I’m still amazed that individuals in high positions within the financial industry continue to claim that Bitcoin has no value because it doesn’t provide services like a company does. But what does a bank do? It securely holds your money for savings and capital accumulation, offers investment assets to guard against inflation and grow purchasing power, provides access to networks for sending money to family, business partners, or merchants, and, in some cases, facilitates the issuance of new money under specific rules. Nobody argues that these functions are useless, nor that banks have no value. Bitcoin, however, provides all these services—often more effectively than any bank. It offers safer storage for savings and capital accumulation, acts as a speculative investment with an unparalleled track record (outperforming any asset offered by banks over the last decade), and enables money transfers to anyone globally at a fraction of traditional banking costs. Furthermore, Bitcoin’s network handles systemic issuance through mining rewards, which are completely predictable and transparent, unlike the ad hoc and often excessive money printing by banks. So, if banks have value, how can anyone argue that Bitcoin lacks it? In fact, Bitcoin should arguably be valued much higher, given that its services outperform those of banks in all major aspects. Currently, the combined market capitalization of all banks worldwide is approximately $10 trillion, while Bitcoin’s market cap is around $2 trillion. One could argue that Bitcoin is significantly undervalued and, as adoption grows, it could match or surpass the $10 trillion mark based on the superior services it provides. Moreover, Bitcoin has the potential to capture market share from other asset classes, such as gold or real estate. Considering this, it’s reasonable to suggest that Bitcoin’s market cap could easily surpass $20 trillion in the long term. That’s $1M per 1 BTC, which is cent parity with satoshi. This event will likely mark the point of bitcoin singularity, beyond which the valuation of BTC is unpredictable and also loses meaning in fiat terms. We may see a total paradigm shift away from fiat currencies around the world and the start of hyper-bitcoinisation.
⚡️ We're about to reach 10,000 registered and verified users on LN+! Thank you for your amazing work of making #bitcoin #lightning a highly functional, decentralised and reliable network!
Big moves for Bitcoin Lightning in Southeast Asia! 🏮 @Neutron powers Aliniex to bring faster, cheaper BTC transactions to the region. This could spark a new wave of LN adoption:
⚡️ The Lightning Network is a game-changer for Bitcoin, making transactions faster, cheaper, and more private. The Lightning Network is Bitcoin’s supercharged secret weapon:
🟠 If Bitcoin were to reach $1M by the time it's 20 years old (in 4 years) it would need to appreciate on average ~78% per annum: End of Year 2025: $178K End of Year 2026: $316K End of Year 2027: $563K End of Year 2028: $1M
The Bitcoin genesis block was mined 16 years ago. 🫡 An interesting and less known fact about the Genesis block of Bitcoin is that the 50 BTC reward from this block is effectively unspendable. This is due to how the transaction is encoded in the block; it uses a non-standard scripting language which does not include spending instructions, making the initial 50 BTC locked and inoperable. Satoshi didn't even want to premine the first bitcoin block. Another lesser-known fact about the Bitcoin Genesis block is the hidden message embedded within it by Satoshi Nakamoto. In addition to the well-known text from The Times newspaper headline (“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”), the block contains the value 486604799 in its coinbase parameter. This number, when interpreted as a hexadecimal string (0x1D00FFFF), represents the easiest possible mining difficulty for the Genesis block. One final, lesser-known aspect about the Bitcoin Genesis block is that it wasn't actually broadcast to the network in the conventional sense since there was no network at that time. Satoshi Nakamoto mined this block on a single computer, and it only became part of the blockchain when other nodes joined the network later. This means the Genesis block was essentially a solitary event, unique in that it didn't need validation from other nodes to confirm its existence. This underscores the unique, bootstrapped nature of Bitcoin's initial implementation, where the blockchain started from a single point of origin before growing into a distributed network.
🐝 New store in the #bitcoin #lightningnetwork marketplace selling 🍯 #honey: