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There’s a new way to mint non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Bitcoin, one that involves putting the actual content of the NFT completely on-chain. Only the creator of this standard, Casey Rodarmor, doesn’t want to call them NFTs. He thinks that the word is tainted, so instead he’s calling them “digital artifacts.” An ordinal is any number that defines a position in a series (e.g, first, second, third). In this case, the ordinal is the unspent transaction output (UTXO) for a specific satoshi. This satoshi includes an inscription with the NFT’s content, which could be txt, an image, an HTML, or even an MP3 file, and the ordinal marks this inscribed sat as a special transaction so users can identify and track them. Notably, an ordering system for sequencing satoshis was proposed as early as 2012. Since launching in January, over 1,000 digital artifacts are now immortalized on the Bitcoin blockchain.

By using data storage features of the Bitcoin network that were introduced by the Segregated Witness (SegWit) upgrade in 2017 and the Taproot upgrade in 2021, Bitcoin node operators are stuffing images, GIFs and other media files into Bitcoin blocks. But this practice has also resurfaced a conversation of growing importance: miner extractable value (MEV) on Bitcoin. Ordinals are Bitcoin data inscriptions that give miners a glimpse at what the future of Bitcoin MEV could be.

Munger is a Cantillionaire – after Richard Cantillion who wrote one of the first economic treatise in the eighteenth century describing how proximity to the monetary inputs of a society confer special advantages at the expense of wider populus. If there is such thing as “structural inequality”, it has more to do with the way the monetary system is constructed to benefit people who are already super-wealthy than anything else. Bitcoin is more than a disruptive technology. It’s a decentralized counter-attack against a structurally unsustainable and predatory financial system.

In Bitcoin the smallest error has the potential to be catastrophic; as such, those focused on private key security strive to eliminate any single point of failure in the systems they build. Naturally, this makes the concept of splitting up a secret into multiple pieces and later performing a ritual to recombine them sound somewhat appealing. It's so appealing that variations of Shamir's Secret Sharing (SSS) have been implemented several times in the cryptocurrency space, only for developers to later realize that the additional complexity ended up reducing the security of the system.

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Traditional banking systems have, time and again, served as a tool for centralized governments to dictate financial access, especially during emergencies. A large portion of the general public sees Bitcoin as a gateway to financial freedom amid growing fiat inflation and geopolitical uncertainties. As intended by the creator Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin seeks to bring power back to the people. No amount of regulations, sanctions or bans can stop people from using Bitcoin as money. Beyond that, a calculated investment in Bitcoin has the potential to bring people closer to attaining their dream of financial freedom.

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It took two years for the Fed to deny Custodia’s application despite approval normally taking ten days. Only for it to grow fishier. Denial from an allegedly non-political entity came in concert with the Biden administration releasing a rather skeptical statement about cryptocurrencies: “Roadmap to Mitigate Cryptocurrencies’ Risks.” It gets more ridiculous. And obnoxious. The Fed is excusing its alleged caution about Custodia given the “significant risks associated with cryptoassets and the crypto-asset sector.” Oh dear. Can they be serious? Better yet, do the regulators at the Fed think anyone is fooled here?

What bitcoin’s strong January may imply for the rest of the year, Ordinals NFT project provokes important questions for Bitcoin community and FOMC's rate decision sends Bitcoin higher.

On Feb. 3, the Australian Treasury released a consultation paper on “token mapping,” announcing it as a foundational step in the government’s multistage reform agenda to regulate the market. The paper proposes its taxonomy of four types of crypto-related products: Crypto asset services, Intermediated crypto assets, Network tokens, Smart contracts. While the paper proposes to start the discussion on this taxonomy and doesn’t provide any legislative initiatives, its authors anticipate a relatively easy tailoring of existing laws for a large portion of the crypto ecosystem.

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Bitcoin’s architecture trades speed for security. Lightning Network addresses that tradeoff. On the brink of Lightning’s fifth birthday, we now have a global adoption wave taking place. While bitcoin relies on its network of miners to provide security to the network and to build the blockchain for decades and centuries to come, it now depends on Lightning Network to power instant payments. We must therefore associate bitcoin and Lightning as one entity—bitcoin, modernized.

How many bitcoin users are there? How should we define a bitcoin user? We cover our preferred ways to categorize and track user growth then compare it to other available estimates. Significant bitcoin adoption is much lower than the estimates of 10-15% penetration or roughly 500 million users that are commonly thrown around today. In fact, he suggests that bitcoin adoption by what we would consider “heavy users” is at 0.01% penetration of the global population.

The miner said in a release on Thursday that the decision was made to cover some of its expenses. "With bitcoin production increasing and becoming more consistent, we made the strategic decision to sell some of our bitcoin, as previously planned, to cover some of our operating expenses and for general corporate purposes," Marathon’s Chairman and CEO Fred Thiel, said. Marathon said it mined a record 687 bitcoin, which is up 45% from December 2022. Marathon has about 4% of the total Bitcoin hash rate.

The app, which runs atop the Jack Dorsey-backed decentralized social networking protocol Nostr, was removed from the China App Store per request by the country’s top internet watchdog because it “includes content that is illegal in China.” Nostr is built to be censorship-resistant through “relays”, a type of network responsible for receiving posts and distributing them to network participants. Users can publish their posts to multiple relays, and they only see content in the relays they connect to. So if one relay is censored, they can post their content through another.

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The entire Nostr protocol depends on people somewhere running a relay server. There is no "Nostr network," there are only relays and clients that connect to relays. There need to be incentives for people to run relays, and in the long run, that is ultimately going to be a huge part of how far relays can scale.

Most of the world may be fading bitcoin and the layered stack being built on top of it at the moment, but it doesn't seem like those who realize its potential really seem to care all that much. Wallet of Satoshi (a custodial Lighting wallet that has a lot of traction in LatAm) has a record month in January with a ~35% month-on-month increase in transaction volume. People are building products with actual utility that are creating a natural funnel for adoption.

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Eight out of 10 high net worth (HNW) individuals have asked their financial advisers about including cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, into their portfolios over the last 12 months – despite the market experiencing a difficult year in 2022. “The world’s largest cryptocurrency is up over 40% since the turn of the year and this will not go unnoticed by HNW clients and others who want to build wealth for the future.” - Nigel Green, the CEO and founder of deVere Group

Lebanon will adopt a new official exchange rate of 15,000 pounds per U.S. dollar on Feb. 1, central bank governor Riad Salameh said, marking a 90% devaluation from its current official rate that has remained unchanged for 25 years. The pound has lost some 97% of its value since it began to split from the 1,507 rate in 2019. While capital controls have never been formally imposed in Lebanon, banks since 2019 have imposed their own controls, severely limiting withdrawals in dollars and Lebanese pounds.

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Nostr spiked in popularity after former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey became an enthusiast of the technology, later making a 14 bitcoin donation to its creator. Nostr is still a niche project, as the protocol is very much in its infancy. However, the technology is promising, given it’s an open, censorship-resistant and permissionless communications protocol.

Strike has partnered with Pouch.ph to enable transfers from U.S. dollars to Philippine pesos, which can be received in a bank or mobile money account in the Philippines. Send Globally was launched in December 2022 starting with transfers from the U.S. to Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana. Lightning will continue to expand into more markets with more partners to provide better payment services to communities around the world.

It is yet to be seen if Nostr turns into a widely adopted protocol with a vibrant application layer built on top or a flash in the pan that fizzles out after initial enthusiasts lose interest, but it has certainly piqued the interest of a lot of people. Particularly bitcoiners. Which makes sense because it is a protocol created by bitcoiners who weren't happy with the status quo of media and information distribution on the Internet. Lightning addresses being native to some clients is just the tip of the iceberg. The ability to do end-to-end encrypted chats over Nostr has created a new way to privately exchange bitcoin addresses.