1/ Don’t Fear Tether

Whenever Bitcoin has a bull run, naysayers try to cope with missing the boat by rationalizing why it will fail through FUD. Most of these are completely unsubstantiated, but annoyingly persist as negative narratives Bitcoin must fight against.

More from Dan Held

1/ The Price of Bitcoin

- Why price is entirely what matters
- How the price helps build Bitcoin

A thread👇

2/ Marketing viral loop

“A viral loop is a mechanism that drives continuous referrals for continuous growth.

It’s how you drive your existing customers to refer others to your brand, and in turn, get those new customers to tell even more people about you." - @ReferralRock

3/ Most of us heard about Bitcoin in 2013, 2017, when friends and family were talking about the rapid price increase. It’s through this viral loop that Bitcoin grows in adoption.

4/ The price is that signal to folks that Bitcoin is interesting, solves a problem, and that others are recognizing it as a new money. If Bitcoin’s price had stayed at $100 none of us would be here. While there is volatility, we keep seeing higher lows = long term trend upwards.

5/ Satoshi built a viral loop into Bitcoin.

“As the number of users grows, the value per coin increases. It has the potential for a positive feedback loop; as users increase, the value goes up, which could attract more users to take advantage of the increasing value.” - Satoshi

Dan Held
@danheld

1/ [December Bitcoin yield update]

Over the last year and a half, I’ve earned ~1.2BTC with various yield generating services to earn an average of 5% on 30 BTC.

Here’s my journey and how to guide👇

2/ Here are the ways you can earn yield:

Lending (Easiest/most popular)
Yield: 3-6%
- Ledn: https://t.co/4x0YATuQ0v
- BlockFi: https://t.co/90Xtg2cNka

Covered calls (Harder)
Yield: 1-80%
- Deribit: https://t.co/2iQVkXlylP
- LedgerX:

3/ Earning a yield enables you to stack more sats (what I’m doing), or reduce the temptation to sell your coin through earning an income.

The yield you earn comes with RISK!

Below is my current allocation for Dec (will update MoM)

(yellow = changes)

https://t.co/PZwVYs8lFT

4a/ [Nov > Dec Changelog]

- Covered calls: approx. 4 BTC was in $40k 12/28/20 contracts. Those closed without them being exercised (a good outcome for me). However, I was nervous about my January 1/28 $50k contract so I decided to close out my position at a small loss.

4b/ [Nov > Dec Changelog]

- In process of reallocating the 5 BTC (probably will be a lending platform).
- I incorrectly had my Ledn rate at 6.5%, it's 6.25%

Dan Held
@danheld

1/ Satoshi’s Vision™ is a silly endeavor, as it doesn’t matter what it was, we are where we are now. However, those pushing the “Bitcoin was first made for payments” narrative insist on cherry-picking sentences from the white paper and forum posts to champion their perspective.

2/ The following tweetstorm is a categorical repudiation of this tired narrative. Bitcoin was purpose-built to first be a Store of Value (SoV), a thread:

3/ How do we determine Satoshi’s intention? We need to look at his ideology, description of functionality/architecture, timing, and audience. Let's start with how Satoshi describes the problem Bitcoin solves. In his first public comms after the whitepaper, in the first paragraph:

4/ “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.” - Satoshi

5/ He later expands on that Libertarian thought in his other writings:

“[with Bitcoin] we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years.” — Satoshi Nakamoto

Dan Held
@danheld

1/ Bitcoin: a bold new world.

Satoshi published the white paper on 10/31/2008. Right at the moment of peak despair during the 2008 financial crisis. Trust had been lost in a world that ran on trust.

2/ But why October 31st? It certainly wasn’t because Satoshi was a fan of halloween, it must have had a deeper meaning. With all of his actions, he demonstrated a careful precision.

He had been working on Bitcoin for at least a year and a half before publishing the white paper.

3/ “I believe I've worked through all those little details over the last year and a half while coding it, and there were a lot of them. The functional details are not covered in the paper, but the sourcecode is coming soon” - Satoshi Nakamoto

4/ On August 18, 2008 Satoshi registers registers https://t.co/rMWwiEwtxT through https://t.co/Uj8lMr10kB.

Satoshi was ready and waiting to hit the send button throughout 2008. What was so special about October 31st?

5/ I believe that Satoshi published the Bitcoin white paper on 10/31 as a hat tip to the ancient Gaelic festival of “Samhain” which was also the date in which Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to a church door. Both represent an end of the old and the beginning of the new.

Dan Held
@danheld

1/ Why Silicon Valley Doesn't Get Bitcoin

Over the last 12 years of it’s existence, Bitcoin has been misunderstood by Silicon Valley which has led to many cringe worthy moments as they’ve endorsed silly ideas and even worse, scams.

More from Bitcoin

Jordan Eliseo
@JordanEliseo

Agree mate. Well done @ttmygh @profplum99 and @nic__carter on a ripping show. Im obviously in the "gold is superior" camp, though I am long #BTC (tiny position). I thought the best/most interesting point of whole debate was raised by @profplum99 regarding the fact that a 1/n

Exceptional listen on #Bitcoin.

In particular Nic's responses to Mike's aggressive anti-BTC stance.

One dispute with Nic: Even if crypto mail list was best place to announce BTC, if Satoshi wanted fair distribution, surely creating 50% of the supply by Nov 2012 was too fast? https://t.co/e1Hpx4wWOu
— Joseph Skewes (@josephskewes) January 26, 2021

#Bitcoin transaction is never really final, given the energy required to keep the network running, and obviously its scale issues will only grow over time. That said, I actually though @nic__carter "won" the debate as it were, and I was unconvinced by the threat to national 2/n

security or undermining Fed policy angles Mike put forward. Two areas that are super interesting to me. One is the issue of #Bitcoin ownership, and how concentrated it is in terms of a small % of addresses that own most of it (2% addresses > 95% of holdings I think). 3/n

made great point a lot of this is omnibus/exchange related - so exchange or fund - ie @Grayscale holds #bitcoin for multiple investors. That may well be true - but it brings up 2 other issues. One - it proves that #bitcoin doesn't really "work" without 4/n

centralisation - as this implies most people need exchanges or funds (or @Paypal) to buy it. If so, that kills off a major "bitcoin is better than gold argument" - as in reality, gold is way more decentralised (from mine supply to ownership distribution). It also brings up a 5/n

Ted Nash
@Nashy

1/ If, like me, you've been looking at #Bitcoin over the last few years with interest, but you have never really decided which side of the fence you sit on, this thread might be good for you.

This isn't another opinion piece on #Bitcoin , in-fact, it's exactly the opposite. 👇🏼

This thread is a list of resources I have found to be useful and insightful when it comes to understanding the pros and cons of #Bitcoin .

Below, you'll find knowledgeable people 👩🏽‍💻, articles/essays 📝, podcasts 🎧 and videos 📹 about #Bitcoin . Enjoy!

/2 People 👩🏽‍💻

These individuals are valuable to listen to, whilst they are bullish, they justify their stance:

@RaoulGMI
@michael_saylor
@DTAPCAP
@APompliano
@VentureCoinist
@AlexSaundersAU
@danheld
@aantonop
@jchervinsky
@real_vijay
@lawmaster
@LynAldenContact

/3 Resources 🏢

A video library of interviews from various Bitcoin enthusiasts. 👇🏼

https://t.co/CJJvHavSOn

A great guide for new investors to Bitcoin. 👇🏼

https://t.co/fOoSfTlWr5

A portal for people to go from zero knowledge to intermediate level.

/4 Tweet threads 🐦

A great thread on rebuttals from common #Bitcoin queries/criticisms. 👇🏼

https://t.co/tPEpFMMPhH

Why companies are starting to put BTC on the balance sheet. 👇🏼

https://t.co/lL71M1A3NF

“A double-spend broke Bitcoin" debunked.

1/ Fear and Bitcoin.

Whenever Bitcoin has a bull run, naysayers try to cope with missing the boat by rationalizing why it will fail through \u201cFear, Uncertainty, and Doubt\u201d or what we Bitcoiners have nicknamed \u201cFUD.\u201d
— Dan Held (@danheld) January 10, 2021

Lucas Nuzzi
@LucasNuzzi

1\ There is an alarming amount of misinformation (fueled by the media) on what exactly happened to Bitcoin yesterday, and whether funds were "double spent"

Here's everything you need to know 👇

2\ On the 18th, a user broadcast a transaction with very low fees.

When users underpay fees, their transactions gets stuck because miners have more profitable opportunities.

Users are left with 2 options:

a) wait until fee levels drop
b) tell miners they will increase fees

3\ The most popular way to (b) increase fees of an already-broadcast transaction is through a "Replace By Fee (RBF)" transaction.

Put simply, RBF is a copy-and-paste of the original transaction with higher fees and an explicit instruction to favor the new transaction instead.

4\ Nearly a day passed after our infamous user broadcast the original transaction and miners did not include it.

So the user decided to issue an RBF on the 19th with higher fees... but not high enough!

And the transaction was again stuck...

5\ A couple of hours later, the user decided to bump fees up again via a second RBF!

This time around the user paid enough fees.

Dan Held
@danheld

$Emin G\xfcn Sirer$

Emin Gün Sirer
@el33th4xor

Another #FreeLoveFriday. So far, I’ve covered Bitcoin, Mastercoin/Omni, and last week ChainLink and the importance of decentralized oracles. Today, let’s talk about one of the most fascinating projects in crypto - @MakerDAO

Back with another #FreeLoveFriday. Last time, we covered how Mastercoin/@Omni_Layer pioneered digital asset issuance on blockchains. Today, let\u2019s discuss @Chainlink and the vital role it plays in connecting blockchains to the real world. https://t.co/0poYIBtGrt
— Emin G\xfcn Sirer (@el33th4xor) January 22, 2021

In my thread about Mastercoin, I briefly touched on the vital role fiat-backed stablecoins play in crypto markets, but there’s a catch with them:

The counterparty risk of a third-party holding fiat in reserves.

Enter MakerDAO, which set out to create a decentralized, collateral-backed cryptocurrency, DAI, that would be “soft-pegged” to the U.S. Dollar using the power of algorithms. In crypto tradition, its supporters said trust game theory, not operators.

In 2017, MakerDAO published a whitepaper describing a system where anyone could create DAI by leveraging ETH as collateral to create Collateralized Debt Positions. Essentially, you take out a digital USD loan against your crypto.

The game theory of the system is structured such that DAI issuance is controlled to keep the price pegged to $1.00. In essence, it buffers the fluctuations of the underlying collateral to create a synthetic dollar bill.

Project: Lifelog

Started by DARPA in 1999, the goal of Lifelog was to create a database on civilians without their knowledge, and track everything they do.

The project "ended" on Feb 4th, 2004.
Facebook began the exact same day.

The CIA funneled tens of millions into Facebook. pic.twitter.com/r7hwF0v9kh
— Robert Horan (@Robby12692) December 13, 2018