Title mostly says it all. I have a hardware wallet but the battery is toast and it only works when plugged in, and the buttons are a little sketchy at times, sometimes they work sometimes they don't.

gensler is one of us! confirmed btc maxi

The bitcoin community’s favorite social networking protocol, Nostr, now has millions of users worldwide and is quickly becoming an integral part of the digital economy. Primal, an emerging player in the Nostr industry, has secured $1 million in funding from Ten31, Hivemind Ventures, and others, making it the first venture capital-backed startup solely dedicated to developing bitcoin-infused Nostr applications.

Google Cloud is the latest company to show interest in Bitcoin Lightning. The $225-billion cloud and data service recently partnered with Voltage, an infrastructure provider specializing in the Bitcoin Lightning Network.

The partnership will allow one of the world’s largest cloud computing providers to roll out Bitcoin-based services worldwide while assisting the expansion of Voltage’s operations.

The new third-party payment service claims to be independent of the Damus iPhone app that Apple has tried to restrict, and lets users tip one another on any app that runs on the Nostr protocol.

TL; DR: Splicing changes the game. Phoenix now manages a single dynamic channel, no more 1% fee on inbound liquidity, better predictability and control, trustless swaps.

Bitcoin, the groundbreaking peer-to-peer electronic cash system, is often referred as a "cryptocurrency." Although Bitcoin falls under the category of cryptocurrency, some argue it should be distinguished from the broader crypto concept. Is it true?

Bitcoin developer Entero Positivo launched “BIP39Colors” last month, an open-source tool that can convert one’s BIP39 mnemonic phrase into a series of colors, and vice versa.

“With this method, you can convert your 12-word phrase to 8 colors (or your 24-word phrase to 16 colors),” explained Positivo to Decrypt via DM. “Then you can convert your colors back to your original seed.”

By Tomer Strolight June 22, 2023

If you were to ask the question “What is man?” you might get a joking reply like “mostly water.” Such an answer wouldn’t be incorrect, but it would hardly be useful. It wouldn’t even tell you the difference between a man and a watermelon, or a cup of tea, both of which are also mostly water.

To be useful, you would need to go deeper and ask the question “What is the essence of man?” That’s a discussion that has been ongoing for thousands of years. I’ve personally thought about and discussed this topic a great deal, in large part because I want to understand what it is I am.

I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking about the question of “What is the essence of Bitcoin?”. I’ve been asking this because I am fascinated by Bitcoin. However, I also think Bitcoin is a reflection of some very particular things about man and his essence, so asking questions about Bitcoin actually provides answers about the essence of man and mankind as well.

Luxor Technologies, a Bitcoin mining software and services company, has announced the expansion of its Bitcoin mining derivatives contracts. According to a press release sent to Bitcoin Magazine, the new offering from Luxor's Derivatives Desk includes six-month duration contracts and daily settlement rates, providing market participants with extended contract periods and swift access to liquidity. The press release stated that the addition of these features enhances hedging efficiency and reduces the cost of capital in the Bitcoin mining derivatives space.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/636503

> This video does a pretty good job at describing the global consequences of the fiat money system. It gives a short historical overview and shows modern consequences. It is kind of long, but the material is high quality. > > Bitcoin is not just about number go up, it is about freedom and equal opportunity, worldwide, for everybody, without permission.

Bitcoin mining may soon be reducing more emissions than its energy sources produce according to Daniel Batten, cofounder of CH4Capital. Batten is a partner in a fund raising $400 million to fund projects mitigating vented methane from landfills by using the gas to mine bitcoin.

“Once fully deployed, we will have enough capital to take the entire Bitcoin Network carbon negative,” Batten told me in our interview, a claim that flies in the face of recent high profile bitcoin critics.

Archive link due to paywall

Crypto enthusiasts are hopeful that a once-in-four-years event which rewrites the underlying code of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency will extend the current market rally. But the milestone also risks sounding the death knell for certain Bitcoin miners.

[…]

“Nearly half of the miners will suffer given they have less efficient mining operations with higher costs,” predicts Jaran Mellerud, crypto-mining analyst at Hashrate Index.

He points to the break-even electricity price of the most common mining machine, which is expected to drop to six cents per kilowatt-hour from 12 cents/kWh after the halving. Around 40% of miners still have higher operating costs per kWh than that, Mellerud said. Miners with operating costs above 8 cents per kilowatt-hour will struggle to stay afloat, as will smaller miners that don’t run their own mining rigs but outsource them instead, he said.

This explains in laymen terms how Bitcoin wallets work. This is from the 101 Blackboard Series, is an oldy but goody.

By Matt Odell.

For many years there has been a common misconception that bitcoin is private by default. The reality is that many bitcoin users are extremely easy to track. Every transaction is recorded forever in the block chain; publicly visible to all participants. If personal information is linked to a specific transaction - name, email, IP address, mailing address, phone number, twitter account, etc. - that information can then be used to track past and future transactions using publicly available data. As bitcoin has matured, so have the tools used by surveillance companies. Bitcoiners should assume these companies have large datasets which combine information from many disparate sources including public on-chain metadata and private off-chain information used to improve their transaction tracking capabilities across the network as a whole.

OpenSats is pleased to announce a new long-term support (LTS) program for Bitcoin Core developers and similar Load-Bearing Internet People. This grant program is designed to provide financial support for developers who are working on critical infrastructure for the bitcoin network.

[…]

The first recipient of an OpenSats LTS Grant is Marco Falke, a long-term maintainer and contributor of Bitcoin Core with thousands of contributions over many years. Marco will continue to focus on testing and quality assurance, as well as maintenance and review, helping to make sure that the Bitcoin Core software is as solid as it can be.

I suspect I am probably preaching to the choir here, but I know in the Reddit Bitcoin sub there are a surprising amount of people in the community that still express concerns in the comments because Bitcoin lacks inflation. This is, of course, a feature, not a bug.

The most pernicious claim is that of the "Deflationary Spiral" which is the most cited reason however, it also makes no sense. This is the theory that as the value of money increases, it incentivizes hoarding of cash and harms the economy.

(1) The claim is that as prices decrease, demand will decrease. This is in direct contradiction to the base economic model, no one makes this claim outside of the deflationary spiral argument. They reference human psychology, not math or controlled experiments, yet they have no psychological studies to back this claim.

(2) The same claim can be made in reverse for inflation, with similarly damaging effects in the other direction. Nobody makes this claim because chronic low-level inflation does not trigger a spiral. Inflation artificially promotes spending that would not have otherwise occurred, increasing malinvestment and conspicuous consumption. The central bank actually guarantees debasement of the currency (unlike deflation, where there is no explicit guarantee) which should trigger people to try to get rid of the currency, which should trigger more inflation, which would trigger more people to dump the currency. This doesn't happen because people are not hyper-rational and it is too burdensome for the average person to try to figure out how to protect themselves against such low levels of inflation. If you think about it there are actually more factors that incentivize inflationary spirals than deflationary spirals.

(3) Well-off individuals store a majority of their wealth in appreciating assets, this has the same net effect as storing wealth in a deflationary currency but no one extends the claim to these stores of wealth.

(4) Technology is inherently deflationary, and probably the only sector that has regularly sustained predictable deflation. It is also the most productive element of the economy.

(5) The time value of money states that money with a fixed value is worth more today than it is worth in a year from now purely on the fact that you can spend or invest it now and with no delayed gratification. Compensating those that abstain from spending money is actually the more rational position. There is no natural law that says money must decay over time.

The truth is a currency that goes from stable to highly variable, inflationary or deflationary, is damaging because most economies are built on the assumption of price stability. This includes fixed wages of people, locked-in interest rates, long-term contracts, and psychological expectations, none of these things are actually fixed or mandatory in an economy. One could just as easily tie these arrangements to the value of a basket of goods rather than fiat currency. A low level of deflation, the final stage of Bitcoin, also does not challenge this paradigm.

Inflation also eats away at wages and savings and for that reason enriches the current power structure. Of course, to these people, slowly siphoning off other people's wealth is an integral part of their job and their future wealth accumulation, so anything that threatens that game "threatens the economy". Or rather, threatens "their" economy.

(Copied from the Youtube description) In this video, I discuss Nigel Farage having his bank accounts involuntarily closed down in the context of a wider global government crackdown on free speech, as well as the right for anyone to use money and the banking system, regardless of political views.

Cutting off banking access was once a punishment reserved mostly for nation-state actors (Venezuela, Russia, Iran, etc). Over the past few years, we’ve seen it increasingly used, even in developed countries with rules of law, by governments to target individuals whose political opinions go against the establishment.

“Bitcoin has no use cases except for speculation and gambling” People who say things like this must be blissfully unaware that money and banks have been and will continue to be weaponized against people to stifle free speech, to control the political opposition, and ultimately to control whole populations (like the CCP does to China).

Huobi accidentally exposed a set of credentials that enabled access to the crypto exchange’s cloud storage, putting user data at risk for prolonged period of time.

There's a significant divide in the Bitcoin community at present, revolving around the adoption narrative. How does Bitcoin achieve widespread adoption? What conditions must be met for it to be globally recognized as a reserve currency? Two key narratives dominate the discourse.

[Archive link due to soft paywall]

BlackRock Inc. has refiled paperwork with US regulators through Nasdaq to add new details to its proposal for a exchange-traded fund that invests directly in Bitcoin.

The exchange on Monday submitted new documents with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to indicate that Coinbase Global Inc. will provide market surveillance in support of the proposed ETF from the world’s largest asset manager. The move came after the regulatory agency had said that initial filings by issuers were deemed to be insufficient and lacked necessary information.

Today, I’m pleased to announce we’ve entered into an agreement to be acquired by Loadpipe. We chose Loadpipe because they are e-commerce veterans focused on mainstream adoption. As an industry, we’re still on Day One in terms of developing real world crypto use cases for the masses, and we feel confident in the e-commerce veteran team at Loadpipe to continue stewarding our evolved vision to make crypto useful.

By Andrew Lee, Co-founder of Purse

Bitcoin can alleviate many of the most common issues world travelers face, giving them more time to enjoy their journeys.

This is an opinion editorial by HodlingCarla, an avid traveler and Bitcoin advocate.

A new event in London is dedicated to bitcoin adoption by inviting bitcoin activists to gather for an evening of e-sport activities, sim race challenge, discussions and lectures and open networking.

Bitcoin enthusiasts and motorsport fans are in for an electrifying evening of high-speed esports racing and immersive entertainment at the Sam Brooks Brewery in London. The ultimate fusion of speed, technology, and Bitcoin, The Bitcoin Racing Challenge – #RaceForAdoption, aims to fuel the race for Bitcoin adoption in style.

Event Details:

– Date: Thursday, July 27, 2023

– Time: 5:00 PM – 10:00 PM BST

– Location: Sam Brooks Brewery, 1 Bellweather Lane, The Ram Quarter, London, SW18 1UR, United Kingdom

– Ticket Information: Early bird tickets available for £10, or £21 including 10 minutes of simulator time.

A description of known problems in Satoshi Nakamoto's paper, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", as well as notes on terminology changes and how Bitcoin's implementation differs from that described in the paper.

[This is a few years old, but I found it recently and thought it was interesting]

Full link, but soft-paywalled: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-30/kraken-ordered-to-turn-over-its-users-information-to-the-irs

Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken was ordered by a judge to provide a wide swath of information about its users to the Internal Revenue Service for the agency’s investigation of underreported tax liability.

The IRS has said it wants information on Kraken accounts that did at least $20,000 of cryptocurrency trading in any single year, from 2016 to 2020. Kraken had called the agency’s summons an “unjustified treasure hunt,” arguing it went well beyond the boundaries set in a similar fight with Coinbase about six years ago.

The RGB network is a Bitcoin-based protocol that leverages the Lightning Network (LN). RGB addresses scalability by enabling the execution of private smart contracts between two parties (e.g., LN channels). It was developed to improve upon colored coins and tokenize digital assets on the Bitcoin blockchain.

It's one of the latest developments to come to the Bitcoin ecosystem as of late and has played its own part in helping show that the Bitcoin blockchain is, in fact, scalable, and that additional use cases can be built on top of Bitcoin.

In this documentary, I tell the true story of James ‘Jimmy’ Zhong. In 2012, while studying Computer Science at the University of Georgia, he found an exploit on the most notorious darknet market allowing him to take Bitcoins directly from the site. As the years went on and Bitcoin soared in value his loot had increased to a staggering $3.4 billion dollars. For nearly a decade he avoided the FBI & IRS, but in 2019, he made one single mistake leading them directly to his door. Jimmy's case is the second-largest seizure in the Department of Justice's history.

Bitcoin mining is a capital-intensive business where having access to low-cost capital is critical for the success of an operation. Unfortunately, bitcoin miners’ cost of capital is significantly higher than that of companies from comparable sectors. This high cost of capital limits miners’ growth prospects and eats into their net incomes.

Luckily, not all hope is lost for capital-hungry bitcoin miners. This article analyzes the high cost of capital in the bitcoin mining industry and explains how cash flow hedging with derivatives can open up new capital-raising opportunities for these companies.

Bitcoin Suisse is preparing for the next bull market by re-inventing itself as a fully-fledged “crypto asset manager” and wealth advisory firm that caters for an emerging breed of ultra high-net-worth individuals and crypto-curious institutions.

The strategy involves complex efforts by the digital asset gateway to secure a license from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), Switzerland’s financial regulator, as well as expanding operations into the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates.

This is news from earlier in June but was overshadowed by the SEC lawsuits that came out at the same time. SWIFT represents critical banking infrastructure and its openness to crypto assets signals a sea change in attitudes among banks. This article is still the lead story on their site, www.swift.com , which is also telling, despite recent regulator crackdowns on tokens.

In February of 2013, theymos, a mod for /r/Bitcoin, requested submissions for an advertisement for the subreddit. That day, mavensbot submitted a MSPaint illustration of a wizard with the caption, "Bitcoin Magic Internet Money".

Original version of the artwork: https://i.imgur.com/bmMyvf3.jpg

Original reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/18smyy/comment/c8hmtr2/?context=3

Artist: Mickey@nostrplebs.com

Bloomberg: The enterprise-software maker co-founded by crypto proponent Michael Saylor acquired 12,333 Bitcoin between April 29 and June 27 at an average price of $28,136, according to a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Wednesday

(edit 2023-07-04: it appears I killed the original link when I added the photo, so I have now fixed it so that the original article is now linked to this post)

The Skull of Satoshi created by art activist Benjamin Von Wong.

This phenomenal sculpture was quickly adopted by the bitcoin community taking on new meaning, and becoming an inspiration for those who aim to make the world a better place through the use of sound money.