Things are rapidly turning around for Bitcoin
Is Trump to be believed?
The Bitcoin turn around is on! Just a few weeks ago it looked pretty dim for Bitcoin in the USA with Samourai Wallet arrest, Bitcoin companies exiting the USA and a cloud over whether self custody would be supported. And now, we have a big turn around from both major parties in the USA. They’ve turned around on SAB121, and now Trump is out saying he’ll keep Elizabeth Warren and her goons away from your Bitcoin. Trump also promised to free Ross on day one if he’s elected. Of course, who knows if he can be trusted to do it but nevertheless, it is interesting to see how the conversation has shifted from just a few weeks ago.
And this isn’t to say we’re out of the woods, and for people who want to contribute to the Samourai Wallet defence fund, you can do that here: https://p2prights.org/donate.html
While politicians are not to be trusted, the fact that Bitcoin is achieving this level of mindshare is notable. The industry is achieving a real level of user adoption, which is in turn forcing a conversation and at least political pandering to the tens of millions of bitcoin users. What happens in the USA will ripple out to the rest of the world, whether that is the UAE, China, Singapore and the EU.
News hits:
Former US President, Donald Trump in a recent speech at the Libertarian National Convention, announced that he would ensure that the future of crypto and Bitcoin will be made in the USA. He also mentioned that he would support the right to self custody and vowed to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht to time served if elected President. 2024 is indeed proving to be the year of ‘Bitcoin elections’. Source Video.
SAB121 and FIT21 represent a turn around in the attitude from the left wing administration in the USG. The “Crypto'' lobby is proving to be powerful. Matt Hougan’s comments here on how the US banking industry doesn’t want Tether to have all the fun and make all the profit.
Discussion on Bitcoin “Ossification” contrasted with broader ideas like the Great Script Restoration is heating up. Some of the recent discussion between Lyn Alden and others like Shinobi and reardencode relate to whether engineers are being cautious enough. The concern might be whether GSR and other OP codes create some form of centralizing MEV or MEVil. It seems most don’t believe it will, but discussion continues.
The House of Representatives has passed US Congressman Tom Emmer’s CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act. This proves to be a significant milestone in the aspect of financial freedom as it opens a lot of doors for consideration of ‘Fundamental Bitcoin Rights’ in independent states, as Oklahoma did in the last few weeks.
In a written judgment published on May 20, Justice James Mellor ruled that Craig Wright forged evidence to prove that he is Satoshi Nakamoto. This lays to rest any claim that Craig is Satoshi. The Bitcoin whitepaper can now be hosted in its rightful place: https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paper
After El Salvador, Bhutan, Oman, Ethiopia and the UAE, now Kenya enters the nation-state race to mine the hardest asset on the planet! Marathon Digital Holdings and Kenya’s Ministry of Energy and Petroleum (MOEP) have jointly signed an MOU to utilise the country's surplus geothermal energy capacity for Bitcoin mining and further technological development. Source Video.
On the technical front, here’s some of what the brightest minds in the Bitcoin ecosystem have been up to:
Carla Kirk-Cohen shares her summary and analysis of existing proposals for upgrading existing Lightning channels to support new features.
Josie started a discussion on Delving Bitcoin about PSBT extensions for silent payments (SPs), citing a draft specification by Andrew Toth. Also keep an eye out for my upcoming episode on Silent Payments next week.
Tl;dr Podcast summaries:
Payjoin Dev Kit for Bitcoin Privacy - Dan Gould SLP576
PayJoin is an idea that could really help in privacy and scalability of bitcoin transactions. Think of it as a collaborative transaction between you and your counterparty. A typical payment might only involve you spending your UTXOs, but in a PayJoin, the receiver can contribute UTXOs. This undermines CIOH - Common Input Ownership Heuristic.
PayJoin v2 uses directories to make the protocol more asynchronous than the prior v1, this also improves the possibility of it being a settlement layer.
PayJoin Dev Kit is a library to make it easier for wallet developers to integrate PayJoin as a feature.
PayJoin is more of a settlement layer than a payment layer and it's one of the simplest ways of batching transactions.
PayJoin does help the whole network and is not restricted to helping in individual privacy. The more people use PayJoin by default, the better the overall health of the Bitcoin transaction becomes - improving on collaborative
Great Script Restoration with Rusty Russell SLP577
Instead of ‘horse trading’ between different covenant proposals to try and get ‘the minimal thing into bitcoin’, the idea is to safely re-enable the OP codes that Satoshi disabled in 2010, and let developers build with these more generalized tools. The goal here generally being to enable more functionality and also improve on-chain efficiency.
The need for humility and not knowing exactly what the market of developers, entrepreneurs and users will want. E.g. not building out for a specific use case, but making the engineering tools available for people to build what they need. Whether that is LN-Symmetry, Ark, Coinpools, Vaults or other ideas.
Instead of sigops - now it’s a varops concept. More research and work needed to show that this is safe against DOS attacks etc.
This particular idea is not a short term soft fork proposal, GSR is seen as a medium or longer term idea. Perhaps in the nearer term, a different soft fork, the Great Consensus Clean Up by Matt Corallo would make more sense, as it relates to bug fixing.
There is a concern about further enabling scams or spam, however Rusty believes the benefits of improved scripting capabilities outweigh the risks in the long-run.
Bitaxe: The Open Source Bitcoin Miner with Skot - SLP578
Bitaxe is an open source bitcoin mining device designed to provide an affordable and accessible way to start mining bitcoin. It is more targeted towards hobbyists and enthusiasts, given that it isn’t as commercially focused.
Skot’s interest evolved into reverse-engineering Bitcoin mining hardware (ASICs) due to the lack of open-source ASIC designs in the market. The open-source hardware and all the details to set it up are readily available at https://bitaxe.org/ for anyone to use and tinker with.
Bitaxe in its current state acts more like a lottery miner with the chance at winning a block reward through solo mining. The power consumption is almost negligible and it won’t feel like you’re running a heavy-duty appliance at your house. To put things in perspective, if a Bitaxe has 1TH, 1 million Bitaxes to equal 1 Exahash; at current network difficulty, any one of the 1 million Bitaxes stands a chance to solve a block and get the full block reward every 4 days!
He envisions the idea of everyday households having a Bitaxe device, in an optimistic attempt to truly make mining very accessible, thereby enhancing Bitcoin's censorship resistance and decentralisation.
Upcoming conferences:
Bitcoin Seoul May 29-31 in Seoul, South Korea. Discount code for general pass here, and for VIP pass here.
BTC Prague June 13-15th 2024 in Prague, Czech Republic - code LIVERA
Nomad Capitalist Sept 25-28, Kuala Lumpur Malaysia (tickets sold out but there is a wait list)
Pacific Bitcoin October 18-19 2024, Los Angeles, California - code LIVERA gets you 21% off
See you in the citadels!