🎶 3AC was first in line 🎶 🎶 Now Silvergate and Gemini 🎶 🎶 SBF, Caroline 🎶c 🎶 Gensler wants Binance to die 🎶 🎶 We didn't play with shitcoins 🎶

Copied on a thread right now that reminds me of the Great Microsoft Exchange Email Storm of 1997 (Bedlam DL3) For your morning enjoyment:

TECHCOMMUNITY.MICROSOFT.COM

Me Too! | Microsoft Community Hub

  One way of telling how long a Microsoft employee has been working here is their reaction to the phrase “Bedlam DL3”. Just for grins, I w...

shill me your best 'the train derailments were caused by cyberattacks' theory

Nostr is less interesting to me as a communications protocol per se - at that layer it's just a bunch of websocket clients and servers with novel ways of discovering each other and a shared understanding of how to encode datagrams- but the sort of de-facto "not quite petnames, not quite SSL certs, something else" identity layer that has built up on top of that is frigging nuts

Getting used to the nostr dynamic of posts with maybe two likes but several thousand sats from a dozen randos

The first live show at Pubkey last night was a blast! Thanks to everyone who came out, especially in the middle of our first snowstorm of the year. Most of the examples of data embedded in the blockchain are catalogued here:

Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain - Ciro Santilli

This 2018 paper goes over different techniques to embed arbitrary data, including the Satoshi uploader I'd mentioned: https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf @BitMEX did an amazing article on the OP_RETURN wars that covers Counterparty:

BitMEX Blog

Why DApps Built on Ethereum, Not Bitcoin: OP_Return Wars

Abstract: In this piece we explore why Dapps are typically built on Ethereum rather than Bitcoin, which takes us all the way back to March 2014. W...

The PSBT dutch auction stuff that @orenyomtov is working on is here

OpenOrdex - Open Ordinals Decentralized Exchange

OpenOrdex is an open source zero-fee trustless Bitcoin NFT marketplace based on partially signed bitcoin transactions

The case of the Slovakian politician sending financial transactions that were secretly coded messages is here:

Marian Kotleba - Wikipedia

...and I think that's all? DM me if you have any questions and see you next time!

From a comment on an HN article about the causes of the decine of UseNet: "These days we're used to being overrun by everyone who can use a point-and-drool interface on their phone to look at Facebook, but back in September 1992 it was a real shock to the system when usenet was suddenly gatewayed onto AOL, I can tell you. Previously usenet more or less got along because the users were university staff and students (who could be held accountable to some extent) and computer industry folks. Thereafter, well, a lot of the worse aspects of 4chan and Reddit were pioneered on usenet. (Want to know why folks hero-worshipped Larry Wall before he wrote Perl? Because he wrote this thing called rn(1). Which had killfiles.) " ...we're gonna need nostr killfiles Soon.

Kill file - Wikipedia

gm, ETHDenver has approximately 60% the number of attendees as the Midwest FurFest, America's largest furry convention

gm, Gary Gensler is an ex-Goldman Sachs investment banker in an appointed-not-elected position, this guy isn't your friend just because he's making shitcoiners miserable. better to let all these bad ideas fail on their own (lack of) merits instead of cheering that they're being regulated out of existence

The PSBT auction stuff is undeniably cool. I hope it gets more traction / use cases. Maybe the POWSWAP hashrate derivatives Jeremy Rubin was working on...?

Moving on from UseNet to the death of Gopher, comparing this article: "Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher in the Battle for Protocol Mind Share"

Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher in the Battle for Protocol Mind Share

...with an interview with Mark McCahill, lead Gopher dev: https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107471/oh328mmc.pdf TL,DR: Historian: This protocol failed due to complex technological and sociological problems Lead Dev: "What killed the protocol off was when people stopped using Gopher clients specifically and started using Mosaic" 🤔

The combo of: a) this Politico oral history with Biden admin officials marking the one year anniversary of the war in Ukraine - in which sanctions against Russia are described in terms of 'shock-and-awe' and collective punishment, with Treasury officials imagining themselves as warfighters deterring enemy behavior and blithely ignoring collateral damage https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/02/24/russia-ukraine-war-oral-history-00083757 and b) this Bloomberg article published on the same day, quietly admitting that sanctions proponents have given up on them having any impact on Russia's behavior

Bloomberg.com

How Biden’s Shock-and-Awe Tactic Is Failing to Stop Russia

The economic punishment of Russia was touted as a game-changer. Instead it’s turned into a war of attrition — and a race against time.

has convinced me we're in the final stage of the decline of the dollar system, in a "where are we going and why are we in this handbasket?" kind of way.

CBDC strategy docs, but make it 30 years ago

I think it's great that this mining pool came back from the dead right after that first non-standard ordinals transaction was mined and people started getting shouty. Definitely not an existing player spoofing the OP_RETURN in the coinbase transaction to avoid criticism!

Sharing this to help motivate me to get finish Chapter 7 and what I anticipate to be a loooong slog through Chapter 8:

Excited to announce Based, a new programming paradigm for aspiring blockchain developers! How it works: * You send me a DM on Nostr * I explain to you that you don't need a blockchain * You call me a poisonous feminine hygiene product, or a toxic maxipad, or whatever, idk * Five years later you realize you're wasting your life and rebrand as being 'Pro Bitcoin', just in time to buy the top of the next cycle. Welcome to the future. It's Based.

Bitcoin obituary vibes

"We've known for a while that the Internet has ossified as a result of the race to optimize existing applications or enhance security" -- this paper from 2011 is the earliest academic reference I can find to Internet protocol ossification https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2068816.2068834

gm, thinking of ways a client can bootstrap a list of relays and test that they're minimally trustworthy in some way. maybe we end up defaulting to nip-05 relay recommendations - if that happens, would providers injecting their own relays into a user's records be helpful or viewed as an attack vector? maybe a canary bot that tries to send restricted samizdata - 3D PDW files, politcally sensitive speech, financial transactions to blacklisted addresses - through a list of relays and testing end-to-end delivery would be useful?

"Further resentment was created on the Net side by AOL's habit of advertising itself as "the Internet, and a whole lot more," further confusing where the boundary, if any, might lie...." Re-reading Chapter 3 of Wendy Grossman's net.wars, starts off with a bang: