Asset management firm Stone Ridge launches Bitcoin-focused accelerator program | TechCrunch

Asset management firm Stone Ridge launches Bitcoin-focused accelerator program | TechCrunch

Teams in the accelerator will range from small startup teams to early-stage companies. They will receive individual investments of $250,000, while one winner of the cohort will get an additional $500,000 for a total of $750,000, Brewster said.

Some themes Brewster is interested in seeing startups expand upon include micropayments and tipping through Lightning and Taro.

Announcing Taro: A New Protocol for Multi-Asset Bitcoin and Lightning 🍠💱🌍 | Lightning Labs

Announcing Taro: A New Protocol for Multi-Asset Bitcoin and Lightning 🍠💱🌍 | Lightning Labs

Announcing Taro: A New Protocol for Multi-Asset Bitcoin and Lightning 🍠💱🌍

Ryan Gentry

April 5, 2022

Today we’re excited to announce Taro, a new Taproot-powered protocol for issuing assets on the bitcoin blockchain that can be transferred over the Lightning Network for instant, high volume, low fee transactions. This announcement marks a big shift to a multi-asset Lightning Network with the potential for the world’s currencies to route through bitcoin liquidity on the network. At its core, Taro taps into the security and stability of the bitcoin network and the speed, scalability, and low fees of Lightning. Together with the new protocol, we're also announcing our Series B fundraise to further build out Lightning Network infrastructure and help Number of People Go Up. 📈

Taro enables bitcoin to serve as a protocol of value by allowing app developers to integrate assets alongside BTC in apps both on-chain and over Lightning. This expands the reach of Lightning Network as a whole, bringing more users to the network who will drive more volume and liquidity in bitcoin, and allowing people to easily transfer fiat for bitcoin in their apps. More network volume means more routing fees for node operators, who will see the benefits of a multi-asset Lightning Network without needing to support any additional assets.

We see Taro as an important step in bitcoinizing the dollar, getting the best of both worlds by 1) issuing assets like stablecoins on the most decentralized and secure blockchain, bitcoin and 2) allowing users to transact on the fastest global payments network with the lowest fees, Lightning.

Taro relies on Taproot, bitcoin’s most recent upgrade, for a new tree structure that allows developers to embed arbitrary asset metadata within an existing output. It uses Schnorr signatures for improved simplicity and scalability, and, importantly, works with multi-hop transactions over Lightning. To that end, we are releasing a series of Taro Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) for feedback and comment from the developer community, as it is an open protocol for the community to adopt. You can learn more and read through the full Taro specification on Github.

Why Does Lightning Need More Assets?

Last year brought an explosion of growth to the Lightning Network. New users from all around the world, but especially Latam (e.g. El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, Brazil) and West Africa (e.g. Nigeria, Ghana), experienced instantly settled, low fee, peer-to-peer transactions without financial intermediaries for the first time. We've continually heard from people, developers, and startups in emerging markets such as Galoy, Strike, Ibex Mercado, Paxful, and Bitnob that adding stablecoin assets to Lightning would expand financial access for their communities.

Residents of Bitcoin Beach use Lightning in El Salvador

Taro enables wallet developers to provide users with a USD-denominated balance and a BTC-denominated balance (or any number of assets) in the same wallet, trivially sending value across the Lightning Network just as they do today. Importantly, as more users are onboarded to Lightning wallets through fiat, they will be able to easily acquire and use bitcoin. This is what bringing bitcoin to billions looks like.

How does a Taro transfer over Lightning work?

Imagine Alice and Bob have a Lightning-USD (L-USD) channel with $100 of capacity, balanced such that they both have $50 worth of inbound liquidity, and Carol and Dave have a L-USD channel with $100 of capacity, balanced such that they both have $50 worth of inbound liquidity.

Example multi-hop Taro transfer

If Bob only has a BTC channel with Carol, Alice can still send $10 of L-USD to Bob, who charges a small routing fee in BTC and forwards $10 of BTC to Carol, who charges a small routing fee in L-USD and forwards $10 of L-USD to Dave, the final destination. Taro interoperates with the existing BTC-only Lightning Network as-is, only requiring the first hop and the second-to-last hop to have L-USD liquidity.

This structure taps into the network effects and liquidity of today’s Lightning Network to route any number of assets, avoiding the need to bootstrap an entirely new network for new assets, and ensuring that bitcoin underpins all transactions on the network. It also incentivizes the growth of BTC liquidity within the Lightning Network to serve a broader multi-asset Lightning Network.

Where Does Taro Come From?

Taro makes use of the new Taproot scripting behavior (available on bitcoin as of the soft fork last November) to allow developers to embed arbitrary asset metadata within an existing output. That means no additional burden on full nodes, no burning of bitcoin via the OP_Return opcode, and that Taro assets inherit all the same double-spend protection of normal bitcoin transfers, along with additional functionality like transferability over the existing Lightning Network.

Because the Lightning Network is a payment channel network, it has faster settlement and lower fees than other blockchains, and retains those properties as the network scales. Bringing stablecoins to bitcoin via the Lightning Network is good for users who want access to financial services, good for app developers who want new tools, good for routing node operators who want more fees, and good for issuers who want a better experience for their users.

For more deeper technical details of the Taro protocol, you can dive into the protocol BIPs. In a nutshell, the major benefits of such a modern Taproot-native design are:

• Scalability: a single Taproot output can contain an essentially unbounded amount of Taro assets
• Programmability: Taro assets have an unlocking script, similar to normal Bitcoin UTXOs, enabling developers to program transfer conditions into said assets
• Auditability: the special tree structure used by Taro allows efficient supply audits both locally within a given wallet, and also globally within the chain for an issued asset
• Usability: asset-specific addresses enable wallets to be smart enough to prevent users from sending the wrong asset by mistake

How Do I Get Started?

The first step in getting Taro out to the world is releasing the draft protocol and its underlying components in a series of BIPs, and getting feedback from the community at large. The second step is to build the tooling that allows developers to issue and transfer arbitrary assets on-chain. The final step is to build functionality into Lightning that allows developers to open channels with Taro assets that can be sent over the existing Lightning Network. We are working on all three and invite the community to contribute.

We’re incredibly excited for companies building on the Lightning Network to be able to integrate this new protocol, be it via integration into apps or tools, or the ability to issue assets on Lightning, and let users all around the world harness the security and decentralization of the bitcoin network with assets like USD. While much of the motivation for this protocol comes from enabling fiat stablecoin value transfers over LN, Taro as proposed is a general asset issuance and transfer protocol, and it can enable both fungible and unique assets.

We hope readers will review the Taro proposal, read our documentation, contribute to the code, and most importantly, build the world's monetary network with bitcoin! 🌎

How Belarusian hospitals concealed Russia’s military casualties in the Ukraine war

How Belarusian hospitals concealed Russia’s military casualties in the Ukraine war

Drilling 12 miles down - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

Drilling 12 miles down - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

By Mark Bergen

Drilling 12 miles down to tap geothermal energy

Most geothermal power today comes from natural geysers or drilling operations that plunge a few miles down to harness heat from buried rock.  Quaise Energy, a startup based in Boston, is taking a third approach: digging deeper—and using more heat—than any company has before. To do so, it’s refashioning a millimeter-wave drilling technique from nuclear fusion experiments. A millimeter wave transmission line carries electromagnetic energy from the gyrotron to the rock chamber underground. Location: Oak Ridge National Laboratories Photographer: Quaise Energy Carlos Araque, Quaise’s chief executive officer, likens it to “a big cousin of the microwave in your kitchen”—only with 1,000 times more power. “It’s a fairly mature technology,” he says. “We just use it for this purpose.”  Geothermal is an also-ran of renewables. It only accounts for 0.2% of the world’s power supply, according to BloombergNEF, a clean energy research group. It’s a risky business, but one with the capacity produce terrific amount of energy with limited emissions. But geothermal operators often struggle to find fruitful places to dig and few have tried digging much below a few miles down. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pitches his country as a climate leader, but Canada’s emissions tell a different story – one of little actual progress. In this week’s Zero, Akshat Rathi sits down with Trudeau to talk about Canada’s climate record. Listen to the episode and subscribe now on Apple, Spotify, Google or Stitcher to get new episodes every Thursday. Araque, a former engineer for oil services company Schlumberger, says that’s because it hasn’t made financial sense. For years, oil and natural gas has been cheaper to produce and easier to sell. Once a drill gets a few miles down into the Earth’s crust, the high temperature and pressure start to damage the equipment. “It’s very simple,” Araque says. “It’s risk-reward. It’s the economics.” Those economics are changing as ESG standards and new legislation reward buying cleaner energy. Quaise plans to start testing its drills in fields near Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Bend, Oregon in 2024. The company’s drill—it is building three prototypes in laboratories—is about 100 feet tall and looks like conventional equipment used in the oil and gas industry. Except built into the center of the drill is a gyrotron, an electrical vacuum designed to heat plasma in thermonuclear fusion machines. It’s designed to go as much as 12 miles deep and access steam as hot as 500C.  Right now, experts consider 150C an extraordinarily high temperature for such operations, says Maria Richards, who runs the Geothermal Laboratory at Southern Methodist University. She applauds Quaise’s ambition, but is skeptical that it can dig as deeply as advertised in its designated areas, where the terrain is volcanic and tough. “All of a sudden, the equipment fails,” Richards says. “It’s not an easy area to drill.” Quaise has an aggressive timeline. By 2026, the startup hopes to have the “first super-hot” system producing 100 megawatts of power—Araque estimates this will take less than 10 geothermal wells. By 2028, Quaise wants to retrofit an entire fossil fuel power plant with geothermal.  Araque says Quaise has held talks with power plant owners and other energy providers, although he isn’t ready to share names. The company has raised $75 million since spinning out of MIT, where the initial concept for the drilling tech was formed. To fully retrofit a first power plant, Araque estimates that the overall process will cost $1 billion.  He says he isn’t worried about capital. Quaise counts several individual investors who, according to Araque, know that a clean energy economy requires taking some technical risks. “We’re not doing this because it’s cool,” he says. “We do this because there are very few other options.”

Spectacular interiors of rediscovered Orient Express carriages revealed | CNN Travel

Spectacular interiors of rediscovered Orient Express carriages revealed | CNN Travel

Singapore's CapitaSpring: 'Biophilic' skyscraper bursting with 80,000 plants opens - CNN Style

Singapore's CapitaSpring: 'Biophilic' skyscraper bursting with 80,000 plants opens - CNN Style

Global Macro Update—Email Interview with Barry Habib - Mauldin Economics

Global Macro Update—Email Interview with Barry Habib - Mauldin Economics

At the Monaco Yacht Show, there's no sign global turmoil is hurting sales | CNN Travel

At the Monaco Yacht Show, there's no sign global turmoil is hurting sales | CNN Travel

... 1,024 superyachts were under construction or on order in 2022, an increase of 24% on the previous year, with a 10.5% rise in orders for those measuring 45 meters and above.