BTCNews.Today
Come for the news, stay for the low time preference.
Latest
Keynesian central banking has turned the American economy into a giant economic science experiment. They are flying by the seat of their pants, guesstimating as they go, while pretending it’s all coming out of scientific economic models. The drunken sailor’s take on the US economy and inflation articulated by Lael Brainard reflects nothing more than the ever-changing groupthink of the Fed heads and their acolytes on Wall Street. It is based on the in-coming data from primitive government measures of inflation, employment, GDP and other macroeconomic series—all stuffed into an economic framework/model predicated on blatantly faulty macroeconomic theories.
$Moves by financial market and banking regulators over the past few weeks have had crypto industry participants on alert regarding a regulatory crackdown in the US. While we continue to believe that ongoing regulatory and legal clarity is beneficial for the industry, we understand that given the flurry of news, investors have questions about the state of crypto regulations, how it impacts businesses, and the path ahead. It is important to understand that while there has been a flurry of regulatory activity in this space, none of it is existential. Nothing we have seen so far nor foresee on the horizon portends the banning or outlawing of digital assets. Certainly, the business practices of some industry participants are being called into question as is the regulatory designation for certain assets. However, we ultimately feel that sensible guardrails and knowing the rules of the road allow investors to confidently deploy capital in the asset class, benefitting prices.
Tweets: @NYDIG $oundry Pool is nearing the 40% network hashrate mark–an uncomfortable margin for many Bitcoin enthusiasts. While an attestation to the Foundry team’s ability to bootstrap, grow and sustain a mining pool within three years, the percentage needs to come down for a few reasons. Chief among them being the type of clients Foundry services: public miners. There’s two threats worth paying attention to: confirmation times and feather forks.
Tweets: @ercwl $Please tag @BTCNEWS_TODAY on Twitter to submit tweets.
Interest earned on bank accounts, certificates of deposit and corporate bonds is subject to income tax in the year it’s generated, according to the Internal Revenue Service. Typically, that’s a fairly straightforward process: Banks and other institutions send out 1099 forms listing the taxpayer’s interest income, which is then used when determining overall obligations for tax season. But in a quirk of last year’s crypto collapse, investors are now receiving tax bills for money locked up on platforms like Celsius and Voyager Digital, which have frozen customer withdrawals as they undergo bankruptcy proceedings. It could hardly come at a worse time for crypto investors.
Tweets: @realrephy @CryptoTaxesGuy @business @CryptoTaxesGuy @CryptoTaxGirl @ckaminsk $The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) has granted 2 billion satoshis, approximately $475,000, from the Bitcoin Development Fund to 10 global projects. The funding will support areas such as censorship-resistant communication, Bitcoin education in authoritarian regimes, core development and building local communities and education, with a focus on Africa and Southeast Asia. The grants include $100,000 to Qala, a fellowship program training the next generation of African Bitcoin and Lightning developers, allowing the program to continue their 13-week fellowship and sponsoring six Qala fellows to attend the Oslo Freedom Forum.
Tweets: @AnitaPosch @gladstein $Please tag @BTCNEWS_TODAY on Twitter to submit tweets.
Tweets: @gladstein @BitcoinPierre @CaitlinLong_ @VailshireCap @FossGregfoss @amlivemon @grant_mccarty @gladstein @giacomozucco @LynAldenContact @RSync25 @gladstein @gladstein @IIICapital @gladstein @WalkerAmerica @parkeralewis @gladstein @unchainedcap @jackmallers @BtcpayServer @gladstein @gladstein @IIICapital @raw_avocado @SovrynM $We used to be organized into families and tribes. Nowadays, we're organized into companies, which are very debased versions. Companies are artificial and don't have anywhere near the level of history or close relationships that families do. You can feel it in the pointless meetings you're forced to attend. Yet companies are very much the way individuals are organized in a fiat economy and this is due to the incentives of fiat money. We used to depend on our families, our clans or our tribes for our security. Kin was who you depended on to help you in times of need. Fiat money has changed everything by providing all manner of safety nets for individuals through these companies. All of these functions have been subsumed and you are now free to replace your family with government goodies. Insurance and money are poor substitutes for human relationships, like seed oils for butter and just about as toxic. Social security and pensions have replaced children. A cold, impersonal company that will lay you off at the drop of a hat has replaced the traditional family trade. Is it any wonder that people are so depressed?
$Please tag @BTCNEWS_TODAY on Twitter to submit tweets.
Caitlin Long said that crypto is currently comparable to the mutual funds market in the 1930s when it was rife with bad actors and fraud. But instead of thwarting the market altogether, President Franklin D. Roosevelt came up with breakthrough regulations that helped weed out the bad actors without killing the potential of mutual funds. And the U.S. needs to do the same with crypto; the country and regulators need to sit down with credible people in the crypto industry to develop a regulatory approach that does not thwart the innovative potential of the industry, she said.
Tweets: @jespow @CryptoSlate @jespow $This article provides a look at the author's latest research, revealing how it came to be that a 2022 Cambridge Centre For Alternative Finance’s (CCAF) study on Bitcoin’s environmental impact underestimates the amount of sustainable Bitcoin mining going on. I also address why we can be very confident that the actual sustainable energy usage is at least 52.6% of Bitcoin mining’s total energy use.
Tweets: @DocumentingBTC @DSBatten @DSBatten @DSBatten @DSBatten $Please tag @BTCNEWS_TODAY on Twitter to submit tweets.
The LATAM region records a high interest in unbacked crypto assets and stablecoins and its authorities’ policy responses have varied substantially, ranging from the introduction of Bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador to their prohibition in many other countries worried about their impact on financial stability, currency/asset substitution, tax evasion, corruption, and money laundering. This paper also describes briefly the results of a survey on CBDCs’ introduction plans and crypto assets regulation. Finally, this paper presents some general lessons and policy recommendations for the region on the regulation of crypto assets, digital currencies and cross-border payments, and on the potential introduction of CBDCs.
$On the same day that the Federal Reserve denied Custodia's membership application, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (the "FRBKC") also denied Custodia's "master account" application. We summarize below the recent actions by the Federal Reserve, FRBKC, and other regulators and discuss their implications for banking institutions looking to commence or expand their crypto-asset banking services and activities.
$Please tag @BTCNEWS_TODAY on Twitter to submit tweets.
Tweets: @herrytheeagle @malekanoms @BitcoinEkasi @Bitcoin_Xoe @BitcoinMerges @MilenaMayorga @unchainedcap @Reuters @CoinDesk @economics @futurepaul @BitcoinAudible @saylor @athena_alpha_ @unusual_whales @AP_Abacus @coryklippsten @BTC_Archive @gaborgurbacs @gladstein @mempool @adam3us @robustus @TheGuySwann @elonmusk @lopp $The U.S. state of Wyoming has passed a bill that protects its citizens from having to disclose their private keys, with a singular exception. Having now been approved by the state Senate and House of Representatives, it now simply needs to be signed by the Governor in order to take effect.
Tweets: @sashahodler @btc $Custodia Bank filed an amended complaint against the Federal Reserve Friday, weeks after the Fed rejected the bank's effort to secure a "master account" and become a member of the Federal Reserve System. The Wyoming Special Purpose Depository Institution claimed the denial of its application was unlawful, alleged the Federal Reserve Board and Biden administration coordinated a series of public statements to accompany the rejection of Custodia's application and said the Federal Reserve Board – not the Kansas City Fed – was "pulling the strings." The Federal Reserve denied Custodia's application to be a member of the Federal Reserve System at the end of January, and Custodia's master account application was rejected "immediately after," the suit said. "Defendants had a non-discretionary duty to grant Custodia’s master account application and not to discriminate against Custodia in its ability to access all bank services using that account. Any other outcome eviscerates the dual-banking system that has served our nation since its founding," the filing said.
Tweets: @CaitlinLong_ @CaitlinLong_ @CaitlinLong_ @CaitlinLong_ @TheBitcoinLayer @CaitlinLong_ @coryklippsten @coryklippsten @CoinDesk @CaitlinLong_ $Please tag @BTCNEWS_TODAY on Twitter to submit tweets.
Tweets: @TXMCtrades @HumbleSats @clarkmoody @raypaxful @natbrunell @prestonjbyrne @kollider_trade @YahooFinance @SenatorHagerty @Farida_N @gladstein @JeffBooth @coryklippsten @BitcoinPierre @coryklippsten @Okcoin @lopp @lopp @gladstein @gustavojfe @mdudas @fedibtc @BitcoinTalentCo @callebtc @AutismCapital @LynAldenContact @OmarTamo19 @francispouliot_ @MichaelRoerade @otteroooo $Bitcoin enthusiasts often make the mistake of concluding that Bitcoin’s potential valuation is infinite. This is true in dollar terms, since there is no limit to the amount of dollar debasement that can occur into the future (see Weimar Germany or recent Zimbabwe). But it is unrealistic in real terms, relative to other assets. The truth is that Bitcoin stands in relative competition with other store-of-value assets, all of which have unique value propositions. A wealthy individual is not very likely to sell their mansion or their prized Rembrandt to buy Bitcoin, but is instead more likely to sell some of their bond portfolio, because they believe Bitcoin better fulfills the intended purpose of holding bonds (propagating value into the future and earning a modest nominal return to offset inflation).
Tweets: @Croesus_BTC $Just five days after reaching 50,000 inscriptions, Bitcoiners using the Ordinals protocol have now inscribed more than 100,000 pieces of data onto the Bitcoin blockchain. Since the project’s launch in January 2023, a seemingly endless stream of pictures, audio files and PDFs have been uploaded. Prominent projects on Ordinals include Bitcoin Shrooms, Astral Babes and Bitcoin Punks, which are Bitcoin-based uploads of the original Ethereum CryptoPunks. One of these has now sold for as much as 9.5 BTC, or approximately $215,000 at the time of writing.
Tweets: @hash_bender $Please tag @BTCNEWS_TODAY on Twitter to submit tweets.
Frustration has been building for weeks after a shortage of the newly designed naira notes led to a lack of cash. Some customers in southern Nigeria's Warri and Benin City reportedly set fire to two commercial banks. Nigerians have faced long queues at cash machines with some sleeping outside banks to try and be first in line to get some money. People say they have been forced to skip meals and work without cash to pay for food or transport to their jobs. Some banks were broken into while protesters looted their cash machines. In Benin City, customers attempted to invade the Central Bank of Nigeria's (CBN) local offices but security officers fired tear gas at them.
Tweets: @steve_hanke @BitcoinMagazine $While CBDCs may seem like a modern and convenient solution, they come with a host of threats to individual freedom. The potential for government surveillance, financial exclusion, and cyber attacks, as well as negative interest rates, pose serious risks to your financial and personal freedom. As such, it's important to understand the dangers of CBDCs and weigh the risks against the potential benefits before embracing them.
$Please tag @BTCNEWS_TODAY on Twitter to submit tweets.
Tweets: @mempool @WalkerAmerica @Pledditor @lisaabramowicz1 @TonyRobbins @TheBlueMatt @HaileyLennonBTC @saylor @CaitlinLong_ @MilenaMayorga @CaitlinLong_ @ODELL @clarkmoody @coinbeastmedia @arcbtc @jackmallers @BTC_LN @saylor @DylanLeClair_ @samjrule @CaitlinLong_ $Dozens of American University in Cairo (AUC) students have staged several protests against the rise in tuition fees, echoing outcries by other Egyptians against the toll the deterioration of the Egyptian pound is taking on their lives. They have called on other students to join in, complaining that the rise in education fees is far more than their families could handle. AUC's administration says it encourages students to express themselves freely, having approved the protests that are taking place on campus.
Tweets: @BloombergAfrica @MiddleEastEye @steve_hanke $Ads
Umbrel — A personal server OS for self-hosting.
Amboss — Lightning Network Power Tools #FindYourEdge.
Geyser Fund — Lightning-native crowdfunding: Launch projects in just a few clicks.
Tech & Dev
Your guide to ordinals, lightning minecraft servers, personas, a whole bunch of conferences and bitcoin job opportunities.
$What’s the best solution for you? The best solution is the one that fits your personal needs best. Every wallet has different features, as well as up- and downsides. It is on you to figure out your needs and possibilities and then to find the optimal solution for those. Non-custodial Lightning wallets might be a little less convenient to use and come with an initial cost when setting up the channels, but you are in full control over your own funds. You are financially sovereign.
Tweets: @AnitaPosch @TheGemHodlers @BTC_LN $One of the biggest challenges of the Bitcoin network is having a low latency, highly secure and private way of exchanging messages between peers. The censorship resistance requirement of the system is determined by the ability to propagate messages without risk of interception by third parties like ISPs. Implementing solutions that enhance privacy among network participants is one way of ensuring that the censorship resistance requirement is satisfied. In this post, we dive into the need for bitcoin’s transport protocol to encrypt messages exchanged between peers. Since all data relayed in the Bitcoin P2P network is inherently public, and the protocol lacks a notion of cryptographic identities, peers talk to each other over unencrypted and unauthenticated connections. This is a risk to the Bitcoin network’s security in the presence of attackers.
$In Bitcoin, a UTXO is considered dust when the fee required to spend it is greater than the amount on the UTXO. Bitcoin Core considers a UTXO as dust if it's value is lower than the cost of spending it at the dustrelayfee. In Bitcoin Core, this dustrelayfee can be set by a commandline argument -dustrelayfee. Additionally, Bitcoin Core default dustrelayfee is 3000 sat/kB. In this article, we explore the bug while trying to open a channel from an LDK node to an LND node. This bug made us explore an important concept in Bitcoin and Lightning called dust limit. We also see how payments under the dust limit don't create HTLC output as transaction with outputs under the dust limit are not viable on-chain as they will not be relayed by nodes.
$lnurl-auth is very unique in the sense that it doesn’t even need a Lightning wallet to work, it is a standalone authentication protocol that can work anywhere. The basic idea is that each wallet has a seed, which is a random value (you may think of the BIP39 seed words, for example). Usually from that seed different keys are derived, each of these yielding a Bitcoin address, and also from that same seed may come the keys used to generate and manage Lightning channels. What lnurl-auth does is to generate a new key from that seed, and from that a new key for each service (identified by its domain) you try to authenticate with.
Tweets: @dergigi @dergigi @k00bideh @kerooke $This week’s newsletter summarizes a discussion about storing data in transaction witnesses and references a conversation about mitigating LN jamming. Also included are our regular sections with the summary of a Bitcoin Core PR Review Club meeting and descriptions of notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software. On the issue of storing data in transaction witnesses, Andrew Poelstra emphasizes that there is no effective way to prevent data storage. Adding new restrictions to prevent unwanted data storage in witnesses would undermine advantages discussed during taproot’s design and would likely only result in the data being stored in other ways. Those other ways might raise costs for those generating the data—but probably not by enough to significantly discourage the behavior—and the alternative storage methods might create new problems for traditional Bitcoin users.
$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.
$Bitcoin Core developer James O’Beirne proposed vault opcodes in a post to the official Bitcoin-Dev mailing list. His soft fork would add two new operation codes (“opcodes”) to Bitcoin script: OP_VAULT and OP_UNVAULT. What would these new opcodes accomplish? What are the alternative proposals and next steps?
$It's great to see Bitcoiners joining Nostr, the decentralized social network. This is a good, short post from ConsentOnChain blog that all Nostriches should read.
Tweets: @jack @pleblira @jb55 @andreneves @cameri @melvincarvalho @derekmross @JeffBooth @yeg0rpetrov @pippellia @notgrubles @cameri @jameslavish @SovrynM @vishalxl @fiatjaf @fiatjaf @CaptFrancisDank @nitesh_btc @spiralcrunch @shukla @nvk @shukla @nvk @resistancemoney @BTCNEWS_TODAY $Podcasts
| Date | Name | Episode |
|---|---|---|
| 2023-02-22 | Bitcoin.Review Podcast with NVK & Guests | Demystifying and Understanding Bitcoin Core Development ft. Sjors, Schmidty & James O'Beirne |
| 2023-02-20 | The Bitcoin Layer | The 24 Risks of Equities with Michael Saylor |
| 2023-02-16 | What Bitcoin Did | Bitcoin Mining & the Energy Grid Transition with Troy Cross & Shaun Connell |
| 2023-02-16 | Swan Signal - A Bitcoin Podcast | Dr. Jeff Ross & James Lavish | Hedge funds, Inflation and Bitcoin | Swan Signal E96 |
| 2023-02-15 | Stephan Livera Podcast | Q1 And Bitcoin Security With NVK |
| 2023-02-14 | POD256 | Bitcoin Mining News & Analysis | State of the Network, Industrial Scale Miner Consolidation, Special Guest: Casey Rodarmor - Creator of Ordinals |
| 2023-02-14 | Coin Stories with Natalie Brunell | Luke Gromen & Preston Pysh: Macro + Bitcoin Outlook for 2023 - "Mild Recession Not an Option" |
| 2023-02-11 | Citadel Dispatch | CD90: Spiral Initiatives with Steve Lee |
| 2023-02-10 | Citadel Dispatch | CD89: Open Source Week Party Rip at Bitcoin Park with NVK, Vivek, Paul, Tony, and the Bens |
| 2023-02-09 | Swan Signal | Lawrence Leopard & Greg Foss | Gold, Bonds and Bitcoin |
Longform
“Bitcoin” encompasses two related but distinct concepts. First, individual bitcoins (lowercase b) are units of (fiat) digital currency. Second, the Bitcoin protocol (uppercase B) governs the decentralized network through which thousands of computers across the globe maintain a “public ledger”—known as the blockchain—that keeps a fully transparent record of every authenticated transfer of bitcoins from the moment the system became operational in early 2009. In short, Bitcoin encompasses both (1) an unbacked digital currency and (2) a decentralized online payment system. Whether Bitcoin becomes a bona fide money is still an open empirical question, but at this point—since Bitcoin is already a medium of exchange—Mises’s regression theorem doesn’t have any bearing on the outcome.
$Transcript of the 24 Risks of Equities with Michael Saylor from the Bitcoin Layer Podcast. Michael covers the following risks: #1: Governance Risk #2: Operational Risk #3: Strategic Risk #4: Financial Risk #5: Competitive Risk #6: Technology Risk #7: Political Risk #8: Facilities Risk #9: Regulatory Risk #10: Employee Risk #11: Vendor Risk #12: Customer Risk #13: Reputational Risk #14: War Risk #15: Currency Risk #16: Tax Risk #17: Weather Risk #18: Customs Risk #19: Legal Risk #20: Tort Risk #21: Patent Risk #22: Health Risk #23: Lifecycle Risk #24: Dilution Risk
$Nostr is for developers. It’s an open-source project for builders that serves as a broadcast platform and content hub aggregate. From the architecture alone, we can start to differentiate it from Twitter or any other existing platform. This protocol is newly, actively developed — so while it tugs at the root of topics like free speech and privacy, the tech itself is in its nascent stages. Nostr aims to decentralize private communications and data while allowing us to interact in new ways. For all of those reasons, we should learn about it — perhaps in the same way some of us should have learned about Meta products before dishing our credentials.
$On one side of this, a sharp and persistent increase in the broad money supply is the biggest quantifiable correlate with price inflation. On the other side, sharp changes in the supply of goods and services (e.g. a major boom or a major loss in productive capacity) also significantly affect price inflation. We can see this with long-term charts of several different developed countries as examples. These charts show the five-year rolling cumulative amount of broad money supply growth and consumer price index growth. Areas where money supply growth greatly exceeded changes to consumer price index were generally due to some sort of productivity boom. combination of high debt, high interest rates on that debt, aging demographics, geopolitical tensions, and tight energy supplies are likely to result in ongoing waves of inflation. For periods where we generally get inflation under control, it will likely be due to global demand suppression and economic stagnation, rather than what we actually want: global disinflationary growth.
$Greg Foss thinks Bitcoin should be considered default insurance on the entire global fiat currency system—like a CDS on the US dollar, Canadian dollar, British pound, euro, yen, yuan, and all the rest of the government currencies. Some proponents believe the endgame for Bitcoin is to eventually emerge as the world’s dominant form of money. It’s a process called “hyperbitcoinization”—or what I like to call The Bitcoin Supremacy. That’s why Bitcoin is even better than a CDS. It provides insurance against the failure of the entire worldwide fiat currency system, has no counterparty risk, and doesn’t expire.
$Would the collapse (in terms of redemptions) of a stablecoin cause contagion in the traditional financial system? To answer this, first we have to clarify the starting point, and then there is actual data that can answer many of these questions.
Tweets: @PaxosGlobal @cz_binance @Schuldensuehner $history of debt in bitcoin mining, examined key principles of debt, and looked at some of the most common structures available to bitcoin miners. Now that we understand the landscape, we will take a look at the considerations for borrower and lender alike, the effect of leverage on mining returns, and discuss how the future of the market might look. Here are the main topics covered in Part 2: Key considerations from a lender's point of view and from miners' point of view, a case study, comments on the future of debt in Bitcoin mining, shortcomings of ASIC-backed debt, cost of capital being king, and The Forever Forthcoming Hash Rate Marketplace.
$Computation is competition. While the quantum computing threat is not something we expect to be worth worrying about for many years, it is better to be proactive rather than wait for it to come for us. Security is the science of staying ahead. The very act of wealth preservation is comprised of staving off the many attempts to steal it.
$Between 2009 and the end of 2021, household sector wealth soared by 150%, increasing from $60 trillion to $150 trillion. The index, which is commonly referred to as the Wealth-to-Income Ratio, has a 68-year average is 550%. Its interesting to observe how the index behaved in the face of past examples of record high stock prices. “Actual” inflation is likely much higher than the official number. According to Shadow Government Statistics, if inflation were calculated in the manner that it was back in 1990, we would have an “official” inflation rate of more than 17%. What will the Fed and the government do now? This time, it is unlikely that the government will step in to save investors. Additional fiscal stimulus would likely drive inflation even higher. And in the face of high inflation, the Fed’s response is money destruction, not money creation. Investors, therefore, are in a very tough place.
$Over the past 10+ years, there has been a growing movement of people adopting a low-time-preference strategy of saving and investing with the goal of achieving financial independence early in life, putting themselves in a position to retire earlier than the traditional age of 65. Hence the acronym, FIRE: Financial Independence, Retire Early. Bitcoin allows you to mitigate the certainty of dollar debasement without exposing yourself to the risks of investing. A deep dive into the bitcoin rabbit hole tends to lead to the conclusion that its adoption will continue apace, leading to its value rising exponentially. Bitcoin represents the greatest asymmetric bet the world has ever seen.
Tweets: @ts_hodl $The U.S. Federal Reserve is now operating at a financial loss, and is months away from having negative tangible equity for the first time in modern history. This article explores how we got here and to what extent any of this matters for savers and investors. The Federal Reserve’s soon-to-be negative tangible net equity won’t matter at first, and for most people won’t even be noticed. However, over the long-term, this is actually somewhat relevant. By the end of this decade, I have considerable concerns regarding a fiscal spiral occurring in the United States and other developed countries, meaning that a combination of high deficits, high debts, and high interest rates on those debts, will all work together to create structural inflation and money supply growth.
$The longstanding compromise on transaction sizes, how Taproot and SegWit inadvertantly blew it up, and the nascent NFT protocol emerging in its wake.
Tweets: @resistancemoney @AsherHopp $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. We examine a debate about whether and how a Dapp protocol called Counterparty should use Bitcoin’s blockchain. This was sometimes called “The OP_Return Wars”. We explain the history of OP_Return usage and sidechains in Bitcoin. We conclude by arguing, whether one likes it or not, that it was the culture in the Bitcoin development community in 2014 and the negative view of using Bitcoin transaction data for alternative use cases, which played a major role in pushing developers of these Dapps onto alternative systems like Ethereum, along with other factors.
Tweets: @fiatjaf @resistancemoney @benthecarman @alexbosworth @brian_trollz @astridwilde1 @BitMEXResearch $Part I of the two-part series covers the following topics: (1) The History of Debt in Bitcoin Mining (2) Principles of Debt: Capital stack overview, Creditworthiness, Collateral, Covenants, Cost of capital, Back-end financing (3) Debt Products for Bitcoin Miners: Asset-backed debt, Corporate Debt and (4) Summary Comparison.
Tweets: @BraiinsMining @BraiinsMining @emilyjnicolle $Disconnect from price. Secure your bitcoin for the next 10x. Avoid short-term capital gains. Tread carefully with lending opportunities. Develop your own market analysis. If you want to truly change your fortune, use your bitcoin journey as an opportunity for education, rather than a search for overnight riches. Develop new skills. Keep learning about money, technology, economics, and all the problems Bitcoin was designed to solve. The more you understand and appreciate bitcoin, the closer you come to making a splash of your own.
$The US debt ceiling is in the news again due to Congressional gridlock, along with the possibility of a US sovereign default and the unintuitive idea of the US Treasury Department minting a trillion-dollar platinum coin to bypass the problem. This article breaks down some of the nuances involved in this strange situation, which comes up every few years.
$We Bitcoiners are in a race. Perhaps the most important race we will ever run. We are racing against time to drive the adoption of Bitcoin as fast as we can. We are racing toward a future in which the U.S. Government never coordinates a concerted attack against Bitcoin and Bitcoiners. This is a race to avoid a war. Although Bitcoin is destined to win, if we lose the race to avoid the war, victory will be far more costly. This would be the long way — and the hard way. Instead of a sprint to a bright, orange future, we would be embroiled in a long, hard confrontation with a government desperate to hold on to the power of the monetary printing press. If we lose the race, the long, hard path will be a war in which hundreds of millions of people will suffer the decivilizing and impoverishing effects of hyperinflation. So, for those of us alive, for those of us ready and able now, it is vitally important to run this race as well as possible.
$This article explores technical analysis of mining behavior exhibited by an entity that is plausibly Satoshi Nakamoto. The major conclusions are: - Their goal was to keep the "heartbeat" of the network alive while it was being bootstrapped. - They mined on a single machine with a maximum hashrate of 6 Mhps. - They could have easily earned more than twice as much BTC if they had mined at full power. - They did not want to be in a position of dominating the network hashrate, but may have felt it was necessary during the earliest days when the network was far more fragile due to having fewer than five miners. - They cared a great deal about difficulty adjustments. The adjustment algorithm was one of Satoshi's greatest innovations and they opined upon the topic more than almost any other. - They wanted as many people to be able to mine on home PCs as possible (Satoshi decried the FGPA / GPU mining race)
$Exasperated with a conversation, I asked my friend directly, "What do you think the probability is that Bitcoin hits $1M per coin?" My friend replied without hesitation, "0.001%." I laughed and said I put it at 80%. We had a conversation about my friend's skepticism, and I wondered if there was some information asymmetry, or if it was self-motivated beliefs. My friend group is full of people like this, highly intelligent and successful, yet resistant to Bitcoin. I've found it to be a topic of fascinated frustration. I believe that my friends are resistant to Bitcoin because of their trust in the current system, and see Bitcoin as a radical departure from it. In contrast, I see Bitcoin as a necessary response to the flaws in the current system and a trust-minimized store of value.
Tweets: @BitcoinAudible @sunny_satoshi @sunny_satoshi @epodrulz @stephanlivera @TheGuySwann @petermiyoung @jakeeswoodhouse $Many speculate that Bitcoin’s security will lapse with the end of the mining subsidy. But other factors will continue to incentivize miners. Two prominent and likely factors are: (1) Higher transaction fees due to base layer settlement activity for higher layers which in turn is the result of increased adoption and (2) Bitcoin miners can act as an auxiliary tool for other business practices, an example being the highly-overlooked development in the mainstream involving the Bitcoin miners’ incentive to pursue stranded, wasted or excess energy.
$Bitcoin provides the ultimate form of transferable value because it preserves the encapsulated wealth. This is an opinion editorial by Leon Wankum, one of the first financial economics students to write a thesis about Bitcoin in 2015.
$After years of learning, I now devote a fair amount of my time trying to help others understand bitcoin better. While many people have referred to me as a “bitcoin expert,” I still consider myself a student – I have yet to determine how deep the rabbit hole goes.
$The precursors of money, along with language, enabled early modern humans to solve problems of cooperation that other animals cannot – including problems of reciprocal altruism, kin altruism, and the mitigation of aggression. These precursors shared with non-fiat currencies very specific characteristics – they were not merely symbolic or decorative objects.
$Some thoughts on FTX... Subprime meets Enron meets Madoff - on steroids thanks to altcoins... A recipe for disaster... Framing the conversation: Key challenges for Bitcoin... Potential negative impacts of the FTX collapse... Ultimately, the impact is very positive... Is regulation the answer?
$