ROLLUP: BTC Halving is Here! | Worldcoin's New Chain | China ETF Approvals | Solana Chain Upgrades

Thankless Nation, it is the third week of April. It's a special week. This only happens once every four years. I'm talking about the Bitcoin having. David, it is Bitcoin Having Week. How are you celebrating?

Uh I might I'm actually throwing a party now that you're asked. Are you really? Yeah. Yeah yeah. Which while all my friends were like, why why are you throwing a having party party? Yeah, it's a having party, yeah.

No way! What do you do? Like, what do you do?

I'd invite friends over and I feed them drinks.

About Bitcoin

Yeah, talk about me.

money?

Yeah.

Hand out uh the Bitcoin standard. Sabine and Moose.

Well you you know I have a signed copy of the Bitcoin standard by stakeholders. I know you do.

This is a tree stole.

It's addressed to uh uh the shit corner, uh which is me.

Yeah, well uh that that's great. That that's accurate as well. So we we gotta start with that though. We gotta celebrate that because it happens only once every four years. And uh I think this is our second havening as a Bitcoin podcast. So

Bitcoin Parcast, that's right. That's funny, that was actually a slip of the tongue. I did

Bitcoin podcast.

keep it in.

So you're having this party, David, but uh the havening is scheduled to happen on Saturday. The big question I think in everyone's mind is is this going to be bullish or bearish for Bitcoin prices? What about my bags, David?

We got some takes in the uh show to talk about that. Uh Willcoin and OKX are releasing their layer twos. Do we need more layer twos? How will they differ? Will they bring new users on chain? In addition to more layer twos, Kraken is also opening up their own wallet, their beautiful wallet, which I've got my phone. We'll debut that here in a second. Uh what's uh what's the deal about the Kraken wallet? Open source, privacy first, it's great. What else we got talking about, Ron?

Hong Kong, they are front-running the US. They just got their Ethereum ETF, okay? In addition to a Bitcoin ETF, they got an Ethereum ETF. So the question is, does this mean big inflows in Asia? We'll talk about that. And the next Ethereum upgrade is going to make Ethereum wallets great again. They could use a uh an upgrade, I would say. So we'll talk about that. Also, alt restaking is now a thing? Question mark? What is this? Non-Igonlayer restaking?

And then last up, Solana is patching their chain, deployed a patch to uh account for some of the uh transaction spam that's going in. Uh and now Solana is no longer broken. Uh Solana is now fixed, but there is still a roadmap to uh perfect the engineering around the Solana ecosystem, so we'll talk about that and more.

Huh? Search.

Perfection. Perfect, perfection of engineering.

Yeah.

Okay, so uh before we get in, we gotta shout out our friends over at David. Before we get to the prices, though, and and markets, I think we need to spend a minute to talk about the Bitcoin having more.

More halving content.

Yeah, more having content uh on this Bitcoin podcast that you you you've come to appreciate. Um all right, so we are this according to this timer, we are at the time of recording one day until the halving. So does this

is this going to happen on April nineteenth then? By the time people get this episode, will it be having day?

Um I think it actually might depend on where you are in the world. I think only maybe Hawaii is going to have the Bitcoin halving on 420. Everyone else will have it on 419.

Oh, okay.

So I think this happens like uh ten PM like ten and may maybe the West Coast also has it in four twenty two, but I think this happens like ten P. M. Eastern time, uh on Friday tomorrow. Uh today for the time of listeners.

Do we do we need to recap like what the havening ac actually is?

I hope not, but I think we're gonna do it anyways.

Okay, so what is it?

So for every 210,000 blocks, so 210,000 blocks times 10 minutes gives you approximately every four years. The Bitcoin reward for mining a Bitcoin block gets cut in half. The Bitcoin uh reward for mining the first Bitcoin blocks was 50 Bitcoins per block, back when Bitcoin was literally valueless. Um, and then it went from 50 to 25 in 2012, it went from 25 to 12 and a half in 2016, 12 and a half to 6.25 in May of 2020. And now, uh tomorrow and today for listeners, uh it's gonna go from 6.25 down to 3.125 Bitcoin per block.

So this is the fourth one out of you know uh I guess there've been three previous and we have some history. So a question in everyone's mind is what is price going to do? Because everyone knows this is written in the code of Bitcoin, it's been here since inception. Everyone knows what's going to happen. There's always this question of have people front run this? Is the market already priced it in? What's going to happen to price? This is a tweet from Bitwise doing some analysis on this. What what do they say?

They just basically show the returns on Bitcoin for the year after the happening. Um, and so for 2012, it was a whopping 8,800% uh price appreciation. Oh, okay. Is that what we can expect? Sorry, big listeners, you should not be expecting that. In 2016, it was 285%. And then in 2020, it was 550%. So we have yet to have out of three data points, we're about to have the fourth, we are yet to have a bearish year post happening for Bitcoin.

Real con

After the happening, between 285% and 8,839%.

I will say actually, so both 2016 and 2020, which were very strong performer years for Bitcoin, it was actually the year after those years that were the the better of those two years. So in 2016, Bitcoin was up something like a thousand percent. And in 2021, Bitcoin was also up something even higher.

Now people say this this time could be different, of course, because like maybe we maybe we front ran some of that demand. We got a Bitcoin ETF in January, which was a few years. We've never had a Bitcoin ETF before, so maybe it's different in that way. But also there's something that happens in the month following the happening, which is the month we're in. So if you're like a near term one month trader, what has traditionally happened in the month after the happening?

Nothing significant.

Uh in 2012 we were up nine percent. In 2016, we were down 10%, and in 2020 we were up six percent.

And so basically it's saying,

hey, like zoom out, think long term, don't think about like don't buy Bitcoin now because of the happening is tomorrow. Like think about it on like a longer time frame than that.

I mean, you say it's not significant, and I agree, like, but the significance is it's super flat in the month after, right? And then like, so don't expect this to get like immediately priced in. I mean, the market's kind of uh anticipating this, uh I suppose.

Everyone has seen the happening coming. It has been in the code since Genesis.

Yes. Um, all right, so there is something that is actually shipping with this halvening and has nothing to do with the Bitcoin core protocol. So it's not like the the code itself is undergoing any upgrade, but simultaneous with the uh halving is the shipping of Bitcoin runes. What what's the significance of that? Why is why is that happening on the halving?

Yeah, so if you are paying attention to Bitcoin land, runes is like the very hyped thing that is being released. Uh the code, the core, the Bitcoin software for runes is being released tomorrow. This is uh Casey Rodemore, who created Bitcoin ordinals, NFTs on Bitcoin, using Bitcoin as like a data availability layer of sorts, just to inscribe JPEGs on the Bitcoin blockchain. Uh he has since figured out a way to do a very similar thing, creative construction of the nooks and crannies of Bitcoin block space to produce fungible tokens inside of Bitcoin, like enshrined on the layer one. This is not a layer two on Bitcoin. This is not like a sidechain to Bitcoin. This is inside of the layer one, fungible tokens uh using Bitcoin Blockspace. Uh and so this is a very hyped thing in Bitcoin land. This is launching with a havening. Uh, we did a show with Casey yesterday, it came out yesterday. Uh, if you want to learn more about it, um, probably one of the more hyped things that I've heard in the Bitcoin.

I think these are l like more like like the most legit Bitcoin tokens uh idea that uh we've we've seen so far. And w why is uh Casey releasing this on on halving? Just because? Why the hell?

Well,

yeah.

Yeah, why not? So it's nothing to do with he's just uh chose this as a shelling point. Uh very cool. All right. So what about prices on the week? Where are we at on the Bitcoin price?

Down about 10% start of the week, a little bit above 70,000 currently at 62 and a half thousand dollars.

So

Uh thanks to Kraken Pro for these charts, even though they are down.

I wish make them go up.

Yeah, please Kraken, help help us with that. Um I feel like it was a rough week. Look at look at some of these red uh spikes downwards.

That's been a rough couple weeks.

Yeah, it's just like especially over the weekend, there were some spikes downwards. And the question, of course, when we go down. Mostly when we go down. Well people don't ask these questions why we go up.

Go down.