It's been an economics-heavy and bitcoin-light week here at The Bent, so I figured I'd brain dump some interesting things that caught my eye over the last few days that show that Bitcoin's fundamentals are only improving.

First up, we have the emergence of a new second-layer privacy protocol proposal in the form of CoinPool, which was dropped on the bitcoin-dev mailing list by Antoine Riard and Gleb Naumenko. The duo believes that this privacy protocol would be able to provide privacy for users in a way that also helps the network scale due to the fact that many users will use single UTXOs. This protocol relies on Taproot so it is nothing but a proposal at the moment. Who knows if it will be implemented in the future, but it's awesome to see very smart people already thinking about this stuff. Moving the ball forward.

This week also saw the long awaited ION protocol from Microsoft go live on Bitcoin's mainnet. Here's a diagram of how it works.

ION is an open-source second layer that is attempting to bring the Decentralized Identifiers to the world. ION leverages Bitcoin by hashing data into the blockchain. This is a very interesting experiment that, if successful, will help aid in developing a healthy fee market. I'll definitely be keeping tabs on this.

This news is a bit old at this point, but I haven't mentioned it here yet. A new mining pool has emerged on the scene in North America, Laurentia Pool. They are looking to provide regionally segregated mining pools for interested users. This is another project I will be following closely as it grows.

Last, but certainly not least, since we're on the topic of mining; hash rate has been rising at a rapid pace after the last difficulty adjustment (-9.29%). So far during this difficulty epoch blocks have been coming in at 8 minutes and 34 seconds. This could be a combination of the rainy season in China, new hardware getting to end users as the supply chain opens back up, and S9s getting turned back on by miners with extremely low energy cost. Right now, the next retarget is looking like it will fall on June 16th and will be a 16.8% adjustment upward.

A very bullish week for fundamentals if you ask me.

Final thought...

I need to witness more sunrises.

Enjoy your weekend, freaks.