Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2019.01.07
1/10/2019 · 70 min · transcript via mlx
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Key topics
— Deplatforming and Bitcoin adoption: Gab.com, blocked by traditional financial services, educated 850,000 users on buying Bitcoin, framing it as "free speech money" rather than sound money to drive adoption among censored content creators.
— App store censorship: Google Play removed certain functionalities from Samurai Wallet (SIM disable, stealth mode); highlights centralized app stores as attack vectors on Bitcoin infrastructure.
— Apathy as the core threat: Mass adoption requires people to care about privacy, sovereignty, and decentralization; most users remain apathetic until their livelihoods are directly at risk.
— Mining pool decentralization and BetterHash: Bitcoin mining pools are becoming more distributed; BetterHash protocol could return block construction power to individual miners, but requires urgent adoption before hash rate growth makes bootstrapping impossible.
— Ethereum's mining and fork strategy: Constantinople hard fork reduces block rewards; ProgPow fork would eliminate ASICs, increasing network vulnerability and breaking expensive mining hardware investments (e.g., $4M Linzai ASIC).
— Ethereum Classic 51% attacks and Infura centralization: ETC faced multiple attack attempts; Infura nodes (hosted on AWS) control a large portion of Ethereum traffic, creating a single point of failure and Joe Lubin's outsized influence over the network.
Market & price signals
— Bitcoin price on January 10, 2019: $3,633.93 (per Bitfinex XBX index). Kraken compliance report showed 315 law enforcement requests from the U.S. in 2018 (six times higher than UK at 61), with requests accelerating yearly: 71 in 2016, 160 in 2017, 475 in 2018. ShapeShift experienced massive volume decline and laid off 37 people (30% of staff) after implementing KYC; multi-coin exchanges suffer more in bear markets than Bitcoin-focused businesses. Bitmain reportedly lost $1.2 billion in 2018 and rumored leadership changes signal distress in the mining hardware sector.
Actionable insights
— Prioritize privacy tools like Wasabi when transferring Bitcoin from centralized exchanges to break blockchain analysis trails before government requests can link your identity to transaction history.
— Seek out alternative app stores (F-Droid on Android) and sideload Bitcoin wallets directly from GitHub to reduce reliance on Google Play or Apple App Store censorship vectors.
— If you run an Ethereum application, diversify away from Infura-dependent infrastructure and explore decentralized node providers in geographically distinct regions to mitigate single points of failure.
Episode sponsorships
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