Boltz is ready for the Merge

With the Ethereum merge creaking in the wind. You can swap out for bitcoin on-chain or on lightning quick and easy no kyc right here at https://boltz.exchange/

Video Calling Eachother Using Our Lightning Nodes :)

Everyone has been chasing this, Impervious, Red phone, Zues. Sphinx Chat already does it although it uses Jitsi at the moment, which is decentralised but not totally. However, zip zap Keet has beat everyone to the zoom punch. Uses "Whole Punch" to stream video peer to peer.

Check it out!  https://keet.io/

2140 Bitcoin Futurollogy

This story dives into the effects of forking and altcoins in a bitcoin world. Those who lived through the block size debates and bitcoin cash forks will have some personal experience here.

A fee market has developed for transactions ranging from one block to one year of blocks. Most all transactions happen on layer two networks. Smart contracts and DAOs are prolific mostly running on lightning rgb and and rsk. The world Mars and Venus's governance systems are all on the bitcoin blochain. 

Forking causes transaction surges. The prospect of these fee surges tend to cause some "public political" main net coins to indicate their fork choice and implementing forked coin sell-offs quickly to reduce their utxo's and loose anonymity in the process. Since information is very free and dispersed and the world isn't exactly a utopia this is a big disadvantage.

This exposes large and political organisations to various risks and over time this political behavior is reduced. So we have more forks and fewer people selling these forks early on. The prices are more stable and so this propensity not to sell forks immediately adds to the money supply. 

So we have a natural process where when there is disunity in the bitcoin system we get a short theoretic doubling of the money supply, one bitcoin for each side of the argument. Though many people will not intend on collecting this money. This disagreement is more common when the economy is not working well or when society is under stress. So it tends to happen at a time when resources are needed but when the actions needed are unclear. 

As people who are neutral, unclear or private will tend not to want to move their coins this could slow down the economy. Counter to this people with strong opinions, through the forking can get an opportunity for a financial boost. They would need to make it work quickly though as when both forks have perceived value and they are trading within their forked group with the new forked currency then the money supply increases and the economy can speed up.

Consider in 2140 that the human race is interplanetary and we are beginning to explore nearby solar systems and the resources required for exploration might stir up debate. Some people may want to put a lot of resources into covering the galaxy with human beings, others may consider this risky and destructive of nature. So politics develop. People at this stage have seemingly almost unlimited resources. Bitcoin can not control the people and what they do, so many people are just building rockets. Others who don't want this start to devote time to convincing people that this is unwise or leave to form a separate society. 

So on Earth we have politics between noninterventionist naturalist who want to be conservative at home and spendy explorers. They decide to separate financially and so we get a bitcoin fork for the spendy explorers and as you might expect it has slower blocks. Both forks hold value ok for a few years. this means that we get an increase in the money supply and its great we can fund a good amount of explorations. 

Over time the "spendy explorers" need funds to implement their expansion so at first they sell more of the opposite fork. Naturalists and in-betweeners hold both forks as it seems that the exploration is not all bad and could prove productive. Initially, let's say the unchanged "naturalist" bitcoin fork drops in price more than the explorer coin, but as explorations projects start taking longer to work out, explorers double down on their plans and end up selling their own coins to get their agendas done. Explorations expand to the point where it's not practical than the "explorer" coin drops. Everything comes back into balance. 

Celsius Freezes Transactions

It must be cold outside, bitcoiners are laying down the dad jokes at all the crying eth heads (whilst they also shiver a little). Celcius, Ethereum darling of defi (not defi, real name dinofi) seems to be in bad shape. This will be a significant issue for the Ethereum and defi space and will ripple into bitcoin also as a lot of defi projects wrap bitcoin with Ethereum to create more stable value for their customers. It could certainly be Luna time 10. Hold on everyone, it's the roller coaster, I am buying (just bitcoin that is).

Panic Yield - A New Type of Yield in Bitcoin

Transaction volume is up recently due to the dip in price caused by Ethereum and Celcius discussed in my other posts. But when looking at my lightning node transactions are up, fees are increasing and my near-zero yield is starting to float. More importantly when you look at mempool.space you see that fees are up slightly on bitcoin. This means miners though they are making less on the value of the block reward get a little bit back to balance that with more fees. 

These two parts of the industry have a little stabilization factor. It is a new type of yield on the zero risk rate of return. I call it Panic Yield.

Meme Term, Fiat Forward vs Bitcoin Forward

Reflecting on my first lighting node a Casa pi 3 with a spinner got ne thinking about business decisions. These nodes were really revolutionary at the time. An Autopilot feature that is still not matched in user friendliness today. There apparently were some issues with the autopilot that meant it could be gamed a little, but nobody lost much money over it. It could have been patched. They were also blamed for not realising that the available technology at the time would be quickly outdated and too slow to run a strong enough LND node. I have to admit I was a bit grumpy, but made even more so when Casa decided to stop providing lightning nodes altogether.

I can only guess that it was a decision made chasing fiat. The nodes were a kind of bait for their subscription model and the fiat probably didn't add up when you looked at all the administration needed, and the possibility of having to ship new hardware, charge for it and fess up to making some mistakes. 

The bitcoin does stack up though, especially when you look at it now, they were too Fiat forward. In the long term they would have held the market share which Umbrel now has. You could create a mesh network with the pi 3 and a pi 4 and have a more powerful node that everyone would be gaga over right now. At the time, looking at the fiat you would have thought that was crazy, but looking at bitcoin you would have thought, how honourable and selfless for the cause.

Fiat forward decisions are often wrong it seems. Bitcoin forward decisions, though they may seem altruistic at first but probably the right financial decision in the long run.

Bitcoiners know that bad money leads to bad decisions.Bitcoin forward decisions are best. What is good for bitcoin is probably best for you. in the meme term

Casa still do some really good work. check them out here

PoW and PoS are the New Left and Right

PoW, short for Proof of Work and POS, short for Proof of Stake, have become a political in the bitcoin crypto space.The consensus mechanisms of the protocols be fundamental to the structures and cultures they create. This is completely different to our existing political systems in one way, we are talking about autonomous computer algorithms but in another it echos the past. 

In proof of work the concept of and primary importance of work to society, this relates quite closely to what was the Labour movement or traditional left wing politics that primarily aimed to support the working person. For those in the united states its a little more fuzzy, but this is supposed to be like the current Democrats.  

Politics has become an ugly subject, corrupt to the core if you ask me, but on the right we have conservative parties of various objectives, but they generally hold the protection of property rights among their highest priority. Referring to the  Tories, National, or the Republican parties you can see that your traditional voter demographic shareholders and land owners.

Not so recently this fulcrum has begun to break down, I would argue that workers are realising that PoS type politics aren't helping them and that left wing parties are not really PoW. Both sides of politics have let money be corrupted, not balancing budgets and printing new money for themselves or certain coercive powers in times of need. This it was though had little to do with these primary tenants of worker and property rights, however in reality bitcoiners know that monetary policy is at its core. They can see this thing in politics as altcoin behaviour "PoS Shitcoinery" something in crypto that is considered just a continuation of old corrupting systems.

Why is it that people think the system of value (ie the monetary system) is so disconnected from the system of values (ie the way we form our society)? It's complex and it stinks so people don't want to talk about it but this had lead us to the uniformed nightmare that I think we see today. Bitcoiners know these things are inextricably connected. When you value work in your society you get things done and you get honour and dignity for many. When you value ownership it is not as clear what you get, ownership is more subjective than work and can be manipulated more easily through force and coercion. Work must be carried out by an individual, where ownership requires agreement of the public to enforce. Without property rights we get some-kind of disfunctional bedlam (often people would say anarchy, but that would be offensive to anarchists). We need both things to function well, but proof of stake is a slippery slope. Rent seeking and manipulative behaviours become commonplace and anything but working is fashionable among those who can afford it lead to dysfunctional bedlam also and this time with working people becoming effectively slaves. 

So government monetary policy like printing money and deficits, things closely related to inflation, are actually a political activities. At the time it happens the politicians often say they need to do it for social reasons, but these rarely have the long term effects desired and at the same time people don't realise that it destroys the future value of labour. most everyone who is working has a contract to sell their time for money. It is set in advance and so if during the course of that contract the money becomes worth less ie inflation happens then the value of the contract is reduced by that. In addition there is an expectation of ongoing employment which is exponentially devalued. This has a major impact on people well being, probably the highest impact action, because your job and your time are the most valuable thing that a working person has. It often makes the vote for a left wing or Labour party counter intuitive if they run more inflation than their competitor. Labour is supposed to be something supported as a left wing tenant so what ever the social policy may be, often it ends up counteracting itself. 

The same happens with conservative parties with often their austerity policies. they are chosen and timed in order to protect asset values and not the worker. If assets are supported it diminishes the strength of your work, because it is comparative Ie: If your house price goes up and you're wage doesn't its the same effect as what you would get with a poorly targeted social program. Austerity occurs in a coercive and corrupt way and this allows wealthy to extend rent seeking behaviours.

Understanding that governments not balancing their books or saving money and printing money when they need it destroys the value of work and labour and this has major social implications. When people ask for austerity or spending we have to ask for who and how because often it works against us. governments to be fair actually need to save money for rainy days. It makes sense and PoW vs PoS also put a clear perspective to this. It's the new, better defined, less corrupted, left and right wing politics and maybe not in the way you expected.

Ps: Bitcoin is not political, I feel I need a disclaimer here given the content obove suggests so strongly that it might be, also....  I have a new post coming up describing how Bitcoin in practise is not completely PoW.