WTFBitcoin Week 40, 2023
The realization that Bitcoin is absolutely finite.
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.
It’s been some months since the debt ceiling was raised for the umpteenth.. As many have predicted, there is no real ceiling. With the hopes of taming inflation, the Federal Reserve has been rising rates in the most rapid pace our generations have experienced before.
With $33.5T in total USD debt, this week the US had increased the debt by $275 billion in JUST ONE DAY.
As people struggle to buy groceries, and max out their credit cards with incomprehensible interest rates, there are many who aren’t even able to get loans any more. In times of “economic contraction”, it seems theres a player who is immune to the rules, and can get to continue borrowing out of the populations future, with no restrictions.
The time will come, if it isn’t here yet, where countries, institutions and wealthy families will realize that there is no real “risk free” Treasury bonds, and that they no longer meet the standard for high-quality liquid assets.
With less demand from other parties to buy US debt, there will end up being just one buyer of future US treasuries to fund the countries deficit, the FED.
As people realize how easily treasuries can become diluted, it will likely generate an incentive for people to look for alternative investment vehicles which can’t be debased.
And as the narrative continues to change and improve, it is not crazy to think that some of that massive wealth transfer can splash into hard assets, like bitcoin.
And with the level of conviction it already exist by current holders, a potential massive appreciation is not out of the cards.
But well, let’s now go on and enjoy more of these bitcoin bullish news 🗞️🗞️!
THE NEWS
1. Unchained, in partnership with Coincover and Kingdom Trust, introduced the enterprise collaborative custody network: a completely new form of custody for securing private wealth and enterprise bitcoin holdings.
“As the recent hacks of Prime Trust and Fortress Trust have demonstrated, qualified custodianship only means something in bitcoin if it can be supported by a custody model that respects the bitcoin protocol.” – Unchained
2. Volcano Energy and Luxor unveil Lava Pool, El Salvador's inaugural Bitcoin mining pool.
3. Swan Bitcoin and Blockstream announced a partnership by integrating Jade’s multisignature and hardware-based authentication into Swan Vault, elevating the standards of collaborative custody.
4. Jack Dorsey's payment company Block appears closer to going public with its first Bitcoin hardware wallet product, called BitKey, finally sharing the product ready to be shipped.
5. Onramp introduced the Onramp Terminal, a comprehensive bitcoin-only research portal which offers real-time market information, on-chain data, key indicators, adoption metrics, news, research, and collaborative tooling.
6. With Ditobanx, business owners can now accept Visa & MasterCard payments and settle in Bitcoin without a bank account. Individuals can withdraw cash from traditional ATMs using their bitcoin wallet.
7. Lightning Labs release LND 0.17: Tapping into Taproot. The release includes Simple Taproot Channels, which not only bring about the multi-year long privacy improvement dream of co-op channel closes being indistinguishable on-chain from single-sig spends, they also lay the foundation for so much future LN development:
Taproot Asset channels for stablecoins on LN
Point Time Locked Contracts (PTLCs) for even greater privacy, plus enhanced programmability
Increased multi-sig capabilities for more flexibility in key management and ownership
8. Marathon Digital Holdings released their production update for September:
The company Increased Monthly Average Operational Hash Rate 20%, produced 1,242 BTC in September 2023, and holds a record of 13,726 bitcoin on their balance sheet.
9. CleanSpark released their September numbers with 642 bitcoin mined, and 2,240 bitcoin in balancesheet.
10. Coinbase has been approved for a payment institution license (PMI) from the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
Japanese automobile giant Honda now accepts Bitcoin and Ethereum as payment methods, through third-party FCF Pay.
11. Video of people in Ghana buying a chicken from a poultry farmer and paying with Bitcoin.
As time goes by, mainstream media continue to realize that “Fiat currency” is actually just a blatant scam.
12. The EU issued a contract over €800k to develop a framework to mitigate the environmental impact of crypto mining. Seriously? Haven’t they seen this video back from April? Or KPMG’s latest report? Seems like a money grab.. Just remember the narrative is changing.
FUNDAMENTALS
Alexander Leishman, cofounder of River, announced an upcoming Lightning Network report by sharing a record of 3 million Lightning transactions routed with River’s nodes, and a new high in September with close to 400K transactions.
To put it into perspective and shed some bullish bliss on the Lightning Network, the bitcoin timechain, or base layer, handles approximately 13M tx/month. Just the data shared by one node is already reporting participation in the equivalence of 3% of timechain transactions.
On another new high, LN Markets set a new record too with trading golume of $54.4 million USD in September.
We often mention how the bitcoin holders are relentless and aren’t moving their coins, but painting a perspective by comparing it to the past could make it clearer.
If every action has a reaction, these Hodl Waves might have big consequences in the following two years, making this cycle potentially parabolic, closer to 2017’s rally.
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