"I believe it’s important to go back to what this sovereignty is made of. Bitcoin works because an economic majority is aligning incentives for every constituent of the network. The longer tail of the economic distribution may choose to run a node and validate consensus but ultimately consensus follows the money." — ⁠ Alex B. Today…

"To not die, Bitcoin must become more used. The current thesis accepted by most “maximalists” is that Bitcoin will continue to be thought of as an investment and its price will keep increasing, the price movements will bring more attention to it in a virtuous cycle. Eventually enough people will want to hold it so they will…

"Often overlooked is the importance of interoperability between not only the second-layer protocol and Bitcoin but the layer-2 protocols themselves. A second layer, where end-users can leverage several protocols together and move seamlessly between them, creates a healthier, more resilient financial system and an overall better user experience—both essential for mass adoption."— ⁠Chase Smith Today…

"When reading a draft of this post, my wife got kind of depressed right around here. Her macabre question, basically, is: “if everyone just winds up interacting with sidechains, and not Real Bitcoin, hasn’t the whole thing failed? At every point you’re dealing with some token that isn’t really bitcoin." — James O'Beirne⁠ Continuing the…

"The headroom there isn’t unlimited — expect it to show up as fee pressure and backlogs and less ability to quickly resolve transaction storms. And that will in turn make it hard and expensive for people with small stacks to continue to do self-custody on the main chain. At that point, acquiring new high value…

"While bitcoin is still mainly seen as digital currency, it’s essentially a timestamped log with special properties. As such, it can be utilised for far more things than payments and store of value. I presented some of the alternative uses several years ago and the list continues to grow. Brian Deery, chief scientist at Factom, wrote an excellent…

With so many common misconceptions about money, how can we possibly make sense of Bitcoin for customers who have spent their entire lives using only a single product, and know almost nothing about it? Without even a means to compare one "product" to another, where do we start? Most only understand money from the context…

"A successful blind merge mined sidechain with significant MEV opportunities could offer Bitcoin significant benefits, which could more than offset the disadvantages." – "Blind merge mining works by a third party running the sidechain, building sidechain blocks and receiving the sidechain fees. This entity then creates a Bitcoin transaction, which passes on these fees to…

We have an incredible chat today with Pablof7z who is on a mission to make Nostr the global, decentralized marketplace. With highlighter for integrated, universal note taking, data vending machines for micro tasks and shared computing, and using Ai to bring new services and coordination to the ecosystem. Pablof7z dedicates all of his time to…

"Talk to a bitcoin maximalist – someone who believes that bitcoin is the only digital asset with innate value – and, more likely than not, they’ll tell you the world’s oldest cryptocurrency is, in fact, ‘not crypto’ at all. The refrain can be confusing: clearly, bitcoin pioneered the use of cryptography – an ultra-secure type of encryption…