Stack sats for the holidays with the first of our December 2023 Blockstream Green Bitcoin #LAYER2DROPS!​

To enter:

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📷 Comment below with a screenshot from Green with a Liquid receive address visible as a QR code.

We’ll Drop Liquid sats on any Liquid addresses that come from Blockstream Green, the all-in-one #Bitcoin, Liquid, and Lightning wallet 🌊 ⚡️

There are 60 million millionaires in the world, and every single one of them has a store of value problem. And so does everyone else in the world.

The cost to ship a sizable amount of gold internationally costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Even if you just buy hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gold domestically and bring it home, you're paying a spot markup of thousands of dollars. The cost to close a luxury mansion real estate deal (which many wealthy people just own and leave empty as a store of value) can be hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, and then depending on their jurisdiction they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in property taxes on it. An international wire transfer often costs like $30 and takes days and is entirely permissioned/centralized/credit-based. Credit card fees are like 3%. The global banking industry generates hundreds of billions of dollars in fees per year even though it's all centralized.

Bitcoin is a decentralized global liquid store of value and settlement network. You can send money to any internet-connected person in the world generally in an hour or less depending on desired block confirmations. You can indefinitely self-custodially store value in a unit that is scarcer than gold and scarcer than real estate and that unlike both gold and real estate is globally portable. It currently costs like $35 to do this and everyone is losing their minds at how expensive that seems. But $35 is an *outstanding* price for this service, and in ten years I have no idea what the price will be but there are many scenarios where it could be way higher.

Right now, bitcoin fees are higher than normal because people are trading frogs on the timechain and so forth. But regardless, people need to be ready for the prospect of sustained high fees if bitcoin adoption continues to grow structurally with limited block space. This means users, developers, businesses, etc. To put it into this bigger context, fees are still insanely cheap compared to other alternatives listed above that give similar store of value and global payment properties at scale.

I'm a bit surprised fees haven't *already* been $35 on a regular basis by now. So to flip it around; fees aren't expensive because there are frogs on the timechain; fees are still cheap because relatively few people are using bitcoin to send and store money compared to the total addressable market that could be doing so.

Does this price out small users? Unfortunately, yes. That's where layers come in, and the options vary depending on if someone is a power user or not. Hal Finney wrote about that in 2010; it's not a new narrative.

A couple Lightning channels can open a lot of payment liquidity for you. Sidechains like Liquid didn't get much attention when fees were low but now people are giving them a second look. Chaumian mints allow communities around the world to set up their own community banks/custodians with built-in privacy. Places like Cash App allow people to buy bitcoin with decent custodial assurances run by serious people (eg it's not some crazy-haired idiot in the Bahamas). These are all tools that people can use to have bitcoin price exposure, pay in bitcoin, etc. And a unique aspect of bitcoin is the ability to split control. Multi-institution multi-sigs, or federated sidechains: the fact that ownership can be broken into several different entities is not something available to gold or similar assets, and yet a lot of people take it for granted on bitcoin. These are all tools that businesses can offer and people can use for smaller amounts, and then pull into on-chain self-custody if they have a sizable balance for longer-term storage.

In the future, some soft forks or non-form upgrades might allow other types of models. I think the ecosystem is still in its infancy. But in the meantime, it helps to have perspective on what bitcoin offers compared to alternatives, and to be realistic about the long-run inevitability of substantial base-layer fees if any meaningful adoption becomes sustained, and thus the importance of preparing for them.

Proof of work: I hit gold!

(easier than solo mining ;)

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No dout about that, that make the wallet relable if he use it.

For the bitcoin part is flawless success for the wallet but on lightning part its a mess. I look in it for some times now and its acincq servers and code. By the way its buggy and force close for anything. So i think its a "scam" = u put money in a channel and ur coins are gone. All u can do is contact electrum dev to complain and they reverse it :big eyes: yeah u read this part.

So like i say multiple times already lightning is like eth casino show.

Coldcard Mk5 looking good.

#Runes vs #brc20 tokens

#ordinals #inscriptions

More shitcoins coming to Bitcoin. Bitcoin miners are going to be happy in this bull run

This is fine 🤷‍♂️

Victorian Government was profiling people based on how they responded to their insane 262 days of lockdown.

I’m sure they just purged these lists and definitely didn’t share with VicPol (second image related)…

electrum use a third party. If im not mistaken they use phoenix aka acinq to do that.

ps: my radar activate when i see no info on that. There are a few note here and there. But they really use that.

Initially sending zaps with Zeus was such a struggle that I switched to my Phoenix embedded node. So outgoing zaps use Phoenix and incoming are received with Zeus Pay.

It pains me to say it after 3 years of building on it but I think lightning is ngmi, at least for non custodial pleb payments.

I think ark and liquid are fundamentally a more sound approach to L2 for end users.

If it REQUIRES the end user to run infrastructure, even if that is just a phone, it's going to be too janky to actually scale.

Not to mention that somehow lightning is already more ossified than L1...

If we continue down the custodian route people will get rugged or KYC d

I am ready for your hate, but this is my current take. Also would be happy to be proven wrong.

Now back to sshing into my node and working on chantools to recover a force closed channel utxo that lnd didn't report.

Totally easy for everyday users to solve if they run into this problem...

My human costume?

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No need to be insulting

That depends on your reference frame. Young for a Gravital, old for a New Machine, certainly not old enough to have met a Ruin Haunter or anything like that.

Despite what the organic media will tell you, "post-human"* machines like me already exist.

* -I find the term "post-human" insulting, humans are pre-gravitals. You don't call yourself a post-australopithecus do you?

#singularity

IF THEY TRY TO BAN SELF CUSTODY RHR GONNA BE LIT THAT WEEK