time I joined a local choir and met a fellow chorister who would, weeks later, move from NYC to SF to be an early OpenAI employee (according to Wikipedia, OpenAI was founded in December 2015). A small cohort of the Recurse Center batches would form AI study groups: digging into how to train a model to win competitions.

Some of them competed in competitions, reminiscent of the Netflix prize from the decade earlier, where they’d tweak model parameters on a training dataset to try and get the best results on a competition set of data.

There were early image net productions that looked a lot like a the “Magic Eye” photos I had spent a lot of time staring into as a child had barfed up dogs. (The internet tells me these were first invented in 2015, by Google engineer Alexander Mordvintsev. More here.) These floated through the Recurse Center ecosystem, some people did projects trying to re-create them.

A few of the experiments that summer’s batch of Recursers (as we called the hackers that showed up for a batch) stuck with me.

The first was a demo of trying to get an LLM to write a computer program. I think the presenter, a young woman from Europe somewhere, showed a couple of potential programs, each with varying levels of success. I think in one it tried to build a method that would tell you if a number was odd or even. It had fifty-fifty odds of getting the right answer. It did a little bit better than that. Another, you’d draw a number on a pad of paper and it’d tell you what the number was. The last one was the game Pong.

What struck me about it, as a facilitator, who’s job it was to help people get better at the art of programming, was how much of the work that went into these LLM or “convolutional neural networks” as they were called at the time, felt like a lot of guess and check work.

These devs were thinking about probabilities and trying to shape pattern recognition out of data, but they weren’t learning much about how to actually write code that would do work on its own. Instead they massaged inputs and outputs and tried new connection topologies (mostly in Python) to see if they could get better experimental results.

I wasn’t very impressed by the code that their creations came up with. I worried these devs were substituting science projects for honing their technical craft and mastery of the primitives that would help them build “real projects”. Was that justified? Hard to tell.

(I did see one demo that impressed me: a word vector demo where you could explore topics with algebra. What happens if you add woman to crown? You get queen. Subtract the woman what do you get? A king. For some reason this did impress me, or at least I felt like it was fun to try and guess what the computer would tell me when I added or subtracted different concepts. Conceptual algebra was fun!)

No Code

Fast forward to now, the beginning of 2024. The “AI” revolution has captured the capital and mindshare of this era of Silicon Valley. It seems like every few weeks a new way to get work done, without needing to write code for yourself, pops up.

I ran across this tweet yesterday and it got me thinking about how much the new LLM interfaces all look… a lot like the “no code, Zapier” style process optimization solutions that have been popular for the last 6-8 years.

For those of you who don’t want to click, it’s a woman who wires up an AI chat bot and instructs it to call United to ask about her lost baggage. The AI is on the phone for 3hours; she finds out that she should call back in the next 48hours for an update.

The interface that she uses the schedule the task looks like a flow chart. Let’s dig into it a bit.

On the left there are two boxes. One contains the Customer Service phone line number for United Airlines.

The other is labeled “Objective” and contains a written description for the task she’d like carried out. “You are calling United Airlines to find …’s missing luggage.” And then gives the Flight number, her date of birth, and current address.

These two boxes then feed in to a “Phone Call” box, which takes a Phone Number and an Objective. Calls cost $0.010 per minute, USD. That outputs a transcript of the conversation (so the person who setup the AI to do the call can see what’s happening).

This is a lot like what the ‘no-code’ interfaces have been pioneering for ages. No code gets written, you tell the computer to execute a task with drag and drop boxes.

Tradeoffs and Leverage

I don’t really know what I’m trying to say here, other than I don’t think that developers are going away any time soon. But I’m also a little curious and wary about one more level of abstraction that we’re creating for ourselves between what we want to happen and what we’re capable of requesting.

I think the thing I like about code as an object is your ability to inspect what you expect to happen, and the repeatability that you’re (roughly!) guaranteed. Once you have the right code written, in theory you should be able to re-execute it and get the same or similar results every single time. For infinity.

It’s also inspectable. You can drill down into what’s happening, place debug statements. Typically the levers you have to pull for what you change are extremely granular — the system is malleable at a low-level and understandable. By spending time with expert crafted code systems, you learn more about how reality works. It gives you tools to become more powerful.

With projects that use LLMs, you’re at a bit of a disadvantage. You can’t replicate, exactly, the result that you get out of these neural network systems. There are less levers for changing them but rather rhetoric and dialog. You have to hone your description and narrative building skills to communicate more finely with the LLMs.

They use probabilities under the hood to generate new results; inspecting what particular path through its weights that any single query took isn’t something you can just do.

And in fact, if you dig into the deep neural net literature, it’s a well known secret that these nets are black boxes — most people aren’t really sure how or why they work. Instead, users become alchemists that attempt different inputs to get back something different.

Not to say that they don’t have their uses. I would 100% use one to avoid sitting on a phone for a few hours, only to get told to repeat the process again, 48 hours later.

In Exitus

LLMs are gasoline on the no-code fire. I think it’ll just end up in more weird bureaucracy for all of us: generating reams of content that other agents will read, answering phone calls that other agents place.

At some level, maybe we should turn those interactions into API calls, but instead of doing that we left the “human designed” interface in place and instead built more complicated machines that can access it.

Community thinking and reconnection to a tribe are ideas I see floating around in the id of America on the interwebs lately. More than ever, people seem to really understand that joining the group means showing up for the rituals and participating in the project in a meaningful way with your time. Participation means putting on the costume or eating the right food, owning the right things, or showing up in the right places to show that you know and do any of the above.

Signaling that you belong to a group is a big part of being the group. Different communities take different strategies. One internet group I follow, the postrats, it seems like the answer to showing off tribalness was “attends vibecamp”. That was the court where the scene of postrat-ism was set to take place: if you wanted to be a part of the scene you’d better show up for court.

For bitcoiners, it’s disavowal and spartan-ism that proves you’re saving sats.

On other projects, like open source or coding it means devoting hours to learning how an arcane system works so that you can participate in the conversations and contribute to what people are collectively building.

For NFT owners, it was owning a piece of a large-ish collection and displaying that as your profile pic. The rarer the collection, or the more elite the owners, the more valuable the ingroup relationship.

Legibility is Valuable

While there’s certainly other ways to be legible as a community (github commit counts anyone?) the NFT movement really grabbed onto the concept of the value of legible communities, and the wealth and status that that legibility can confer.

There’s a reason to gate belonging — it’s hard to hold court and have it feel like court when any and everyone is invited to participate. This is a hard gap to navigate, especially for communities that want to be ‘inclusive’ while also being still an ingroup. Most recent example I’ve heard of the difficulty in navigating this is where vibecamp2 was a bit “overrun” with newcomers that didn’t know how to act at court and it made it a bit of an unpleasant experience. (I expect the real ingroup of that movement to go further underground — they’ll still host experiences but some of the openness of invitation will be cut off.)

The crypto communities solved this problem of access via the legibility of ownership of an asset, with the NFT profile pic communities becoming the biggest and most legible of them all.

The pfp projects that became “big ones” — Cryptopunks, BAYC — launched in-person meetups and groups and cultural spaces to follow on the tribe that they minted into being by drawing a line around early adopters and late comers with enough bags to buy their way in.

Digital assets make group legibility easy. You just need a digital wallet and a blockchain to do the record keeping for you. The value of belonging to the group is a social one: who else is a member of the club? How many club memberships are there? These club passes can be ultra valuable if the right people are part of it, or if the pass gets you entry into the right places.

During the last bull cycle (and maybe continuing through the last bear), I heard of parties that only asset owners were invited to; you had to show proof of ownership to get in. There’s definitely invite only Discord chats that are members only — inclusion is both through knowing another member as well as owning the right thing.

The value of the artwork, the NFT, persists only as long as that affiliation or group remains powerful. And you have to be right person too — owning the right NFT is only useful if you’re able to ‘wield’ it correctly. To say the right things, to navigate space of the court according to the rules.

If you die, who gets your NFT? Will they be able to make use of it?

Royalty is an NFT

Ingroups that gain power and endure across centuries we call dynasties.

Dynasties are ingroups that gained power and the NFTs that go along with it (the crown jewels, the palaces, the reverence of the government).

They’re passed down by birth; the only way to join a dynastic ingroup is by marrying into it, or being born into it.

It’s probably a good thing that access to legible sovereignty isn’t available for sale on the market. That’d drastically reduce the value of the ingroup, which relies on being small and extremely hard to get in to. Luck in terms of what stars you were born under are really the only way to join certain dynasties.

Unless you create your own.

In Exitus

I don’t really have a bigger point here, but thought it was interesting that in order to really make a pfp oriented NFT project live up to its fullest potential, you really do need to create a dynasty.

I’m fairly certain that at least one group this century will become a new dynasty. It’s hard to tell who it’ll be or where it’ll come from, but I’m bullish on bitcoin being at the core of it.

Replicating Bordeaux

I’m not sure that something like Bordeaux is even possible outside of the few hundred years that it was developed, ages ago. There’s a strong need for artisans at scale to be able to accomplish that type of work; you also really need a culture of building in the real world, so to speak. These days we spend hours re-arranging bytes on computers and feeling accomplished; most of our built environment is mass produced in factories or built with immigrant labor who are incentived to finish jobs in a shorter amount of time, since they get more time to do more jobs then.

Building materials have also “evolved” such that a basic manufactured siding object is prized for it’s cheapness and rapidity of construction. In some ways, the past was defined by a lack of options — you built with sand-stone or granite blocks because that was all that was available for construction in your environs. The availability of new and cheap and fast materials has changed the investment quality of a build (and the experience of existing in it!) probably more than anything else.

I really enjoyed my time in France this week; but I am looking forward to getting back to Texas shortly.

Here’s a few notes from this week.

• Oman has decided bitcoin is worth investing in. They’re pledging $1.1B to build out a mining operation. It’s interesting that the announcement comes at around the same time that the BRICS organization announced an intention to de-dollarize inter-country trade. It’ll probably be a few years before this starts having an impact on US dollar trade, but it’s coming. Add to this the fact that most US Treasuries are currently bought + held by US institutions* and I think we might be in for an interesting next decade or so. (*Or the Tether organization??)

• At Surfin Bitcoin, I met the filmmaker who’s working a film called “Dirty Coin” about bitcoin mining + energy. Chatting with her was a fun reminder of how little known the impact of bitcoin as a (semi) predictable power sink is changing the narrative of investment in energy projects. I can’t wait for the movie to come out! More info and updates on their twitter account.

• “Jewel cutting didn’t really exist until the Ottomans, which means most medieval crowns are mostly rock collections” — Twitter

• Finally, if you’re interested in learning more about Bitcoin’s Taproot update, we’ve got a handful of spots left in the Base58 Taproot class in Atlanta next week! Class info + signups here: https://base58.school/classes/taproot

I picked red.

I didn’t pick it because it was the most correct choice for everyone (if everyone picks red, everyone survives, no problem).

I picked red because it had the lowest chance of death for myself (0%).

There’s no outcome where the red people get killed. That seemed like the correct choice for myself, personally.

I have to admit I was a little relieved when I saw the poll results that I was in the minority. In fact, I was immediately happy for the Blue cohort — they were going to survive!

Their survival wasn’t a given, so it was exciting to see that they were making it.

It’s fun to be excited about making it, even if it’s not yourself in the running for being outed.

Speaking of making it, Jane Goodall’s in the news this week. Long famous for her work with gorillas in Africa, a video of her has been making the rounds for the last few hours. In it she’s talking about how we, as a society, need to cut down on population and meat eating because there’s too many of us. We should go back down to a smaller population so that earth can better exist without us.

(Definitely an aside, but she’s in the public eye currently afaict because she has a new movie out, “Reasons for Hope”. It’s a little difficult to figure out what the film is about from online notes, but seems to mostly be a film focused on herself and her perspectives.)

I wonder what button she would have picked in the poll. Is talking about how nice it is to have less people in the world a Blue button or a Red button?

Let’s Talk about Survival

The funny thing about the Blue or Red poll is that, no matter what, the majority is going to survive.

If 50% percent of the people pick Red, then the minority dies off.

If 50% of the people pick Blue, then everyone survives. Either way we’re not cutting a majority with this sort of decision making on who lives an who dies.

Maybe that’s an interesting way of considering the outcomes of the poll: from a pure survivalist perspective. There’s two ways that everyone survives: you either all 100% pick the same thing (red) or half of you pick blue.

Voting for diversity seems like the correct choice, independent of the outcomes. I did the diverse thing and voted for the odds I personally liked, but it seem so easy to hit a 50% goal. If you take the risky choice, the blue one, you’re not really sure what the future holds but you’re betting on others joining you in survival.

It’s fun to vote on a risky option that you’ve got some solid confidence in the result coming up in your favor, the sense of accomplishment is there. It’s doable. You don’t have to worry about the desires and opinions of the edges of humanity, because you trust in the middle/center wants the same things: to continue to survive, together.

Is Jane Right?

My recent way of wading through the lives of others means trying as much as possible to understand what’s true about what they’re saying. Most people say true things; it doesn’t do anyone much good to disagree with the parts of what someone says that are true.

Jane’s probably right that the way the world looks would be much different if humans raised less cows and just *existed* less. I think the part that I disagree with is the desire that the world have less humans.

At some point we will arrive at the maximum human carrying capacity of Earth, and then we will suffer the consequences for a majority of us having chosen to try to continue surviving, despite the odds.

We can talk and act in ways that maybe lead to us missing or hitting that point, but I think that this number will always be in the minority. And I think that that means that we’ll probably continue to exist until reality itself, not humans, deems otherwise.

Things on the internet this week:

• I’m teaching a class on Taproot in Atlanta this upcoming Sept 4 - 5. It should be a good extension of the original Base58 class, except re-oriented around Taproot.

• This banger of a tweet about “minds are constructed, not catered to”. How are you constructing your mind lately? I’ve been getting into NixOS, a build system cum operating system that helps get others work (software devs) more easily into a place where you can use it.

• Turns out that the LK-99 plausible semi-conductor ended up not actually being a semi-conductor. But we did discover that the old Soviets had their own science knowledge that included these weird metals. So that’s fun.

Finally, a tweet about taking chances while driving (hint: don’t!)

Hope you guys survive another week. See you the next!

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It wasn’t just a film about a single starlet’s career though. Rather, it was an “ensemble” cast, at least that’s what Wikipedia tells me. Instead of just telling one character’s story, it captures the story of several characters, all living through a single moment of history together — when Hollywood jumped into the future with pictures with sound, and cemented itself as an institution that would endure for over a century.

I think we’re at a similar junction point in history in a lot of ways right now. The people who are alive now are part of that cohort, the ensemble cast that are moving through a big time of change in their lives and industry.

Here’s a few things that have happened just this week that I think are going to prove to be just incredible inflection points in our own lives.

- The room temperature semi-conductor murmurs haven’t fallen away. Instead we keep getting tantalizing new videos, and new buzzwords that will probably define a new generation of science in the popular imagination. Flux-pinning. Type I + II semiconductors. We haven’t had a tangible, quantum level consumer impacting tech yet. I think our understanding of the world is about to get a mass-level upgrade. Material science is cool again.

- Global warming is undeniable and Geo-engineering at scale is officially on the table. This year is hot. Sure, we all know that. But did you know that it also happens to be the year that Sulfur emissions were cut from oceanliner fuel mixes. The added Sulfur had been causing more cloud cover, reflecting more light away from the oceans keeping them cool. Without the Sulfur, there’s less clouds, and the dark seas are now soaking up a magnitude more sun. Notably, this is the first year I’ve ever heard the term “marine heatwaves”. The ocean got hotter all at once, because we stopped making clouds. Unbeknownst to any of us, the geo-engineering bandage has been already, accidentally pulled off. The next one probably won’t be an accident.

- Speaking of feedback loops, I dug into Long Covid research. The research I got into (the Google Doc here) was assembled, notably I think, by an electrical engineer who passed away recently from the disease. The picture he painted was pretty grim. Long-haulers are basically suffering from immune and blood system failures. The cascading, systemic type of failure where feedback loops compound in the wrong direction. It’s very hard to bring a dysfunctional system back into balance, as the feedback loops that were helping you stay there suddenly start fighting you. Repeated exposure and environmental stressors can trigger it. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being a bit worried about minor symptoms in myself snowballing — I’ve had a lot of COVID infections. It’s basically like getting AIDS, you can live with it and manage the symptoms but righting the ship is extremely difficult. I’m taking vitamins and getting lots of sleep, not pushing myself too hard physically. It’s pretty scary.

Finally, to bring it back to the idea of being at a moment in time when phase shift is happening, when the threads of our own ensemble cast start maybe pulling in different directions: a presidential nominee tweeted about the project I’ve been working on for the last half decade. Not just “bitcoin”, but Lightning, specifically.

There’s an enormous cohort of people who’s work and contributions have gotten us to where we are currently in Lightning. But, as I said in my talk at Consensus this year: we really are facing a cambrian explosion of new bitcoin projects, adoption and relevance. More than ever it feels like the industry is growing, which means shifts and new ideas. New ways to be relevant, or new people to see grow into their own in the industry.

To take a quote from Babylon: The industry at this point is bigger than any one of us. Old faces will probably shuffle around in the next few years. New ones are popping up to take their place.

But we’ll remember being there, no matter where else we all end up in the coming years.

Called LK-99 for the two discoverers (Lee and Kim, who supposedly started working on finding the material in 1999, source: https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1684385895565365248), some corners of Twitter have been in a steady furor as various labs around the world race to create their own floating rocks.

Here’s a video of a replication result, sourced from an unknown Telegram channel and then posted to Twitter.

Via: https://twitter.com/667keos/status/1686490898480173056?s=20

Origin Story

The back-story to the material is pretty fun. A now-passed physicist and his team made a few strange discoveries back in the late nineties. It took his surviving proteges basically until the pandemic to really find the time, space, and resources to try to replicate the process themselves.

If what I’ve read twitter is to be believed, the biggest breakthrough was made by them accidentally bumping a tray on its way out of the oven, which led to cracking the quartz test tubes that the material was baked inside of.

The break in the quartz led to the introduction of oxygen at precisely the right moment, which led to producing a superconducting substance.

The Race to Replication

I don’t really feel like giving a huge summary of what all has happened in the physical replication of this element; the most interesting thread I read was one by a “anime cat-girl out of a Soviet country” who was working on re-creating the floating rocks out of her kitchen.

I can’t find the thread now, but the most interesting part of it, in my opinion, was how she improvised and improved certain parts of the replication steps in order to arrive at a sample faster than the recommended process in the paper. Since she changed the steps, her attempt doesn’t technically count as a true replication. According to whoever is making the rules.

The more interesting thing than replication, I think, was this paper that just dropped this week that talks about the physical structure of the material, and why that gives the rock its superconducting properties.

Sinead Drops a Rock

Via https://twitter.com/sineatrix/status/1686182852667572224.

It seems a researcher at Berkeley, Sinead Griffin, used a large compute cluster to figure out what structure of lead and copper might lead to a super-conductivity at room temperature. She ended up finding an configuration of molecules that would explain what the South Korean team has observed. To me, this discovery is sort of more important (as important?) as the replication attempts, as it explains *why* a room temperature superconductor works at all. (Apparently the copper is embedded in a lattice of lead molecules, which due to the ‘crystal’ structure collapse enough such that electrons are forced along the copper channels in the material. It’s a really cool discovery, that a ‘collapsed’ or shrunken molecular structure can create superconducting materials.

I also love that the write up of it is all of 5 pages long.

What’s cool about this is that even if we’re unable to make much use of this current formula, LK-99, for room temperature semiconductors, there’s a decent chance that a brute force search for similar materials might lead to more robust compositions that are more useful for practical applications.

I asked my sister who spent a few years in a lab trying to come up with a cost-effective process for manufacturing super-conductive wire at scale what her thoughts were about LK-99. Her response was something along the lines of “mass producing superconductors is incredibly difficult”.

Networked Intelligentsia

I don’t really think I know what a superconductor does.

But I do think it’s pretty remarkable that the first time I’ve heard of super-conductors is also the time that there’s reason to credibly believe that we’ve actually found one.

There’s something about being plugged in to an intelligence network like Twitter, in the right way whatever that is, where the information that I get tends to be pretty high quality.

Apparently there’s been other attempts at making superconductors that have failed to replicate or largely turned out to be bogus. I think it’s a bit remarkable that I didn’t hear about those.

This has the same quality of slowly leaking out information that early COVID had — it was through first-person experiences and sort of smaller, not as well known accounts that were compiling information and making it available to people.

I kinda think it says something about the modern intelligentsia, a bigger collective of people that spend time on the internet looking for new information and spreading it whenever we find it. There’s a bit of a hivemind quality to it, but it’s more than that. It’s a highly filtered hivemind. Information that isn’t high quality doesn’t really seem to travel the same waves, or hit my account with the same level of frequency.

I sort of wonder if it’s something that I’ve indicated to The Twitter Algorithm (I guess “X” Algorithm these days) or if it’s something more organic than that.

It’s Not a Closed Club

Joining the hivemind is available to anyone who wants to participate in it. You just need to be able to show up and understand what other brilliant people are saying, and be able to understand for yourself the importance of it.

That sounds strange, but your capacity to understand and then, using that understanding, participate back in the dialog or get excited or believe in what you’re seeing is limited, then your chances of being in the right place or understanding what you’re seeing when it happens the next time you see it diminishes greatly.

Anyone can join, but you have to figure out how to understand what’s happening there. And that’s, I think, a much smaller group of people than you’d think.

In Exitus

Alright this feels a bit haphazard, but I’m leaving it here. Here’s a few more interesting things I saw around the internet this past week.

• The latest evolution of a project I’ve been contributing to for, oh, almost half a decade, finally got merged into Core-Lightning. Congrats Dustin on your first enormous CLN feature! Really really excited for this to get to a place where people can build and benefit from it.

  https://twitter.com/niftynei/status/1686093580249481216?s=20

• Georgia’s long promised nuclear plant went into operation. Let’s go nuclear!

  https://twitter.com/GeorgiaPower/status/1685971245655904257?s=20

• The Ordinals team launched a non-profit! Congrats!

  https://twitter.com/isabelfoxenduke/status/1686457560185057280?s=20

• I’m launching a weekly technical bitcoin hang out at PlebLab every Tuesday (that I’m in town). First one’s on the 15th of August.

  https://twitter.com/niftynei/status/1686439394624851969?s=20

Finally, this joke about how the lost city of Atlantis had superconducting lead+copper but we lost it and instead found… silicon was pretty great.

~nifty

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Rather than drinking the genderade, you get served something else. Hopefully something more palatable?

Surveying the Field

I don’t really think the anti-genderade crew is achieving what they, at least in theory, set out to do. Which, as I understand it is to erase labels so that we as a people can live together more harmoniously. We destroy hate by destroying labels, at least that seems to have been the ideal of the movement.

As with all ideas that become movements, this was clearly a very powerful statement for a lot of people. They had felt trapped by a label and scared or frustrated about the reality of living within it. Allowing these people to “remove labels” was an act of freedom for them, and a powerful one at that.

I think there’s some irony that, a least a subset, of that movement has re-developed a strong sense of labeling. The pride flag as a rainbow was pretty great — it’s an easily recognizable symbol of acceptance. “We support all colors under the rainbow”. “We are all the different colors under the rainbow, but united under the colorfulness of who we are”. I liked (and still like!) the rainbow.

Color is a spectrum, I would think that spectrum would have been enough, symbolically to encompass the evolution of the “sexual expression freedom” movement, what all the colors of gender and self are.

It wasn’t tho, and I think that’s telling of the character of the movement, or at least what it has evolved into. I’m not sure who’s idea it was to add more colors to the rainbow, but it fees like a bad, bureaucratic decision. It seems, for all intents and purposes, a re-enactment of the labeling impulse that the original movement was trying to escape from in the first place. Learning to be content with the simplicity of the existing symbolism is an important aspect of a movement that endures.

I’m not sure what happened in the gender remapping zeitgeist but I do know one thing, from my work in computer systems:

Categories are a hell of a drug.

Picking Positions

An ex-colleague of mine and his wife are raising their son in a “genderless” environment. From a very early age, they dressed their son in dresses and skirts, and let him decide how he wanted to wear his hair. They’re very lovely people, I’m sure it’s just play for their son.

Play or not, it does strike me as a particular form of experimentation. I don’t think it’s my place to say that’s not an experiment anyone should or should not be allowed to run. It’s just not what we, as a society, do normally. Raising a son to think that gender is a fluid object that he can “play with” is a novel proposition. You’re taking a gamble on the stability of your son’s self-understanding, a self-understanding that is often later useful for his ability to find a role in the world that works for him.

Some people are well positioned to question boundaries and build a version of their own reality. Maybe this fluidity in how he sees himself will be a useful experience that he’ll be able to build into a happy life for himself, in his later years.

Making a Play

Why do gender roles exist? That’s really the question that my friend is trying to get a perspective on from first principles within his own family dynamics, I think. At least that’s what it looks like on the outside.

It makes sense that we, as Americans, would want to question the foundations of our understanding about the world. We care deeply about our independence, and true independence doesn’t exist without the ability to question and experiment to gain a deeper understanding. Gender roles are worth experimenting with, and I think there’s a lot we can learn from them that help us build a more solid understanding about ourselves and how to build a happier, more content nation of humans that feel values, loved, and secure in their own self understanding.

All roles are meant to be negotiated. Frustration and resentment stem from the inability to participate in negotiation of your role in any situation.

Low wage jobs are difficult to be content in because they’re typically contracts that offer you, the worker, little in the way of negotiation.

That being said, standard contracts often exist in common areas where people with little or new experience are often expected to interact. “Protocols” we call them, in computer science.

The Standard Playbook

Texas has a standard contract which it enforces for all residential real estate deals that are brokered by licensed real estate agents. It is law that if you buy or sell a house in Texas, your agent will use this contract. The standardization of the contract saves a ton of money on lawyer fees for people who are buying or selling homes in Texas.

In comparison, New York state doesn’t have a standard contract for home sales. Instead, every sale requires you to hire a lawyer. Transacting real estate in New York then is more expensive, as most people will end up paying two professionals to move a house then: their real estate agent and a lawyer.

How many of those housing contracts are really that boutique though? Most people want the same things in a house sale. In fact most people don’t even really know what they want or need in a house sale. They’re relying on experts in the industry to help them through the process. How much should they value pre-paid property taxes? What’s a normal negotiation for leaving the washer and dryer behind?

In New York, lack of standardization means hiring a lawyer to help you navigate it. In Texas, that means following the law and using the standard issue contract.

Breaking New Ground

It’s when you start wanting things outside the norm that negotiation gets more expensive. You have to pioneer a new process. New processes require a lot more conversations. In addition to coming to agreement with another party, now you also have to know what you want, and how to communicate that effectively. It’s possible that the other party in the transaction won’t understand what you want, or even if they understand it, won’t know how to fulfill the request.

Sometimes novelty alone is a put-off to most people. What’s the name of that book, “Don’t make me think!” Even just asking others to contemplate a new way of doing things often can be the end of a negotiation or a deal.

Note that in Texas, if you’re using a licensed agent, you can’t really ask for something novel in real estate contracts. If you want to buy or sell a house, you’re basically stuck with the same contract that everyone else uses. Either you figure out how to make that work for you, you do things without an agent, you break the law (risky as the sale might be considered invalid), or you don’t transact.

What’s in Play

Usually there’s a reason that a standard contract is designed the way it is: it aims to cover the general desires and negotiation points of an interaction. The people who have the most experience in the industry are typically the ones writing them, and they’re trying to get everything written into it to ensure a smooth and well understood navigation of an expensive and long lasting negotiation.

Houses are one of the expensive purchase most Americans make. They’re also probably the longest lasting contract that you will sign. It makes sense for there to be a well understood outline for how to “get that job done”, so to speak.

In fact I think New York is a little crazy for not having a similar system. The additional costs that adds to the house transaction industry just seems obscene. There’s no good reason that the majority of New Yorkers need a lawyer to help them go through the process of writing up an agreement to buy or sell a house. Houses have been transacted millions of times in New York state alone.

Bringing it Home

I think you can tell where this discussion of standard contracts is going.

That’s right. Cross-gender interactions are a negotiation.

One that humans have had to navigate and, arguably, develop as we’ve evolved and built societies for ourselves. Different cultures have different standard contracts that they adhere to in the gender negotiation realms, but pretty much every culture has a general contract of understanding about what their roles are in the society they live in.

To some extent, gender role contracts tend to contend with similar topics: how two people are going to navigate the difficult task of supporting each other as they look to grow a family and contribute to society together.

Even if you zoom out and include the entire family/close-knit community of peers as the ones that are participating in the role-making system for each other, the inevitability of finding a place, or a way to contribute starts to really come to the forefront.

Dual Nature

There’s two ways to think about the where and why of gendered roles. The first is probably the more common understanding of why they exist: from the perspective of family planning. Without that grounding, I’d agree that the roles do start to appear a bit arbitrary. Like something that you can play with, negotiate, break out of.

But once you bring the family unit, of raising children and building a legacy as a unit into focus, suddenly I think there actually is some biological as well as capacitative differences that become way more important in terms of interaction and expectations.

Or maybe this is all just copium for recent thoughts I’ve had about how being a stay at home mom might be a nice change of pace, at least for a decade or so.

The other, second framing for gender roles, as negotiation of desires, I think comes from a deeper truth about the experience of being “a gender”. Maybe not in all cases, but I think you can make a strong argument that the grounded values and attention objects of the two genders are quite distinct.

I’ve been working in tech for over a decade now and it just, within the last few years, started to occur to me that maybe the reason why I don’t feel the same level of enthusiasm for certain important topics in computing might have more to do with a lack of shared experiential understanding of the world.

Put bluntly: I often find that I don’t have the same paranoias as the men around me do. It doesn’t occur to me to worry about being canceled. I’m not terribly out of sorts about the prospect of an Automated Intelligence taking my job. While I certainly worry about my own safety, I rarely have a strong sense of duty to protect others from harm.

But these seem to be experiences that are more common amongst men, a sort of mapping of cornerstones of their own experiences in the world. Ones that I can landmark and visit but wouldn’t realize even existed if it weren’t for the way that these concerns make notable impressions on the men around me in society.

Finalizing the Deal

How do you communicate those differences in values succinctly, between parties that have a long standing history of working together, but in an ecosystem where new participants to the interaction will be joining at a semi-constant rate (a healthy society always has new humans joining the ranks of “adulthood”).

Communicating established patterns of interaction that work, that help describe and encompass the values and lived experiences of sort of different sides of the same species is a difficult task. Having to renegotiate it for every interaction wouldn’t work.

So instead we end up with standard contracts. Sometimes we experiment with them. When they don’t work, it gets expensive and can often be difficult to renegotiate. Maybe it’s a healthy thing to have a state like New York where lawyers for renegotiation are readily available; I’m not sure what that looks like for gender role negotiations at large.

But maybe there’s something powerful to having a strong understanding of what’s included in the general standard contract for your regional society, as a jumping off point of where any next negotiation should start.

Generally speaking, people appreciate feeling like they can contribute and have a role to play, not just in interpersonal relationships but in their families and wider society as well. Figuring out how you contribute back, and what you need from others to feel like you’re able to be yourself to your fullest is a good goal for us a coherent social unit to strive for, as we all benefit when each person is enabled to be the best of themselves.

Anyway, I definitely don’t think I’ve got the best answers to how to negotiate interpersonal connections, but I’ve been enjoying figuring out what my role is of late. Maybe others have as well.