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Devs Debate Tech Upgrades to Top Crypto

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Proposed soft forks percolate up from the bitcoiner community. They undergo study and debate, and if they find sufficient interest, get a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) number. From there, they face more debates, security reviews, debates, and also debates. BIPs that win community consensus (whatever that means) must then be activated as a soft fork – a mechanism that itself is up for debate.



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Bitcoin May Hit $100,000 Faster Than Expected

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Follow Nikolaus On X Here

It’s been just over seven days since Trump was re-elected as president of the United States, and bitcoin is up over $18,800 (25.3%) at the time of writing. And it’s currently steamrolling its way towards $100,000.

I cannot lie, this is all happening way faster than even I expected.

$100,000 has, for the last four years, been the magic number Bitcoiners have been laser-focused hitting. It felt like there was consensus among Bitcoiners during the 2021 bull run that we were guaranteed to hit this target. But alas, the 2021 bull run underperformed most people’s expectations, with bitcoin’s price only reaching a high of $69,000 (which in retrospect, was a great run considering the low of the previous bear market was ~$3,000), $100,000 bitcoin was put on hold. But now, we’re almost there.

I feel like the price of BTC loves to do the opposite of what everything thinks it will do. Just when everyone thinks bitcoin is going to rip forever, bitcoin’s price falls or stagnates and vice versa (which is why it might not be so safe to assume we’re going straight to $100,000 from here).

Even I’m guilty of this, as I’ve been telling myself for a long time that the battle for $100k is going to be extremely tough with the amount of sell pressure I was predicting there to be. I think $100k is a number at which traders, ETF buyers, and OG whales may take some profit and that it would be an uphill battle to get there. And it still very may well be, considering we are only at $93,000 currently. But since Trump won the election, there has been practically no sell pressure, and we’re slicing through new all time highs like a warm knife through butter.

Bitcoin is now up over $5,500 (6.22%) today alone. If Bitcoin continues this momentum, we could see $100,000 BTC literally any day now — including even today. Nothing is off the table. Throw all your models out the window, they’re all being broken by the buying pressure from these ETFs and those trying to front-run the U.S. government’s implementing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

Bitcoin is on its path to taking on gold as a legit reserve asset. $100k is the next big milestone for bitcoin to hit along this journey, and it may just come faster than expected.

This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.



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Senator to Push the Bill in Trump’s First 100 Days

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The Senate hopes to push through a Bitcoin reserve bill in the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency while the Republicans consult on crypto policy.

American Senator Cynthia Lummis expressed optimism that plans to create a strategic Bitcoin (BTC) reserve will be implemented soon after Donald Trump‘s inauguration.

“I believe we can get this done with bipartisan support in the first 100 days if we have the support of the people. It is a game changer for the solvency of our nation. Let’s put America on sound financial footing and pass the Bitcoin Act!”

Senator Cynthia Lummis

Lummis’s post responded to David Bailey, BTC Inc. CEO, who has been actively advising Trump on cryptocurrency policy. Bailey had previously suggested that such a reserve could be created quickly under the new administration.

“The Bitcoin and Crypto industry’s policy wishlist is long and pressing… but the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve is the #1 most urgent and transformational policy on President Trump’s agenda. The downstream effects change everything. We must get it done in the first 100 days.”

David Bailey, BTC Inc. CEO

Bailey also floated the idea of ​​using Bitcoin more widely in government programs. He suggested that if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services and assumed responsibility for managing the Social Security program, there would be a discussion about paying 5-10% of Social Security payments in Bitcoin, stored in a strategic reserve.

What is known about the Bitcoin reserve project?

Trump announced the creation of a Bitcoin reserve in the U.S. in July 2024 during a speech at an event supporting his election campaign. A few days before the politician’s announcement, media reports appeared that Senator Cynthia Lummis was preparing a Bitcoin reserve bill called the BITCOIN Act of 2024.

The act proposes creating a network of decentralized vaults nationwide to securely store Bitcoin reserves. The U.S. Treasury Department is supposed to have 200,000 BTC annually for five years, and the U.S. reserves would eventually amount to one million BTC. It is also assumed that Bitcoin reserves will be stored for at least 20 years.

The cryptocurrency can be purchased at the expense of other assets at the authorities’ disposal, such as gold certificates. Lummis proposes to cover the costs of purchasing cryptocurrency by revaluing it.

In addition, the proposal plans to implement a reserve verification system to verify the availability of funds and consolidate all existing BTC that are currently in the possession of the U.S. government into a new reserve.

Bitcoin reserves to make the U.S. new crypto haven

Analysts at CoinShares write that implementing the plan to create strategic reserves in BTC can generate significant institutional and government interest in Bitcoin. According to their forecasts, this will potentially accelerate its growth and raise its value to new heights.

In general, many participants in the crypto community expect that the U.S. bet on Bitcoin can significantly increase the cryptocurrency’s investment attractiveness. For example, Anthony Pompliano, the founder of Pomp Investments, is confident that the initiative will cause the market to experience FOMO.

Lummis’ proposal implies that the pace of Bitcoin purchases may outpace the cost of BTC mining. In this case, a cryptocurrency deficit will form in the market, which can also support the growth of its rate.

Trump’s rally is in full swing. Or just a rally?

In general, Lummis’ words are confirmed based on the dynamics of Bitcoin and the entire crypto market since the U.S. elections. Over the past week, Bitcoin has repeatedly updated historical highs.

The total capitalization of the entire crypto market has grown by 25% in a week and exceeded $3 trillion. At the same time, the price of Bitcoin has increased by 23.8% in 7 days, several times updating the all-time high and reaching $93,000.

BTC reserve is closer than ever: Senator to push the bill in Trump's first 100 days - 1
BTC Price Chart | Source: crypto.news

The crypto market’s index of fear and greed has grown by as much as 14 points in a week—from 70 points to 84 out of 100- indicating the market’s extreme greed.

BTC reserve is closer than ever: Senator to push the bill in Trump's first 100 days - 2
Source: Alternative.me

However, some experts doubted that Trump’s victory was the only growth driver of the crypto market.

Thus, the co-founder of Onramp Bitcoin, Jesse Myers, noted that such crypto market dynamics are routine and predictable after the Bitcoin halving in April. During this time, a shortage of coins has arisen on the market, therefore the price is growing under pressure from demand. This triggers a chain reaction that should lead to another bubble.

Myers reminded that the same situation happened after each previous Bitcoin halving, so it makes sense to expect something similar this time. The change of power in the U.S. to one potentially more friendly to cryptocurrencies only acted as a catalyst.





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ARK

Scaling Bitcoin Practically With Ark Labs

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Company Name: Ark Labs

Founders: Marco Argentieri and Simone Giacomelli

Date Founded: June 2024

Location of Headquarters: Europe

Number of Employees: Six full time

Website: https://arklabs.to/

Public or Private? Private

Ten years ago, just after graduating from high school, Marco Argentieri began his career in Bitcoin.

Some of his earliest work in the industry included helping people make remittance payments using bitcoin. From those early days, Argentieri looked at bitcoin more like a currency and less like an investment, and he helped to make it easier for others to use.

“I had many people that were using Bitcoin because it was like a Western Union without the KYC hurdles, and it was much cheaper back then,” Argentieri told Bitcoin Magazine.

“They were not even interested in bitcoin price or volatility. They were just using it to send money overseas,” he added.

Fast forward to 2024, and Argentieri is still focused on the same mission: helping people to use bitcoin cheaply, easily and privately. Though these days he does this in a more sophisticated way via his company Ark Labs, through which Argentieri and his team develop the Bitcoin layer 2 Ark.

What is Ark?

Ark is an open-source protocol created to help scale Bitcoin. The protocol enables users to amortize the cost of a single on-chain transaction across many off-chain swaps. These swaps occur on Ark’s servers, and they’re most well-suited for Bitcoin users who already operate Lightning nodes.

Ark servers were created to remedy the liquidity constraints of Lightning by allowing users to receive funds off-chain in what are called vTXOs (Virtual Transaction Outputs), which alleviates the need to open a channel and/or receive inbound liquidity. The off-chain system runs on Ark servers, which also enable unilateral withdrawals on-chain.

Ark provides and sources the liquidity for the transactions it facilitates via its servers (instead of relying on peers for liquidity the way that Lightning does). Argentieri embraced Ark as a solution after acknowledging Lightning’s shortcomings.

“Looking at a current scaling solution like Lightning, the developers were idealistic in the sense that they were saying ‘Okay, people should hold the keys, which is a big, big, big step. And plus they also run server and plus they also became very expert in liquidity management and whatnot,” explained Argentieri. “I think that hasn’t been a very realistic assumption for how people operate.”

Argentieri founded Ark Labs under the pretext that just as most people didn’t want to deal with using bitcoin on their own for remittance payments 10 years ago, they don’t want to become experts in running Lightning nodes to make payment these days.

“Ark tries to build on top of this assumption that there will be specialized people or specialized enterprises that know how to handle liquidity, and that’s what we call Ark servers,” he explained.

“Then you have like the clients — people that only want to send or receive a payment and use bitcoin. They don’t really want to get into all the complexity,” he added.

“Ark starts by assuming that not everyone is a peer, so there will be a liquidity provider on one side and a user on the other side. We acknowledge that this is the natural course of things — even though we may not like it.”

Argentieri, a pragmatist, acknowledges that while the centralized design of Ark might not be philosophically flawless, it is effective.

“The goal again was to have a protocol that starts working backwards from the user perspective and not from an ideal scenario,” explained Argentieri.

“If you think from the user perspective, they really just want to have a user experience that looks like Bitcoin on-chain. With Bitcoin on-chain, you just have a key pair. You just create a simple key and, boom, you can receive,” he added, detailing how Ark works.

A Bitcoin Interest Rate

UTXO owners can serve as liquidity providers for Ark, which Argentieri sees as an opportunity, especially for those in the West.

“In the Western world, we know people really are attached to this concept of yield,” said Argentieri.

“Westerners cannot just hold sats in cold storage and be good with it. They really feel that they’re missing something,” he added with a laugh.

To both obtain liquidity for Ark servers as well as to quench Westerners’ thirst for yield, those willing can become liquidity providers to Ark in exchange for a small fee.

“Ark is really like a way to introduce a bitcoin interest rate,” posited Argentieri. “Ark can be a discovery mechanism for a real true native interest rate for Bitcoin.”

Argentieri described how liquidity providers can share a small percentage of their bitcoin holdings via what he terms a “warm wallet,” a wallet that enables users to hold the keys but that Ark still has access to.

The yield would come in the form of transaction fees via the VTXO model. While Argentieri said that some may look at this as “financializing bitcoin,” he simply sees it as a win-win, a way to help scale while providing a small reward to those who provide the liquidity to help do so.

Scaling Horizontally

While a layer 2 solution like Lightning helps Bitcoin scale vertically, Ark helps Bitcoin scale horizontally, according to Argentieri.

“With Lightning, we set up one address and then two people can do an infinite amount of transactions between each other — but that doesn’t scale,” he said.

With Ark, a UTXO can provide liquidity for an exponential number of transactions compared to the amount of funds in the UTXO. Argentieri gave the example that 100 BTC can provide liquidity for tens of thousands of virtual transactions.

Not only does Ark enable more transactions, but it’s also usable in many of the ways that Bitcoin itself is usable.

“People are very focused on Ark for payments, but the beauty of Ark is that you retain most of the UTXO capability, which means that you can do 95% of things you can do in Bitcoin right now on ARK,” said Argentieri. “You can do multisig and you can open multiple channels with a single address.”

Argentieri also shared that using Ark is nearly as trustless as using Bitcoin, because even if Ark shuts its servers down, you can still get your sats back on-chain.

“If for any reason the server goes away, censors me or goes offline, the whole virtual transactions tree goes on-chain,” explained Argentieri. “This is what we call unilateral exit.”

The Future of Ark

Argentieri said that Ark is hard at work in preparing to bring Ark Node to market, a B2B enterprise-grade offering that Argentieri described as a “plugin for your LND node” that will help businesses with rebalancing liquidity.

At Bitcoin Amsterdam last month, Ark Labs announced a partnership with Boltz to enable off-chain Lightning liquidity management, with the intention of making swaps faster, cheaper and easier via the Ark Node.

Other than that, it seems Argentieri and the team at Ark Labs have a seemingly countless number of new advancements in the works, though, it will take the company some time to roll these out.

“I’m living inside the action, so I wish to release things every week, but engineering takes time, especially when you are the first one doing these things,” he said.

The plan for now is to remain on mission — the latest state of the mission he embarked on ten years ago.

“We can really have a tangible result within the Bitcoin ecosystem,” concluded Argentieri. “People will see Bitcoin payments get better, and we hope to be part of the reason why that will happen.”



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