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What is up you beautiful people!

This Week in Bitcoin is your homebase for staying up-to-date on everything happening around Bitcoin.
Focused purely on the tech, and builders actually building the shit. No price predictions or philosophy of money.
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I want to get you in, out, and updated as quick as possible.
This week I have 5 sections, covering Bitcoin Proper, Lightning, Stacks, RSK, and Liquid.
If YouTube or Podcast is more your style, hit the respective links.
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Big thank you to our sponsor, The Stacks Foundation.​
If you want to get started building on Stacks and push the mission forward of a user-owned internet with Bitcoin as the base layer. Check the links below.
Learn Clarity: https://start.stacks.org/
Learn more about Stacks: https://stacks.co/
Apply for a grant: https://stacks.org/grants
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Without further ado, let's jump in.

Bitcoin Mainchain

• There are now 1 billion BItcoin wallet addresses in existence.​
• Great article on why Bitcoin needs DeFi. Article​
• New bug bounty program for Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs). This is a new way for Bitcoin Core development to be funded by the masses. Bipbounty.org​
• #WEAREALLHODLONAUT. The latest legal battle with supposed Bitcoin creator, Craig Wright, is starting next month. Hodlnaut is a Twitter user who was critical of Craig in the past, and was slapped with legal proceedings. Last week he put a call out to raise funds. Through that he raised over 47 BTC (Over a million dollars) to fight the legal battle.

Stacks

• Gamma, One of the largest NFT marketplaces on Stacks now offers free Discord bots to creators. Check it out.​
• Alex Miller, CEO of Hiro Systems, hinted at some Stacks-Lightning integrations on Twitter. Hiro wallet support???
• Write-access to Bitcoin. Tycho (from Zest Protocol) wrote an interesting thread on the problem of Bitcoin write-access and thinking out loud out some potential ways the community can think about solution to the problem.
• If you're looking for more in-depth updates into the Stacks ecosystem, Proof-of-Research is the best newsletter out right now for Stacks news.

Lightning

• Lyn Alden has been putting out phenomenal content on the macro-economic environment and how it overlays with Bitcoin.
  She recently put out this great article on the Lightning network. Be warned, Its a beast! You'll be 10x smarter about the Lighting network if you read it though. Article​
• Lightning-enabled podcasting app Fountain released a new update. You'll likely hear me harp about Fountain a lot going forward. Lightning removes so many barriers between creators and their audience to exchange value in a fair and low-cost way.
  Fountain as a podcast app, is one of the best examples i've seen of blending the web2 world with the web3.
  Listen to this weekly update your reading right now, in more detail on Fountain right now.

RSK

• The RSK network will undergo a planned upgrade on block #4,598,500. This is a mandatory upgrade happening in roughly one week. There's a few more technical upgrades happening in this upgrade. The most noteworthy is a change to how the peg-out functions. Peg-out is the way you get your BTC back from the RSK chain to Bitcoin main. Deep-dive into this stuff here.​
• Sovryn hits another ATH in BTC locked. There new Zero lending offering is probably the most interesting thing on the platform right now, and Sovryn is the most interesting thing on RSK. So you'll likely see alot of updates on Sovryn in this RSK section.
  Tweet here on new record.

Liquid

• Blockstream is continuing to collaborate and research on Fedimint. A federated e-cash solution that aims to offer better privacy and spend-ability, with some trade-offs in how easy it is to audit balances. It also exists outside of a blockchain. More info here.​

Side note on Liquid and Blockstream. They get roasted a lot on Twitter for a dead network and being pretentious pricks. These are true at the crypto Twitter level of Bitcoin. Deep diving as I have though, Blockstream does quite a bit on the research and engineering side of things on low level Bitcoin. Things like Bitcoin core and nerdy stuff around there. From my view, Blockstream is more of an extensive of Bitcoin Core development with some fancy experiments on the side.

Drop Apple podcasts, Listen on Fountain. This is an amazing new podcast player with built-in support for Lightning. It makes it dead simple to stream some sats to your favorite creators. They also have some cool features to earn some sats yourself.
Hit that button.

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That’s it for this week’s edition.
Love yall!
Peace
-Jake

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