Ep. 122 Well Endowed
On this episode of the Unhashed Podcast, we cover Doge pamping, Tesla picking up BTC, Slush Pool not censoring transactions, Ledn rolling out proof of reserves, another shocking DeFi exploit, and Randy McMillan's noble efforts to make bitcoin more widely accessible.
On Saturday, Bitcoin plebes on Twitter were angry with Elon for saying “Doge appears to be inflationary, but is not meaningfully so (fixed # of coins per unit time), whereas BTC is arguably deflationary to a fault. Transaction speed of Doge should ideally be a few orders of magnitude faster.” Bitcoin twitter was not amused. Doubly so when none other than Snoop Dogg renamed himself to Snoop Doge.
As a result of the Doge pampage, Bitcoin Cash is no longer a top 10 coin due to it being replaced by Doge. Sorry Roger!
“In retrospect, it was inevitable” - Tesla has confirmed that it has purchased $1.5 Billion in Bitcoin. Congrats on your purchase Tesla! ""We hold and may acquire digital assets that may be subject to volatile market prices, impairment and unique risks of loss. In January 2021, we updated our investment policy to provide us with more flexibility to further diversify and maximize returns on our cash that is not required to maintain adequate operating liquidity. As part of the policy, which was duly approved by the Audit Committee of our Board of Directors, we may invest a portion of such cash in certain alternative reserve assets including digital assets, gold bullion, gold exchange-traded funds and other assets as specified in the future. Thereafter, we invested an aggregate $1.50 billion in bitcoin under this policy and may acquire and hold digital assets from time to time or longterm. Moreover, we expect to begin accepting bitcoin as a form of payment for our products in the near future, subject to applicable laws and initially on a limited basis, which we may or may not liquidate upon receipt.
Is Slush Pool censoring transactions? There was a large kerfluffle on twitter this weekend, with @willhash4coins seemingly stating that Slush does not include addresses from the OFAC list in blocks that it makes. ""There are pools out there already that are compliant with OFAC restrictions, Slushpool f.ex. They don’t mine with OFAC addresses."" This was later clarified “Surprised so many have misunderstood this, even people that have been in the space for a while. So before any of you get your panties in more knots...it just means we as a company do not send BTC to OFAC addresses. Deep breaths people. Deep breaths.”
Bitcoin loaning and interest company Ledn.io has announced a $2.7 M financing round and completion of first-ever Proof-of-Reserves attestation for a digital asset lender. Its most recent financing round was led by White Star Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Global Founders Capital, CMT Digital, Kingsway and Darrow Holdings.
According to Coindesk, Yearn Finance has suffered an exploit in one of its DAI lending pools, according to the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol’s official Twitter account. At 5:14 p.m. ET, Banteg, from the Yearn team, posted in Discord: “Attacker got away with 2.8m, dai vault lost 11.1m.” An Aave flash loan was used to trigger the vault draining, according to an Ethereum address presumed to be associated with the exploit. ”Further, Tether announced the freeze of $1.7 million in USDT involved in the attack, according to Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino.
Many of Bitcoin’s most active stakeholders have just about nailed down the activation method for Taproot, the Bitcoin software’s biggest upgrade in years. In a public meeting on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Tuesday, Bitcoin developers, miners, business professionals and enthusiasts hashed out the specifics of how to package the Taproot upgrade into an update – and how to activate it once the code has been shipped. The most active of the 200 or so participants on the chat (mostly, but not all, developers) seemed to agree on the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) that would be used to activate Taproot. To prep the BIP for shipment, they also voted to “merge” two “pull requests” (PRs) on GitHub that outline the rules for Taproot’s activation logic into Bitcoin’s source code when the time comes to push the upgrade. One of these, PR #1021, includes a measure to allow users to force activate the upgrade should miners not support it, while PR #1020 only “recommends” this forcing but does not enable it by default. Since most all participants support BIP 8 without forced activation, as meeting leader and Bitcoin Core developer Michael Folkson noted in the chat, further discussion will pinpoint a date to begin activation – and further discuss the extent to which a “flag day” to force activation is necessary.
Randy McMillan is fundraising on Github to make Bitcoin more accessible. RESEARCH INCLUDES • Bitcoin accessibility for the VISUALLY IMPAIRED • Bitcoin Usability for the DISLEXIA • Bitcoin Usability for the TACTILE IMPAIRED. There doesn’t seem to be any other research like this going on in the space, so consider supporting him at https://github.com/sponsors/RandyMcMillan, to help him reach his modest goal of $1000 per month