✨ Season’s Greetings Bitcoiner,

Welcome to issue #49 of the Bitcoin Breakdown, where we wear the title: Bitcoin Maximalists as an absolute honor.

You will notice that we are merging the two twice-weekly emails into a single weekly edition. This change, prompted by extensive reader feedback, will ensure sustainability for the newsletter moving forward. Please share your thoughts on the new format by participating in the poll at the end of this email.

You can now also find us on Telegram here.

Lastly, please leave us a positive 5-star review here (where you’ll then be rewarded 2000 sats for free). Happy readings! 👽️

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🏆 FEATURE STORIES

• Anna Baydakova, writing for The Block, suggests Bitcoin faces the risk of protocol-level censorship due to increasing regulatory pressure on miners, potentially impacting its transactional transparency and decentralization (Dec 26 | 6 min read).

• Jameson Lopp provides an annual comparison of Bitcoin node performance tests to determine their efficiency in fully validating the blockchain and finds that despite a 22% increase in blockchain size, most implementations work faster than expected (Dec 24 | 9 min read).

• @davidw suggests that a white hole might be a more apt analogy for Bitcoin's nature of distributing power and expanding potential than a black hole and contrasts the two in terms of centralization versus distribution of power, darkness versus light, and contraction versus expansion (Dec 21 | 20 min read).

• Strainly and BTCPay Server publish a case study demonstrating the successful use of bitcoin for payment processing in the financially marginalized cannabis industry, highlighting its efficacy as a tool resistant to censorship (Dec 20 | 7 min read).

• Jimmy Song challenges the notion that exposure to altcoins leads to adopting Bitcoin and argues that most people discover Bitcoin before altcoins and that mere exposure to Bitcoin isn't sufficient for adoption (understanding Bitcoin's advantages over fiat money is crucial) (Dec 19 | 3 min read).

• Tomer Strolight of Swan explores how Bitcoin can be a technology that helps bring people together in a time when community is needed more than ever before (Dec 18 | 12 min read).

• Dhruv Bansal of Unchained explores the history of digital currencies in this report and makes the case that Satoshi’s focus on sound monetary policy is what led Bitcoin to succeed where other projects failed (Dec 12 | 34 min read).

⚡️ QUICK BITS

• Argentina legalizes Bitcoin for contract settlements as new president Javier Milei combats high inflation rates.

• Ocean Mining grants miners the option (at a fee) to not censor ordinals.

• BitcoinTalk.org announces ban on link sharing and promotion of custodial No-KYC mixers.

• Braiins Mining releases free audiobook version of their popular ‘Bitcoin: Separation of Money and State’ book.

• Bitcoin declared dead only seven times in 2023.

• Sats4AI deploys a new cheaper, faster and uncensored text generation open-source model thanks to the power of Lightning as ChatGPT leaks private data and suspends accounts.

• GAMA launches Bitcoin mining seed program to help new African miners.

• Stacker News launches P2P Marketplace called Agora.

• PlebLab unveils Top Builder - an intense competition designed to discover the next wave of innovators in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

• The Reserve Bank of India maintains its opposition to legalizing Bitcoin, citing no economic benefit and potential risks to macroeconomic stability.

• Amboss introduces Ghost Addresses - a Lightning address for every node.

• Replit CEO wants to replace site currency (‘Cycles’) with Lightning payments.

• Sats-For-Ads allows you to earn sats by viewing targeted ads sent to your Lightning Address.

• Alby introduces Liquid Network to its browser extension, promoting lightning interoperability.

• Chinese nationals are using bitcoin to discreetly move money from China to the US.

• CrowdHealth integrates Lightning payments with the help of Breez SDK.

• Mempool dot space releases new ‘Mempool Goggles’ feature that allows you to filter transactions in mempools by 25 categories.

• Lightspark tests Universal Money Addresses, facilitating the settlement of USDC from Argentina to pesos in the Philippines via the Bitcoin network.

• Unchained launches a new transaction fee estimation algorithm to enhance privacy and generally reduce fees on many transactions.

• Zaprite adds a new integration with WooCommerce.

• Forbes names Fold’s debit card the best card for maximizing bitcoin rewards.

• Putin signs law integrating the digital ruble into Russia’s tax code as part of their CBDC development.

• Russia toys with bill for mined BTC to become export product.

• SEC says Bitcoin ETF will be approved by January 10th.

• Howard Lutnick, Cantor Fitzgerald CEO, comes out as a Bitcoin Maxi.

• UK judge tells Craig Wright to prove that he's Satoshi Nakamoto.

• Fountain Podcasts introduces its inaugural 'Fountain 1.0' platform, showcasing their biggest design and user experience upgrade to date bringing usability improvements across the app along with powerful new social features.

OTHER NEWSLETTERS TO CHECK OUT

• TLDR is a free 5 min daily newsletter read by 1,000,000+ software engineers, founders, and tech workers.

• The Passionate Income: Join over 15,000 readers to learn, improve, and grow through actionable steps in a bite-sized three-minute read.

• Morning Brew is the daily email that delivers the latest news from Wall Street to Silicon Valley to 4M+ readers.

• The Marketing Letter by Indexsy keeps you in the loop.

• AI Tool Report will teach you how to save time and earn more with AI. Join 220,000+ free daily readers for trending tools, productivity-boosting prompts, the latest news, and more.

• Get The Rundown on the latest developments in AI before everyone else.

👉️ You can find more here.

*One click subscribe link

📽️ QUICK BITS MEDIA

• Bitwise releases first in what will probably be an oncoming wave of commercials marketing Bitcoin ETFs to mainstream investors (0:15 min watch).

• Hashdex, right on queue, also releases cringe commercial touting worthless paper bitcoins (0:20 min watch).

• Keet, the P2P Chat App that allows anyone to create apps that don’t use any servers, releases a rad song (1:06 min watch).

• PlebLab releases cringe standoff video titled ‘Johnny Laserdisc vs Code Monster Billy Rampage - Top Builder 2024’ (2:04 min watch).

• Richard releases new track, ‘Immutable Christmas’ (2:46 min watch).

• Lyn Alden on the current state of Bitcoin (6:50 min watch).

• Nomad Capitalist releases video, ‘6 Takeaways from the Sovereign Individual’ (17:17 min watch).

💥 MEME BREAK

CLASSIFIEDS

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• Hal9 allows you to chat with your enterprise databases using secure generative AI and empower business users in your team to do their own data analyses in seconds.

• Advertise in the Bitcoin Breakdown to get in front of a growing audience of dedicated and burgeoning bitcoiners alike.

Thank you for reading!

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Until our next transmission,

Naiw

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