June 1, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

What Do You Meme?

The Bitcoin 2021 Conference is this week.

What’s Poppin’?

Yesterday, Marathon Holdings, a prominent Bitcoin miner, announced in a press release that the mining firm “will be updating all our miners to the full standard Bitcoin core 0.21.1 node, including support for Taproot.”

The announcement comes about a month into CEO Fred Thiel’s arrival at the company, where he appears to be taking the miner in a slightly different direction. Previously, Marathon had described itself as an OFAC compliant pool, meaning they would only mine blocks compliant with US regulations — excluding transactions associated with sanctioned addresses from the blocks it mined. Furthermore, not all of Mara Pool’s (Marathon’s mining pool) have signaled for Taproot activation, with half of the non-signaling blocks for Taproot coming from Mara this epoch.

Bitcoin’s Taproot update recently began its three-month activation period. @bitcoin_DLC described Taproot rather succinctly on Twitter:

Miners who wish to adopt the update can signal support by adding a “signal bit” in blocks they mine.

At the time of publishing, miners have signaled for activation at a ratio of 97.67%, with 251 out of 257 blocks signaling readiness for taproot. However, there is a long way to go before Taproot is activated, as 1562 additional blocks are needed for the protocol to lock-in.

Recommended Reads

  • Goldman Sachs on crypto as an asset class: 

  • If the Taproot activation section got you excited about the intricacies of Bitcoin, here is an excellent thread on all things Taproot:  

  • Here’s a great thread linking to a handful of guides for beginners Bitcoiners: 

On The Pod…

June 14th is the 5-year anniversary of Unchained. 🎉

On Tuesday, June 15th, we’ll publish a 5-year anniversary episode with questions or messages from you listeners to me.

If you want to have your question or message included:
  • record a video or audio message of 60 seconds or less stating your name, where you’re from and your question or message.
  • email it to hello@unchainedpodcast.com with “anniversary” in the subject line (or just respond to this email)!
You can also email a question, and I will read it on the air. If so, please let me know how you’d like to be identified. (And let me know how to pronounce your name.)

The deadline to get your submissions in is Thursday, June 10 by 5 pm ET/2 pm PT.

Thanks so much for supporting Unchained all these years! 🙏

Check out the latest episode of Unchained:

Nick Tomaino on 1confirmation’s $125 Million Fund and What Future NFTs Will Look Like

Nick Tomaino, general partner of 1confirmation, discusses his firm’s recently announced third fund of $125 million and gives his perspective on many hot crypto topics, such as NFTs, Layer 2 solutions, Polkadot, DAOs, and more. Show highlights:

  • why Nick became interested in crypto and his background
  • what drives 1confirmation’s investment thesis
  • why Nick believes NFTs have taken off in popularity this year
  • why NFTs are currently in a bubble
  • what we might do with NFTs in the future
  • how competition between different NFT marketplaces will shake out
  • how music NFTs could work
  • the feasibility of charging royalties in the secondary sale of NFTs
  • why environmental concerns over crypto mining to only be a short-term issue
  • why Nick is not an Ethereum maxi and how he feels about the fragmentation of Layer 2 solutions on ETH
  • why Polkadot is such an exciting project
  • whether, as an early Coinbase employee, he would say the fat protocols thesis is true
  • what new trend Nick is keeping an eye on for 2021 and beyond

Book Update

My book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, is now available for pre-order now.

The book, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, comes out Nov. 2nd. Pre-order it today!

You can purchase it here: http://bit.ly/cryptopians