WTFBitcoin Week 16, 2023
Bitcoin is the solution to inflation.
TLDR: MicroStrategy email addresses to lightning addresses, enormous $6 million coinjoin, Lightning meets Mining, Buhtan accumulating Bitcoin & more…
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.
While I was going through all the accumulated content that I’ve found for you over the week, I couldn’t stop thinking how Bitcoin is just inevitable in my head, but at the same time many people around just don’t seem to get it.
I saw a tweet that even AI has an accurate understanding of the world’s economics when it comes to “Fiat inflation”.
"Fiat inflation is when the value of a currency decreases due to an increase in its supply. This decrease in purchasing power leads to an increase in prices for goods and services, causing inflation" –ChatGPT
But somehow friends and family still can’t get the connection between products becoming more expensive, and their decreasing purchasing power of their currency. With an abrupt influx of money throughout the pandemic, but a slower increase of prices over the last 3 years, people still find themselves blaming Supply Chains, Putin, and making excuses in their heads instead of understanding the actual problem: inflation. It is only when someone fully understands the problem when they start to think about finding a solution: Bitcoin.
It is as if it just have to get way worse before people start to pay attention, like the frog being slowly cooked until it is too late, or like Bitcoin reaching new highs in places like Lebanon, Argentina, Turkey and Pakistan.
The week perception often correlates with the price, but not to worry there are always some good news on bitcoin, so lets find out 🗞️🗞️!
THE NEWS
1. MicroStrategy has converted all email addresses into Lightning addresses. After this was shared, Saylor received multiple random transactions of 21 sats.
2. Someone figured out how to do multiple inscriptions in a single transaction.
3. A large coinjoin made 209.70283337 BTC, over $6 million fungible. With 351 inputs & 336 outputs from multiple users. Or at least we hope there was multiple users, indeed..
4. On average, a 1% increase in Bitcoin allocation will result in a $129,752 increase in the final IRA balance, according to Nakamoto Portfolio Theory from Swan’s Research.
“Bitcoin's low correlation to traditional assets can lead to better risk-adjusted returns.” - Alpha Zeta
5. The newly launched Lightning Spark, released a Lightning-enabled Chrome wallet extension and open-sourced it too. Streaming value (Sats) to content creators is becoming increasingly easier.
6. BlockwareTeam integrated Lightning into their Bitcoin ASICs marketplace, with the help of Voltage. An interesting use case, which might even pave the way for things such as Lightning payouts for miners contributing work to the Blockware Pool.
7. The small country of Bhutan has quietly been dumping millions of dollars into bitcoin. Apparently their sovereign investment arm was a customer of BlockFi and Celsius. I hope they hold their keys this time..
8. Bitrefill shared their distribution of payments across different coins for their operations world wide, where bitcoin represents close to 30%, and lightning an additional 10%, or a total of 40%.
On the other hand, if we see the distribution in el Salvador:
Lightning ~ 73%
Bitcoin ~ 18%
Binance ~ 7%
Other ~ 2%
9. Bitcoiners will gather this week for the year’s inaugural Bitcoin Policy Summit in Washington, DC to educate lawmakers about the benefits of Bitcoin and to discuss why the Lightning Network is the open, inclusive, equitable payment innovation the world needs.
10. Unchained Capital rebrands to Unchained, and announces a $60 million series B fundraising round led by Valor Equity Partners and other investors. The funding will be used to expand Unchained’s client base and improve its suite of financial services.
11. Bitstack, a bitcoin savings app in France, has announced a $2.1 million (€2 million) funding round. The funding comes from a range of investors, including Founders Future, Y Combinator and Kima Ventures, among others. The startup will use the funding to expand its product offerings, make strategic hires and finance customer acquisition efforts.
12. MyEListing, a commercial real estate marketplace, is set to launch the United States' first bitcoin-enabled real estate marketplace through a Coinbase integration, allowing buyers to purchase U.S. real estate properties with bitcoin or cash.
13. El Salvador’s Bonds rally, luring Wall Street back as their notes due to 2025 climb highest since September 2021. It seems all efforts of the IMF to undermine the country’s pro-bitcoin policies by spreading fear and concern ended up not yielding as they expected.
“Investors are more confident about the outlook for El Salvador,” – Katrina Butt, a senior economist at AllianceBernstein LP. Werner
14. El Salvador will start university education program to produce world class Bitcoin and Lightning developers this Monday.
15. Texas A&M college student receives an "A" on a paper describing Bitcoin as a solution to the world's energy crisis. ( Read the paper :) )
16. 1of21mil released a nice Lightning faucet/game last week. A simple scratch game, where you login using LNURL and get 3 cards a day. If scratching your card reveals 4 check marks in a row, you win 21 sats.
17. Stacker News continue to grow with more than 350 users stacking over 750,000 sats on the platform this week.
18. Mempool clearead and we see cheap transactions once again.
. Some of the celebrities have gone public admitting they own some bitcoin include:
Joe Rogan (podcast)
Tim Cook (live interview)
Keanu Reeves (wired)
FUNDAMENTALS
Over the past few weeks, Nostr has demonstrated consistent expansion, marked by a thriving assimilation of open source development with bitcoin.
Some of the latest developments or releases we’ve find out this week are:
. Strom: Lightning/Nostr Enabled OCPP Bridge, an open source application that allows charge point owners to accept lightning payments for charging sessions.
. Wavman, an open-source music player built for Nostr, brought to you by the good folks at Wavlake.
. n3xB, a layer 2 protocol to be ran on top of the Nostr protocol, designed to standardize and facilitate asynchronous exchanges of any kind by utilizing the concept of a fidelity bond, essentially a naive nostr noKYC exchange for bitcoin.
Taking a look on an update on the public Bitcoin Miners balance sheet year to date, it is palpable that miners haven’t accumulated nor significantly dispose of their reserves, but perhaps taken advantage of the surge in price to sell the new production and pay their operations and debts.
Regardless, it appears that we are nearing the conclusion of the fourth epoch with the halving scheduled to take place in only a year. It is noteworthy that during this epoch, the percentage of the circulating supply held on exchanges has declined.
This could be a positive sign that individuals are recognizing the significance of securely storing their bitcoin in their own wallets, without the involvement of any third party. This feature of bitcoin, which provides protection against confiscation, is one of its most valuable properties - the ability for self-custody.
Have a great weekend niblings.
Stay humble & stack sats.
Share some love with Uncle Bam for cup of coffee ☕ or a nice ribeye 🥩 <3
Lightning Address: rustybeam47@walletofsatoshi.com
Lightning URL: LNURL1DP68GURN8GHJ7AMPD3KX2AR0VEEKZAR0WD5XJTNRDAKJ7TNHV4KXCTTTDEHHWM30D3H82UNVWQHHYATNW3UKYETPD56RWT9G2XF
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