E91: This Week in Bitcoin for September 28th, 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 all the innovation happening across the Bitcoin ecosystem still has my job and trying to find the founders and interesting tech that's going on all the different nooks and crannies of Bitcoin. So I am your host, Jacob Brown, but you'll see me around the interwebs as jake Blockchain and this is a this weekend Bitcoin episode. So that's what we're gonna do. We got some news on Bitcoin proper, some news on stacks, some big big lightning news and some more stuff happening over on R. S. K. So without further ado, Let's just jump right into this episode. I try and keep you guys updated in 10 minutes or less. So let's get it popping. Uh starting with Bitcoin proper. So last year El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender. They're doing a bunch of stuff with Bitcoin Beach. There's a Bitcoin bond coming, but that's put the traditional credit markets kind of in a tizzy with these other countries getting off of the traditional system. So they've had a bad rating for a while and people are saying that they might default on some of their bonds. So in an act to some, to dispel those myths, they have begun a program to purchase back bonds early if people want to cash them in. So if you have a 2023 bond or a 2025 bond in El Salvador. Uh they'll buy those back for a certain set price. I'm not exactly sure what that means is not really a finance heavy guy. I just kind of like no some of the overview stuff but I just want to put that as lower notes. Think Outside window is a big one to watch for bit corners because if it goes well they can become a shining example of how other countries can you know lift themselves up by their own uh through good decision making and you know leading in the Bitcoin space. So putting that one there. All right next up in Bitcoin land spiral which is the one of the offshoots of block. I can never tell which one's which blocked the main one spout the main one. But it's something that Jack it's one of Jack Dorsey's cos it's Bitcoin focused and they released a Block Explorer. So that doesn't sound that interesting. But apparently a lot of the block explorers that you currently use they take your I. P. Address and some of your data that can get transferred across the I. S. P. Just for browsing the web which is pretty standard. But if you're trying to be really really private um someone could blame data from that sp data. So at least they put you in a geographical location maybe further. So I guess this new Explorer which I'll link below has kind of like the highest grade privacy tools to where it's just not possible to track you at all Using the Explorer. So if you went to a block Explorer otherwise you paste in your Bitcoin address. There's now a link between that Bitcoin address and some of the machine data that it was transferred when you went on to the website. So with this new Explorer, that's the thing of the past. Pretty cool. And then last but not least, I'll just link to in description below to the Bitcoin op tech newsletter, which is like super nerdy in the weeds about Bitcoin core and some lightning. Um, so this is this is a newsletter for people who are watching the Bitcoin core maintainers and like what they're working on week by week by week. So that's uh something up your alley. Hopefully check that out. All right, next up we'll jump into stacks. But real quick, quick word from my 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. The next best time is right now, the same thing applies to building on Bitcoin. If you want to come build with the most active developer community. Building new use cases for Bitcoin and it's time you make the leap to learning clarity, clarity is the stacks, smart contract programming layer, which enables us to work on defi, smart contracts and so much more all built with the safety and security that comes with Bitcoin. Start today by going to start dot stacks dot org Start dot stacks dot org has a five step journey that will take you from complete stacks, novice to teaching new clarity all the way to finding a job with the web. Three stacks startup, don't wait another month, year or decade, waiting to get involved in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Start building on Bitcoin today. Go to start dot stacks dot org to start learning and building today. All right, thank you to the stacks foundation for making this possible. And yeah, so stacks, a few things going on one. They launched a collaborative course on block chains with code academy. So for the Blockchain, Nube doesn't know what it means. They can now uh watch this free course, interact with free course to learn the very basics of how block chains work. So trying to get the educate, the masses on what the benefits are of block chains. Alright, second stacks, 2.1 continues to be worked on. It's coming. I don't think there's a set date yet. The code is still being being written. You can go to the GIT hub and watch as things are getting passed around and you know, what do they call it? PRS reviewed. So But yeah, I dropped a link to an article. This upgrade is a big, big upgrade as far as making Bitcoin more of a star citizen on stacks and making integration between stacks and Bitcoin main chain, much stronger. So something to watch if you're curious about stacks or you're already a stack supporter, you want to see exactly what can you expect. Um from this next one, I'm gonna do a breakdown video soon but there's a ton of good stuff. The one thing that's not here yet is using Bitcoin proper Btc. The asset in a super easy way. It's not gonna come in to one directly but the tools coming to make it easier so it lays the foundation and then last but not least for stacks. BtC names have been going crazy. So decentralized identities. This idea that especially as we're going to a more pseudonymous or privacy focused culture or just having a persistent identity online that you can carry from protocol to protocol and app to app. Dot pdc names is one version of that. So there's E N. S on ethereum, there's dot Btc on stacks. Web five is an initiative put on by spiral or block one of these is gonna win the internet just like how you sign in with google or sign in with facebook. There was something like that. They just carry around the internet and people seem to be snatching up a lot of the more valuable perceived names um and they're putting a lot of transactions on the network. So cool to see. People seems like it's somewhat speculative. They're just trying to get it for the cash out in the future but given current Btc or stacks price, I mean you could buy a dot B. C. Name for like 50 cents. So if you haven't got one yet, get you one. All right coming up now with lightning uh Taro is the biggest news this week by far. So if you don't know what Taro is, it is its taproot and lightning integrated in some way that allows different assets to be carried along the lightning network. So you can carry stable coins is kind of the most common put example. But it could be other assets as my understanding. And so uh the way that taproot works and this is a very broad overview but it's something where Bitcoin has utx sos and you can put more data into those utx owes those transactions and uh have them right along with the Bitcoin asset on lightning. So I don't know the specifics, I gotta do a breakdown that video as well. But Taro code was announced stimulus today. So now you can put up the alpha version of Taro on a test net and see and start to play with what it's gonna look like so early. But Taro could be big, big, big for changing how foreign exchange works. Western Union Remittance is. Um but also just like paying people like you know fiber is great for finding someone who is in a country that has a lower currency or lower, you know living wage and you can get great work done for a cheaper price but there's freezing between two paypal or whatever. Lightning could do that for almost no cost very fast and you can pay them in a harder asset so I'm super bullish for someone creating you know the fiber on lightning and just get rid of all of this stuff so I can pay someone maybe less or maybe more and uh they get more of the money that goes to them which is gonna have a bigger impact so super bullish on Taro, this is exciting to watch. Alright next up there's a there's been some talks about the privacy on lightning, I don't know the specifics of it. There's a new service called Ln proxy that allows you to spin up invoice that then pays a different invoice and makes it more private I guess if you use lightning this might sound kind of crazy but yeah so it allows you to kind of like hide your payment in some way and make your lightning invoice payments much more private. That's cool. And then last one on Lightning Thunder games that's th N. D. R. Games, their Bitcoin first company and you play games and you can stack SATs they lose a new game, their version of the classic solitaire but they have a ton of games so if you haven't checked out Thunder there on android there on IOS I like Bitcoin bounce it's like a reaction time game. Yeah if you have some downtown you're just chilling check out thunder games and you can stack some SATs and just chill. So that's it for lightning. And then last but not least for the week coming up is rsk. And uh more news from Sovereign. So Sovereign has their zero protocol where you take Btc, you convert it into R B T C N R S. K. And then you can lock up the R. P T. R Btc on sovereign in their zero loan protocol and take out a zero interest loan against your R. Btc. So now and that's a protocol. So what that means is that the standards are open and someone else could build different front ends and offer different options uh using those same smart contracts. So someone's doing that, that's called fluid. You can check it out at, let me see here, fluid sats dot com and they're gonna bring a different kind of UI and uh remove some of the steps to get your R. Btc. So when you do a 00 protocol loan, uh it makes you a stable coin in Z. Usd. And I guess there's a couple of steps to get that Z USd into a more favorable stable coin that has more liquidity across the crypto space. So this fluid company that's building on top of zero protocol, it's gonna make it easier I guess to get into a stable coin that you actually want to be in. So something to watch out for. Um I'm also continually impressed by how these open protocols what they actually unlock. So you know, the protocol is just running on the Blockchain and then people can interact with it as they wish and build different interfaces are different value propositions based on that. I think it's going to see that more and more over time. We're just in the first ending of that, but I think it could be huge. Alright. And then the last thing with Sovereign is they've been moving their data infrastructure to graph protocol which is called graph QL. And uh so that allows them to index and access Blockchain data that then gets pushed to the website uh in a more decentralized fashion. I don't know the specifics on graph protocol but they're moving all their infrastructure as far as data feeds to graph and I believe they're coming close to the influence with that integration. So that's pretty cool. Alright. And that's it. You are now updated with the most important things I saw this week in Bitcoin. Uh Yeah, that's it. If you love the show, please do me a favor and listen on fountain fountain dot FM. It's a podcast app and you can send me some stats but maybe you'll get rewarded for listening to podcasts. So it's a lightning integrated podcast app. I think it's the future. It's amazing to use you can you can clip out pieces from this episode. Host them on and people like them, They can send you sets so check out fountain and uh yeah, that's it for this week. I love y'all. I'll see you next episode. Welcome to Built on Bitcoin things on. But I'll be figure out a way to make it out, make it out.