Nostr, Nostr, Nostr – Bitcoin Evolution Continues to Thrive – BitTalk #8

by James · March 1, 2023

The latest episode of the BitTalk podcast has provided an interesting insight into the current state of Bitcoin, including NFTs, mining pools, lightning nodes and institutional adoption.

Table of Contents

Quick take

The development of new Nostr apps and use cases, such as a Nostr cloud for privacy and a decentralized store system
The trend of peer-to-peer technology and how it is gaining interest in the Bitcoin community
The simple development at Nostr and the creativity it has triggered
The economics and future of Ordinals in the NFT space
The dominance of mining pools and the misconceptions surrounding their centralization
The distribution of Lightning nodes and the limitations of identifying their ownership and location
The usefulness of Mempool.Space as a tool for data collection and analysis in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Hash rate difficulty and its exponential growth
Profitability of mining with current Bitcoin price
Increase in OTC balances and possible return of institutions to Bitcoin trading
Closure of OTC platform Local Bitcoins and its impact on the market
The difficulty of using exchanges and the growing demand for concierge services in crypto trading.

Reducing transaction sizes for word counts

James started the discussion by presenting the Bitcoin weather forecast and pulling up charts to show Mempool’s total size of transactions by cohort. It indicated a decrease in transaction sizes for Ordinals. However, the team believed that Ordinals would continue to thrive as a protocol, especially when it comes to premium collections.

NFTs and Bitcoin

James also brought up the news of Yuga Labs using Bitcoin for NFTs, which could add momentum to Bitcoin in the NFT space. Nick noted that the economics of the Bitcoin blockchain would not allow for 10,000 mints of a copy of a popular project due to the high costs, but pure art NFTs like Yuga Labs are an exciting prospect.

Mining pools and decentralization

The hosts also discussed the dominance of mining pools, where Foundry has a 33% market share. However, they believed that the noise about centralization was unfounded, as miners could easily switch between pools, and this theme is almost as old as Bitcoin itself.

Lightning nodes and institutional adoption

Akiba shared his conversation with Unchained Monkey, who distributed their collection of 10,000 pieces on Ordinals, a small space in terms of how much is stored on the platform. They also discussed the OTC market, where James noted an increase in OTC balances and suggested that institutions may return. OTC-desk offers a concierge service, which is becoming increasingly attractive to users due to the difficulties of using exchanges that ask for more personal information than banks.

Conclusion

The bite-sized Bitcoin podcast went into more detail on the topics above, so listen to the full podcast to stay up-to-date with all things Bitcoin. Overall, the hosts believed that Bitcoin was still seeing a lot of activity and development, with Nostr bringing fast development cycles to the platform. The podcast provided insight into the current state of Bitcoin, highlighting ongoing developments and trends.