Bitcoin is up more than 30% on the year. After a crash alongside equities, it has proved incredibly resilient. There are famous new entrants to the space like Paul Tudor Jones II.
So how can a Bloomberg editor argue the year has been bad for bitcoin?
In this response podcast, NLW argues that most of the arguments are about narrative, not the underlying fundamentals. He presents six reasons why not only has it not been a bad year, but the exact opposite is true:
Richard Myers says the future of ad-hoc mesh networks for SMS messages and bitcoin transactions on your smart phone is here, but it needs the lightning network to succeed.
On today's episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin! you're invited to join Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Adam B. Levine, Stephanie Murpy and special guest Richard Myers for an in-depth look at the past, present and future of 'Mobile Mesh Networking' technology.
Just as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin don't rely on static infrastructure and professional providers, mobile mesh networking allows the creation of inexpensive, high range, low bandwidth and power consumption ad-hoc networks that'll let your phone send text messages or even bitcoin lightning network micro-transactions, even in areas with no coverage.
According to Richard, Bitcoin's lightning network is a what's needed to make mobile mesh networks catch on by bootstrapping on top of the payment routing infrastructure.
"...the Lightning Network currently sends payments from A to B to C and then all those intermediate nodes can connect a small fee if the payment is delivered at the end. All we're doing is saying 'Not [can you send] a payment, but [you can send] a small message. In our case it'd be a SMS message. So you sending an SMS message along with a lightning payment from A to B to C to D, and when D receives that message they return proof that it was delivered and that's what flows back through the network. In the lightning sense, that's your pre-image. It's computed from the message, that's how the nodes are able to collect payment even if they lose touch with the original person who sent it."
But the way the lightning network uses data isn't ideal for mobile mesh. The open source Lot49 protocol is another layer on top of lightning that Richard says is necessary to make it work at scale while using mesh devices as an extremely low-bandwidth TOR-like privacy layer.
"In many ways we're not making a new protocol, we're literally using lightning. Lot49 is custom communication protocol that's optimized for mesh. For example, right now there's a 1300 byte onion that's used to route messages over the internet and that's very important because you lose a lot of privacy... you lose all your privacy... if you were to just send messages over the internet without onion routing.
We're sending over more or less a physical TOR network since it's going from node to node, not through a central ISP who can associate who you're trying to pay. We're also doing it over a low bandwidth network, so if you were sending 1300 bytes it may not sound like much in the age of the internet but we're talking about devices that [have a maximum data transmission capacity of] about a kilobyte a minute so that's a significant amount of the bandwidth that you have [tied up just in the web's onion routing]
So for example with LOT49, we take out the onion and we use the native routing at the mesh device [level] which is optimized for mesh communications. And there's a few other little changes we make like that in order to reduce the bandwidth by chunking up messages... the ultimate goal is to minimize the lightning protocol overhead so that there is more bandwidth available for data... For things like sending an SMS and as bandwidth increases there may be things like internet protocol..."
This episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin features Stephanie Murphy, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Adam B. Levine and Richard Myers. Music provided by Jared Rubens and Gurty Beats, with editing by Jonas.
The stock market has long been disconnected from the underlying economy, but much of what happened this week - particularly the pumping of bankrupt company stocks - suggests that something new is afoot.
In this episode, NLW breaks down three long-term trends suggested by the so-called Robinhood Rally, including:
The “insurgency” aspect of a generation of young professionals who are willing to play the financial game rather than have it be played for them
A totally new force in financial media, which could hit like a wrecking ball in one of the stodgiest, traditional media industries
An embrace of a certain type of cynicism or nihilism when it comes to the values of financial markets
This week on The Breakdown:
Monday | Why War Reporting Is the Right Mental Model for Today’s Media, Feat. Jake Hanrahan
The founder of Popular Front joins NLW for a discussion about protests, media and how the people being covered tend to not reflect divisive politics.
Tuesday | What the Stock Market’s ‘Robinhood Rally’ Means for Bitcoin
The largest 50-day rally in stock market history and even shares of bankrupt companies are up more than 100%. What is going on?
Wednesday | A Vision for Digital Property Rights, Feat. Nic Carter
Most people today look at social platforms like any other private company, but what if we saw them as alternative jurisdictions with a new set of property rights?
Thursday | Why the Fed Keeps Denying Its Role in Increasing Inequality
The Federal Reserve expects low inflation, says rates will stay close to zero through 2022 and keeps lying about the role of central banks in increasing inequality.
Friday | Bitcoin Is More Than an Inflation Hedge
While fears of a “great monetary inflation” have driven the recent bitcoin narrative, other aspects like censorship resistance and peaceful protest matter just as much.
In this audio interview, CoinDesk’s Leigh Cuen and adult content creator Allie Awesome talk about payments and money in the sex industry, especially the trends impacted by the coronavirus crisis. From how porn performers and entrepreneurs deal with Bitcoin Twitter to the ways the pandemic changed our digital sex lives, Cuen and Allie explore what actually drives demand for censorship-resistant systems.
The biggest problem? Allie and other performers and sex workers basically have their digital advertising and distribution platforms controlled by third parties that aren’t responsible to the workers. For example, OnlyFans briefly froze Allie’s account earlier this year. Although she regained access, her distribution conduits remain at the mercy of tech platforms. This is where peer-to-peer transactions come in. Allie said she knows how to use a cryptocurrency wallet and would gladly do so if more customers wanted to pay her directly. The fact is those customers are few and far between.
“To those people who want to come up with a solution, my first question is ‘well, are you paying for porn’?” she said. “I think a lot of people want to make money off of ‘adult’, but they aren’t really willing to invest in ‘adult’”.
Another major issue according to Allie, is an increase in traffic or visibility doesn’t always translate to profits. Plus, many crypto fans see her industry as something they want to profit from, by building their own tech solutions, rather than contribute to experienced performers. Compared to other bitcoin or ether holders, sex workers are even more likely to rely on social networks like Twitter than exchanges like Coinbase, which deplatforms them just like Paypal. Performers require either a high degree of technical skill, to use decentralized exchange (DEX) platforms like Bisq, or a de facto social liquidity network in order to use cryptocurrency without trusting third parties. Allie shares why she is excited about cryptocurrency, even if it’s a challenge to use it for censorship resistance.
While fears of a “great monetary inflation” have driven the recent bitcoin narrative, other aspects like censorship resistance and peaceful protest matter just as much.
A bank-the-unbanked narrative for the digital dollar
It’s Dave Portnoy’s world and we’re all just living in it
Today’s main topic: Why inflation isn’t the only bitcoin narrative that matters.
When bitcoin’s halving coincided with the most aggressive central bank policy of all time, it set a clear narrative framework for bitcoin as an inflationary hedge. This was captured by people like legendary hedge fund investor Paul Tudor Jones, who warned of a “great monetary inflation.”
In this episode, NLW argues 1) that inflation could be a dangerous narrative to focus on too closely due to a number of countervailing deflationary forces, and 2) there are a variety of other narratives that are just as important to bitcoin, including:
The Federal Reserve expects low inflation, says rates will stay close to zero through 2022 and keeps lying about the role of central banks in increasing inequality.
Three Arrows holds more than 6% of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust
New platform for censorship-resistant blogging
Coinbase announces new token potentials as anti-surveillance hodlers flood out
Today's main topic: The Fed's inequality problem
Some key takeaways from yesterday’s Federal Open Markets Committee meeting:
Interest rates are likely to stay near zero through 2022
Unemployment anticipated to average between 9% and 10% during last three months of 2020
Economy expected to contract 4% to 10% this year
No specific discussion of yield curve control
Inflation expected to be 1.0% this year and 1.5% in 2021, lower than Fed target of 2%
According to Chairman Powell, inequality has nothing to do with Fed policy
On this episode, NLW recaps the above and dives deeper on two of the points:
Net inflation stats gloss over specifics, including food prices that have been rising at an annual rate of 17.5%
The Fed’s pronounced role in exacerbating inequality by propping up artificially high asset prices, effectively locking low and middle income households out of the mechanism for economic advancement
Most people today look at social platforms like any other private company, but what if we saw them as alternative jurisdictions with a new set of property rights?
A record week for peer-to-peer exchanges in the developing world
A digital dollar gets discussed in Congress
Previewing the Federal Reserve’s FOMC guidance
Our main topic: A brainstorm on digital property rights
Here’s a radical idea. What if by virtue of the fact that you had put so much time and effort into building a following on social media and filling that following with content you had legal claim to and distinct property rights around your corner of social media platforms?
It’s wild in the context of today’s terms of service, but has significant legal precedent in the world of physical land.
In this new type of deep-dive 20-minute episode we’re calling a “Breakdown Brainstorm,” Castle Island Ventures investor Nic Carter looks at:
The two schools of thought around digital property rights
The historical precedent for squatter’s rights
What the specific example of the USA’s Westward Expansion can teach us
Why this type of approach can be highly economically generative, according to economists like De Soto
How John Locke’s theories provide a moral basis for the argument
Why today’s platforms are akin to anti-democratic feudal lords
How bitcoin provides a model and a mechanism for digital rights enforced on the protocol level rather than by a state or other external actor
