Rabbit Hole Recap: Bitcoin Week of 2021.11.15
11/19/2021 · 110 min · transcript via mlx
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Key topics
— Taproot activation at block 709,632 succeeded; multiple wallets including Muun added support quickly, with Cash App enabling pay-to-Taproot addresses by December 1st.
— Dust UTXO consolidation problem discussed; dust jubilees would require out-of-band payments or mining pool coordination, raising questions about long-term UTXO set bloat and whether Bitcoin can scale to billions of individual UTXOs.
— SEC continues rejecting spot Bitcoin ETF applications while approving cash-settled futures ETFs; officials argue custody concerns justify rejection, though futures products offer less direct Bitcoin ownership.
— Perth Heat baseball club in Australia adopted a full Bitcoin standard: paying players, receiving advertiser payments, selling tickets and merchandise in BTC via Lightning Network, and holding Bitcoin treasury reserves.
— TBDex protocol released by Square's TBD; allows peer-to-peer asset exchange using decentralized identity (DIDs) and verifiable credentials, supporting both KYC and privacy-preserving modes based on counterparty negotiation.
— Tether announced Synonym, a stealth-mode company launching to bring tokens and tether specifically onto the Lightning Network, alongside identity and trust-building primitives.
Market & price signals
— Bitcoin price dumped to $57,640 after Taproot activation, roughly $1.09 trillion market cap (1,735 sats per CUC buck). Block height 710,469; 89.89% of all Bitcoin mined (18.87M BTC). Difficulty adjusted up 4.7% last weekend; next adjustment (November 27) estimated at 2.8% upward. Blocks averaging 9 minutes 43 seconds. Samurai wallet maintains 4,156.04 BTC in unspent capacity ($239.8M). Hash value has moved above hash price, suggesting favorable mining conditions.
Actionable insights
— Avoid trading crypto; IRS seized $3.5B last fiscal year and expects billions more seizures in 2024 as infrastructure law improves agency visibility into crypto transactions; long-term holders avoid tax complications entirely.
— If you hold Lightning channels, monitor dust limits post-Taproot; consider monitoring chaumian e-cash federated models (mini-mint via Synonym) as a lower-friction alternative to on-chain UTXO bloat for smaller payments and privacy.
— Recognize the emerging "destabilization" narrative against Bitcoin as projection; prepare factual counters for family discussions using the lifeboat analogy—Bitcoin solves currency instability caused by central bank debasement, not the reverse.
Episode sponsorships
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— Cash App makes stacking sats easy by offering dollar-cost averaging into Bitcoin, the smallest unit being satoshis (100 million per BTC). The app functions as a full bank account with routing and account numbers for direct deposit, and will enable taproot address payments beginning December 1st. Use code STACKINGSATS for $10 credited to Owls Lacrosse.
— Unchained Capital eliminates single points of failure in custody through their Vault product, a two-of-three collaborative custody multisig wallet where you control two keys and Unchained holds one, ensuring you can always move your sats without intermediaries. Their white-glove concierge package takes you from zero to a thousand "cuck bucks" worth of sats secured in a multisig vault, includes hardware wallets, video calls, and derivation path backup; use code TFTC for $50 off at Unchained.com.
— Compass Mining increases individual ownership of Bitcoin hashrate through at-home ASIC mining services; visit compassmining.io to purchase an ASIC with professional support for electrical setup, pool configuration, and wallet routing. Their team guides you through non-trivial hardware and infrastructure requirements to avoid leaving sats on the table.
— Braiins provides BrainsOS Plus Firmware to maximize ASIC profitability for compatible models; use braiins.com or insights.[braiins.com/profitability-calculator](https://insights.braiins.com/profitability-calculator) for profitability calculators, hash rate stats, difficulty charts, transaction fees, and mining economics. Daniel Frumps' consolidated dashboard solves the multi-tab problem by aggregating hash value, hash price, and other mining data in one location.