Socratic Seminar 7
Announcements
- Respect people's privacy
- Interaction and asking questions are encouraged
- Chatham House Rules
- Pushed discussion on Special Purpose Digital Currency Licensure Bill to next month
- Apply for a Bitcoin job
- Join our telegram group
Geopolitics
- Tom Emmer introduced a bill prohibiting the Fed from issuing a central bank digital currency directly to individuals
- Congress announces hearing on Bitcoin energy use
- Prompted by a letter sent to the House in October by a cohort of national and international climate organizations that argued against the energy usage of Bitcoin and its Proof of Work (PoW) system
- Rebuttal from the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI)
- Arkansas Launches $10k in Bitcoin relocation bonus
- Rio De Janeiro to Allocate 1% of Treasury Reserves to Bitcoin (maybe crypto?)
- Plans to apply discounts to tax payments made with bitcoin
- $87 billion Italian bank to add Bitcoin trading
- Strike Launches in Argentina
- Uses USDT because BTC isn't legal tender
Funding/Bounties
- Jack Dorsey launches Bitcoin legal defense fund
- HRF Gifts 4.25 BTC to Bitcoin projects
- A full bitcoin will be awarded to Jarol Rodriguez, a Bitcoin Core developer working on a new graphical user interface (GUI) for Bitcoin’s main software client
- Four recipients will each receive 50 million satoshis: Togolese human rights advocate Farida Nabourema, Afghan entrepreneur and Bitcoin educator Roya Mahboob, Sparrow Wallet, and Bitcoin educator and author Anita Posch.
- Five other grantees will each receive 25 million satoshis, including Boltz Exchange, Summer of Bitcoin, Exonumia, Blockchain Commons, and Meron Estefanos
- 1 BTC grant from Wasabi Wallet for a privacy-focused Lightning wallet
- ~4 BTC crowd-sourced bug bounty for a show-stopping flaw in OP_CTV
Tech
- Bitcoin OpTech 2021 year in review
- Great overview of technical updates last year
- NFC-based signing devices
- New RoninDojo node presale
- Moxie's thoughts on Web3
- OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY (BIP-119)
- Learn more about OP_CTV: utxos.org
- MuSig2: Multisig with Schnorr
- Experimental Musig2 implementation in Python
Mining
- New Bitcoin hashrate all-time high
- ~207 exahash/second
- Bitcoin miners produced more USD revenue in 2021 than they did in 2018, 2019, and 2020 combined
- Impact of Kazakhstan internet outage on Bitcoin mining
- Incumbent government leaders shut down internet in attempt to quell protest/dissent
- Many estimate that the country is home to ~18% of the hashrate dedicated to the Bitcoin network
- Block commits to building open Bitcoin mining system (based on October announcement)
- Two different solo miners discover blocks within a couple days of one another
Economics/Finance
- Headline CPI for December came in at just over 7%, a 40-year high
- Bitcoin is half of Bill Miller's portfolio
- Fidelity adds Bitcoin exposure to traditional ETFs
- NASDAQ-listed blockchain firm BTCS will pay dividend in Bitcoin (a first for US markets)
- San Diego State University is now openly accepting bitcoin donations
- Only 1% of the donations will be employed each quarter to explore Bitcoin opportunities for SDSU
Other
- Bitcoin’s 13th Anniversary and Infamous Tweets
