Rabbit Hole Recap: Bitcoin Week of 2021.03.29
4/1/2021 · 150 min · transcript via mlx
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Key topics
— Coldcard MK3 physical attack discovered: requires physical device access, sophisticated extraction, and vulnerable pre-June 2020 bootloader plus older secure element; newer devices are protected or bricked during attack; multi-sig and passphrases mitigate risk.
— Kentucky signed Bitcoin mining tax incentives, waiving sales tax on energy costs; part of growing jurisdictional competition attracting Bitcoin businesses to US states.
— Strike launched in El Salvador without banking partners, enabling remittance flows and merchant adoption; Bitcoin Beach community expanding adoption infrastructure.
— Azteco added Lightning Network support via LNURL standard for lower-fee Bitcoin vouchers; non-KYC onboarding to self-custody wallets.
— Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley moving to offer Bitcoin exposure to wealth clients; institutional adoption accelerating despite late entry.
— Brink distributed first developer grants: Jesse Posner (Frost threshold signatures), Alexis Fellini (Bitcoin Dev Kit), Henadi Stepanov (Bitcoin Core); Gemini granted $25k to mempool.space.
— Specter Desktop v1.3.0 released one-click Bitcoin Core + Tor setup, dramatically lowering node-running friction for average users.
Market & price signals
— Bitcoin trading at $58,740 on Coinbase Pro; $3,010 (4.9%) below all-time high of $61,760. Market cap at $1.1 trillion. Corporate treasuries holding 1,373,716 BTC (7.36% of supply). Bitcoin at 33.9 ounces of gold; 9.77% of total gold market cap. Block height 677,344; 88.91% of total supply mined (18.67M BTC). Difficulty adjustment in 32 blocks estimated at +6.3% increase (all-time high), with average block time at 9m 24s. BISQ trading at ~11% premium to Coinbase. Mempool at 56,988 transactions; estimated next block fee ~13 sats/vB. Whirlpool liquidity at 1,960.82 BTC ($115.2M).
Actionable insights
— If you hold older Coldcard MK3s (pre-June 2020 bootloader or old secure element), consider adding a passphrase, enabling multi-sig across geographically dispersed devices, and plausibly accepting a $25 discount from NVK for a newer unit; physical security and threat modeling remain paramount.
— State-level Bitcoin mining incentives (Kentucky, proposed North Dakota) and merchant adoption (El Salvador, Azteco vouchers) show real jurisdictional arbitrage; evaluate relocating business or mining operations to favorable regulatory environments or using non-KYC purchase paths via Lightning vouchers.
— Run your own Bitcoin node using Specter Desktop v1.3.0's one-click Core + Tor setup; this removes the verification friction that has historically blocked average users from controlling their own validation and UTXO verification.
Episode sponsorships
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