A recent reoccurring theme on Rabbit Hole Recap has been the incredible pace of development in and around Bitcoin in recent months. It's not always easy to keep up with everything, especially in a world filled with so much noise. With this is mind, here's a smorgasbord of things (signal, if you will) that have caught my eye recently:

Privacy

Over the last few weeks, privacy has been on the come up as people like Pierre Rochard and the team at Trezor have been working hard to make their products more inherently privacy-preserving. After the next release, Pierre's Node Launcher will default to Tor support. Making it so users are shielded with a layer of anonymity from the get-go. An extremely important feature for people living under oppressive regimes. It also seems like Trezor is working on integrating Wasabi wallet support for its users, which will make it easy for Trezor owners to CoinJoin their UTXOs from their devices so they can transact with a certain degree of privacy. This is especially good for merchants/service providers who don't want customers/clients following their money on the blockchain or really any self-respecting individual who acknowledges and yearns for their natural right to privacy. Huge ups to these guys for pushing the ball forward.

Robustness

We've touched on Blockstream's Satellite and the ABCore node in this rag in the past (here and here). Both projects aid Bitcoin in its quest to be as robust as possible, making it so users can relay and verify transactions in as many ways as possible. A world in which people have the option of sending transactions via the Internet, a Satellite, a Ham Radio, or a mesh network device is a world in which Bitcoin is an extremely robust, stubborn sunuvabitch that is hard to take down. Being able to verify those transactions on a relatively cheap and portable mass-market Android device accentuates and adds to this robustness. So it's great to see both projects racing forward, iterating, and adding to the optionality Bitcoin users have when interacting with the network. Blockstream pushed out a new update to the satellite a couple of days ago and buzz around ABCore has been growing, with builders integrating it into Bitcoin/LN node launcher apps they're building on Android. Slowly but surely, Bitcoin grows stronger as the humans it has contracted out to keep it alive continue to fortify the system and make it as robust as possible in preparation for a real attack.

Miscellaneous

There are some people out there who still believe that simply holding Bitcoin isn't using Bitcoin. This idiotic idea needs to be squashed once and for all. Just because a UTXO lays dormant for an extended period of time does not mean it is not being used. Bitcoin, if successful, will provide the world with the best vehicle to store value it has ever known. Part of storing, and more importantly, preserving value is not spending all of it. So it is only natural that people will decide to USE bitcoin as a tool to store their wealth.

Speaking of storing value in Bitcoin, we should really push the effort to start mentally pricing things in sats when transacting with BTC. At current price levels, talking in terms of whole bitcoins is an easy mental calculation. As Bitcoin becomes more popular and more widely adopted, the price will rise and these easy mental calculations will become harder. We should preemptively prepare for this by thinking in sats. Always be #stackingsats

Thanks for indulging and enduring my scatter brain this morning, freaks.

Final thought...

Upgraded my monitor this week and, my god, is life different. Big monitors FTW.