WTFBitcoin Week 12, 2023
Nothing can stop the Bitcoin Hodlers.
TLDR: Fed Raises Rates and Bitcoin becomes an alternative, Sending Fiat through Lightning, Greenpeace anti-Bitcoin campaign backfires, Bitcoin held over a year reaches ATH.
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 the infamous Federal Reserve had their closed doors meeting again, and came out with the announcement of raising rates by 25bps (0.25%.. basis points?.. I know right?). This becomes an interesting moment in the market, and for bitcoin too, as people start to price in a pivot. What is a pivot? Well, essentially the Federal Reserve stopping or changing direction in regards to their interest rates increases or decreases.
Well many of you might already know this, but the Federal Reserve, and Central banks of the world have two mandates:
Maintaining low inflation
Full employment
When they want to increase employment, they lower interest rates to encourage investing, and when they want to reduce inflation, they increase interest rates. Did you get the irony? Yep, when they increase interest rates they directly attempt to lower employment rate, or in other words, they are actively trying MAKE YOU LOSE YOUR JOB, AFFORD LESS THINGS, HENCE PRICES STOP FROM INCREASING.
Due to this mandates, this unelected entity, has the control of manipulating the cost of capital and influence our lives. In the name of “the greater good”, they are trying to control the economy, and as we can see, it doesn’t look like a happy ending for Banks at the moment, which are on the brink of collapsing.
All the efforts done to reduce the monetary supply from the system seem to be almost completely wiped out. People have been suffering from their mortgages increasing parabolically for the past few months. The Federal Reserve had to give in and increase two-thirds of the quantitative tightening (QT) in just two weeks.
Ultimately, people are realizing how vulnerable banks are, that it is not a surprise if they try to withdraw their money from the bank, and it ends up being denied, even in the mighty United States of America. It is important to understand that we are currently living with a non-volatile currency but a completely unstable financial system as a standard. While there is an alternative out there of a volatile digital money operating in a stable system.
With all this inflow of capital, which essentially means the government offering "short-term" loans to the banks to prevent them from selling their treasuries and allowing them to service their liabilities, the money will definitely flow to other places where people consider it less risky. For this reason, Bitcoin is starting to become an alternative.
“I don’t think that the current rally is due to mainstream adoption of bitcoin, I think it’s because of crypto adoption of bitcoin. … They’re having a come to Jesus moment; that bitcoin is the one thing that we can all agree on.” – Michael Saylor
Long Bitcoin, Short the Banks.
Now let's hear some good news on Bitcoin. 🗞️🗞️!
THE NEWS
1. Bitcoin continues to be the best asset to transport your wealth and verify its authenticity. It only takes running a software to validate your Bitcoin are real.
It seems that JP Morgan couldn't do that with their Nickel. They thought they were holding 54 metric tons of nickel worth $1.3 million, but it turned out to be worthless rocks. They should have just bought Bitcoin.
2. The power of Dollar Cost Average:
If you have started buying bitcoin the day when it was $69,000 on a daily basis, your average purchase price would be now around ~25,700 and would be sitting on a portfolio close to 10% on return.
3. Strike now allows users to send US Dollar direct to bank accounts in Vietnam. By using the Lightning Network, Strike allows the banks to reach final settlement with low fees!
Strike: Close to Zero fees
Paypal/Western Union: 10% fee
Black market: 5% fee.
4. Blockstream Green shares a preview of how its software will interact with the Lightning Network.
5. Wallet of Satoshi is processing over 28,000 LN payments per day, a big increase from the first couple months of 2023.
6. Marty Bent, host of the TFTC Podcast, shares on a video how he receives sats every second, as people utilize the feature of Value for Value on podcast 2.0
7. Adam Curry, the Podcast Godfather, validates his numbers, as he is receiving over 44 million sats/month with over 345,000 transactions each month over the Lightning network, for his podcast “No Agenda”.
8. People can now buy Bitcoin inside the Costarican Congress.
9. Orange Pill App will donate 535 copies of “The Bitcoin Standard”, one to each member of Congress (USA).
10. Lightning has also grown parabolic on Nostr, with the feature of “Zapping”, or donating sats to a specific post. Benthecarman ran the numbers, and more than 91% of all payments go through a custodial wallet.
We should definitely try our best and shift towards non-custodial wallets like Phoenix, Breeze, Blixt, and Muun Wallet. (I’m sure there are more) Or even use our own nodes!
11. Greenpeace had hired Von Wong to do an art installation on regards bitcoin’s energy spenditure, the Skull of Satoshi. The art piece immediately got trendy and Bitcoiners gathered around in a back and forth discussion via Twitter, clearing up some miss-conceptions. The author allowed himself to engage in conversation and do his research and learn about Bitcoin.
It seems that Greenpeace ended up spawning a new bitcoin advocate.
12. Paying for Burgers in a restaurant in Prague, Czech Republic.
13. Lady in a market in Costa Rica accepting stablesats with Beach Wallet, vegetables shop.
FUNDAMENTALS
The network growth is not stopping. We have seen how payments on lightning continue to increase in a parabolic way, and as the price rises, one would think people could be taking some profit.. right?
CoinBeast media shares a chart on how the bitcoin 10 years older and more continue to increase, while Bitcoin on exchanges is down from 3.1M to 2.2M, as people shift to self custody.
The amount of bitcoin not moved in more than a year, reaches a new high TODAY! As 67.95% of the total supply remains peacefully storing individual’s wealth.
And on this regard, besides hashrate also reaching new highs, we are about to have the biggest month of bitcoin traded on spot market, and last week being the biggest spot volume week in BTC’s history.
All in all, Bitcoin seems to be continuing to grow in a slow and steady, healthy way. It's easy to get carried away by the never-ending stream of positive news from around the world, but remember that it's still early in the Bitcoin monetisation phase. As more people join the network, it will remain volatile. However, volatility does not necessarily imply risk. In fact, with volatility comes the potential for great appreciation. So have a great weekend niblings. Stay humble & stack sats.
Want to share some 💕 with Uncle Bam?
Help with some sats a cup of coffee ☕ or a nice ribeye 🥩 🔥.
Or even better, just share this issue with your friends, together we thrive 🫂.
Lightning Address: rustybeam47@walletofsatoshi.com
Lightning URL: LNURL1DP68GURN8GHJ7AMPD3KX2AR0VEEKZAR0WD5XJTNRDAKJ7TNHV4KXCTTTDEHHWM30D3H82UNVWQHHYATNW3UKYETPD56RWT9G2XF
BAM. I have a MUNN wallet. Every time I try to send you sats, and scan the Lightning QR code, I get:
"this is a LNURL code. Do you want to receive bitcoin ?