Greetings from Los Angeles!
Lightspark and River Unveil More New Features + Central Banks Interested In Bitcoin
This week, I headed out to Los Angeles, where I met with the Lightspark team, headed by David Marcus, the former President of PayPal, and Kevin Hurley, who formerly worked on Libra — Facebook’s cryptocurrency project.
Lightspark is one of the biggest companies in the Bitcoin space building on the Lightning Network, a payment network built on top of Bitcoin.
At the company’s first ever partner summit — Lightspark Sync — it unveiled a new Bitcoin Layer 2 it has built, plus three new capabilities for the Universal Money Address (UMA) standard it’s created.
Now, with UMA, you’ll be able to send money — bitcoin or fiat — anywhere around the world using the Lightning Network as the payment rails. Essentially, Lightspark has built the PayPal or Venmo for the world.
If you want to send your friend in Mexico $5 worth of pesos, you can simply use your UMA address (read the piece below to learn more) to send US dollars from your account before those dollars are automatically swapped into bitcoin before their swapped back into Mexican pesos on the other end of the transfer — and all of this happens within about 30 seconds. This obviously changes the game as far as remittance payments.
While I understand why some Bitcoin enthusiasts (including myself) have issues with fiat being sent over Bitcoin/Lightning, the technology is impressive nonetheless.
I wrote more about it in the following piece:
Earn Interest In Bitcoin On Your US Dollars
Trusted Bitcoin exchange River, now lets users earn interest in bitcoin on the FDIC-insured dollars they have on the platform.
I wrote more about how cool this is in the following piece:
Central Banks May Soon Start Stacking Bitcoin
A recent report from the Bitcoin Policy Institute featured a number of strong reasons why central banks might start looking at bitcoin as a reserve asset.
I outlined and analyzed these reasons in my latest for Forbes Digital Assets:
Excerpt:
“…it’s important to note that bitcoin is being mined by governments around the world, including those of Bhutan and Ethiopia.
Will some of those Bitcoin mining profits be transferred to the coffers of the central banks of those countries? This remains to be seen.
Maybe some central banks are quietly acquiring bitcoin, while others might be listening to the likes of Dr. Ferranti, contemplating the pros and cons of putting bitcoin on the balance sheet.
It’s hard to imagine that some form of game theory won’t play out when one or two central banks come forward to say they’ve followed El Salvador’s lead in holding bitcoin as a reserve asset, especially if one of those countries is the United States, where a bill has been introduced to create a strategic bitcoin reserve.”
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The European Central Bank (ECB) Doesn’t Understand Bitcoin
Speaking of central banks, the ECB published an anti-Bitcoin paper about two weeks ago.
Because the arguments in the paper were borderline comical, I wrote a rebuttal to the paper for Bitcoin Magazine:
Excerpt:
“The main premise of the paper is that if bitcoin’s price continues to rise, early bitcoin investors — the “early birds” (the authors’ term) — will gain wealth at the expense of the “latecomers.” While this is true if the early birds hold all of their coins to no end, the dynamic is no different with any other publicly-traded asset. The bigger point that the researchers miss, though, is that some of us are both “early birds” and “latecomers.” I first bought bitcoin in January 2018, and I also bought some last week. Did I impoverish myself in this scenario? No, I didn’t. Nor has anyone who has dollar-cost averaged into bitcoin over any period of time. Also, I bought some gold earlier this year. After doing so, I didn’t shake my fist at the sky yelling “Damn all of you who have front run me to gold over the last 5,000 years!” I simply made the purchase in efforts to preserve my wealth in a highly inflationary environment — one that the ECB itself is partially responsible for causing — and went about my day.”
Bitaxe And The Open-Source Bitcoin Mining Movement
I recently profiled Skot, the creator a Bitaxe, an open-source Bitcoin miner that anyone can plug in at home.
His story is massively inspirational. You can read it here:
Why Bitcoin Is Important
I met with an old friend in Los Angeles and she’s recently become inspired to learn more about Bitcoin and to spread the word about why and how Bitcoin is intrinsically linked to human rights.
I created this document as a starter guide for her. Please feel free to share it with friends!
Okay. That’s all. Frank The Tank is still recovering from his red-eye flight home from LA, so he has to go now.
As always, thank you for reading and take it ease.
Best,
Frank
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