WTFBitcoin Week 30-31, 2023
Bitcoin is now ESG friendly
Welcome to the latest issue of WTFBitcoin!
🚀 The ultimate newsletter that catapults you into the heart of all the exciting developments surrounding Bitcoin.
🎉 At WTFBitcoin, we're all about riding the bullish wave, and we bring you nothing but the most thrilling and optimistic news about Bitcoin. No fear-mongering here, as we leave that to the mainstream media!
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Okay, now on with our story…
TLDR: MicroStrategy & and Tether acquire more Bitcoin, KPMG Bitcoin Bet of $100K before halving, Bitcoin circular economies are going parabolic & more!
Hey there niblings, it’s uncle Bam again, with a little delay again due to the beautiful summer, but I’d argue the most bullish sentiment I’ve had in a while.
This week coincided with financial earnings reports, and end of month Mining companies production report and it seems we have a whole lot of good news.
Personally there is 3 things that have me quite excited:
The changing narrative
The unprecedented stacking
The palpable impact in my surroundings.
I’ll share a little about these three points and then we will go on to some of the good news on these last two weeks. I say some, because I believe they were almost endless!
The changing narrative
We have already mentioned how BlackRock’s filing for a Spot Bitcoin ETF, has generated a better narrative about bitcoin in the mainstream media. I mean it is not “anyone” saying it, but just THE LARGEST INVESTMENT MANAGER in the world.
“I think the most important thing that happened this year was BlackRock's CEO getting orange pilled on Bitcoin” – Galaxy Digital CEO
And if there was still a concern about bitcoin “wasting energy”, we now have KPMG, one of the mythical big four releasing a 12 page report on how Bitcoin perfectly fits the ESG movement, as it
reduces emissions through use of renewable energy, demand response, recycled heat, and methane reduction,
promotes financial inclusion and cross border payment,
and its decentralized governance structure makes the protocol immutable, ensuring data validity, and high confidence in the system.
This is definitely big news for the Bitcoin’s view from the eyes of the pre-coiners.
The unprecedented stacking
We continue seeing not only wallets between 0-10 bitcoin increasing their exposure (see end of post), but also public institutions such as MicroStrategy continuing to double down in their bitcoin accumulation, with a total of 158k bitcoin and $750 million queued to acquire more.
The palpable impact in my surroundings.
This is more of a personal story about two close friends who recently expressed their intention of buying a substantial amount of bitcoin. One of them had a negative experience with altcoins, while the other witnessed the consequences of inflation and his native country not accepting a Nordic currency in the local Forex when he returned home for a visit.
I guess everyone find their way to bitcoin sooner or later.
History shows it is not possible to insulate yourself from the consequences of others holding money that is harder than yours.” - Saifedean Ammous
But well, let’s now go on and enjoy more of these bitcoin bullish news 🗞️🗞️!
THE NEWS
0. MicroStrategy acquired an additional 467 bitcoin for $14.4 million in July. The company now holds 152,800. When discussing their financials, the company announced that the company enters into an agreement to sell up to $750,000,000 in addition shares to purchase more Bitcoin.
That would be equivalent to ~25,700 BTC at today’s prices, or almost an entire’s month of mining supply.
1. Tether announced its Q2/2023 attestation with operational profits over $1 billion (To shed some perspective, BlackRock reported ~$1.6 billion). The company confirmed having bought 1,529 bitcoin worth $44 million in this last quarter, and ended the period with a total of $1.67 billion worth of bitcoin.
2. KPMG, one of the big four accounting firms, released a report called “Bitcoin’s role in the ESG imperative” acknowledging the positive impacts Bitcoin can have on the environment. (Read the report)
In the report, it mentions that “data centers powered by natural gas are partnering with companies like Exxon to convert flared gas into electricity to mine Bitcoin, providing the benefit of both reducing emissions as well as creating an additional revenue stream to monetize.”
3. CH4Capitall Landifill Gas BTC Mining acceleratour kicked off with 8 bitcoin mining companies commited to turn an environmental pollutant (methane) into a source of power of the future,
4. First European Bitcoin ETF ($BCOIN) from Jacobi Asset Management, is now live for institutional investors.
5. HRF Launched 20 BTC Bounty Challenge for Improvements Requested by Activists
6. Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream and referenced in the Bitcoin whitepaper, is betting a million satoshis that Bitcoin prices reaches or exceeds $100,000 before next halving at block 840,000. (March-April 2024). Is there something he know 👀? But being real, its just about $290 at todays prices..
7. Coinbase is looking into how “best add Lightning”, and commented as a response to Jack Dorsey’s tweet asking why are they ignoring bitcoin.
8. IDG Capital, investment fund with 23 billion of assets under management, bought more stock in Bitcoin miner Bitdeer, with a total investment of $930,000
9. Mining Companies report their end of the month operations updates, some of the reporting contain:
Marathon produces 1176 bitcoin in July, sold 750 bitcoin and holds 12,964 btc in their balance sheet. The company leads as the public miner company holding the most bitcoin, and second place after MicroStrategy.
CleanSpark produces 575 Bitcoin in July, sold 43 bitcoin and holds 1,061.
Riot produces 410 Bitcoin in July, sold 400 bitcoin and holds 7,275.
Hut 8 produced____
TeraWulf mined 330 bitcoin in July, it has a low power cost average at $12K per bitcoin, but not holding any in their balance sheet.
10. Liquidity ratio from the Public Bitcoin Mining companies shows Riot & Marathon having the best positions to cover their short term obligations.
11. An AI agent can be enabled to buy things using Bitcoin by using LangChainBitcoin #L402 tools.
“Once you get it wired up, you can give instructions like “go purchase XYZ data”.. and it just goes and does the thing” – Hanna Rosenberg
12. Uber will soon start accepting Bitcoin payments, says CEO Dara Khosrowshahi
13. Bitcoin-only startup TheyaBitcoin from ycombinator is out for building the UBS for Bitcoin and aiming to simplify Bitcoin self-custody.
14. Unchained released a new feature where Miners can now have remote collaboration for uploading, approving, and batch spending transactions from an Unchained vault.
15. Block reported $5.5 billion in Q2 revenue, where $2.4 billion of that belonged to Bitcoin.
16. Cashu now enables sending Bitcoin over Nostr directly to your contact's inbox with the upcoming beta release of the eNuts Cashu wallet. (Watch video)
17. PlebLab has published their engagement of their new NostrDevs course “Build a Social Network from Scratch” which has already reached learners in 52 countries, sparked interest across multiple platforms, and helped expand our total student count to 429 devs, marking a significant step in our mission to foster a broader understanding and use of Bitcoin, Lightning and Nostr.
18. Little girl Olivia learned how to turn her monopoly money into Bitcoin using a salvadoran engineer bitcoin ATM.
19. San Miguel de Allende is becoming a new Mexican Bitcoin hub!. Businesses are using @Bitcoinhubs to remove their barriers of accepting bitcoin
20. Binance officially launches bitcoin and crypto trading platform in Japan.
FUNDAMENTALS
Small addresses hodling 0 - 10 bitcoin now hold 18% (3.5m bitcoin) of the entire mined supply, and rising..
Wallet of Satoshi processed 664,000 Lightning payments in July, more than double their total of 266,000 from last July.
THNDR Games made 253,446 Lightning payments to their users in July, up roughly 3x from 82,218 last July. The gaming company was also responsible for 21.6% of all Wallet of Satoshi Lightning payments last month.
Bitcoin Circular economy has gone parabolic in the last two years, after Bitcoin Beach had lead the way.
Smart money has been buying all of 2023, as the net position shows long term hodlers continuously accumulating. Note this metric usually flips read when bitcoin is in price discovery mode or new highs...
HOPIUM
A little hopium once in a while wouldn’t hurt, and just now we see that Bitcoin has golden crossed on the 3day chart for the third time ever. Now look back at what happened previously.. Not only the narrative is changing, but the trend is doing so too.
A little thought.
Even though there is many good news on bitcoin adoption, the custodians 10-Q filings show that amount of bitcoin held on behalf of their customers:
PayPal $532M
Block Inc: $763M
Robinhood: $4.2B
Coinbase: $60.7B
We should do better at teaching self-custody..
Have a great weekend niblings.
With love, Bam.
Share some love with Uncle Bam for cup of coffee ☕ or a nice ribeye 🥩 <3
But more importantly, buy some sats for yourself.
Lightning Address: bamthemexican@noah.me
So much bullish