shoutout to all the awesome people and orgs that support nostr:npub1dwah6u025f2yy9dgwlsndntlfy85vf0t2eze5rdg2mxg99k4mucqxz7c52 year after year

i see you and it literally would not be possible without you ❤️

YALL READY FOR THE BITCOIN IPO!?

"im sorry your honor, we had to delay the news. we were compromised"

already? wow

few more things that are banging around in my head recently (about the etf, but also some personal history):

my first ever technical presentation as a "bitcoin dev" was at the Magical Crypto Conference in NYC in May 2019

i was there during consensus, so there was a lot of other stuff happening at the same time. on of those things was a "dragon party" that blockstream was hosting.

this was the trip that i met my first (non-blockstream) famous bitcoiners: i got seated next to luke-jr at a steak dinner, met jack mallers at the party, had to brush off charlie lee in the speakers lounge because i needed some alone time to freak out about my first every public presentation as a 'bitcoin expert'

in this era, jack mallers was talking about hashrate derivatives. a few weeks/months later i'd watch on twitter as he built a mobile app that would grow to be Strike.

i *also* met Gabor Gurbacs of VanEck. He told me he was working on getting a bitcoin etf. i had no idea what this really meant, it seemed like a cool idea. like ok yeah, bitcoin etf!

anyways, it strikes me now that people have been working on this for a very very long time.

the etf might not happen this week, but it does seem rather inevitable (america is a free market still right? right??).

i haven't really been paying much attention up until now and suddenly i'm struck by the thought that hey maybe this will be the week it goes live. seems about as good as any other? guess we'll see.

(in case you're curious about the MCC presentation, it's here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4i5cEI1jnc)

so yeah i am really curious where those coins are coming from

where do market bitcoin come from??

when i worked at cashapp ages ago i got to meet the person on the team that was responsible for doing the exchange's OTC trades for keeping the bitcoin float at the right 'level'.

they exchanged buy/sell orders via an encrypted chat on messaging app.

the "float" was the margin of bitcoin on the books that belonged to cashapp. the goal was to have enough available so that any incoming buy order was immediately fulfilled, but not too much so that the org was over-exposed to the asset.

so there was a person on the team that bought and sold coins with a real-live trading partner to keep our 'float' where it needed to be

this was 6y ago now; i'm sure they have a different process in place. and i'm 99% sure they've rotated out their trading partner, as the one they *were* using back in the day is now in bankruptcy

wait i just realized that the reason the etfs dont "just buy a bunch of bitcoin ahead of going getting listed" is because they won't have access to the money to buy the coins until after people start putting capital into their funds (post-being listed)

i mean there's probably some initial capital investment happening, they call that 'market making', right?

still thinking about that tweet i saw about thousands of coins moving off kraken in batches this week. are things moving around ahead of a sale cycle?

this etf thing really has gotten my attention, and i dont know what to think about that. i'm really really curious about where these guys are planning to get their coins from, what are the logistics of their OTC agreements? who are they planning to buy from?

does coinbase have sellers lined up? have the mining companies been called? what's coinbase's take rate for helping their ETF customers close on bitcoin?

weird to think that bitcoin might soon be a rebirth for the 'broker-age' industry -- the person who can actually broker bitcoin deals about to be a rare beast? do they already exist or are we gonna see a whole new ecosystem of coin hunting get born?

yeah i kinda .. miss Base58?

shorter, had ALL THE LETTERS (could make it say coherent things), looked less alien

oooh that's a good one! i think bitcoiners, with all our fancy tech terms, definitely fall a bit in the shibboleth category as well haha

this piece is kinda focused on NFTs, but i think it poses an interesting question

https://niftys.substack.com/p/is-it-ingroup-or-is-it-dynasty

it’s possible that you’d reach a situation where the *only* people selling are miners, but that’s infinitely better than no one

this is one of the brilliant, under appreciated things about the PoW: finite number of a depreciating asset has strong potential for locking up and imploding, but bitcoin was built in such a way that there’s always a network participant that needs to sell coins to fund real world expenses (miners)

is this more or less than MSTR holds??

*3.125

slowly getting over whatever part of my ego that was convinced michael saylor was just an insane corporate larper

“that dude is too midcurve to be correct, right? isnt doing that share issuance/dilution thing going to get him rekt?? at what point exactly does his board dump his insane ass?”

no no, turns out he’s probably the “right” amount of long term thinking and all in conviction

which is legitimately insane behavior but dear god

correct me if im wrong but one thing that feels very rare thing about saylor, situationally, is that he’s a successful dude who maintained his ability to keep placing interesting bets

seems like other wealthy people stop exploring at some point? or get afraid of losing it all? or are so consumed with other stuff or get weighed down by boards etc that they lose either the ability to bet big or the foresight

bitcoin really has done an insane job living up to being the realm of the self-sovereign 🤔

very confused about how we're going to fill the etfs and also blocks

wont the btc get locked up in cold storage? what bitcoin is gonna be available to transact onchain??

client side validation is where you put a hash into the blockchain as a proof of some statement or a commitment, so rather than being able to just use whats written in the blockchain to understand who owns what, now you need more data to verify ownership

CTV does this: it puts a hash into the chain and you need a separate set of data to prove that that hash actually means *you* can spend (some?) of those coins

the beauty of the LN protocol is that you actually can be the decentralization you want to see in the world, by running your own node