WTFBitcoin Week 38, 2023
Bitcoin is designed to appreciate forever.
TLDR: Bitmain announces new efficient miners, Mexican University adds Mi Primer Bitcoin to its curriculum, Japan’s largest investment bank launches bitcoin fund, El Salvador welcomes Bitcoiners.
If you have been in bitcoin for some months, you probably have stumbled upon the famous metric CAGR, or compound annual growth rate. This is an interesting metric that people often use to disregard the asset’s volatility and focus on the long term perspective of the asset, while often adding a spice of strong hopium in it.
It used to be said that bitcoin was always profitable in every 4 year time frame or more, which proved to be invalidated last December when the price went under the previous high from 2017. (Compare price of Dec 2022 to Dec 2017)
So if indeed you’ve seen this metric, you probably have heard outrageous numbers of a 70% CAGR, or even 100% CAGR.. The former would mean your portfolio doubles every ~2 years, while the latter assumes that your investment is doubling EVERY SINGLE YEAR!
I think it’s somehow deceiving to lure people into bitcoin by promising outlandish appreciation. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe bitcoin is actually artificially designed to appreciate FOREVER.. but there is no guarantees in its appreciation. I a better approach is to be honest and admit we can’t predict bitcoin’s future price and instead focus on its properties as money impossible to debase or hard to be confiscated.
Coming back to the topic though, perhaps a better way to evaluate the CAGR, would be if we focus on halving periods, while ignoring the extremes. It seems fair to avoid maximum and minimum values of given time frames, as volatility can get wild due to extreme social media hype, and now adding to it the incredible amount of gambling happening out there..
Ultimately, what we all want (and I hope I speak for most of us), is for the government to stop stealing our money by depreciating our currencies and purposely disincentivize us from saving. This is why bitcoin fixes this, as the first and only ever asset to mathematically enforce absolute scarcity of only 21 million units, while allowing us to transport it at the speed of light.
You might already know this, im sure you definitely do.. but never hurts to be reminded. Let’s read some news now!
THE NEWS
0. Universidad de Tecnología San Miguel de Allende, a public Mexican university, will officially be implementing Mi Primer Bitcoin courses as mandatory curriculum which every student will receive by the time they graduate.
(Uncle Bam is feeling like a really proud Mexican right now.)
1. Cuba is slowly adopting bitcoin! Watch this documentary by Joe and Paco of a society finding refuge in bitcoin, as their currency fails.
2. Japan's largest investment bank Nomura launches bitcoin fund for investors.
3. El Salvador’s Bitcoin Office is inviting everyone to go and build Bitcoin in their country, while listing the reasons why Bitcoiners should make a move to El Salvador.
4.Bitmain announced a new Antminer S21 series of bitcoin mining machines with significant improvements:
- S21 has 200 TH/s hashrate with an efficiency of 17.5 J/T
- S21 Hydro has 335 TH/s hashrate with an efficiency of 16 J/T
5. Bitcoin mining difficulty has just adjusted up by 5.48%. Hashrate and difficulty are both around or at all-time highs.
6. Marshall Long, OG bitcoiner, met from miners from Guinea, Kenya, Zambia, Ethipia, South Sudan and Nigeria, and is confident that Africa will be the hashrate epicenter in 7 years.
7. Blink Bitcoin Wallet implemented batching with BDK, now when multiple users send an onchain payment, it will be just one transaction with more outputs.
8. Peach Wallet announced their public API is now available for people to build peer2peer applications using bitcoin.
9. Bitcoin community has been helping increase El Salvador’s bitcoin adoption by setting businesses up with Bitcoin wallets and onboarding them to the Blink and BTCmap!
10. UTXOracle offers a way to derive the approximate fiat price of Bitcoin in a trustless way utilizing only your full node and a single script.
11. LN Markets is leading the bitcoin derivative trading space, with a new high in record trading volume exceeding $2 million of a daily average for August.
12. A parody account of Louis CK, famous comedian, made waves in Social Media, by asking the Bitcoin community, what would happen if we converted all currency into Bitcoin, and had questions regarding loans and interest rates..
The answer was simple, in this framework, the government actually needs to raise money rather than printing, or effectively stealing, from all the current savers.
Many of the infinite responses had apparently be enough to change his mind.
But was he a parody? Or perhaps the real Louis CK?
Find some real life orange pilling moments:
Matt Wild presenting bitcoin to chiropractors in New Zealand.
Joe Nakamoto, paying with bitcoin for a bus and taxi in Peru.
Parker Lewis shares another mastermind piece titled “Pay Me In Bitcoin Theory”
FUNDAMENTALS
There is now an updated metric for Long term holders, which currently own close to 15 million bitcoins, or 77% of the circulating supply.
Bitcoin whales seem to be accumulating this week. As one can see, all the appreciation rallies proceed after whales undergo through an accumulation phase.
Have a great weekend niblings.
Stay humble & stack sats.
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