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While Secure Elements sound like a fantastic place to store something like a Seed Phrase, they’re also closed source, proprietary chips that cannot be openly verified due to NDAs the manufacturers force everyone to sign. So if you want your Hardware Wallet to be entirely FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), you can’t use them. Many of the top Hardware Wallets out there all use the same STM32 microcontroller, which becomes a problem because now you have the vast majority of Hardware Wallets all using the same product from the same manufacture: STMicroelectronics.

The dollar hegemony that the world is under is something of a historical serendipity for the U.S., but like any skilled operator, the U.S. has taken this advantage and used it to dominate the world. The result has been an unjust world ordered on a Cantillon hierarchy that the U.S. gets to determine. The best human capital has been captured by the U.S. even as dollars get exported out. The depleted countries become zombies, serving three letter organizations as they get exploited for their resources. Bitcoin fixes the dollar hegemony because Bitcoin takes away the exorbitant privilege of the U.S. Unlike previous reserve currency transitions, however, Bitcoin will not be centrally controlled.

Silvergate has served as one of the two main banks for crypto companies, along with New York-based Signature Bank. It has just over $11 billion in assets, compared with over $114 billion at Signature. Bankrupt crypto exchange FTX was a major Silvergate customer. “In light of recent industry and regulatory developments, Silvergate believes that an orderly wind down of Bank operations and a voluntary liquidation of the Bank is the best path forward,” the company said in a statement. All deposits will be fully repaid, according to a liquidation plan shared on Wednesday. The company didn’t say how it plans to resolve claims against its business.

If Bitcoin becomes a ~$200T asset, each of the 21M Bitcoin that will ever exist will grow to be worth $10M apiece. The same value as the median net worth of a Harvard MBA from the Class of ‘86. For millennials and zoomers, the path to achieving financial success on the scale of the legendary Harvard MBA’s of our parents’ generation may be as simple as accumulating one whole Bitcoin. The best of the boomers achieved $10M in wealth through leveraging an unprecedented era of equities and real estate price appreciation; the best of the millennials and zoomers may achieve the same wealth simply by plucking the low-hanging fruit of accumulating Bitcoin before the rest of the world has caught on.

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It is important to understand that the digital asset industry, including the assets, the service providers, the regulators, the legislators, and the practices employed, are not all the same, and interpreting them as such is likely to lead to false conclusions. The outcomes of the Ripple litigation and the Wahi insider trading case can set legal precedents with regard to securities definitions for digital assets and are therefore important items to watch going forward.

Last month, Foundry USA coordinated 34% of the hash rate alone. If we add Antpool, whose share is 18.2% of total hash rate, we have 52% of Bitcoin's global computational power in the hands of just two mining pools. It is no coincidence that Foundry's growth coincides in part with the Chinese mining ban of May 2021. The risk of censorship and the risk of a 51% attack by mining pools will be eliminated once a new communication protocol between miners and pools is extensively used: Stratum V2.

People are very quick to project technology adoption curves onto Bitcoin. But the problem is that Bitcoin is not just a technology. It’s not just a smartphone, or a computer, or a social network, or a new stock or security, or a new payment method, or a search engine, or a messaging platform, or any other new product, app or service. Bitcoin is an entire techno-socio-economic transformation. It’s a reinvention of money from the ground up, incompatible with any prior primitives. So, it’s not only orders of magnitude larger as a shift, but it’s also completely different in a paradigmatic sense. These are massive benefits and massive hurdles. We need to understand that we’re playing the “greatest game” as Jeff Booth would say, with the greatest stakes, for the largest winnings, against the greatest foes — both external and internal. We’re fighting both the establishment and the very cultures we’ve been brought up in.

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Nostr is a revolutionary protocol for social media because it provides a decentralized, monetizable, incentive-aligned, market-driven, and open-source platform for social interaction. Nostr has the potential to create a new era of social media that prioritizes user sovereignty and free market competition.

The state of Texas wants to become the center of the blockchain industry in the US and they have surprisingly taken an strategic approach to realize their vision. It all started with H. B. No. 1576, passed in May 2021. This bill created the Texas Workgroup on Blockchain Matters and tasked the group with the development of a master plan for the Texas legislature for the expansion of the blockchain industry in the state including recommended policies and state investments. We will soon see a few more states emerge as Bitcoin friendly states and once a sufficient number of states have enacted Bitcoin friendly legislation, it will be impossible for the federal government to go in the opposite direction.

Szabo was primarily talking about the challenges of consumer nano-payments for generalized things like internet packets, storage space, bandwidth, energy, text messages and more — thinking about the cost of a phone call or text message every single time. What is missing in the nano-payments-for-utilities equation are the experiences that people care about. Ones to do with status, access, connection, beauty. Experiences that are interactive, and that connect you. The end product, not the plumbing that enables it.

Mark Mobius, a pioneer in emerging markets investing, said China is restricting investment outflows from the country, a move that would be taking place as the world's second-largest economy is trying to shake off pressure from COVID-19 lockdowns. "I'm personally affected because I have an account with HSBC in Shanghai. I can't get my money out. The government is restricting the flow of money out of the country," Mobius said on Thursday on the Fox Business show "Mornings with Maria". "So I would be very, very careful investing in China," the founder of Mobius Capital Partners said. Mobius, who has spent decades traveling the world searching for investment opportunities, said he hasn't been able to get an explanation about why he's running into the restrictions in China.

Representatives of Trezor, a hardware cryptocurrency wallet maker, reported on Twitter about “the active phishing scam.” Attackers contact victims via phone call, SMS and/or email to report that their account has allegedly experienced a security breach or suspicious activity. The Trezor team urged users to ignore these messages because they have nothing to do with the company. The company’s representatives stressed that they would never contact their customers via phone calls or SMS. They also assured that no evidence of a possible database hack was found. After this one subscriber asked how then the scammers could know that he is the owner of the Trezor device. In response, the company admitted that the victims of the attack are chosen at random. Probably, due to mass mailing, the attackers have a chance to reach out to the company’s customers.

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Many of the raw numbers reported by Silvergate over the years reveal an institution that may have peaked in 2021, well before the dramas of 2022 shook the crypto sector. The volume on its Silvergate Exchange Network, for instance, hit a high in the first half of 2021, with $406 billion in transfers, which slid to $230 billion by the second half of 2022. A traditional, regulated depository institution can’t make it without a deposit base, and Silvergate’s coffers were drawn down quickly as major crypto clients dealt with their own collapses, bankruptcies and legal disputes that required an instant vacuuming of their liquid cash last year.

"If the central bank says «The sun rises in the West», it makes sense for you to just believe that. Because you’re going to get paid to repeat that, and you’re going to make a good career out of it. It doesn’t matter how wrong or how destructive it is for the world. As long as the central bank is paying people to behave, the sun rises in the West, and the rational smart thing to do is to believe that the sun rises in the West. Your job as an economist is to justify what central banks are doing." - Saifedean

According to a Bloomberg report, Nationwide and HSBC are the latest U.K. banking giants to impose new limits on their customer’s cryptocurrency purchases via debit cards and end purchases with credit cards. “Nationwide is applying daily limits of £5,000 ($5,965) on debit-card purchases of cryptoassets, the building society informed customers on Wednesday, while its credit cards can no longer be used to buy crypto. HSBC said it barred customers from making crypto purchases via its credit cards from last month,” reads the report. HSBC states that the decision is due to alleged financial risk to customers.

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The only Bitcoin spending conditions in widespread use today are simple single-sigs and simple multisigs, even though Bitcoin Script, the language used to encode spending conditions in Bitcoin transactions, is much more powerful than that. The reason for this is that Bitcoin Script, while appearing to be a simple stack-based language on the surface, is actually very difficult to use in practice. For every new spending condition a developer might want to create, a lot of time has to be spent making sure it is correct and sound under all circumstances, which can be hard to reason about.

TBD, a Bitcoin-focused subsidiary of Jack Dorsey’s Block, has announced a new Lightning Network business called c=. The purpose of the company is to “provide infrastructure using bitcoin from Block’s treasury to make bitcoin’s Lightning Network more usable and reliable for developers, businesses (such as merchants that accept Lightning payments), and those businesses' end consumers,” according to a press release sent to Bitcoin Magazine. The release explains that the Lightning Network is still growing, and that transactions often fail due to liquidity shortfalls. In order to address that, “c= will build infrastructure using the bitcoin it is committing to the network so that businesses and wallets can make their Lightning transactions more reliable and dependable.” c= will be available for connection immediately for those seeking to operate a Lightning node and benefit from TBD and Block’s infrastructure.

The 15-year-old cryptocurrency has filled many roles - from source of speculation to hedge against inflation - but has struggled to find a clear identity. Now there are growing signs it's edging towards its intended purpose: payments. The amount of bitcoin stored on the Lightning Network - a payment protocol layered on top of the blockchain - has jumped by two-thirds over the past year to hit an all-time high of 5,580 coin, according to crypto data firm The Block.