WTFBitcoin Week 51, 2022
Bitcoin enables financial inclusion
TLDR: Remittance getting better through Bitcoin, Human Rights Foundation awards grants, Nigeria about to become friendlier to bitcoin.
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.
Merry Christmas to everyone! The year is about to end, and while being unsure if I’ll be taking a small break or not, I’ll consider this issue as if it was the closing one for the year. While the price mainly dropped throughout the year, many of you kept coming back every week to get a glimpse some positive notes of progress in development and acts of hope that bitcoin has brought to communities all over the world, which I happen to stumble upon.
What keeps me motivated in the space, is the potential bitcoin has for interoperability with the current financial system, which allows for financial inclusion without the need of having a bank. It is true that many of us expect bitcoin to take over the world of payments, but new technologies don’t get adopted from night to the morning, specially if we are talking about a new currency, or changing the way we interact with value.
This year though, many companies which interoperate with the financial system started to come out to life. And partnerships between them allows fiat currency to move within countries utilizing Bitcoin Lightning as its rails.
Sending money between countries, will become cheap as the number of intermediaries gets reduced if money can find instant settlement across borders. This is the power of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. And as soon as more people realize it, the world of remittance will begin to flock towards bitcoin just due to its utility.
As the network grows bigger, it gets stronger.
THE NEWS!
1. After a pseudo-ban on bitcoin since February 2021, Nigeria is finally looking to regulate bitcoin usage.
“According to PCNS Research, Over 22 million Nigerians hold Bitcoin and crypto.”
2. CoinCorner, a U.K. based bitcoin exchange, partners with Pouch, a Lightning service provider based in the Philippines, to bring instant remittance payments to the country using bitcoin’s Lightning Network
3. NYDIG will take ownership of 2.8 EH/s of mining machines, while eliminating $57-68 million of Greenidge's outstanding $74.4 million loan.
4. Paxful, a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency trading platform, has announced that it will delist Ethereum, an “integrity” move according to Ray Youssef, CEO.
5. Layer 2 Labs raises $3 million at launch. The company has the goal of scaling and building out drivechains for the Bitcoin Network.
6. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has now allowed banks to now hold 2% of their reserves in cryptocurrencies as per its recently released Prudential Treatment of Crypto Asset exposure report for December 2022. In June, the BIS had allowed only a few banks to hold not more than 1% of their reserves in cryptos.
7. Edward Snowden postulates himself to take Twitter’s CEO position saying he’d accept payment in bitcoin.
8. René Aaron release a payment module that allows to equip existing vending machines with lightning payments. It is currently in the process of being rolled out to a small group of merchants in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
“There are ~5 million vending machines in the US alone, estimated to earn more than 10 billion USD a year. Fees for payment processors are ranging from ~1.5% to 4%.” - René
9. A new innovative wallet, Liana, was released. With a new kind of wallet built around a Miniscript which allows to have a recovery path. This experimental feature could help for inheritance, where funds flow to a specific path after not being moved for a specific amount of time.
10. Human Rights Foundation awards $325,000 in new grants towards bitcoin projects focusing on areas like privacy, Core development community building and education.
50,000 to Gleb Naumenko for his work on the release of Coinpool, a concept for scaling Bitcoin and for conducting research potential Bitcoin scaling solutions.
$50,000 to Furzy for his work on stability, security and performance features.
$25,000 to Bitcoin4India for support for community initiatives and local meetups, education, translation projects and support of local artisans.
$25,000 to Bitcoin Mountain for their building of circular economies, meetups, conferences and training in Cameroon.
$25,000 to the We Are All Satoshi project, “an Africa-based organization that aims to identify teenage women and men from all religious backgrounds interested in tech and help steer them to contributing to Bitcoin.
$25,000 to Tor relay operator associations to support increased network reliability and performance, as recommended by the Tor Project.
$25,000 to Bitcoin Magazine Ukraine to support regular Bitcoin meetups in Kyiv, which continue even in the midst of the war.
$25,000 to Dusty for his work on Lightning Splicing, which allows nodes to resize Lightning channels, allowing Bitcoin wallets to have “one balance” where the wallet could pay to both legacy on-chain destinations as well as make payments on Lightning.
$25,000 to Raseef 22, the leading independent pan-Arab media covering the 22 Arab countries, with a focus on freedoms, democracy and human rights, including the social impacts of bitcoin.
$25,000 to New Belarus, a digital democracy platform that aims to provide the framework for activating direct and representative democracy and preparing a new generation of politicians and democracy-savvy citizens, including programming that will focus on building a bitcoin-based financial infrastructure.
$15,000 in travel grants to support students, activists, and developers at the Africa Bitcoin Conference.
And $10,000 to support bitcoin ++, a Mexico City based Bitcoin developer conference that has a specific privacy focus, with lectures and workshops.
FUNDAMENTALS
We have talked last week about the amount of bitcoin flooding towards small players and the unprecedented amount of new “wholecoiners” in the network. While these strong displays of conviction happen, we also have addresses classified as “long term holders” increasing its presence. In other words, more than 70% of the total amount of existing bitcoin, is not moving, as there is an expectation of a brighter future for the network.
Have a great weekend and enjoy your holidays niblings!
Stay humble & stack sats.
Want to learn how to buy bitcoin?
If you are in Europe, I made a pretty simple guide with 3 steps, which avoids you having to set up an account on an exchange, give them all of your personal information, plus custody of your funds.
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