Upcoming AMAs

• Nico, host of Simply Bitcoin, will be doing an AMA Thursday Jan 5th at 10a CT.
• Lightcoin, product at Sovyrn and HRF research fellow, will be doing an AMA Friday Jan 6th at 10a CT. Lightcoin recently wrote Validity Rollups on Bitcoin as part of his HRF fellowship.

Top Posts

1. @Birkeland reminds us that Bitcoin's social layer is its most important layer in Problems in Layer 0—Social Attacks on Bitcoin. The worst thing that can happen to Bitcoin is people believing - for whatever reason - someone else should control their money. @Birkeland classifies the aggregate attempt of turning people against Bitcoin as a PsyOp.
   • Problems in Layer 0—Social Attacks on Bitcoin
2. Joe Nakamoto, journalist at Coin Telegraph, shared his article about What it’s actually like to use Bitcoin in El Salvador. In summary, it's both better and worse than most of us imagine. Nearly every Salvadoran knows what Bitcoin is, but many don't yet know the difference between on-chain Bitcoin and Lightning. Joe almost paid for everything with Bitcoin in El Salvador, but not quite and it wasn't easy.
   • https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/what-actually-use-bitcoin-el-salvador/
   • SN Discussion
3. Bitcoin's node count is far from all time highs. Currently, the network has 50k non-listening and 5k listening nodes. (Listening nodes are ones that accept connections from peers for relaying both blocks and transactions.) This dovetails nicely with Birkeland's article from last week on (lightning) node UX being too hard. This discussion copied from Bitcoin's subreddit calls upon us to do better.
   • Think Bitcoin is Inevitable? Think Again. Complacency is the Enemy of Bitcoin
4. @Darthcoin has more experience onboarding small merchants to Bitcoin than many of us. Without billion dollar sales and support teams to assist in onboarding, like those at PoS provider Clover, Bitcoin will struggle to compete even if it saves merchants money. The learning curve is steep, particularly with Lightning, and @Darthcoin proposes someone build Liquidity services for merchants.
   • Proposal: create Private LSP (Liquidity Service Providers) for businesses
5. Man, even folks at Forbes are excited about Nostr. They wrote a nice Nostr puffer that doubles as an Elon basher titled Nostr Is The Decentralized Protocol That Might Replace Elon Musk’s Twitter.
   • SN Discussion

Don't miss

• Fountain Rewind 2022
• Lightning Tip Cards
• Strike Commerce Update
• Introducing the Honey Badger Wallet: Safe Self-Custody and Inheritance Planning
• Sending ecash via nostr

Top Meta

• What are you working on?
• 10 random things I learnt about wallets from Stacker News
• Stacker News <> Nostr Integration

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