2022W14 - WTF happened in Bitcoin this week?
Bitcoin is becoming legal tender, everywhere.
TLDR: Bitcoin becomes legal tender without officially being legal tender, Bitcoin becomes legal tender in Prospera and Madeira. Mexico to introduce a bitcoin bill.
Hey there niblings, it’s uncle Bam again, with a summary of the most insightful events in the Bitcoin space. Back at it again digesting all the important news for you.
This week was a blast, multiple bitcoin conferences going on in distinct parts of the worlds and the awaited Bitcoin 2022 finally happening and getting more than 25,000 bitcoiners together in a single location sharing announcements, the state of developments of bitcoin and the lightning network, thoughts, visions and ideas.
One of the most awaited talks was Jack Maller’s talk named “The King’s Gambit”, where he shared how Strike has partnered up with Shopify and NCR and will open up doors for retailers to accept bitcoin without the need of holding it.
From now in the U.S. people will be able to use their bitcoin to pay in any of these stores, just as also being able to checkout with bitcoin on Shopify.
In essence this is how it looks to make bitcoin legal tender, without officially making bitcoin legal tender.
Some people don’t even like this as they say.. “Who would want to spend their bitcoin?”
Well I think it is simple, so lets list the benefits:
Stores will have the possibility to reduce about 3% in fees by accepting payment through strike, which makes it an incentive of adoption.
Some people won’t even know they are using bitcoin under the hood, so bitcoin is being purchased and sold at the beginning and end of the transaction.
People who believe it is a savings technology but still doubtful, will now feel even more comfortable to increase their positions as they know adoption is going in right direction.
While using an own node through tor, the user increases its privacy by not needing to swipe a Visa/Mastarcard and having all of these information stored by the banks.
And what about taxable events and regulations? There is already laws being proposed to at least have a limit of non taxable events by using bitcoin, but the door is still open for
NonKYC bitcoin.
Underbanked population.
Foreigners visiting the country.
Bitcoin is moving on the right direction, and adoption is moving with it.
THE NEWS!
1. MicroStrategy has purchased 4,167 bitcoin for $190 million.
The company now owns 129,218 bitcoin purchased at an average price of $30,700.
2. Terra has bought 9170 bitcoins since last week’s report, amassing a total of 39,897.98 bitcoins.
3. Block and Blockstream team up to mine bitcoin off solar power plant in Texas, powered by Tesla’s Solar technology.
4. Samson Mow, the former chief strategy officer of Blockstream brought legislators from around the world on stage at Bitcoin 2022 to highlight regulatory progress being made to encourage nation state Bitcoin adoption.
Joel Bomgar, the president of Próspera, an “economic development hub” located in Honduras, described favorable tax regulations being established there.
Miguel Filipe Machado de Albuquerque, the president of Portugal’s Madeira region announced that bitcoin investors will pay no personal income taxes there.
Indira Kempis, a senator in Mexico, announced that she plans to propose regulation there to recognize bitcoin as legal tender.
5. Oklahoma is the latest state to introduce bill to encourage the expansion of Bitcoin mining
6. Texas bank Laredo to offer salary payments in bitcoin as part of staff savings plans
7. OTR gas chain with over 100 stations across Australia to accept bitcoin payments.
8. Cash App announces new Lightning integration, 'Pay Me With Bitcoin' feature
9. Robinhood enables On-Chain And Lightning withdrawals.
10. Brink announces the latest open source developer grantees to:
- 0xB10C: To support his current and upcoming Bitcoin network monitoring efforts, his work on Bitcoin Core development and review, his educational efforts maintaining http://bitcoin-dev.blog and his work on reorgs on Signet.
- Vicenzo Plazzo to supports his work adding new features to Core Lightning and reviewing others' pull requests, as well as his ongoing contributions to the Lightning specification.
- Niklas Gögge to support his work on Bitcoin Core, including an implementation of Utreexo. Utreexo aims to reduce the hardware requirements of running a Bitcoin full node by introducing a hash based accumulator for the UTXO set.
- Bruno Garcia to support his review and testing Bitcoin Core PRs, extending and improving test coverage, and P2P/wallet work.
FUNDAMENTALS
The amount of Bitcoin that has not moved for 12 months or more has now equalled its all-time high of 64%
The number of addresses with at least 1 bitcoin has made an all-time-high at 833,242 addresses. This metric has been rapidly increasing since the beginning of February 2022.
And Lightning keeps on growing, innovation and adoption accelerating while passing a capacity of 3,700 bitcoin.
As a summary note..
While innovation is at its peak, adoption growing by the day and even majors and politicians from multiple countries start to get involved, somehow we still find some outcast attempting to become relevant in a weird kind of way.
Rep. Norma Torres couldn’t focus on anything more important inside her own country than introducing the “Accountability for Cryptocurrency in El Salvador Act” thinking bitcoin is a careless gamble destabilizing the country, and she believes there should be a plan in place to protect the “U.S. financial systems from the risk of El Salvador’s decision”.
Last time I checked, El Salvador was a small country and would have been considered little to no impact to the U.S. But hey, this is when we realize that bitcoin is on to something, something big.
Have a great weekend niblings.
Stay humble & stack sats.
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If you are in Europe, I made a pretty simple guide with 3 steps, which avoids you having to set up an account on an exchange, give them all of your personal information, plus custody of your funds.
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