Last week’s most memorable moments

Greetings!

The metamorphosis of this email is almost complete. Right now, you’re used to hearing from us twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays.

From today onwards, catch us in your inbox every weekday. 

We’re still diving deep into Bitcoin’s history to help contextualize current events, but there’ll be additional perspectives, new formats and other cool stuff — all backed by insights from Supply Shock host Pete Rizzo, the Bitcoin Historian.

Now, onto this week’s roundup.

Burning legacy

Satoshi once told us to consider lost bitcoins a donation, as they make everyone else’s worth slightly more.

Strategy Chair Michael Saylor has clearly taken that to heart — going so far as to suggest that he’ll burn his bitcoin at the end of his lifetime.

“I believe you should get to keep it [bitcoin], and so if I believe that and I burn those keys, then I have made everybody in the network that much richer and more powerful forever,” Saylor said during a recent CoinDesk podcast.

Everyone else who holds bitcoin has the option to do the same. 

“I mean, you, everybody has the choice to join the network with a dollar, $100 a million dollars, a billion dollars, or $1 trillion right? So, everybody gets to join and we're all in it together from now to eternity.”

“So yeah, that's my legacy.” Saylor is believed to hold at least 17,732 BTC, currently worth $1.54 billion. May his donation be very far away!

Opportunity knocks

The year is 2012. Skrillex’s Bangarang is playing somewhere in the background, and you’re debating whether to see Hunger Games or 21 Jump Street at the cinema.

You decide to scroll Hacker News instead. A new post catches your eye — “Apply with me to YC [Y Combinator] in the next 3 days and change the world.”

It’s Brian Armstrong, pre-Coinbase. “I’m throwing a hail mary here - because desperate times call for desperate measures.”

Armstrong had a prototype, “PayPal for bitcoin,” an open-source Android wallet called Bitbank that let users send bitcoin via email addresses. Y Combinator showed interest, Armstrong said, but he’d deferred the meeting until he’d found a ride-or-die co-founder.

“The killer app will be in disrupting transaction fees that are a tax on every transaction in our economy,” Armstrong wrote. “This is going to be super fucking hard, but the payoff is that we have a non-zero chance of really changing the world in big way. This isn't another photo sharing app.”

He wasn’t wrong. While Armstrong didn’t find co-founder Fred Ehrsam until after he’d graduated from Y Combinator, Bitbank did eventually become Coinbase, which is today a $48-billion stock trading on the Nasdaq. Conviction clearly pays.

Remote work

Legendary Bitcoiners have famously gone to great lengths in pursuit of the network.

Kenya-based startup Gridless is no different: it’s been busy in northwest Zambia, hauling a shipping container full of 120 mining rigs “across bumpy narrow roads 14 hours from the nearest major city,” the BBC reported last week.

The goal was to hook those rigs — which are each making around $5 per day — directly to a hydroelectric power plant harnessing the might of the Zambezi river. 

Bitcoin mining now makes up about 30% of the plant’s revenue, and a revenue-sharing agreement with the company that built the plant means cheap power for the machines and cheaper electricity for locals. 

Increased revenue for the plant has also led to more reliable power for the people that live there — living proof that proof-of-work can turn stranded energy into real-world progress.

"Every day we were wasting over half of the energy we could generate which also meant we're not earning from that to meet our operating expenses. We needed a major user of power in the area and that's where the game-changing partnership with Gridless came in," plant operator Daniel Rea told the BBC.

Game-Start

GameStop gearing up to run the Strategy playbook is a turning point.

Ignore the mixed market reaction. The original meme stock will be the second large-scale firm to attempt an extreme bitcoin buying spree, mirroring Strategy, after Japanese holding company MetaPlanet.

And that includes issuing 0% convertible notes to the tune of $1.3 billion — cash it will use to buy bitcoin — the exact same move that Strategy has perfected over the past five years or so. 

All while GameStop will continue closing its physical stores en masse.

GME initially jumped by about 10% after it announced its bitcoin plan, but then dropped 25% on details of the financing.

All noise. The stock might be a very different beast to Strategy and MetaPlanet, but the three will soon share one common denominator. Forget Denzel, Bitcoin is the real equalizer.

B is for…

In June 2009 — only a few months after the Genesis Block — Stephen Hawking famously hosted a party for time travellers.

Only he wouldn’t send out any invitations until after the party had finished. It was a test: If time travel had been invented some time in the future, then surely travelers would pop in and say hello, no matter how many years had passed.

Sadly, nobody did. But perhaps they were busy working a Bitcoin easter egg into Space Quest IV, an adventure game released in 1991, nearly two decades before the first bitcoin was ever mined.

“So I was playing Space Quest IV last night, and I saw a curious coin in my inventory,” said one Redditor. It was a gold coin emblazoned with a rocket ship and a B symbol that looks eerily similar to Bitcoin’s unicode character, ₿.

As it turns out, the coin isn’t a Bitcoin reference. “The B is for buckazoids. Minted on Xenon and the most common galactic currency but notoriously unstable with wild inflationary and deflationary swings in value,” replied /u/factoredfactorio.

Obviously, Bitcoin fixes this.

— David