E95: This Week in Bitcoin for October 14th, 2022 (Bitcoin, Lightning, Stacks, RSK, Liquid)

[00:00:00] :  What is up you? Beautiful people welcome back to the built on Bitcoin podcast where we cover all the innovation happening across the Bitcoin ecosystem here. We treat stacks, lightning rsk liquid, all of them as first class citizens. If you're trying to unlock coin value and use it as a productive asset, That's what we're covering here. So this is this weekend Bitcoin episode where in 10 minutes or less, I try and get you updated on everything that happened in Bitcoin across all these different ecosystems and yeah, that's, that's it. I am your humble host, Jacob Brown. But you'll see me around this jake Blockchain and without further ado, let's jump in. We've got some ZK rollup on Bitcoin news, some good stuff and lightning defy on stacks and there continued to be some issues on rsk but they're getting worked on. So without further ado let's jump in starting with Bitcoin main chain. So the first thing that was pretty interesting is john light, he goes by light coin on twitter. He released a fellowship to look at the feasibility of CK roll ups on Bitcoin. And through that that fellowship, he produced the report, it came out this week. It's a pretty in depth document. Uh and it just, just the references, there's so much information. Great, great read. Uh if you want to get in the weeds about what that might look like on Bitcoin, I don't fully understand this tech. Um and it does get technical at times, but if you want to see a big building blocks that could be used in the future. It's still pretty early. Fantastic. Fantastic read. So you can read that below or subscribe to the newsletter. Uh they got that first and they can click that link and just read that report so yeah. DK ropes on Bitcoin, that document is fantastic. Alright second. Uh this isn't fully Bitcoin related but it is crypto and I'm gonna put it in that bucket but google and coin base announced the partnership. So google cloud, which is one of the biggest infrastructure players in the game. I think their second behind a W. S they're going to use coin base as their backend infrastructure to handle crypto payments. So they're building their own, they're just going to type into coin base and be able to accept crypto payments like Bitcoin and ether uh for payment of google cloud services. So now we see a huge player, you know, tons and tons and tons of service providers that google obviously offers. They can now potentially if they want to accept crypto in the future and move off of that fiat standard and move into the future. So you know, people feel certain ways about google or coin base but this is a big bullish move for crypto as a whole in my opinion. All right, next up stratum V two code has been released for review and testing if you haven't heard of stratum or just you heard about it as like a cursory thing, You'd be forgiven. I was in the same boat. Apparently it's a Bitcoin mining software for mining pools. So if you have just a mining pool or a mining device at home, you're never gonna find a block and then chances are so incontestably small. And so most people do is they use some software to then route their hash through a mining pool and then you all share in the efforts and you get your program to share what your, your hash is put to the network when the pool finds a block. And so stratum is the most common one used by the most Bitcoin miners. And the V two code has been released to make the software more efficient, I guess the way that it sends messages, it's pretty inefficient and some security and I think some privacy tools are coming online as well. So it's built kind of from the ground up just to be more ready for production and scale as Bitcoin scales where I guess stratum V one was more of uh, you know, hacked together, it gets the job done, but it wasn't built for the purpose that has been used as for the past few years. So it's a big, it's a big announcement in the Bitcoin mining space. Um, and now, you know, and then same last thing with Bitcoin maintain The mining difficulty, just hit a new all time high. So it's now at 35.6 trillion as of October 10 and what that means is that that's the average expected number of hashes that need to be done on the network before a block will be found or a proper hash we found. So 35.6 trillion. Uh So yeah, down market bear market, but you can never tell if you're looking at one stat which is minus hitting the network hash rate and difficulty. All right, so now we'll jump in, we'll talk about stacks. 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Don't wait another month, year or decade, waiting to get involved in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Start building on Bitcoin today. Go to start dot stacks dot org to start learning and building today. All right, thank you to our sponsor. Let's jump into stacks. So most of this is defi related defy on Bitcoin via stacks is definitely maturing and Alex is the biggest defi platform currently on stacks and they just celebrated their one year anniversary. So they went from not being live to Test Net two Main net to releasing a suite of tools from swaps, two pools staking lending and borrowing and now just announced this week but not fully out yet. It's on Test Net is their order book and they're actually renaming it to S. T. S. T. X. D. X. And it's gonna have its own website, its own application will have its own toca nomics separate from the Alex platform that most people on stacks are used to. So if you want to do swaps and trades and lending that will be on Alex. And if you want to do the more order book trading stuff that will be on S. T. X. T. X. That's a mouthful. Can't say that fast. But that's exciting. So you know, we love love to see all these flavors of uh these centralized exchanges coming online closer and closer to Bitcoin. It's only a matter of time between when uh these are fully fleshed out and we can just use this without having to use any kind of like centralized exchange. It's gonna be good enough that we can use those. So uh speaking of Btc defi and lending Zest protocol just announced that they're going on test net next week. So if you haven't heard of zest, they are a on chain Bitcoin lending protocol for institutional bars. So if you want to borrow a big chunk of Bitcoin, you can use this just protocol and a Bitcoin. Hodler's can get yield by giving liquidity to a pool. Someone in the middle will be an underwriter and uh I'm not sure exactly how these things will work in practice, but there's three main pieces, there's borrowers which will be institutions and they'll have to be vetted for their creditworthiness underwriters who will manage that and then lPS that will provide the Bitcoin and they'll get their interest rate back as a yield for their Bitcoin, so, super courtesy. Um I don't think something like this is on any kind of Bitcoin chain yet. At least not this fleshed out. So it's exciting to see Alright, moving on, jumping into lightning. Lightning continues to just be just like the hash rate bear market couldn't tell otherwise if you look at the stats, it hits another all time high, as far as capacity, it's now over the 5000 mark of Bitcoin on the network. Um and one of the big things that came out this week is Danny Kroger is building an open source wallet. So Danny is, was currently at up until recently at cash app. Working on lightning, he also runs one of the biggest nodes on lightning and now he's building a wallet called Tao wallet, that's supposed to be open source, beautiful modular, all the things but super early, that was just a twitter announcement, but I'm putting it here is like a uh placeholder so you can see and look back on this. Alright, another big thing that happened in lightning, there was this very unique taproot transaction that went out. It was a 998 out of 999 multi saved transaction. It caused the network to bug out in some way. And so somehow that transaction couldn't get mind and so things got halted for a little, while I guess transactions were still going through after the fact and a Fix was pushed pretty quickly after that. So within 24 hours it was like, it never happened, but pretty interesting, especially for Bitcoin, which is pretty darn resilient. And then last enlightening River Financial is third leader, one of the leaders in the Bitcoin services space as a provider for if you want to buy Bitcoin, have them be your kind of custodian and kind of be an asset manager in some sense. And so and their fees are relatively low, so they've been running lightning as a node provider, which I guess because I think still pretty early, there's a lot that goes into running an efficient node. You have to have your fees at a certain level so that you actually will get routed uh to be a payment channel and then collect some of that in the middle. You have to keep channels filled up with Bitcoin in some way. Like I got a little more about exactly how it works, but it's pretty hands on to run a very efficient and good yielding like SATS generating lightning channel. And so they now announced a service called River Lightning Services, clever with the name that will handle a lot of that back end for you. So if you want to build an application, your crypto company or application software provider, they'll give you just an api endpoint that you can plug in and all the other stuff will just be handled for you and you can, you can have lightning work on your platform just ready to go. So that's pretty exciting. I like seeing this kind of abstractions where it just makes it easier and easier for a developer or a service provider to just get it done and lightning being super cheap fast instant payment rail. All right, last but not least bring it home rsk if you heard the last week's episode or actually it was the last week's blog post, I didn't do an episode, but uh, they had a payout issue. So the way that rsk works, it's emerged mind chain, you take your Btc, it gets sent over the token bridge and then convert it into our Btc. On rsk to then be used inside the ecosystem and then we want to come back out, you take your R. Btc and then convert it back into Btc and you can go spend it however you wish that peg out issue that peg out function had an issue and apparently it was from there is an update on Bitcoin core where no it's worth flagging the Rsk peg out transaction as invalid for some reason. So as of right now it's still not working um it looks like either have to change Bitcoin core which is unlikely or you have to change the way that this transaction is being labeled in some sense on rsk which from my understanding will require a hard work of a network or at least an emergency network upgrade. I don't quote me on the specifics of how intense that upgrade will be. Um The wording they used was emergency network upgrades. Uh but yeah so kinda shitty like they're supposed to work hand in hand murder mind chain super close to Bitcoin transaction fees go down to the merger mind miners but now things are getting weird with the peg out so you're kind of locked um Yeah and then last little update on rsk they had another network upgrade. They recently announced hop four point oh which was like 23 weeks ago and now hop 4.1 is out and it brings some nerdy stuff that I could tell you but you wouldn't know what it meant. Um, Jason on rpc tracing methods, hard hat development environment, support, rocks, dB storage library. Like some stuff for developers. Probably good, obviously good. That's why they built it. Um but for the average person like myself, I just don't know what that means, but now you're informed so it is a non mandatory upgrade but it does add that functionality. So that's it. That is this week in Bitcoin. It's the things I saw, let me know what you thought about this. What is the most exciting? I love watching the different spaces still super bullish on lightning excited about the future of stacks and uh yeah, also it's hard to find things about liquid. I don't know what they're doing over there. I went to the twitter today and it's just a bunch of them got some conference and that's, that's all the news for the past week. So I don't know, they just talk a lot. Um yeah, that's it. I'm your host, Jacob Brown. I'll see you guys in the next episode. Peace. Welcome to Built on Bitcoin things on. Yeah, but I'll be figure out a way to make it out, make it out dang