"It might feel as if the promised future is perpetually out of reach, but building Lightning is a lot like climbing a mountain. Climbers never really see the summit until they’re standing on top of it. They often can’t even see over the next ridge. Planning the ascent is important, but most of the time you’re simply concentrating on the next foothold. But the steps add up. Just like the view from the top is the reward for all that effort, a brighter monetary future will be our reward for...

"Izzy said there could be inflation in a hyperbitcoinized world. And she's right. Calm down, maxis, calm down! Explaining why this is true sheds light on yet another of Bitcoin’s quasi-magical properties and paints our hyperbitcoinized future an even rosier shade of orange. This is good for Bitcoin." ~ Allen Farrington This may seem crazy, heretical even, but inflation can occur in a hyperbitcoinized world. How could that possibly be? When there's only ever 21 million BTC? Is this nothing...

"I'm super confident that lightning is not just the present but also the future of lightning. It is the interoperability layer between all things Bitcoin." ~ Roy Sheinfeld What is the future of the lightning network and how is it transforming the Bitcoin ecosystem? Today we take a journey with Roy Sheinfeld of Breez, diving into the latest innovations in lightning, exploring the Breeze SDK, liquidity management, and the path and place that lightning will have in an open, permissionless...

"The foregoing considerations are by no means an exhaustive account of the cultural and spiritual legacy of fiat inflation. But they should suffice to substantiate the main point: that fiat inflaiton is a powerhouse of social, economic, cultural, and spiritual destruction." Fiat inflation is more than a hidden tax on everyday folks—it's the fuel for the worst parts of our system, feeding both the war monster overseas and a creeping police state at home. It fosters a culture where...

"During the peak transaction fee times over the past month, our example transaction would be dust even for .001 BTC. That’s a little less than $50 at current market conditions. This feels incredible. 100,000 sats suddenly turned into dust. Gone. Unusable. This is terrifying." ~ Joe Rodgers While we have a short respite from the crazy fees that have hit the Bitcoin world recently, there couldn't be a more important time to discuss the cost of moving UTXOs and just how to manage your...

We had an awesome chat on Twitter Spaces where we discuss the launch of Pear Runtime, bringing Paolo Arduino, Mathias Buus, David Markclem, Samson Mow, and Giacomo Zucco! We dig into what this could mean for the future of application development, the impact it will have on the tech industry, how it could disrupt monetization models, how this could be used in gaming, journalism, social media, et al, the control it will shift back to the user, and about ushering in the second coming of the...

"For too long, the world has had to endure the fallout of subpar academic research on bitcoin mining’s energy use and environmental impact. The outcome of this b******t research has been shocking news headlines that have turned some well-meaning people into angry politicians and deranged activists. So that you never have to endure the brutality of one of these sloppy papers, I’ve sacrificed my soul to the bitcoin mining gods and performed a full-scale analysis of a study from the United...

"NWC is useful for far more than simply integrating Lightning into Nostr applications as well. The entire design philosophy of Nostr itself as a protocol was centered around keeping it simple enough that the entire protocol could be easily implemented correctly by any developer with minimal time and resources. Applications that have nothing to do with Nostr can easily integrate NWC or similar protocols with almost no overhead or complexity to address the underlying issues of how to connect a...

The main promise of quantum computing is the ability to solve problems far faster than classical computers, but exactly how much faster varies. There are two applications where quantum algorithms appear to provide an exponential speed up, says Troyer. One is factoring large numbers, which could make it possible to break the public key encryption the internet is built on. The other is simulating quantum systems, which could have applications in chemistry and materials science." ~ Edd...

"One of the amazing things about the internet economy is how different the list of top internet properties today looks from the list ten years ago.  It wasn’t as if those former top companies were complacent – most of them acquired and built products like crazy to avoid being displaced. The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” ~ Chris Dixon Why do so many miss the biggest innovations and most revolutionary...

"Bitcoin wastes energy. You've heard it a million times. But what if its the exact opposite of the truth in every way? What if its actually our energy grid that is wasteful, and Bitcoin can fix it? What if its renewable energy that is unreliable and uneconomical, and bitcoin mining can balance it out. What is its fiat that's wasteful and unfair, and Bitcoin can correct it? And what if the entire premise is built upon the failure to even understand what it is that Bitcoin does? I think it's...

"One night during my visit to Bondo, Carl asked me to pause as the sunset was fading, to look at the hills around us: the lights were all turning on, all across the foothills of Mt. Mulanje. It was a powerful sight to see, and staggering to think that Bitcoin is helping to make it happen as it converts wasted energy into human progress." ~ Alex Gladstein Can you imagine what it may be like to lack access to the most basic necessities like electricity, only to finally have the opportunity...

"To put it simply, there are now corporations with billions of dollars of investment in not just the asset, but the ecosystem. Mining is a huge economic drain on the system, and all it accomplishes is censorship resistance. If censorship resistance isn’t worth tens or hundred of billions or dollar per year to the corporations; they will find a way to end it. When they do try to end it, they can point to the ETFs enduring appeal and ignore any constitutional brinkmanship from OG Bitcoiners who...

In today's chat we dive into destroying economic myths and unraveling the political divides of our time toward what future they may be leading us to. What can we make of the balkanization of the US, a push for Texas independence, the unraveling of a global reserve currency and what could we see in the dollar's demise? We dive into all this and more with renowned Austrian economist, and author of Choice among many other books, Dr. Robert P. Murphy. References from the show Bitcoin...

"Bitcoin enables perhaps the most powerful mode of ownership ever devised; it would be akin to gold inside a safe that can’t be penetrated with all the energy the universe, and with a password that you know but which could not be guessed over the entire lifetime of the universe." ~ Allen Farrington What if buying an ETF of Bitcoin, is contradictory to the very investment thesis of Bitcoin itself. Knowing the investment thesis for bitcoin, should entail the understanding that bitcoin's...

"Retrospectively, a lot of ex-DigiCash employees understand why Chaum was so paranoid.  As a cryptographer you have to assume the whole world is trying to rip you off.  A certain amount of paranoia is part of the job. Chaum had also worked for intelligence agencies, and that didn't fortify his faith in the good intentions of humankind. His vision of the privacy of the individual was almost an obsession.  In 1996 he said, in the relations magazine of Honeywell-Bull: "The difference between a...

Sometimes in life and the course of history, there are moments where simply stating the truth, in a clear and understandable way, can stir a fire in thousands or even millions of people. Devon Eriksen, author and destroyer of socialist nonsense, joins us today to get to know him and his perspective. We discuss the nature of story, the importance of culture, the power of stating the simple truth, the dangers of being right too early, and what we need to do to turn the tide of a dying moral...

"I hope Bitcoin sticks around and grows more popular, but in its current form to most in #TradFi it is the opposite of SOUND MONEY, especially if it takes cult-like behavior to make it grow. It needs the STATE to force its use on everyone. That is what makes it MONEY." ~ Samantha LaDuc Today we dive into the enlightening twitter thread from financial analyst Samantha LaDuc on why Bitcoin cannot be and is not money, one of which is because money is enforced by the state, but that's only...

"Part of the problem of Lightning’s shortcoming regarding scalability of Bitcoin ownership is that in order to open a channel, or control a UTXO, you actually have to transact on the base layer. After that Lightning can facilitate a very large number of transactions off-chain but a user must still transact on-chain to onboard themselves to Lightning, It massively increases the number of transactions Bitcoin can process but it does nothing at all to increase the number of people who can own...

There are a lot of speculation, claims, predictions, and accusations around the successes and faults of the Lightning Network. But where do this things fall when we look at the boots on the ground metrics? When we really look at the hard data, what can we know for certain? Today we dig into the past few years of lightning development and growth with Sam Wouters from River, author of the incredible Lightning Report released in August of last year. If you are interested in the truth of...

The legacy financial system has arrived. One January 10th, numerous Bitcoin ETFs were approved. But is this even a good thing? What does this signal for the legitimacy of Bitcoin as an asset? What does it mean for the sovereignty of the network? This could both bring trillions of dollars in liquidity into Bitcoin and break through the Overton window of the average person. This may make bitcoin "real" for many who refused to pay attention before. But the big question... the real risk, is if we...

" Channel liquidity and offline receives, in my opinion, are the two most obvious reasons why self-custodial lightning is not popular. When most users hear about any of these, they just think "screw that" and move to a custodial wallet because it is so much easier. If these were our only two problems, I think self-custodial lightning would be fine. It may never be the predominant way people use lightning, but we could get the UX good enough that we have a significant portion of people using...

"The computers used to create valuable new Bitcoin tokens and validate transactions consume around the same amount of energy as a medium-sized country such as Sweden would generate. Hence the stinging critique of how this cryptocurrency wastes the planet’s precious resources." — Ian Birrell Is it true that Bitcoin only wastes energy and is the sole purview of financial gambling and speculation in the western world, or are there boots on the ground showing the real results of the "pioneer...

"Bitcoin appears to be a decentralized Ponzi scheme not a decentralized currency. People don't spend it because they want it to go up. The dollar works because of inflation. It keeps velocity up like hot potato. If you want to store value silver gold and land. Because it's beautiful useful and valuable. Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme without an individual attached to it to go to prison. So the media can control swings for profit. That's my opinion about bitcoin. The purpose isn't currency the...

"Since 2017, bitcoin has been Stone Ridge’s treasury reserve asset because of my extreme aversion to risk. We run net short USD – which is fancy way of saying we net borrow fiat - to pay bills and make investments. We save in bitcoin. It would be impossible to overstate the corporate advantages of being on the Bitcoin Standard. Since 2017, we’ve doubled our franchises to ten, more than 10x’d our trading profits, and delivered 25% annualized ROE for our shareholders. Our firm compensation,...