Greetings Bitcoiner,

Welcome to issue #115 of the Bitcoin Breakdown, where we are grateful that Bitcoin was discovered just in time, as we are approaching a world where interest payments on national debt would soon outstrip even the government’s total tax revenues.

Happy readings! 👽️

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OPSEC FEATURE ARTICLE

The 20 Ultimate Pieces of OPSEC Advice

The unfortunate reality today is that scams, frauds, and untrustworthy characters are always lurking, ready to separate you from your hard-earned sats.

This week we present the ultimate OPSEC guide that everyone needs to help secure their Bitcoin.

Get instant access to this special feature by becoming a premium supporter here.

🏆 FEATURE STORIES

• Parker Lewis of Zaprite in a new piece explores Bitcoin's Exchange Theory of Value, arguing that Bitcoin mainly derives its value through exchange, enhancing its utility as money while facilitating trade and economic activity among participants (Sept 24 | 22 min read).

• Daniel Batten, Bitcoin ESG analyst, argues that measuring Bitcoin's energy use ‘per transaction’ is fundamentally flawed because Bitcoin's energy consumption is independent of transactions, which misleads regulators and environmentalists and distorts the discourse around Bitcoin's scalability in the media (Sept 24 | 3 min read).

• Shinobi critiques Fractal Bitcoin as a misleading project, highlighting its lack of a proper peg mechanism, distorted mining incentives, and the pre-mine structure that benefits insiders at the expense of Bitcoin's security (Sept 18 | 4 min read).

• Blink publishes a real-life story that emphasizes the importance of securing your custodial Bitcoin wallet, highlighting how using email login and two-factor authentication could have prevented a tragic loss of funds (Sept 19 | 4 min read).

• Alex Bergeron, a chaos maximalist, explores how Bitcoin's future in payments may thrive through the innovative ‘fiatless fiat’ model, leveraging the Lightning Network to challenge stablecoin dominance and promote financial sovereignty (Sept 17 | 6 min read).

• Daniel Ramirez-Escudero of Cointelegraph analyzes how Bhutan's $750M revenue from Bitcoin mining presents a compelling model for developing nations, showcasing the potential for economic growth through Bitcoin adoption (Sept 20 | 8 min read).

• Che Kohler of The Bitcoin Manual reviews the Braiins Mini Miner, a compact, energy-efficient, and user-friendly Bitcoin mining device designed for hobbyists and beginners, offering an affordable entry point into pleb mining with minimal setup (Sept 21 | 5 min read).

• Orangesurf, researcher at mempool research, provides a data-driven analysis of Bitcoin merge mining, examining its historical adoption, trends, and impact across different mining pools, revealing a decline in its use since its peak in 2020 (Sept 20 | 4 min read).

• Leo Schwartz of Fortune writes how Thomas Pacchia, owner of PubKey, made history by selling Donald Trump a burger using Bitcoin, marking a significant moment in Bitcoin and political culture (Sept 21 | 4 min read).

• Kane McGukin of The Mesh Point explores how the revolution of money, driven by Bitcoin, AI, and Information Theory, will reshape economies and unlock exponential growth by integrating value, information, and energy into networked systems (Sept 5 | 8 min read).

• Benjamin Funk of venture firm Archetype writes that Bitcoin's development has moved through significant technological and cultural evolutions and now has the ability to support complex transactions and create tokens and other programmable financial instruments directly on its blockchain through BitVM (Sept 17 | 16 min read).

• Brady Noah of ‘What is Bitcoin?’ explores the emerging debate between Bitcoin and real estate, highlighting Bitcoin's superior qualities of scarcity, divisibility, and durability that make it a more effective long-term investment for capital preservation (Sept 16 | 10 min read).

• 0xB10C, Bitcoin developer and observer, explores the extent of mining pool centralization in Bitcoin by examining the similarity of block templates published by various pools, highlighting potential proxy pooling relationships and the impact on network hash rate distribution (Sept 16 | 11 min read).

• Tom Honzik, technical director at Unchained, explains the importance of understanding Bitcoin keys, detailing their cryptographic function, creation process, and storage methods to help users secure their Bitcoin and minimize custodial risks (Sept 20 | 7 min read).

POLL

OTHER NEWSLETTERS TO CHECK OUT*

*You can find more here.

🛠️ TOOLS & PROJECTS

• Ashigaru is a new fork of Samourai wallet, offering a self custodial, open source and secure Bitcoin wallet that is private by design.

• Second, the company that is building tools to help people integrate Ark, the new scaling protocol for Bitcoin, demonstrates the first Ark transactions on Bitcoin Mainnet.

• BOLT12 officially merges into the Lightning Specification, streamlining payments, improving privacy, and enabling innovative use cases such as subscriptions and advanced payment conditions.

• Alby launches Alby Go, their iOS and Android open-source mobile app that enables users to send and receive bitcoin instantly over the Lightning Network, directly from their own nodes.

• Airbtc, a Bitcoin-only property booking platform, introduces Nostr identity verification, marking a leap in enhancing privacy and security in digital property bookings.

• Nomad Network enables off-grid, resilient mesh communication with strong encryption, forward secrecy and extreme privacy.

• Cypherpunk Tools is a website with a list of OPSEC tools hosted by Mynymbox, a company that offers privacy friendly server hosting solutions, anonymous domain name registrations and DNS parking.

• Swapmarket is an alternative Web App frontend for multiple Boltz backends.

• Speed Wallet launches a swap feature that enables you to swap between Bitcoin & USDT-L.

• Lightning Bounties LLC rewards software developers instantly with bitcoin for their contributions in the tech community.

• Voltz Bet enables betting for the 2024 American Elections built on the Lightning Network.

• Nostrize is a browser extension that integrates websites with Nostr.

• Sats.mobi is a Lightning wallet on Telegram with built-in point-of-sale functionality, Scrub function, and NFC card management.

💥MEME BREAK

AFFILIATES & REFERRALS

• Adopting Bitcoin El Salvador 2024: Secure your spot at the premier Bitcoin conference this November and get 10% off tickets with the code BTCBREAKDOWN!

• Start9 empowers you to run your own Bitcoin node while also joining the sovereign computing paradigm, where concerns over privacy, censorship, hacks, and fees practically disappear—get a 5% discount by using the code: BITCOINBREAKDOWN.

• Blockstream Jade is the best hardware wallet for you to take self-custody with—enjoy a 10% discount off of with code: BITCOINBREAKDOWN.

Thank you for reading!

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Until our next transmission,

Naiw

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