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2023-02-08 Unpacking India's CBDC Pilots as Country Prepares for Digital Rupee

India wants to launch its central bank digital currency at a national level by the end of 2023, but early into its pilot, the Reserve Bank of India has identified challenges, several people familiar with the matter said. The CBDC-R is meant for the private sector and Indian citizens. The wholesale CBDCs are restricted to financial institutions and are meant to improve the efficiency of interbank payments. Publicly, the RBI has said the CBDC will provide an additional option to the currently available forms of money that is easier, faster and cheaper to use than existing payment rails, along with the transactional benefits of other forms of digital money. Privately, as an emerging economy, one of the world’s largest populations in 2023, and the fifth largest in terms of GDP, India’s geopolitical motivation is to counter the dollarization of the global economy.

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2023-02-07 Hoarding ‘Britcoin’ to be Banned Over Bank Run Fears Under Sunak’s Digital Currency Proposals

Governor Andrew Bailey and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt revealed a roadmap on Monday night for creating a new central bank digital currency (CBDC) – dubbed “Britcoin” in the press – that could enter circulation by the end of this decade. It is understood that Britons will initially be limited to transferring a few thousand “digital pounds” into their accounts under plans being drawn up. The limit will be imposed in order to prevent “large and rapid outflows” from traditional high street banks.“A limit on individuals’ holdings would apply at least in the introductory phase,” the Treasury said. “This would strike a balance between both encouraging use and managing risks, such as the potential for large and rapid outflows from banking deposits into digital pounds. These limits could be amended in the future.”

Tweets: @allenf32 @BernieSpofforth @Nigel_Farage @thecryptoc0up1e @federico_rivi $

2023-02-07 Ghana's Gold for Oil (G4O) Programme Pilots to Support Import of Petroleum Products.

The prime objective of the programme is to use additional foreign exchange resources from the Bank of Ghana’s Domestic Gold Purchase programme to provide foreign currency for the importation of petroleum products for the country which currently stands at about USD350 million per month. The programme also aims to procure petroleum products at very competitive prices through Government-to-Government (G2G) arrangements.

Tweets: @JanGold_ @PulseGhana @tv3_ghana @JoyNewsOnTV @BBSimons $


2023-02-07 Fedipool: Fedimint Could Mitigate Bitcoin Mining Pool Concerns

Fedimint is an emerging open source protocol that combines bitcoin, lightning, chaumian ecash, and federated custodians (called Guardians) to create community wallets that are easy to use, have strong privacy, reduced custodial risk, cheap and fast payments within the community, and interoperability with all bitcoin wallets. Current Fedimint development is focused on easy to use consumer wallets that could replace usage of major custodial wallet providers such as Binance and Wallet of Satoshi, but what if the same tech was used to replace major custodial mining pools such as Foundry and AntPool.

Tweets: @ODELL @ODELL @TheVladCostea @ODELL $

2023-02-06 What are Ordinal NFTs, Inscriptions, and Digital Artifacts?

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.

Tweets: @BitcoinSapiens @MaxisClub @Cipherhoodlum @BitcoinSapiens @LuchoPoletti @BitcoinSapiens @Pledditor @jimmyvs24 @adam3us @verysmallclaims @thomas_fahrer @CoinDesk @hashrateindex @knutsvanholm @BTCsessions @Pledditor $

2023-02-06 How Bitcoin Ordinals Can Change The Future Of Mining

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.

Tweets: @zackvoell @zackvoell @BitcoinPierre @rodarmor @BikesandBitcoin @BitcoinIsSaving @sethforprivacy @LukeDashjr @peterktodd @BitPaine @CoinDesk @derekmross @hellmoneypod @raw_avocado @wowbitcoinrocks @notgrubles @hashrateindex @LukeDashjr @ercwl @glassnode @stephanlivera @nvk @BitcoinIsSaving @RagnarLif $

2023-02-06 Charlie Munger: Exemplar of Cantillionaire Privilege

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.

Tweets: @BitcoinMagazine @WalkerAmerica @natbrunell @CoinDesk @VandelayBTC @unusual_whales @BitcoinNewsCom @CharFadirepo @BitcoinNewsCom @BitPaine $

2023-02-06 Shamir's Secret Sharing shortcomings

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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2023-02-06 Is It Possible To Achieve Financial Freedom With Bitcoin?

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.

Tweets: @Cointelegraph $


2023-02-04 The Fed's Suspicious Denial of Reality Will Not Deter Custodia Bank's Reshaping of It

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?

Tweets: @MatticusBTC @CaitlinLong_ @CaitlinLong_ @ProfJulieHill $

2023-02-04 Bitcoin’s January Effect

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.

Tweets: @NYDIG @Victor_Velea $

2023-02-04 Australia Introduces Classification For Crypto Assets

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.

Tweets: @CoinDesk @TheBlock__ @crypto @crypto $


2023-02-04 Lightning Network Is Now Synonymous with Bitcoin

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.

Tweets: @TheBitcoinLayer @timevalueofbtc $

2023-02-03 Earlier Than You Think: An Objective Look At Bitcoin Adoption

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.

Tweets: @VailshireCap @BitcoinNewsCom @saylor @BitcoinNewsCom @RealVision @BTC_Archive $

2023-02-03 Marathon Digital Sold 1500 Bitcoin in January, Mined 687 and Holds More Than 11000

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.

Tweets: @NewsDopamine @MarathonDH @Techmeme $

2023-02-03 Damus, a Nostr Social Network App, pulled from Apple’s App Store in China after two days

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.

Tweets: @jb55 @MarathonDH @jb55 @jb55 @0xtonyx @jb55 @derekmross @TechCrunch @Snowden @bastero @make_mhe @Snowden @WuBlockchain @BTC_LN @jb55 @zhubtc @PacStandardTW @CoinDesk $


2023-02-02 Nostr Will Only Scale If It Can Incentivize Users To Run Relays

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.

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2023-02-02 The Lightning Network is Gaining Momentum During the Bear Market

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.

Tweets: @MartyBent @kerooke @adamcurry $