What is Escher hub?
About 83 minutes before these words were typed, Iterative Capital announced the launch on a new on-ramp, Escher Hub. Similar to the recently launched Olympus, Escher Hub takes a leap forward from a UX perspective and allows users to have sats sent directly to their personal wallets, and via the Lightning Network if they so please, in a non-custodial fashion. The type of on-boarding flow that encourages self-custody and true financial sovereignty. Yes, you'll have to cough up KYC/AML information, but this model certainly encourages and enables better practices than some of the leading exchanges today. I imagine that ramps like Escher Hub will be adopted by more technical and high power users at first, but as the public becomes more comfortable with self-custody and knowledgable about its importance and advantages this UX should dominate over time.
Gen Z is on the come up and this cohort of humans is certainly more tech literate than the generations that dominate markets today. It's shocking to me too, but Gen Z is starting to graduate from college and will be entering the workforce soon. It will be interesting to see if they choose to allocate some investable capital (if they have it) into Bitcoin and, if so, how they approach custody of their bitcoin. Will they be more equipped and privy to take on the responsibility of securing their own keys? Or will they fall prey to the siren calls of convenience provided by most exchanges?
Gen Z rant over. Regardless of how that plays out, Escher Hub is particularly cool because the product has the goal of cutting down fiat and bitcoin settlement times while buying/selling bitcoin while increasing buy limits dramatically. Users will be able to buy up to $2,000,000 worth of bitcoin at a time. Pretty insane.
Slowly but surely...
"it’s in every user’s interest that a large number of technical reviewers examine the proposals for possible flaws before they are implemented and before users are asked to consider upgrading their full nodes to enforce the new rules"
— Mike Schmidt (@BitSchmidty) October 23, 2019
Just wanted to echo this call to action from Mike Schmidt and the Bitcoin Optech team. The taproot proposal for Bitcoin Core is in need of more eyes for proper review. If you are interested in Bitcoin, work for a company focused on building on Bitcoin, have been thinking about jumping into Bitcoin development, and are willing to provide some help in this department, lend a hand. Even if you're just a user worried about how the addition of taproot would affect Bitcoin, your critiques can be helpful.
There will be devs leading proposal review sessions starting in early November. Learn more about the initiative here.
Final thought...
Fell down a Patrice O'Neal rabbit hole this week. RIP to a real one.
