Highlight
Bitcoin is one of the best performing assets of the past decade and a seemingly uncorrelated asset class. We’re also well-aware of the FUD around negative interest rates (~$17 trillion globally) and central banks, as well as the #ImminentRecession:
But is Bitcoin really a “Safe Haven” asset? Can Bitcoin hold its value better than alternatives like gold in times of economic crisis?
Here are Matt Hougan and Ryan Todds’ takes.
Bitcoin Use Cases
(1) After interviewing dozens of locals, the Open Money Initiative shared eight Bitcoin / FinTech product concepts that aim to serve Venezuelans who currently live under repressed economic freedom and hyperinflation.
(2) Freelance payments and remittances are reportedly the leading use-cases for Bitcoin transactions in the Palestinian territories. Civilian usage of Bitcoin dwarfs that of terrorists in the region.
Bitcoin Tech
(1) Pieter Wuille, a prolific Bitcoin developer known for his privacy and scaling contributions to HD wallets, SegWit, and Schnorr, just announced Miniscript: a Bitcoin programming language that abstracts away Script’s complexity while simultaneously making programming Bitcoin and wallet interoperability easier and safer. Read more.
(2) Bitcoin Optech newsletter #60 covers:
The Compatibility Matrix: helping Bitcoin users make informed decisions about supporting scaling tech (eg. SegWit + Replace-by-fee). Read more.
Hardcoded previous soft fork activation blocks: the heights of the blocks where two previous soft forks activated have now been hardcoded into Bitcoin Core as the point where those forks activate. This means any block chain reorganization that extends further back than those blocks can create a chainsplit between nodes with this hardcoding and those without it.
(3) 6102 Bitcoin shares their research on how to send CoinJoin UTXOs to Cold Storage in a privacy-preserving manner.
(4) James Chiang, a resident at Chaincode Labs, presents Taproot and Policy. Taproot gives Bitcoin greater smart contract flexibility, while offering more privacy.
Lightning Network
(1) An issue people have when using Loop is that it doesn’t always refill their preferred Lightning channel. Alex Bosworth of Lightning Labs proposes a solution.
Bitcoin Products
(1) After bringing on former Google director Steve Lee to PM the initiative, Square Crypto made their second hire this week: Matt Corallo (formerly Chaincode Labs and Blockstream). Matt contributes to projects like Bitcoin Core, BetterHash, Rust-Lightning, BitcoinJ, the FIBRE network, and more.
(2) More Bitcoin jobs listed here:
(3) The Casa team announces Node Heartbeats and Heartbeat SatsBack Rewards to encourage users to keep their Bitcoin nodes healthy, support the network, and earn bitcoin.
(4) Chainalysis announces a new real-time alert feature for suspicious transactions, as part of its "Chainalysis KYT" solution.
(5) Kraken’s OTC volumes have 20x’d since last year, but are still substantially lower than their existing exchange offering.
(6) Earlier today, an AWS outage caused major issues at crypto exchanges, allegedly allowing some lucky traders to buy bitcoin for under a dollar. Fuck, I should’ve put in my limit orders earlier.
(7) Paradigm, a messaging platform for crypto OTC trading is looking to replace Telegram as the standard. Paradigm just partnered with crypto derivatives exchange, Deribit, which will handle automated order placement and clearance of OTC block trades for crypto options and futures, post negotiation.
Bitcoin Markets / Stats
(1) Gold Market Cap
Gold: ~$8.171 T at ~$1525/oz
Bitcoin: ~$186 B at ~$10400/btc (~2.3% of gold’s market cap)
(2) Fiat Market Cap: Bitcoin is back down to #35 compared to all fiat currencies, placed between the New Zealand Dollar (NZD) and the Qatari Rial (QAR).
(3) Government Debt Clock
(4) Crypto Market Cap Dominance
Bitcoin represents 68.80% of the total cryptocurrency market cap
According to Arcane Research, if we take into account liquidity and weigh market caps by volume, then Bitcoin dominance is more like 90%
Messari measures Bitcoin dominance across the top 10 exchanges around ~72%
(5) Bitcoin Security: Hash Rate + Difficulty
The two metrics hit ~72.68 EH/s and ~10.18 T (ATH) respectively, according to BTC.com
The decrease in hashrate is likely due to a mudslide in China
Matteo Leibowitz recommends the Fee Ratio Multiple when measuring a blockchain network’s security.
(6) Supply + Halvening News:
~268 days until the next halvening, where the issuance rate of new bitcoins will decrease from 12.5 to 6.25 bitcoins per new block mined. Bitcoin inflation will decrease to 1.8%, rivaling the US inflation rate.
We’ve mined >85% of the 21,000,000 bitcoins that will ever exist, in the past ~10 years. To mine the remaining 15% will take ~120 years.
(7) Coin Metrics offers more context on the wealth distribution debate.
(8) Remember this?
Don’t diversify your crypto portfolio.
(9) And remember when $10k was the dream?
(10) Ten years of Bitcoin price action:
Bitcoin Talks / Theses
(1) In episode 141 of WBD, podcasters Peter McCormack and Stephan Livera chat about:
Socialism, Austrian Economics, Free Markets, Libertarianism, Brexit, etc.
(2) To my Precoiner subscribers: keep an eye out for The Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin, a 10 part intro series by Peter McCormack airing in October, covering the below… wish I had this kind of content back when I first started entering the rabbit hole.
(3) Michael Goldstein, co-founder of the Nakamoto Institute and co-host of the Noded Bitcoin podcast, presents How to Meme Bitcoin to the Moon.
Michael Goldstein and Pierre Rochard also cover how toxic rhetoric and childish memes are destroying Bitcoin
(4) Bryan Bishop shares his transcripts for Austin Bitcoin Devs Socratic Seminar #2. Here’s why you should be interested in Bitcoin Socratic Seminars.
Bitcoin Regulations
(1) The New York Supreme Court rules that it has jurisdiction over Bitfinex + Tether, pushing forth the NY Attorney General’s case.
(2) The SEC issues a cease-and-desist order against ICO Ratings, alleging the firm got paid >$100k for promoting securities without disclosure.
(3) The US Treasury’s OFAC has blacklisted the addresses of three Chinese nationals.
(4) The White House says crypto is used to buy illicit drugs. What about the US dollar?
(5) The Indian Supreme Court gives the Indian Central Bank 2 weeks to justify their crypto ban.
Bitcoin Events
(1) Justin Moon’s Hodl Bootcamp will be hosted remotely, August 26 - September 1
(2) Russell Okung’s educational event in Los Angeles, September 1
(3) Scaling Bitcoin 2019 will be hosted in Tel Aviv, September 10 - 11
(4) Baltic Honey Badger will be hosted in Riga, September 14 - 15
(5) Lightning Conference in Berlin, October 19 - 20
DM me on Twitter if you’ve got feedback, questions, and comments.
This is not financial advice. Do your own research.