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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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Shoutout to The Stacks Foundation for sponsoring this podcast.
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.
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Learn more about Stacks: https://stacks.co/
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Bitcoin Mainchain

It's an interesting time for Bitcoin. With the ETH Merge less then 2 week away, You're starting to see more trivial debates spring up and people fight aggressively on them. A couple hotly contested topics this week include "Bitcoin is NOT digital energy", and Bitcoin doesn't get the love it deserves at the technical level because alt tokens have "bought" academia. As usual, I think these arguments are talking at two different levels, and thus past each other. But it's interesting to watch how these narratives evolve.
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My take: Just focus on the innovation, stupid. Less bitching, more building. Here's what I saw in Bitcoin this week.

• Tadge Dryja joins the Lightspark team. Dryja is the co-creator of the Lightning Network and Discreet Log Contracts, Two huge innovations for Bitcoin. Lightspark has been mum on details about what they are working on but their stated mission is " A company created to explore, build and extend the capabilities and utility of Bitcoin". The founder of Lightspark is a heavy hitter from the payments field named David Marcus, David used to work at Meta and before that at Paypal on payments.
• Block, Jack Dorsey's Bitcoin-focused company is relatively quiet compared to how big and well-funded it is. We know they are working on something called Web5, a DEX, a hardware wallet, and an open-source ASIC Bitcoin miner. They announced the processor they will use in their miner. You can get in the weeds here.
• Spiral, a child company within Block focused on open-source funding for Bitcoin announced a couple new grants. One for work on Fedimint, and one for Lightning.

Stacks

• Stacks 2.1 is the next big upgrade for the network. A blog went out that lays out some specifics from this next release. The biggest changes involve some new Clarity functions, more flexible stacking features and some underlying changes to the blockchain that will open up the possible for mining pools. Its worth a read here.​
• Clarity Camp cohort 4 has officially kicked off. This is Stacks education program teaching new developers the Clarity smart contract language. This is probably the most accessible way to get into Web3 if you are new and want to build in the Bitcoin ecosystem. You can get on the waiting list for the next cohort here.​

Lightning

• NYDIG announces new Lightning accelerator program called "Wolf". Article​
• Alby announces their new Wallet API. Alby is a Lightning wallet that makes it dead simple to integrate Lightning into your web app. With this new API, you can add authentication and payments to almost any app. Alby has a focus on Podcasting 2.0, also known as Value4Value. You know I love this. Link​
• Micropayments at scale is the killer feature of Lightning. One example popped up for the week that shows this beautifully.
  Dall-E 2 is this amazing text-to-image generation AI. You give it a sentence, and it attempts to create a image out of thin air with your description. But it's still in closed beta.
  A builder creator a Telegram bot that will automatically take your input, generate a Lightning invoice for you to pay (was 22 cents when I did it), and once its paid, Will have the DALL-E AI generate an image for you.
  Here's what it made for me with the prompt "A podcast about Bitcoin with a man as the host and Satoshi Nakamoto as the guest." Could use some refinement.

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RSK

• Couple updates on Sovryn. First, They now support direct funding or withdrawal to a hardware wallet. This has been a highly requested feature from their community. Trezor and Ledger are supported out the gate.
  Second, Their is a feature called FastBTC which allows swapping from BTC-to-RBTC in one block time. The limit for this has been increased to 3BTC. More info in the monthly release notes.​
• The latest big network upgrade for RSK should be activating today. Bring some improvements to pegging-out (Getting your BTC off RSK and back to Bitcoin proper), and other nerdy stuff I don't understand. Tweet.​

That's it for this week's edition. ​
Peace!
-Jake

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