Reflections on BTC Prague 2024
Great conference with excellent networking and learning opportunities
Another year, another excellent conference with some great networking and fun times in Prague. Some overall key points for me:
Getting interesting people in the room at the same time makes for interesting discussions, and it really helps me keep a finger on the pulse of the latest developments.
Great overall execution by the conference organizing team, and great vibes in Prague.
There’s a little bit of something for everyone, whether it’s talk of bitcoin and economics, mining, protocol discussion, app layer discussion, as well as educators and evangelists networking.
As with last year, the expo area was actually a great area to hang out and meet people. And as always, it’s nice to run into listeners of the show.
For those more interested in technical discussions, I would highly recommend coming in early for the dev/hack/day which happens just prior to the main BTC Prague event. You get the sense that this is much closer to the ‘technical frontier’ as some of these topics won’t necessarily make the main stage of the conference.
Some updates from Mempool.space Simon
A few updates I’m seeing and hearing from a technical and ecosystem perspective:
Research and work proceeds on concepts such as the Great Consensus Clean up by Antoine Poinsot - which is a bug fix soft fork, not an upgrade. No concrete proposal yet, but it is good to see research and progress on this.
Mempool.space are rolling out a community sponsor program, and as usual they are rolling out continual innovations in how to visualise and see things in the mempool and on the chain.
Lightning is advancing with more wallets adding lightning support, and it’s great to see that Breez SDK is getting more and more traction - now being integrated with Relai, BitBox, Cake Wallet and Lipa. More to come here, and Roy and the team have plenty more coming.
The BTCPay team are working on a smartphone app that can help with local community ambassadors to onboard new merchants.
Blink (Galoy) are advancing with their merchant functionality and also moving forward with a new voucher feature that will enable merchants to provide small on and off ramps to the bitcoin ecosystem i.e. the end user can go pay physical cash and get a voucher that they can redeem for sats in their lightning wallet.
New Trezor and Ledger devices were announced at the conference. Trezor’s new Safe 5 has a touch screen and haptic feedback, they’re going with USB-C only though, no bluetooth or NFC or QR. Their overall approach is still more in favour of using things like SLIP-39 Shamir’s Secret Sharing for sharding backups, rather than multi sig (which is my personal preference).
Ledger is launching a new device, Ledger Stax with MuSig2 support. Their device has an e-ink screen with bluetooth and NFC support. I’m a bit puzzled at why you would want to ‘stack’ these devices? But I guess it is a bit novel and maybe mass market users are into that and the style?
At a more political level, it sounds like there is a lot more work to be done by the EU bitcoiners to keep it legal. Luda from the Open Dialogue Foundation gave me an update on this and mentioned how the US bitcoiners have done a lot better and that the EU bitcoin scene needs to rally up against bad laws - especially on the climate and AML fronts.
Giacomo had a great talk on why there’s so much in-fighting in Bitcoin, and ended with some good recommendations to keep in mind.
He notes some interesting parallels and it reminds me of the saying “there’s nothing new under the sun”. OP Return Wars into the Retardinal Wars which could also turn into Hashrate wars in future.
At a fun level, Muzz and the Lightning Ventures gang put on Satoshi Rockamoto, which is basically gathering bitcoiners to sing and play in a band for other bitcoiners. I got up and did a few songs, here’s a nice pic BTC Sessions posted:
I also recorded a podcast with the CFO of Prospera, Luke Thibodeau on the AmityAge pirate ship. So keep an eye out for that episode coming soon.
Tl;dr Podcast summaries:
Bitcoin Ossification Debate with Vijay Boyapati and Reardencode SLP583
Vijay starts out by spelling out why Bitcoin is special in his view, and generally speaks of how making the protocol difficult to change is actually an important benefit.
Reardencode (Brandon) broadly agrees, but where he differs is that he believes further upgrades are required to help bitcoin remain decentralized. As an example, OP code upgrades such as CTV, LNHANCE, or the Great Script Restoration could help more people self custody their coins.
Perhaps the real steelman of the ‘ossify’ position is to include bug fixes. But the way Vijay frames it, bitcoin should only be changed at the gravest extreme. I.e. only at the point where if we do not upgrade bitcoin, it would die. Vijay does mention the idea of not upgrading our bitcoin node, however I did point out that security updates are still important.
Brandon also highlights the need for careful consideration of soft forks and consensus changes, ensuring they do not centralise control or disrupt the network's stability. Brandon’s view might be more like, if we don’t upgrade Bitcoin as it is now, we will probably get a gilded age for a few generations, but then slip back into the same fiat currency style system afterwards.
Upcoming conferences:
Nomad Capitalist Sept 25-28, Kuala Lumpur Malaysia (tickets sold out but wait list possible)
Pacific Bitcoin October 18-19 2024, Los Angeles, California - code LIVERA gets you 21% off
Liberty in Our Lifetime 1-3 November Prague, Czechia - code LIVERA