Author: maikdezana@icloud.com
“That Would Be The Road To Hell For America.”I will never not enjoy that clip. “Clown world” has become so much more than just a meme. Here in the US, but relevant for Europe as well, we have had two tribes within the energy generation industry that have been at-odds for the better part of the past few decades; oil & gas, and renewables (wind and solar specifically). One side calling for the complete phasing-out of the other. While their opposition is pointing to hypocrisies, chiefly: the heavy reliance on demonized resources in order to develop their operations throughout the…
Adam Back, renowned cypherpunk and creator of Hashcash, made a bold statement on X this weekend, arguing that Bitcoin is poised to replace gold as the ultimate store of value for the next millennium. Back’s remarks reflect his deep-rooted belief in the transformative potential of Bitcoin and its ability to outshine traditional assets like gold.In his X post, Back said:These words carry significant weight in the crypto community, as Adam Back is no stranger to the world of digital currencies. He has played a pivotal role in the development of cryptographic technologies and is widely recognized as a cypherpunk luminary. More specifically,…
Alliance Bernstein (AB), a prominent $646 billion asset manager, has predicted that the Bitcoin and crypto fund management industry is poised for remarkable growth, potentially reaching a staggering $650 billion within the next five years. This forecast comes on the heels of recent developments that have bolstered the outlook for institutional adoption of Bitcoin by Wall Street firms.AB estimates that the current size of the crypto fund management sector stands at approximately $45-50 billion. However, the firm’s analysts argue that this figure has the potential to swell to over $500 billion in assets by 2028. This transformation would signify a transition…
The story of Ross Ulbricht is one that has captivated the Bitcoin community for years – a brilliant young mind, an entrepreneur with a passion for free markets, and the creator of the Silk Road, an anonymous e-commerce platform that operated on the fringes of the internet, has now been officially behind bars for 10 years. To many, it’s a miscarriage of justice. Proof that our justice system was caught up in a sensational story. It sought to punish, not find the truth.Still, Ross Ulbricht’s journey from an idealistic 26-year-old to a prisoner serving a double life sentence without parole, plus…
Earlier today, The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) announced their latest round of philanthropic efforts from their Bitcoin Development Fund. These 15 grants from HRF are focused on worldwide education, Bitcoin Core development, lightning-related DLCs, ecash, and providing developers from repressive regimes financial aid to offset travel costs in order to speak at Bitcoin events across the world, with a noted focus on projects and contributors from Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.The grant program includes seven $50,000 grants, five $25,000 grants, and three $10,000 grants, totaling just over half a million US dollars, or about 19 bitcoin at time…
“Time-series analysis (Stern, 1993, 2000) shows that energy is needed in addition to capital and labor to explain the growth of GDP. But mainstream economics research has tended to downplay the importance of energy in economic growth. The principal models used to explain the growth process (e.g. Aghion and Howitt, 2009) do not include energy as a factor of production.”– The Role of Energy in the Industrial Revolution and Modern Economic Growth, Stern and Kander (2012)If energy is so important to any and every economy, why is it so aggressively avoided in research and discussion? Going further, why such heavy…
BTCPay Server has come a long way since Nicolas Dorier first decided to build out a software project with the goal of obsoleting the payment processor BitPay in response to their actions during the 2017 Blocksize Wars. It has blossomed since then into one of, if not the, most widely used self-hosted payment processing stack for Bitcoin users. It’s not even just small eshop operators and merchants using it anymore, major companies like Namecheap (a domain registrar) and CheapAir (an airline booking company) have shifted over to using self-hosted BTCPay instances instead of centralized payment processors. The software stack is…
It has officially been a decade since Ross Ulbricht, the man behind the popular online marketplace Silk Road, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. His crime: enabling free people to freely trade.In the years since, his case has been a lightning rod for debates about internet freedom, drug policy, and the criminal justice system, leaving a lasting impact on the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency community. As the years roll by, Ulbricht remains in prison, still seeking justice for what he believes was an unfair sentence.In 2014, Ulbricht was arrested and accused of running Silk Road, a clandestine…
Three finalists have been selected for the Bitcoin Alpha Competition, a crowd-sourced campaign to find the next top Bitcoin fund manager. The manager with the most promising approach for generating alpha in the bitcoin market will be awarded $1 million USD in seed capital and announced on the Main Stage of the Bitcoin Amsterdam Conference on Friday, October 13th by Samara Alpha Management. Samara Alpha Management and Bitcoin Magazine PRO reviewed more than 150 applications from traditional finance and digital asset fund managers, and have selected the following finalists: Andrey Aakelyan (Theta Digital), Jaron Abbott (Armor Strategy), and Maximilian Pace…
Casey Rodamor, the creator of the Ordinals protocol and reference implementation, recently dropped a proposal for a replacement to the BRC-20 fungible token protocol: Runes. It took roughly seven hours before basic implementations were live and people were minting tokens. They didn’t draw from a specification, or a concrete design, just a rough blog post vaguely describing the concept. The only concrete part of the protocol idea specified was how to handle token movement and allocations. It is a very simple proposal using OP_RETURN in each transaction to facilitate assigning tokens to a specific UTXO with an output index, a…