Privacy is a very important issue. It can be how you manage keeping parts of your life separate. It can be how you maintain your sense of dignity. It can be how you respect someone else’s trust. It can be a matter of your safety, even your life. At the center of all these things, […]
VIRTUAL FUTURE MONEY
Follow Nikolaus On 𝕏 Here For Daily Posts One year ago today, Gary Gensler and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) finally capitulated and approved the trading of spot bitcoin exchange traded funds (ETF) to go live the next day. These ETFs would go on to be the best performing ETFs in history, with BlackRock’s […]
VIRTUAL FUTURE MONEY
The Human Rights Foundation, in collaboration with the Finney family, has awarded Pieter Wuille and Gregory Maxwell the prestigious Finney Freedom Prize for their groundbreaking contributions to Bitcoin usability, scalability, and privacy. The prize recognises their work during the 2012-2016 era, corresponding to Bitcoin’s block height of 210,000 to 420,000. The Finney Freedom Prize honours […]
VIRTUAL FUTURE MONEY
The launch of Bitcoin ETFs in January 2024 was heralded as a groundbreaking moment for the market. Many expected these products to open the floodgates for institutional capital and catapult Bitcoin prices to new heights. But now, a year later, have Bitcoin ETFs delivered on their promise? For a more in-depth look into this topic, […]
VIRTUAL FUTURE MONEY
Follow Frank on X. Perhaps the best way to decentralize the Bitcoin network is through home mining, and things are trending in the right direction. Yesterday, Solo Satoshi announced the Bitaxe Touch, the latest device in the world of home bitcoin mining. This new device will utilize the BM1370 ASIC chip from the Bitmain S21 […]
VIRTUAL FUTURE MONEY
Steve Hanke is wrong about something Bitcoin related once again. He’s recently taken aim at the idea of the U.S. creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR). In the video embedded in the X post below, Hanke claimed that converting government savings into bitcoin would be a “drag on the economy” because those savings wouldn’t be […]
VIRTUAL FUTURE MONEY
Follow Frank on X. With bitcoin’s price dipping significantly below $100k again, the “buy the dip” cheerleaders are out in full force. But I’m here to offer a different perspective, which is simply: Don’t buy the dip. Before I continue, let me please make it clear that nothing that I write in this Take is […]
VIRTUAL FUTURE MONEY
One of the secondary benefits of how the Lightning Network works as a scaling solution is privacy. It’s by no means perfect or undefeatable privacy, but it is a better than naive use of the base layer blockchain itself. It’s also not perfectly balanced. The sender learns a good many details about the receiver, but […]
VIRTUAL FUTURE MONEY
Follow Nikolaus On 𝕏 Here For Daily Posts In less than two weeks, the United States will have a new administration in office, but there’s already much debate about President-elect Donald Trump and his policies. One of the most controversial — his expressed interest in purchasing Greenland for strategic, economic and political reasons. Trump claims that buying […]
VIRTUAL FUTURE MONEY
Bitcoin’s value proposition relies on its ability to resist any type of censorship. Without that feature, Bitcoin loses its power to challenge and resist any authority that wants to subjugate Bitcoin to the same rules that apply in the traditional world. With this in mind, it’s paramount that bitcoin has no central points of failure […]