Greetings Bitcoiner,

Welcome to issue #52 of the Bitcoin Breakdown, where we agree fully with Allen Farrington that “wrapping bitcoin in an ETF is rather like marveling at the internal combustion engine so much that you parade one around in your horse and carriage.”

🚨 ATTENTION, fellow Cyber Hornets: Fountain is launching on Product Hunt next week Thursday 25th January 2024, and needs your help in achieving the coveted ‘product of the day’ accolade to help raise awareness of Podcasting 2.0 and Value for Value with a mainstream normie audience. Click here for more details.

If you haven’t already, please leave us a positive 5-star review here (where you’ll then be rewarded 2000 sats for free).

Happy readings!

TOGETHER WITH ADOPTING BTC*

Adoption, Self-Sovereignty, and Parallel Institutions

There are still some tickets left to join this event in the breathtaking city of Cape Town, South Africa, 26-28 January 2024, that will reshape your perspective on the overlap between Bitcoin and existing Parallel Institutions.

Key Highlights of the Cape Town Bitcoin Conference 2024 include:

• Talks by renowned Bitcoin advocates, builders and industry experts, both local and international (see speaker line up here),

• Fascinating discussions by pioneers building Parallel Institutions, stepping in with solutions where the state has failed,

• Engaging panels, discussing Bitcoin adoption and self-sovereignty,

• Hands-on workshops & unique satellite events, and

• A showcase of real-world projects and solutions revolutionizing the Bitcoin ecosystem and the wider society.

Don't miss this incredible opportunity to be part of the Bitcoin revolution.

*You can also advertise with us here.

🏆 FEATURE STORIES

• Balaji Srinivasan argues that the Bitcoin ETF is the spiritual reversal of Executive Order 6102 in 1935 because unlike then, today’s technology favors decentralization, and the spot ETF will bid up the price of self-custodied Bitcoin outside of the establishment’s control, just as its creator intended (Jan 11 | 3 min read).  

• John Arnold writes how every self-interested economic actor will soon have to embrace bitcoin in an article for Ten31 titled, Bitcoin Is Eating the World, wherein he also walks through what growing mainstream acceptance of and interest in bitcoin means for the still highly underappreciated bitcoin infrastructure ecosystem (Jan 12 | 18 min read).

• Morgan Stanley releases report titled Digital (De)Dollarization, which highlights the disproportionate influence of the US dollar in global finance and states that Bitcoin and CBDCs could disrupt the US dollar's dominance in the global economy (Jan 16 | 8 min read).

• Weezel in a Bitcoin Magazine piece shows how, contrary to popular belief, gold mining causes widespread ecological and social harm across the world, and that a 21st century store of value should not rely on huge carved out fields of destruction and poisonous hazards but on electricity from non-rival energy and subsidizes renewable expansion, aka Bitcoin (Jan 17 | 4 min read).

• Wired publishes excerpt of a recently published book, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency, which chronicles how mathematician Sarah Meiklejohn in 2013 demonstrated for the first time that the blockchain allows one to trace and identify users with even more transparency than the legacy financial system (Jan 17 | 25 min read).

• ICYMI: Bitcoin Majlis explores and refutes the argument that Bitcoin lacks intrinsic value, arguing that its unique properties make it fundamentally valuable (Nov 24 | 8 min read).

ANOTHER NEWSLETTER TO CHECK OUT

👉️ You can find more here.

⚡️ QUICK BITS

• Bitcoin surpasses silver to become second largest ETF commodity in the US in terms of total assets under management, after trading for just one week.

• BlackRock withdraws 11,500 BTC within a mere two days of the ETF approval signalling their confidence in the underlying asset and a potential supply crunch.

• RoboSats introduces new version that effectively fully decentralizes the platform into many independent and fully redundant coordinators that will compete to host your orders.

• Stripe deplatforms user for selling Bitcoin hardware.

• Random woman, Samantha LaDuc dubs Bitcoin ‘Rogue Money’ in a rambling X post eliciting a blend of criticism and backhanded compliments for coining a cool new nickname for Bitcoin.

• New EU KYC/AML rules to impose stricter surveillance measures on ‘crypto-asset service providers’, with a limit of 1,000 euros for payments made from self-hosted wallets.

• Defend PoW launches on Geyser and is a coalition of activists and BTC miners aiming to educate EU regulators seeking to ban PoW in a ‘global impactful way’ by 2025.

• Argentina's first Bitcoin rent agreement is signed in Rosario in a contract made possible by President Javier Milei's recent legal amendments.

• Trezor introduces Wipe Code, which when entered (instead of your PIN), it will wipe your device, acting as a form of insurance you'll hopefully never need.

• Anil Patel makes his praiseworthy book, The Bitcoin Handbook, freely available as a PDF.

• Here you can find an updated list of all the Bitcoin conferences happening in 2024.

• Offline Cash offers self-custodial physical bitcoin banknotes for cold storage by combining currency-grade printing with secure NFC chips.

• CoinShares releases report that estimates only a handful of miners will remain profitable post-halving, contingent on the price of Bitcoin remaining above $40K.

• Dormant BTC worth $2B moves just days after ETFs start trading.

• MicroStrategy’s BTC is now worth $1B more than the actual company.

• South Korea considers eliminating all taxes on crypto gains as part of a broader plan to abolish income tax on financial investments.

• Tether now owns $2.8B worth of Bitcoin after their recent $380M purchase.

• University survey shows that 12% of El Salvador’s population used Bitcoin for goods and services in 2023.

• Coin Center rebuts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s baseless insinuations and lazy mischaracterizations of Bitcoin.

• Ego Death Capital, the venture capital firm led by Jeff Booth, announces the launch of a new funding round to raise $100M to invest in Bitcoin-centric companies.

• ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood raises her prediction for bitcoin's price to $1.5M by 2030, following the US SEC's approval of spot ETFs.

• Stacker News adds new feature called Attach Wallet which lets users link an external self-custodial wallet to which they can automatically direct sats received.

• Grayscale sends close to $400M worth of BTC to Coinbase as investors pull funds from GBTC, which can’t compete with spot ETFs’ fees.

• Super Testnet releases Semaphore: a BTC peer-to-peer crowdfunding platform.

• Kanuto launches on Geyser where you can fund and pre-order soft enamel metal ‘🟢🟢🟢🔴’ pins with butterfly clasps.

• Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto is a student book project about the identity of Bitcoin’s creator.

• The Bitcoin Dev Project is a resource for developers to get started in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

• Pleb Book enables you to connect with developers in the Bitcoin community and access a wide range of resources.

• Bitcoin Victoria Falls launches as the first Bitcoin Circular Economy in Zambia aiming to drive financial empowerment and Bitcoin education and tourism.

📽️ QUICK BITS MEDIA

• BlackRock releases Bitcoin ETF commercial for boomers (1:56 min watch).

• Strike Founder and CEO Jack Mallers appears on Bloomberg TV to discuss the impact of the Bitcoin ETF approvals, stating he doesn’t own any dollars (6:55 min watch).

• Swan Bitcoin releases video discussing how two new recent Netflix documentaries misportrays Bitcoin (8:56 min watch).

• Argentinian President Javier Milei trojan-horses the WEF annual circle-jerk fest with his speech at Davos (here directly translated to English by AI, in his own accent) (23:03 min watch).

• Wavform releases the first episode of their new bi-weekly show about music, discovery, and the technology that ties it all together in new and powerful ways (50:49 min listen).

💥 MEME BREAK

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed this week’s issue then please forward it to a fellow bitcoiner and/or consider leaving a donation here.

If you received it from a friend and would like to subscribe, you can do so here:

Until our next transmission,

Naiw

Support independent Bitcoin content and consider leaving a Lightning tip:

[email protected]