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- This Week in Bitcoin (November 18th, 2022)
This Week in Bitcoin (November 18th, 2022)
What is up you beautiful people!
First round of updates post FTX going bye-bye. It's really insane how much can happen in two weeks. Dont worry. I won't be touching on this FTX bullshit below because its not directly Bitcoin related. And Twitter peeps have been doing a damn fine job of reporting on the SBF craziness if you're into that.Lets jump into the latest in Bitcoin! But first. Shoutout to The Stacks Foundation for sponsoring this podcast. If you want to get started building on Stacks and push the mission forward of a user-owned internet with Bitcoin as the base layer. Check the links below. Learn Clarity: https://start.stacks.org/ Learn more about Stacks: https://stacks.co/ Apply for a grant: https://stacks.org/grants
Now lets jump in and get updated on the latest. Starting with Bitcoin mainchain.Catch the podcast on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or Fountain.
Bitcoin
Bitcoin wasn't in the news much. Maybe that's a good thing?
The biggest news I saw this week was just a bearish overtime tone in crypto right now. This caused the Bitcoin price to slide to it's lowest point in over 2 years. None of the fundamentals have changed, The global need is still there. This seems like one of those unique windows to DCA and accumulate your Bitcoin bag.
There has been some controversy inside the Bitcoin core and developer community over something called ZeroConf. My understanding is it's a way for merchants or platforms to accept a transaction as valid before it has been formally confirmed by the network, Hence zero confirmations. The issue is a change in the Bitcoin Core settings might change how this is used by default. Some service providers have built their core product around zeroconf, and thus we have controversy. Peter Todd and John Carvalho have been the two most vocal on opposite ends of the debate. The latest discussion is happening here on GitHub.
Stacks
Slow week for Stacks,
The Hiro Wallet got a small upgrade. You can finally send STX to someone in the Hiro wallet using just their BNS name.
I did a FIRE Twitter Space with Trevor Owens and Albert Liang on the Stacks main twitter on the topic of "Become a Web3 entrepreneaur, and scale your startup." If you are thinking of building in Web3 as a new founder, This is the one to listen to. Link
The Stacks Ventures Accelerator applications are open for the next month or so. If you are building something on Bitcoin, Stacks, or Lightning. Hit me up, I'd love to talk and learn more.
Lightning
Hitting you with some Lightning stats.
Only one big new release this week in the Lightning space. Amboss released two new tools for making channel management easier. Magma and Connect are marketplace tools for channel providers to sell or buy channels if they need them. Check out the tweet here.
Here's some juicy bear market stats for the Lightning network.
River Financial has routed 1 million transactions through their nodes.
Wallet of Satoshi has routed 5 million transactions to date.
RSK
Every week there's a new conference.
The Rootstock community had their Rootstock summit in Buenos Aires last week. Bringing together builders inside the RSK ecosystem to discuss the future of building on Bitcoin. I didn't read up on any of the specifics. If you interested, you can watch the live stream from the event here.
Blockstream
Bitcoin Layers is looking primed to lead the next bull run.
Blockstream is getting in on the action of Bitcoin layers and building a community to attract developers who want to expand the Bitcoin ecosystem. They announced a new initiative called "Build on L2" that is exactly what it sounds like. A community and tooling for developers building on Bitcoin, Core Lightning and Liquid. You can check out the website here.
Jade, The Blockstream hardware wallet now supports air-gapped Bitcoin transactions as the standard method for signing transactions. What does that mean? Quick rundown. When signing a BItcoin transaction and authorizing a spend of your BTC, you to find a way to let the network know about the transaction while still maintaining security. The generally accepted hierarchy of safest methods (In order) goes. Micro SD Card > Camera > USB > NFC > Bluetooth. Micro SD is super annoying to use but is the safest. Being able to scan a QR code from a device with no other outside access to the world gives you a strong balance of both security and ease-of-use.
We covered the exact topic above in my recent interview with Zach Herbert from Foundation Devices.
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