Effectively, Bitcoin 2022 was all about layer-2. All about Lightning and payments, from their CashApp sponsors to Robinhood, Strike, Voltage, and everything in-between. I was highly pleased to see this, because we're not getting a SAT standard to percolate without a circular economy, and we'll never have a circular economy without FRICTIONLESS PAYMENTS. That whole infrastructure has to be in place before we onboard the next billion users. As I've said in previous posts, bitcoin's greatest surprise over the next 24 months will be when it becomes less volatile than ALL fiat, because of fiat's inflation, debt, foreign demand, and commodity issues. Most reading this live in financial privilege, so don't realize that in many non-english speaking countries, bitcoin is already more stable than their native currency is year-over-year: Turkey, Cuba, Argentina, Russia, Lebanon, much of Africa and soon the Middle-East after the food crisis later this year destabilizes the place, etcetera. The Euro, Yen, and USD will follow. Shortly thereafter, a credit market will develop around bitcoin globally, as the more stable asset emerges, with better lending terms, and respect as a neutral money that can enforce rules trustlessly. With this, centralized global currencies will become less fungible, and more antagonistic. CBDC's (which don't fix the USD's global problems) will make them even less fungible and more antagonistic. All of this is before the world wakes up and realizes that a globally inflationary monetary system cannot produce an abundance of green energy, but bitcoin can (more on that in a revolutionary post later this week).
We had plenty of misfires too. We had Jordan Peterson still trying to figure things out; Peter Thiel seemingly clueless of the PoS layer (LN channels require staking BTC to open) built on top of bitcoin's immaculate PoW L1 which enables extreme velocity of money which can settle instantly; Eric Weinstein unaware that deflationary economics will fund his goofy space ambitions (I happen to believe that with sufficient technology, aliens would reduce their existence to light/energy, and thereby be imperceptible to us anyway, think semiconductors and quantum physics); Mr. Wonderful trying to pump his bags with regulation, struggling to avoid name-dropping shitcoins every few seconds; Cynthia Lummis praising blockchain forensics; and too many speakers unable to distinguish between "crypto" and bitcoin, assuming ignorantly, there's enough parity that bitcoin can be called "crypto". Max Keiser seemed like the biggest OG present, and frankly, almost out of place, even though he's the most honest and correct of them all.
Note: Senator Lummis is important, all she has to do is get a bill passed, even if there are some compromises to the one she has written, because after it's passed, bitcoiners will quickly figure out all the ways around the bill's bad shit, implement the changes, then companies go out into the world and plug bitcoin into anything resembling an outlet. Open source money isn't something government's will get a handle on once they make the terribly foolish decision of passing any bills that effectively regulate/legalize it. It's an absolute Trojan Horse. ????
Strike's announcement was more important than the presentation of it was. On the hard wallet front, things were quite robust and encouraging. Impervious Browser was over-hyped. Nodes, or sovereign computing rather, is starting to emerge as the most important thing in the entire space in terms of privacy and where the LN goes. Tokenized securities were non-existent (next year they'll dominate the conference) in no small part because El Salvador's Bukele cancelled last second which was a bad look, even though it would've been an even worse look for his country if he stepped away in the middle of the gang war raging there.
Overall it appears that the unit-of-account part of BTC is coming soon globally via Lightning, much to Michael Saylor's chagrin since he's such a big advocate of it being digital property, which obviously it is, but it's SO much more.
As a person that runs an LN node with several channels, I'd encourage everybody to do the same, because I've already noticed a 200% gain in earnings over the last 2-3 months alone, and the Lightning space is developing at ridiculous speed. We're not even living in a Taproot world yet with PTLC's, DLC's, SM's, non-cutodial borrowing/lending, and one-click LN liquidity pools (although you can already loan your channels out pretty easily). And because most channels are built on reputation, age, network time, etcetera, your channel will have incredible value in the future. Your channel will also automatically grow in value with the price of BTC. Also, because of awesome innovations like automatic channel rebalancing (LOOP etc), and mobile applications (ZeusLN etc) allowing you to run your node regardless of where you are in the world, it's ridiculously easy to run a node. What I've said heretofore might sound highbrow, but running an LN node now is about as hard as learning self-custody, maybe easier. With an LN node you can broadcast your own bitcoin transactions without a third party, have access to the best coinjoin/joinmarket features, run all kinds of apps, earn sats by processing transactions, help secure/decentralize the L1 network, and be completely sovereign.
I don't know, I remember this time last year sitting around and assuming the LN would take 2-3 years to be commercially viable and ready to rock. So it's shocking to see where it is currently a year later. Completely shocking, and I'm as bullish AF.
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