The bots are here.

You fools ain't fooling me.

It seems to me that you could prove a hardened derivation or a BIP-39 derivation. Unfortunately this reveals your secret key, so you need to either use a (quantum resistant!) ZKP, or a two-stage reveal: hash of the proof, what outputs you will spend, and an indication of what address you want to transfer the coins to, then after that is mined, you do the spend at put the derivation in the annex (or, for non-taproot, in an OP_RETURN).

Nic Carter has an idea toward that end, I'm not sure it he ever wrote it up. Basically tax unused utxos after some time to keep the mining rewards higher for longer. The complexity and push against tax probably makes this DOA, but interesting still.

zfs is great. i wanted to copy my bitcoin node to external drive but didn’t want to shut it off during the copy… so i shut down my node, did a snapshot of the drive (instant), then started it again.

#zfs snapshots keep a readonly, immutable state of the drive in that moment with very little overhead. So my zaps can keep working while i clone the node (snapshots are just symlinks on the drive). Very slick.

Nice set-up we've got going with our #1 POS merchant:

1. Business does well. Customers deplete our channel and balance goes almost entirely to the merchant's side

2. Merchant pays us on LN and pushes that balance to our side of the channel

3. We pay the merchant out on-chain to their cold storage

Now the merchant can keep accepting LN payments, have their earnings safely in cold storage AND we don't have to open a new channel to them; we can keep using the existing one.

⚡🔁⛓️

I spoke at a big bitcoin-adjacent company this week and one of the best questions was from someone who asked what the downsides of bitcoin adoption might be.

I always do appreciate these steelman questions, the skeptical questions, the ones where we challenge ourselves. Only when we can answer those types of questions do we understand the concept that we are promoting.

So the classic example is that in modern economic literature, "deflation is bad". This, however, is only the case in a highly indebted system. Normally, deflation is good. Money appreciates, technology improves, and goods and services get cheaper over time as they should. Price of Tomorrow covers this well. My book touches on this too, etc. The "deflation is bad" meme is still alive in modern economic discourse and thus is worth countering, but I think in the bitcoin spectrum of communities, people get that deflation is fine and good.

My answer to the question was in two parts.

The first part was technological determinism. In other words, if we were to re-run humanity multiple times, there are certain rare accidents that might not replicate, and other commonalities that probably would. Much like steam engines, internal combustion engines, electricity, and nuclear power, I think a decentralized network of money is something we would eventually come across. In our case, Bitcoin came into existence as soon as the bandwidth and encryption tech allowed it to. In other universes or simulations it might look a bit different (e.g. might not be 21 million or ten minute block times exactly), but I think decentralized real-time settlement would become apparent as readily as electricity does, for any civilization that reaches this point. So ethics aside, it just is what it is. It exists, and thus we must deal with it.

The second part was that in my view, transparency and individual empowerment is rarely a bad thing. Half of the world is autocratic. And half of the world (not quite the same half) deals with massive structural inflation. A decentralized spreadsheet that allows individuals to store and send value can't possibly be a bad thing, unless humanity itself is totally corrupted. I then went into more detail with examples about historical war financing, and all sorts of tangible stuff. In other words, a whole chapter full of stuff. I've addressed this in some articles to.

In your view, if you had to steelman the argument as best as you could, what are the scenarios where bitcoin is *BAD* for humanity rather than good for it, on net?