Nowadays, businesses and individuals are adopting Bitcoin as a method of payment. It's no surprise, given the security, speed, and cost-efficiency associated with it, specially using the LN. However, despite the numerous advantages, Bitcoin still faces challenges in terms of privacy, fees, and scalability.

What is ARK?

A Layer 2 protocol for Bitcoin designed to solve some of the Bitcoin Network challenges, to improve its efficiency, security and scalability. The protocol aims to enhance the functionality of Bitcoin by addressing its current limitations by using a shared UTXO model that enables anonymous, off-chain payments through an untrusted intermediary called the Ark Service Provider (ASP). ASPs are always-on servers that provide liquidity to the network, similar to how Lightning service providers work but without the time consuming opening and close and balancing of channels.

Interoperability with the Lighting Network?

Ark will function as a liquidity network that operates like Lightning, but without introducing liquidity constraints or a direct link between the sender and receiver. It uses virtual UTXOs, to enable anonymous, scalable, off-chain payments. ASPs provide liquidity to the network and charge fees for their services.

ARK will address key issues with deploying capital into the Lightning Network providing a layer that settles transactions without the requirement for a specific infrastructure to remain online, as is the case with Lightning, while still providing assurances of the private custody of funds. How:

• Ark can interoperate with Lightning by attaching HTLCs (Hashed Timelock Contracts) and PTLCs (Point Time Locked Contracts) to a pool transaction. Attached HTLCs live under another shared UTXO called the HTLCs outputs, which expires after four-weeks.
• Ark service providers forward HTLCs to the broader Lightning Network the moment after HTLCs are attached to a pool transaction. This requires Ark service providers to run routing nodes on the Lightning Network with well-established outgoing channels. Ark users can also get paid from Lightning using HTLC-nested vTXOs.

Last but not least, the Ark Service Provider will serve not only as a liquidity provider but as a Coin-Join coordinator and a Lightning service provider.

How does ARK compares with the Lighting Network?

Conclusion

The ARK protocol is an exciting development, addressing many of the challenges faced by Bitcoin Network today. ARK promises to enhance, above all, privacy and scalability, making it a valuable addition to the rapidly growing Bitcoin ecosystem.

_

Sources and recommended watching and reading:

• Ark Whiteboard Masterclass with Burak & Robin - MUST WATCH
• ArkPillMe
• GitHub
• Community Telegram Channel
• ARK video from Bitcoin Miami 2023
• ARK presentation from Bitcoin Miami 2023

Is an asset that tracks the price of Bitcoin.

Why is it considered a game changer?

Institutional investors and wealthy individuals, using large investment firms like Blackrock, Fidelity or Ark among others, will be able to acquire the asset with low risk, since these investment firms are highly regulated. These investors have above 15 trillion dollars invested in these large firms and therefore, it is expected that these firms will allocate at least 1% of their portfolios to it. That will be mean a minimum of $150 billions into Bitcoin, which is remarkable considering the current market cap of the asset is currently $570 billion.

An injection of minimum $150 billions translates in a huge demand for Bitcoin with massive potential for price appreciation.

Current mayor players

Until now, very few large institutions have acquired Bitcoin, examples are Tesla Inc (Nasdaq: TSLA) and Microstrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR), which wrote a document labeled "A summary of some of the key considerations for corporations to keep in mind when investing in bitcoin". The link to the document:

https://www.microstrategy.com/en/bitcoin/documents/key-considerations-for-corporate-investment-in-bitcoin

Let's check the math

Amount of Bitcoins mined per day:

• Bitcoins mined per block: 6.25

• Time in minutes to mine one block (approx): 10

• Minutes in one day: 1440

• Blocks mined per day: 144 -> (1440 / 10 = 144)

• Bitcoins mined per day: 900 -> ( 144 x 6.25 = 900)

After the halving, since the Bitcoins mined per block will be reduced to 3.125, we will only have 450 mined per day.

Bitcoins available for trading:

• Around 4 million across exchanges
• 900 per day injected in the market

Assumptions

• Miners are selling all 900 freshly mined Bitcoins
• Financial institutions will allocate at least 1% of their portfolio into Bitcoin

Assuming Miners sell all 900 every day (which is worst case scenario), this means, that in order for the price of Bitcoin to keep the current price (around $29.4K as I write this article), $26.5 millions are needed in the market to buy those 900 fresh mined every day, $795 million per month, $9.54 billion per year.

Projections in price appreciation

Bear in mind that the projection can't be linear since there are many additional variables to factor in, specially qualitative non quantifiable ones as potential financial crisis, absurd regulations, more ETF delays, governments corruption, wars, pandemics, etc...

In terms of price appreciation, a 15X is plausible, which would rocket the price of Bitcoin to around $441K as soon as the $150 billion are deployed to acquire it.

Now, consider that this is worst case scenario and valid only until the end of this halving (the amount of mined Bitcoin per day will be reduced by half after it), next one is around the end of April 2024.

What happens with the numbers after the Halving?

After the halving, with the current amount of financial energy injected into Bitcoin ($26.5 million), the price would potentially double to around $58.8K, and if 1% of the investment companies applying for an ETF is injected, the math take the potential price of Bitcoin to $882K as soon as that 1% is deployed.

Time frame for price appreciation?

Unknown, but I would assume before the end of 2024, Why? Because the ETFs are being yet again delayed for Blackrock and Fidelity until December 2023 by the SEC (Security Exchange Commission) in USA.

But USA is not the only country where large Investment Companies are applying for ETFs, it is true that the two largest ones are in USA, but there are many more that combined across the world would add up to a massive additional amount of capital injected into Bitcoin.

The first ETF to go public will be in Europe

Jacobi Asset Management, issuer of an equity structure for digital assets in Europe with the first Bitcoin ETF, with a total portfolio of approx. $4.8 billion. Assuming 1% (worst scenario) of its portfolio will be deployed into Bitcoin, additional $48 million would be injected. The launch of this ETF was "July 2023", I will assume this capital will be injected between August and December 2023.

Professional investors can already let them know of their interest in their web site:

https://jacobiam.com/jacobi-ft-wilshire-bitcoin-etf/

Long term impact?

We can divide the long term impact into two arenas:

• Asset appreciation
• Attempts to control the asset

Long terms asset appreciation

As explained before, the more capital is deployed into the asset, and the more time passes, the more valuable and scarce it becomes (one halving every 4 years) and therefore, Bitcoin will continue to appreciate over time by "a lot".

Extrapolate the financial institutions portfolio investment to 5% of 15 trillion dollars, then to 10% and so on. Considering that Bitcoin is the best asset in terms of appreciation of the last 10 years, it is plausible that institutional investors will be eager to put more than 1% of their portfolios into Bitcoin, I would assume that 5% for the most conservative and 20% for the most aggressive will be logical.

You do the math, you will get numbers that will explain why so many financial analyst come with such a high numbers in their predictions of the future price of Bitcoin.

Attempts to control the asset in the long term

Recently I read a post from Chris Blec in X, his post was quite interesting, it reads "Pfizer convinced billions of people to inject a mysterious chemical into their body multiple times but you don't think Blackrock can convince normies that their fork is the real Bitcoin?"

A provocative post which opens the door for debate, one that I am certain is being discussed for years already close doors among the Bitcoin community.

Potential Attack vectors

• Forking Bitcoin into POS: Blackrock or a union of Investment corporations could influence with their resources some key developers and miners to fork Bitcoin into a PoS (Proof of Stake) chain, basically centralizing and controlling Bitcoin. A fork creates a new chain and the users will decide which chain is Bitcoin, users decide by changing their Node into the new chain or not, one Node, one Vote.
• Forking Bitcoin to reduce the block time to 1 minute: With the excuse to reduce the validation transaction time. This will imply many changes that will lead to mining 9000 per day instead of the 900 as of today, reducing the scarcity by increasing the offer and therefore reducing the price
• Forking Bitcoin to increase the block size: This was attempted before, Jonathan Bier in his book The Blocksize War: The battle over who controls Bitcoin’s protocol rules does a decent job explaining the depths of the attack. But in summary leads to centralization of control of the network

Countermeasures

• Education: In my opinion, education is key, those investment funds manage money from wealthy investors, if those investors understand the ethos of Bitcoin and why the asset is so scarce and valuable, they will fight back together with the individual investors for those changes not to be pedaled into the chain. At the end, greed is a very strong motivator and Satoshi understood that perfectly and therefore it is accounted for in the design.

• Awareness: A considerable percentage of the Bitcoin investors are well informed and therefore, fear can't be use as a trigger, as it was the case of the pharmaceuticals and their experimental drugs, the investment companies could use their resources to create campaigns pushing their narrative, but the community will see through that and counter it in the social networks quite fast, in my opinion, in the age of information, the legacy MSM (Main Stream Media) can't easily steer the Bitcoin ecosystem opinion as they could have done with the population up to the 90s, now is a real challenge for them. Proof of that is that they have been fighting Bitcoin with everything they got until now. They short it, talk trash it as much as they could in the legacy MSM, call it rat poison, stated that it will go to zero (while secretly buying it...) and after all that, now they are lining up to buy it and speaking highly of the asset.

• Run your own Node: Bitcoin has endured 14 years of attacks and survived thanks to the community and investors, we need to stay vigilant and protect it, run at least one Node at home, remember, one Node, one Vote.

Can you think of additional countermeasures?

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/226279

Bitcoin Lightning Network protocol BOLT12 is a proposed upgrade to the existing BOLT11 protocol, designed to enable re-usable payment requests, increased receiver privacy, and better censorship resistance.

Background:

BOLT11 was the previous version of the protocol, which has been widely used since its inception. . BOLT12 aims to address some of the shortcomings of BOLT11 and provide a more streamlined experience for users.

Current Adoption:

While BOLT12 is still in the development phase, there have been some early adopters and testers who have already implemented the new protocol:

1. Phoenix Wallet

From version 2.3.1 (Jul 3, 2024), Phoenix Wallet has introduced support for BOLT12, a Lightning Network specification that aims to improve payment requests and receiver privacy. Offers are the Lightning equivalent to a Bitcoin address: it's a reusable, static payment request that can be used for donation use cases, or to easily pay/get paid by your friends. Since BOLT12 is not yet well supported, Phoenix keep displaying a BOLT11 invoice by default.

From version 2.3.3 (Jul 11, 2024) the wallet supports paying BIP353 DNS addresses. It allows users to have a user@domain email-like handle, which are much easier to share with friends or on social networks than a BOLT12 offer

This wallet uses very innovative features and is, IMO, best in class of all the non custodial Lighting Network wallets, from the ones new to the technology to the most advanced.

I always run the “mass adoption test” with a small sample of my family and friends that are not tech savvy and this wallet passed with flying colors, after the installation and without my assistance they managed to use the wallet to receive and send sats.

2. Zeus Wallet

ZEUS Wallet is a mobile Bitcoin wallet and * node management * app that offers full functionalities of a Bitcoin Lightning wallet. It enables users to make Bitcoin payments and manage their Lightning nodes from their mobile device

This wallet does not pass the “mass adoption test” , the test users were not comfortable with the user interface neither understood most of the settings.

For the advance users that manage their own nodes, this mobile wallet is best in class.

Adoption summary:
The widespread adoption is still awaited, as many users and merchants are yet to upgrade to the new protocol.

PROS & CONS

Pros:

1. Re-usable payment requests

2. Increased receiver privacy

3. Better censorship resistance

Cons:

1. Complexity of implementation

2. Compatibility with older nodes and applications which could lead fragmentation

Next Steps:

Many developers are working to improve and implement the protocol ensuring a smooth transition. As the protocol is refined and tested, it is expected to become more widely adopted.

Here the web addresses of few projects actively working on BOLT12:

1. https://ocean.xyz/
2. https://zeusln.com/
3. https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1551/files
4. https://twelve.cash/
5. https://clams.tech/
6. https://www.roygbiv.guide/
7. https://www.ridethelightning.info/
8. https://github.com/gudnuf/bolt12-covenant-zapper
9. https://lampo.devcrew.cc/
10. https://github.com/urza/payto
11. https://strike.me/blog/bolt12-playground/
    12, https://phoenix.acinq.co/
12. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/plasma-core-lightning-wallet/id6468914352
13. https://satsto.me/
14. https://dplus.plus/offer
15. https://x.com/eltordev

For updates, specs or to get involved with BOLT12, bookmark the main website:

https://www.bolt12.org

What are your thoughts about BOLT12?

Did I missed any wallet that has implemented it already?

Which one is your favorite wallet, custodial or non custodial, supporting BIP353 DNS addresses?

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/735926

Bitaxe is an open source ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) Bitcoin miner that has been making waves in the cryptocurrency community. This innovative project aims to empower miners at every level with powerful, efficient, and low-cost mining solutions.

It is a fully open source ASIC Bitcoin miner developed by Skot9000, an advocate for open-source innovation in the Bitcoin space.

With all software and hardware specs available on GitHub, this project aims to provide miners with a transparent and accessible platform for Bitcoin mining.

Pros

1. Open Source:
   The Bitaxe is fully open source, allowing users to access and modify its source code, hardware designs, and build gerbers for PCB ordering.

2. Low Cost:
   Bitaxe offers low-cost solutions for miners, making it an attractive option for those looking to enter the world of Bitcoin mining without breaking the bank.

3. Efficient:
   The Bitaxe series is designed to be power-efficient, utilizing either the Bitmain BM1387 or BM1397 ASICs for SHA256 hashing.

Cons

1. Technical Complexity: Being an open-source project, users are required to be technically savvy to set up and maintain the miner, which could pose challenges for those without experience.

2. Bricking Potential:
   Like any complex technology, there is a risk of bricking (rendering the device unusable) the Bitaxe if not handled properly.

Summary

The Bitaxe represents an exciting development in the world of Bitcoin mining, offering a low cost, efficient, and open-source solution for miners. While it may present some challenges for users who are new to the technology or lack technical expertise, the potential benefits far outweigh these drawbacks. As the project continues to evolve and gain traction, we can expect to see further improvements in performance, accessibility, and innovation within the Bitcoin mining landscape.

Where can I get more information

Go to their Github page:
https://github.com/skot/bitaxe

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/659572

It would be nice if more Bitcoiners , specially the ones with channels start sharing as well in Odysee or other platforms less centralized and totalitarian...

#BTC
#Bitcoin
#Odysee
#Nostr

Most people call it "Hardware Wallet", which is inaccurate since it is not a wallet, it is a "Seed Signer"

Basically it is an electronic device with a simple user interface which guides you to introduce your seed words, once configured, you will use it in combination with your Bitcoin Wallet to sign transactions.

How does it works?

Once you are fully setup, if you try to send funds with your Bitcoin Wallet, you will be prompted to sign the transaction with your "Seed Signer", it will prompt you to introduce a PIN or a password or use a bio-metric identification, once you do so, the transaction will be broadcasted, without it, you will only be able to receive, not to send.

Are Seed Signers safe?

The answer is yes, but some more than others, you have to do your homework and choose wisely, here is a check list. I suggest you follow it before buying one:

• Uses a Chip Secure Element (SE), which is a chip that is protected from unauthorized access and stores confidential and cryptographic data
• It is Air Gap, which means that is physically isolated from unsecured networks, no Bluetooth, no WiFi, no USB connector. Only way to add information is via the user interface and for OS upgrades, a SSD card
• The OS in the device is FOSS (Free and Open Source Software)
• If the company offers a Bitcoin Wallet with the device, it should be as well FOSS
• It is build only for Bitcoin, no alt coins development in their products
• You can acquire the product directly from the company
• You can acquire the product with Bitcoin
• The company will agree to deliver to a PO-BOX or similar
• In case you pay the Seed Signer with a non secure methods which give away your full name and address, ensure that the company has a policy of deleting the client records after a short period of time to ensure your safety. If they get hacked, cyber criminals will know your name and address and probably target you

Any Recommendations?

I will suggest you do your own research and do not trust, verify. I am not affiliated or receive any income from any of the products mentioned below...

My favorites so far (yes, they check all the boxes I mentioned):

• "Passport" from Foundation (link: https://foundationdevices.com/ )
• "COLCARD" from Coinkite (link: https://coldcard.com/ )

If you known of any "Seed Signer" that passes the check list above and I didn't include it, please let me know in the comments, always looking forward to test new products.

Note: Important to understand that devices built with Raspberry Pi don't qualify since they do not pass the Chip SE