Here are the few Bitcoin Developments which we can observe in 2022
2022 saw a lot of price drops and crypto breakdowns in the news, but it was also a big year for Bitcoin. In 2022, we witnessed how the Bitcoin protocol enables extensive innovation that meets all needs created by developers and business owners without the need for protocol modifications. Below, we’ve highlighted 10 crucial developments.
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100% uptime for yet another year:
This year, Bitcoin itself was the accomplishment that everyone should be most proud of. With a block appearing around every 10 minutes and coin issuance strictly following the guidelines outlined in Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper from 2008, Bitcoin continued to function successfully. Hard forks, chain splits, emergency restarts, and protocol-level defects or hacks were nonexistent. In spite of everything that 2022 threw at it, Bitcoin once again maintained 100% uptime and was accessible to anybody in the world throughout the whole year. The blockchain of Bitcoin saw daily transactions worth billions of dollars.
Bitcoin accomplished all of this without having a foundation to back it, any direct workers, any leaders, or any venture capitalists. As a result, ongoing projects that depend on Bitcoin’s dependability and predictability were allowed to continue with full emphasis for yet another year and with the assurance that they will be able to do so in the near future.
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The expansion of the Lightning Network:
The Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s most important scaling technology, had tremendous growth and development in 2022, while the foundation layer of Bitcoin continues to function flawlessly. Lightning Network eliminates the need to wait for a block to confirm transactions and enables quick, inexpensive payments off-chain. It increases the scalability of Bitcoin while retaining the foundation layer’s security and settlement guarantees. It is completely decentralised and permissionless. The capacity of the network’s publicly visible liquidity increased from 1,058 BTC to 4,771 BTC in 2022.
There are now 67,339 Lightning Network channels, an increase of +80% from 37,298 channels previously.
From 8,295 to 15,636 nodes, the number of Lightning Network nodes that can be seen by the general public increased by +88%. (though the rate of growth slowed in the second half).
Overall, the Lightning Network had incredible growth this year, thanks to the introduction of several wallets, the development of improved user interfaces, and the creation of more teaching materials. In 2022, instantaneous, low-cost payments—typically under one cent—became commonplace as Bitcoiners sought to transact value peer-to-peer across the Lightning Network.
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Where no country has gone before: El Salvador:
El Salvador underwent its largest ever rebranding in 2022 as a result of President Nayib Bukele’s Bitcoin and economic liberty policies. The president of Bukele was featured on the cover of the year-end issue of Bitcoin Magazine, appearing like the Forefather of hyperbitcoinization, the pioneer, and the leader who dared to embrace Bitcoin-only and the economic freedom it provided for his people.
Bukele urged all Bitcoiners to acknowledge that their fight against the world’s elites is a war shared by El Salvador and all Bitcoin users worldwide in the column. Despite the FUD from the mainstream media, El Salvador’s acceptance of the bitcoin currency showed everyone that it understands exactly what revolutionary money is. Bitcoin helped El Salvador experience a boom period while U.S. authorities and political leaders were duped by Sam Bankman-Fried and others. The GDP is expanding, and the country is steadily accumulating SATs. Tourism numbers have surged.
The first “Bitcoin Embassy” was established by El Salvador in Lugano in October. Josue Lopez, a former bitcoin investor and miner from El Salvador who is now a “Honorary Consul,” will be in charge of this chamber of commerce. The El Salvadorian President’s Office’s Bitcoin Office was established in November. The office was established to satisfy the increasing demand from investors all around the world for access and information. The Bitcoin Office further solidifies El Salvador as a model for other countries to follow on the path to hyperbitcoinization. El Salvador ended the year in the most bitcoin-friendly manner possible, with President Bukele declaring that El Salvador would begin purchasing one bitcoin every day.
Machankura: an African text-based bitcoin marketplace:
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African developer Kgothatso Ngako established this new service in a matter of weeks after realising that the majority of people in Africa only had access to rudimentary phones and unreliable internet connections. With the help of Machankura, people in Africa may send and receive bitcoin via text texts without a working internet connection. According to a survey by Caribou, just 6% of financial transactions in Africa are completed via mobile apps; instead, 94% are accomplished through text messaging. With the help of this new service, people in Africa can now utilise bitcoin on available technology for the first time. The adoption of bitcoin will be pushed by initiatives like Machankura in areas that most require digital sound money.
Taro: Lightning Network resources:
In order to enable the creation, transfer, and receipt of assets on the networks, Lightning Labs proposed a protocol this year to Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. In order to allow the issuance of potentially any type of asset on the Bitcoin blockchain while maintaining the immutable verification of Bitcoin’s proof-of-work consensus method, Taro makes use of the most recent protocol enhancement for Bitcoin, called Taproot. Taro may make it possible to issue a variety of assets on top of the Bitcoin protocol, including stablecoins, stocks, and bonds, expanding network functionality and use cases.
The first P2P Lightning-native browser is Impervious.ai.
The first web browser based on the Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s second-layer scaling technology, was released by Impervious Technologies. It is a peer-to-peer web browser that provides an extensive set of facilities for data transfers, communication, and Lightning payments without the use of intermediaries. Peer-to-peer video conversations, P2P workplaces, decentralised identity management, decentralised data storage, and direct user monetization of their data are examples of this. These solutions all have full encryption and do away with centralised middlemen who gather and sell user data. Impervious Technologies has offered us a glimpse of the future of the Internet by exploiting the decentralised features of the Bitcoin and Lightning networks.
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FediMints – joint legal custody
By creating cooperative custody communities to help secure each other’s bitcoin and preserve anonymity, FediMint is a new way to manage bitcoin. This type of custody makes use of the innate human tendency to place their greatest faith in people who are closest to them. It makes use of federations and (David) Chaumian e-cash mints to guarantee the cryptographical anonymity of a group’s members while simultaneously enabling them to share custody of the bitcoin owned by the whole group. This custody solution provides the opportunity to scale bitcoin, enhance privacy, reduce on-chain fees, and encourage more people worldwide to adopt self-custody of their bitcoin.
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Embedding payment functionality wherever possible with Value-4-Value
Value-4-Value is a novel kind of content publication where the author benefits after the “consumer” has enjoyed the content once more via the Lightning Network. More than 10,000 content producers have already adopted Value-4-Value on their podcasts, and tools like LightningAddresses and Bolt-12 invoicing are enabling this for all other sorts of material, predicting ongoing significant development in 2023.
Tools created by the community for Plebnet Lightning to increase functionality
In addition to sharing advice on best practises, community members have created and made available a large number of open-source applications to make some of the most cutting-edge Lightning Network features easily accessible to everyone. A browser-based interface called sdLightning Terminal is used to identify channels, manage channel liquidity on self-hosted Lightning nodes, perform submarine swaps using the Lightning Loop service, and integrate loopd, poold, and faraday daemon. It is simple to balance channels thanks to the satoshi balance, which also makes it simple to create lightning transactions that balance the inbound and outgoing liquidity of channels. Similar capabilities with more sophisticated features for monitoring nodes and increasing efficiency are provided by LNDg and Lightning Jet.
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Using a gridless computer to mine Bitcoin
People across the globe make do with either very little, expensive electricity or none at all. Changing all of this is bitcoin mining. One example given by Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, was using surplus hydropower to secure the Bitcoin network while also using it to light a remote Kenyan hamlet, all the while reducing the cost of electricity for 2,000 people (500 households) from $10 per month to just $4.
Another $2 million in funding, headed by Stillmark VC and Block, was obtained in December to employ bitcoin mining to expand energy availability throughout Africa while also distributing and safeguarding the Bitcoin network. This is far from being an isolated instance.
History of Bitcoin:
Cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, rely on cryptography to regulate and control their development rather than on centralised authorities. Bitcoin was first intended to be a means of commerce, but it is now mostly used as a store of value. The creation and execution of bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto, who incorporated many preexisting concepts from the cryptography community, marked the beginning of its history. Throughout its history, bitcoin has experienced tremendous growth to establish itself as a significant store of wealth both online and off. Beginning in the middle of 2010, some businesses started taking bitcoin in addition to fiat money.
Background:
A number of digital cash technologies existed before bitcoin was introduced, starting with the issuer-based ecash protocols developed by David Chaum and Stefan Brands. The cryptographers Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor were the ones to initially put up the notion that answers to computational problems might be valuable in some way in 1992. Adam Back, who created hashcash, a proof-of-work system for spam management in 1997, independently rediscovers the concept. Wei Dai’s b-money and Nick Szabo’s bit gold were the first ideas for distributed digital currency based on scarcity. Hashcash was used as the proof-of-work algorithm when Hal Finney created reusable proof of work (RPOW).
Creation:
The domain name bitcoin.org was registered on August 18th, 2008. Later that year, on October 31, a reference to Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper titled Bitcoin was made. A cryptography mailing list received a posting on a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. This study described techniques for creating “a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust” utilising a peer-to-peer network. The genesis block of bitcoin, or block zero, contained a reward of 50 bitcoins when it was mined by Satoshi Nakamoto on January 3, 2009, and this is when the bitcoin network was first established.
Growth:
The first significant retail transaction involving tangible commodities took place on May 22, 2010, when 10,000 mined bitcoins were exchanged for two pizzas delivered from a nearby pizzeria in Florida, establishing May 22 as the Bitcoin Pizza Day among cryptocurrency enthusiasts. At that time, the price of a transaction was frequently discussed on the Bitcoin forum.
Prices and Value History:
The European sovereign debt crisis, notably the 2012–2013 Cypriot financial crisis, remarks by FinCEN enhancing the currency’s legal standing, and growing media and Internet interest are among factors that may have led to this growth. Up until 2013, practically all transactions involving bitcoins were place in US dollars.
Some pundits referred to the price of bitcoin as being in a bubble as the market valuation of the entire stock of bitcoins exceeded US$1 billion. Early in April 2013, the cost of one bitcoin fell from $266 to about $50 before rising to about $100. The price steadily decreased over two weeks beginning in late June 2013 to reach $70. The price started to rise again, reaching a high of $140 on October 1. The FBI took control of The Silk Road on October 2. Due to this seizure, there was a $110 flash crash. The cost immediately recovered, and many weeks later it was back at $200. On November 3, the most recent run increased from $200 to $900 on November 18. At Mt. Gox, Bitcoin reached US$1,000 on November 28, 2013.
Taxation and Regulation:
The Cryptocurrency Legal Advocacy Group (CLAG) emphasised in 2012 that taxpayers should decide whether taxes are owed on a bitcoin-related transaction based on whether they have experienced a “realisation event”: when a taxpayer provides a service in exchange for bitcoins, a realisation event has likely occurred, and any gain or loss would likely be calculated using fair market values for the service provided. The German Finance Ministry described bitcoin as a unit of account in August 2013; it can be used in multilateral clearing circles and is taxable for capital gains if kept for less than a year.
In a press release about bitcoin regulation on December 5, 2013, the People’s Bank of China stated that although individuals are free to trade and exchange bitcoins in China as a commodity, it is illegal for Chinese financial institutions to do so or to use them as legal tender. Additionally, organisations dealing with bitcoins are required to monitor and report any suspicious activity in order to prevent money laundering. Following the announcement of the legislation, the price of bitcoin decreased on different exchanges by between 11 and 20 percent before increasing once more.
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