Crypto News
Everyone Needs An Uncle Jim
The recent decision by Wallet of Satoshi to stop serving customers in the United States brings us to a crossroads in the evolution of Lightning’s use as a consumer tool. While it is trusted and custodial, Wallet of Satoshi has been invaluable in giving casual users a functional and reliable tool for small value payments made across the Lightning Network. This departure from serving the US will leave a massive hole in the Lightning toolbox for American Bitcoiners.
Custodial tools are not the ideal type of tool, especially for anything beyond small amounts, but it is impossible to deny they have a place in this ecosystem. They are not for everyone, and certainly not in my opinion for anything even remotely approaching a significant sum of money, but they can be useful when the risks are well understood by users.
This is just a simple undeniable fact of Bitcoin. From a purely impartial economic point of view this is an inevitable reality. Fees will go up if demand for blockspace increases past the available supply. This will price out lower value users and use cases. Do you want to pay a $20 fee for opening a $50 or $100 Lightning channel? Most people will say no. That leaves custodial arrangements.
The problem with that is two-fold. First, you are no longer the person in control of your money. The custodian is, and you have no real recourse except to trust them. If they screw you over there is nothing at all you can do except, if you are lucky, wait and see how things play out in a courtroom. Second, you have absolutely no privacy. Your custodian sees everything you do with your money, every payment you receive, every payment you send, everything. The more that fees go up, the more people are going to be stuck making this compromise due to sheer economic pressure.
The real solution to this problem is adding some form of limited covenant to Bitcoin. Without that, any answer to the problem is simply in one way or another to introduce trust in the form of some entity co-signing transactions, or being a member in a federation custodying coins, or some other relationship where people using a service or protocol must trust some operator(s) to behave honestly.
That frankly sucks. Regulators will continue coming down on those custodians, making more demands for information, more demands on restrictions for what users can do with their money, they will not stop. So short of actually activating covenants on Bitcoin, what can we do?
Make more custodians. PLEBNET, while a mess in terms of privacy issues and not something actually profitable from the business sense, showed that lots of relatively non-technical Bitcoiners actually could handle running a full Lightning node if they devoted the time to doing so. They helped each other find people to peer with and open channels, helped troubleshoot technical issues, and ensured that people maintained a relatively high uptime for their nodes. They showed it could be done.
Who do you trust more with your money: a giant faceless corporation subject to any arbitrary regulation with no feasible ability to dodge around it, or someone you have known personally for years such as a close friend or family member? Personally, I trust the giant faceless corporation more (just kidding).
Lightning has many issues to deal with right now ultimately requiring either as of yet unknown inventive designs, or consensus changes to Bitcoin, that is why something like Wallet of Satoshi became so popular. It addresses all of those issues through economies of scale. One user managing a channel for just themselves can be expensive and uneconomical, but one person managing a channel for many users piggybacking on their node quickly becomes very cheap and economical on a per user basis.
So let’s do that in a more distributed way. Obviously it won’t be as cheap and cost effective as a massive service such as Wallet of Satoshi, but groups of friends, families, and wider social circles all sharing a single Lightning node will make it cost effective enough to be practical if individually owned self-custodial channels are not. There is already plenty of tooling for this available right now: LNBits, LNDHub, Cashu, Fedimint, and probably many more I’m not even aware of. The software to do it exists right now. With Cashu and Fedimint, it can even be done in a privacy preserving way where the operator has no clue which user is sending or receiving which payments.
The government might be able to easily go after a large operation like Wallet of Satoshi to enforce regulations, but how about thousands of people all running small Lightning nodes and serving a dozen or so close friends and family? That’s not practical at scale. It would also look completely and utterly absurd and ridiculous from a public perception point of view. Kicking in Uncle Jim’s door because he was letting grandma use his Lightning node to send and receive payments because grandma would inevitably screw up and lose all of her money doing it herself? Just think through how that would be perceived by the wider public who don’t care or think about Bitcoin aside from the headlines that the media shoves in their face.
The current realities of Lightning are what they are, it’s not ready for self-custodial use at scale unless you are willing to pay the higher economic cost and deal with the added technical complexity. That will change over time, but for right now it’s how things are. It’s more complicated than just downloading a wallet like Phoenix or Breez, but PLEBNET showed that running a full Lightning node is absolutely possible for a dedicated power user. You don’t have to be a developer to use it. As well, node in a box solutions like Citadel and Umbrel made it plug and play, and both of them support LN Bits in their app stores.
Wallet of Satoshi stopping service the US sucks, it was an incredibly useful app that smoothed over a lot of the rough edges of the current state of Lightning without requiring invasive information collection to use it. It will definitely create a hole for American Bitcoiners. Uncle Jim can step in and fill that hole.
This is a guest post by Shinobi. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
Whatever happened to Uncle Jim? Does he not care about lending a helping hand anymore?
The day Bitcoiners have been waiting for is finally here. Donald Trump, the first-ever pro-Bitcoin president of the United States, is officially being inaugurated today, January 20, 2025. After a historic campaign in which he famously turned his stance around and championed Bitcoin and crypto throughout 2024, Bitcoiners are eagerly watching to see his promises come to life.
Trump’s campaign was filled with bold commitments to the Bitcoin and crypto industry: national bitcoin reserves, freeing Ross Ulbricht, making the United States the crypto capital of the world, and more. Today marks the beginning of his presidency, and these promises are expected to roll out in the days ahead.
Bitcoin Magazine is thrilled to celebrate this monumental moment in Bitcoin history by bringing you live coverage of the inauguration from PubKey NYC starting at 10:00 a.m. EST.
LIVE: DONALD TRUMP INAUGURATION | AMERICA’S FIRST #BITCOIN PRESIDENT https://t.co/KuwGYgUukP
— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) January 20, 2025
The livestream will feature a recap of Trump’s campaign trail, highlighting key moments when he voiced his support for Bitcoin. We’ll be joined by well-known leaders in the Bitcoin space, who will share their predictions and debate the potential impact of the Trump administration on Bitcoin’s future.
This celebratory event brings together Bitcoin and crypto community members to discuss, debate, and reflect on what Trump’s presidency could mean for Bitcoin adoption and regulation.
Don’t miss the action—Catch the Bitcoin Magazine livestream coverage on X, YouTube and Rumble starting today, January 20, 2025, at 10:00 a.m. EST.
Donald Trump’s inauguration as the first pro-Bitcoin U.S. president is here—join Bitcoin Magazine’s live coverage at 10 a.m. EST!
Today, the BTCPay Server Foundation was awarded a $25,000 grant paid directly in bitcoin from Unbank, a cash focused Bitcoin exchange, according to a press release sent to Bitcoin Magazine. The grant will be paid out to contributors working on developing new features, open-source payment innovation, and maintenance of BTCPay Server’s Greenfield APIs and codebase.
“Unbank’s support is a testament to the growing recognition of open-source payment solutions in the Bitcoin ecosystem,” said BTCPay Server core contributor R0ckstar Dev. “This grant will help our efforts to enhance BTCPay Server’s capabilities and reach.”
Unbank, which has become a leading bitcoin ATM network with over 830 ATMs and over 30,000 partner locations, is also utilizing BTCPay Server to process bitcoin sell transactions within their app.
“We love using BTCPay Server in our operations,” Emilio Pagan-Yourno, CEO and COO of Unbank. “When customers buy Bitcoin at our ATMs, we rely on their API to batch and broadcast transactions every 15 minutes. Supporting BTCPay Server is not just essential for our business — it’s a privilege to contribute to the FOSS ecosystem that powers financial freedom.”
Last summer, BTCPay filmed and released a documentary covering the use of bitcoin as a means of exchange at the world’s largest Bitcoin conference in Nashville. BTCPay, in collaboration with Jack Maller’s company Strike, enabled every vendor at the conference to accept bitcoin as payment.
The grant will help BTCPay continue to work on open-source payment development.
When the $TRUMP meme coin dropped Friday evening, no one was surprised. Or at least, they shouldn’t have been. He has a knack for jumping headfirst into endeavors he thinks he can make money on, in self-promoting fashion, that often end in disaster. Some of these ventures include Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump University, Trump Magazine, Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, Trump Mortgage, Trump: The Game. Crypto is the next game in town he’s decided to throw his hat into.
I’ve already written articles and talked at various lengths about Trump leaning into the crypto space to earn votes in this past election that in many ways was quite successful. At Bitcoin Nashville this past summer, in an effort to garner support for his presidential candidacy, Trump said some notable things including that America will become “the crypto capital of the planet and bitcoin superpower of the world,” that he would fire Gary Gensler, and that he wants all remaining bitcoin to be made in America (concerning from a decentralized point of view, and highly implausible in reality). He also famously said that he would commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht on Day one, which if he does I will be the first to give credit where credit is due. (For more on this I recommend watching the recent Reason documentary on why Ross should be freed).
Crypto is Donald Trump’s next frontier and combines several things he absolutely loves when it comes to business deals – Quick easy money, self-promotion, America first messaging, and little bureaucratic friction standing in his way. So, what is $TRUMP coin?
It’s built on the Solana blockchain with a total supply of 1 billion tokens. Initially, 200 million tokens are available for circulation, while the remaining 800 million are held by CIC Digital, a Trump Organization affiliate, subject to a three-year lock-up period (which means the Trump family holds 80% of supply…). Following its launch, the $TRUMP coin’s market cap surged, reaching approximately $6 billion. The coin’s price peaked at $33.7. The $TRUMP coin was marketed as a means for supporters to express their alignment with Trump’s ideals, rather than as an investment opportunity, which is hogwash for the pump and dump self-enrichment scheme that he is in my opinion immoral and unethical for creating, and investors (oops, guess we should say “fans”) are stupid for taking part in.
With inauguration on Monday, we’re entering uncharted territory where it’s likely Trump will issue Executive Orders relating to bitcoin and crypto, and now emboldened by the presidency, lack of legal worries, and supporters that I truly believe would be fine with whatever he does. As he famously quoted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”
Some of these actions could be positive for the Bitcoin industry and advocates in the United States. But many of his actions could also equally benefit the broader crypto space that is rife with pump-and-dump scam coins and useless get rich quick schemes for wealthy insiders and people who have lobbied him throughout this last cycle. The pump and dump crypto landscape, his goofy coins and NFT’s, make sense to Trump. In fact, I’m betting he truly believes this is crypto’s purpose, while knowing little about Bitcoin. Trump has repeatedly said he has “fun with crypto” and ended his keynote address at the Bitcoin Conference this past summer by saying “have a good time with your bitcoin and your crypto and everything else that you’re playing with.” Trump’s experience in and views of crypto and bitcoin are around fun and making easy money. But with Bitcoin, many of us in the space are fighting for much more, which includes Bitcoin’s many use-cases as censorship resistance digital currency, digital gold, a medium of exchange to use in self-custody and via privacy preserving tools, a powerful tool for human rights, and much more. This isn’t a gamble for us…it’s the future of money that challenges the dollar and central bank rule.
If Trump really began to grasp this, based on his track record and previous statements on Bitcoin, he’d be quite against this use of Bitcoin. Or perhaps he knows what Bitcoin is at some level, and would rather promote the “fun” meme coins, and maybe Bitcoin as digital gold, but nothing more. He did after all say in 2021, quite clearly, “Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam. I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar.” He added that he wanted the dollar to be “the currency of the world.” (For more on this concept I’d highly recommend following Mark Goodwin and his work on the bitcoin dollar.)
Trump wants you to keep playing with crypto, funneling money to his organizations, but it’s unlikely he’d be a fan of anyone using bitcoin as a competitor to the dollar, circumventing traditional finance or using privacy tools (particularly if you are an adversary or from what he deems a left/woke cause, which perhaps one day he’d classify our nonprofit The Progressive Bitcoiner as). I’ll keep promoting Bitcoin as resistance money, and hope you’ll join me, rather than endlessly gambling on crypto “and everything else you’re playing with.”
This is a guest post by Trey Walsh. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
$TRUMP Coin is nothing more than a way to extract money from the crypto ecosystem.
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