🌎 MICROPAYMENTS

Can Bitcoin Fix Micropayments?
By Emmanuel Awosika

Micropayments usually refer to transfers of smaller amounts of money of a specific value threshold. For example, if your payment provider (credit card/bank) charges a base fee in addition to the usual percentage of the full cost of the processed payment, it could be counterproductive to use said service if the amount to be paid is below a certain quantity ($5 i.e) and everything beneath that would be considered a micropayment.
Micropayments have always been a problem that the financial industry has tried to solve for decades without luck. The implications of being able to process pocket transactions electronically without incurring in large operational costs are extremely promising since it would open a wide range of opportunities for businesses and customers to maximize their utility. The author of this article writes about how Bitcoin, together with the lightning network, can easily solve this problem once and for all.

📝 LESSONS LEARNED

What Terra's Collapse Teaches About 'Crypto' And Bitcoin
By Namcios

Terra is crumbling, well it has actually stopped by now.
This week has developed some "unprecedented" events, which others might say they were predictable up to some extent, which led to the collapse of the cryptocurrency LUNA, the unpeg of the stablecoin Terra UST, and the wipe out of many investors' savings with it.
Bitcoiners are aware of the event, as the Terraform Labs, had previously announced the intention of acquiring up to $10 billion of bitcoin to be used as reserves of UST, and later on confirming having acquired about $3 billion.
The problem was in essence a failure of its design, or a failure to be resilient and capable of surviving stress periods. In the article, the author dives deeper into the details, but in essence, as the algoritmic-backed stablecoin began to unpeg, meaning there was huge volume exiting their UST position, it forced the project to create demand for it in order to recover its peg. As it unpegged faster than intended, it led to a massive sellout of their bitcoin holdings.
Lessons to be learnt? It can be argued that alternative cryptocurrency projects are but an experiment, while Bitcoin is so far the only tried and tested peer-to-peer digital money.

📰 THE DAILY BITS

How Bitcoin Will Help Solve The Climate Crisis
By Siby Suriyan

Contrary to what mainstream media wants us to believe with baseless, illogical and misleading headlines, such as “A single bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of power that the average American household consumes in a month”, Bitcoin is, by far, way more efficient and environmentally friendly compared to the current global financial system.
Not many people acknowledge that the current monetary standard runs on top of three layers: High-retail performance (credit cards and electronic transactions), banking and fintech (Central banks), enforcement and issuing (governments). Hence, it ends up being a lot more inefficient and energy demanding.
Moreover, the nature of Bitcoin and the necessity to profit out of mining, incentivise the industry to search for cheaper and more efficient sources of energy. Three-quarters of Bitcoin’s energy use is green, making it one of the most renewable-driven industries. Bitcoin mining is actually incentivizing the growth of the green energy industry and is helping lower carbon emissions in the long run.

MEME OF THE DAY