E102: This Week in Bitcoin for December 2nd, 2022 (Bitcoin, Lightning, Stacks, RSK, Liquid)

[00:00:00] :  what is up you? Beautiful people welcome back to the built on Bitcoin podcast where we cover everything going on in the Bitcoin ecosystem and that's what we're talking about today. We're talking about new stuff happening across Bitcoin. This is this week in Bitcoin episode so we're talking about main chain lightning stacks, rsk and liquid. We got updates for you so without further ado let's just jump right in. I was kind of a slow week but I got a couple for each category for the most part. So first and foremost on Bitcoin main chain there was one huge announcement that really has big implications which is that stripe the payment processor announced that they're allowing crypto onto the platform. It wasn't just an announcement. They are already have a lot of this infrastructure built and live and they're doing a big big big push into crypto so they announced this new push if you go to stripe dot com slash use cases slash crypto you can see some of what this is doing but they are now allowing just with a simple A P. I. And a little widget on your website, you can connect to stripe crypto where you can accept us D C U S D T. Bitcoin. Either a bunch of kryptos from day one, they can either move from fiat into crypto super easily or you can push from Bitcoin and pay someone in fiat so they're going both ways. They have a huge global network I think there I think that's how the announcement said they're going to be in 100 and 80 countries at launch day and you can push crypto into fiat in 45 currencies, fiat currencies on day one. Um So it's hard to understate how big this could be. They have some partnerships with Magic Eden on day one um which is a big hefty marketplace that's kind of like number two behind open C. So they're really going after trying to be this middleware layer, whether it's an exchange or wallet trying to get people from fiat into whatever token you want to buy or you're on a service and maybe you wanna accept Bitcoin and then you know that converts into U. S. D. U. S. D. C. And your account so you're safe and don't have the volatility. They're handling both sides of it and they handle all the fraud, all the K. Y. C. All that stuff so just abstracted and makes it safe for you the provider but also the consumer. So yeah, stripes a big big big player in the space and the more they have a pretty pretty trusted brand name. So seeing them get this big in the crypto with this announcement is huge this is the stuff that this is like peak build market bullishness right here because a lot of this is gonna be really really helpful when things pick back up. Alright, so that was the biggest news really in the whole the whole update today. So after that one if that wouldn't interest you feel free to just move right along. But one more update on the Bitcoin side. Bitcoin processed. It's 785 million transaction. So although Sam Beckman frauds doing all this, bullsh it uh, and the media has given him puff pieces. Bitcoin continues to do its thing and just produce blocks every 10 minutes. So pretty great to see. All right, next up, we got a couple updates from stacks pretty slow. But two I saw there was two big updates or two big votes that continue to go on right now. One is the stacks, 2.1 upgrade, which I think has about three weeks left on that boat. And then the other is Alex, the defi platform, both on stacks, is doing a vote to change some of their mission schedules and some other small changes to the protocol. Both of those are live right now. And then second, if you're building a startup anywhere in the Bitcoin ecosystem and you want to secure funding and grow faster in this build market stacks ventures is definitely the place to be and their application for the next cohort. The accelerator has until december 15th. So about 12 days left, if you, if you want to apply, so you can check that out at Stax dot a c. All right. Next up we'll move on to lightning where there's quite a few updates, but first a quick word from our sponsor, we all know Bitcoin is for the innovators, the revolutionaries and the builders looking to build a better world for themselves and for the next generation, we also know the saying the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. 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First, there's a new website called lightning privacy dot com And this is a working group of developers and researchers focused on making lightning more private for the long term. So trying to find out things that they can work on and implement the protocol layer to make lightning more secure and private as it scales to the next billion users. So nice to see that uh next up there was an update from voltage, which if we don't know about voltage, you can check them out at voltage dot cloud but they are Lightning and Bitcoin infrastructure, the one of the bigger players when it comes to tooling and offering uh node infrastructure, especially for lightning and so they announced on twitter the ceo and founder put out the road map of what they'll be working on for the next year and a half or so. So I'll drop that in the description below. Alright, next up there's a standard called lightning address and this is a way that you can link a lightning address which is a bunch of strings and numbers that identify your wallet to something more human readable, like an email address. And so there's a standard that is being attached to uh common websites. So for example, cash, cash app might be one where you can do jake at cash dot app when you're inside of a lightning wallet and it would know to send to me and it would just abstract away all the rest of it would be much easier to make sure you're sending it to the right person and not have to copy and paste or necessarily scan a QR code to make sure you're sending it to the right wallet, so it's a standard, it's ongoing. It's getting momentum though, I think as of right now there's about 20 applications that are using the standard, so hopefully that continues to grow because just like how the Q R standard is making it super easy when you're on site somewhere to pay something. Uh it's still pretty hard if you don't have that data to find the right person and know that it's going to the right wallet. So having something like a user name or an address makes it so much more easy to make sure that it's going to the person you need. All right, next up for R S. K, there's one big announcement. They have a partnership with Redstone. So Redstone is a data analytics platform where they provide you api endpoints to pull in on chain data into your applications, which can be used to provide something on your defi platform. But also this is really important when you're doing something like D L C s where you have this two or three multi stage and one of those signers has to be an external data source. So now Redstone and Rsk are partnered and they'll be offering a bunch of that infrastructure to people building in that ecosystem. So that's exciting. See, And then last step with block stream, there was two announcements. One core lightning, which is their version of a lightning node got an update to version 22.11 and it brings a couple updates. There's some speed and performance upgrades and you can also now Uh with one command you can install and uninstall plug ins which I guess was much more cumbersome before and then last but not least the Jade Wallet which is their hardware wallet is going up in price from $50 to 65 so called inflation. Although I think they also mentioned that they're trying to use some more profits to invest in more uh infrastructure and hardware. So it's still one of the cheapest Bitcoin hardware wallets out there that has the functionality that it does. So it's got a camera to scan QR codes, it's got a screen if you want to be offer up QR codes and be able to scan to the device. Um two factor authentication ton. It's it's actually pretty advanced for its price point. The only downside is it only does Bitcoin and liquid assets so if you have more full full fledged crypto person, you still got to go with a ledger, something like that. Alright. And that's it. That is this update of this weekend Bitcoin besides the stripe update which is obviously the hugest, it's been pretty quiet so I think builders are heads down getting stuff done and their way into a knot stuff later on. But uh yeah, so that's it, keep it going, keep it flowing, I'll see y'all in the next episode. Welcome to built on Bitcoin things are but I'll be figure out a way to make it out, make it out.