Satoshi Upgrades I, first in a series of network upgrades just went live for Stacks! Devs were sitting there for their night watch. One man of the night’s watch was in his yard in the dark. Sounds of 3 great horned owls and even coyotes. A true story of Bitcoin block 960,230 … It was 9am in the tiny rural French village where I’ve setup the unofficial (and humble) headquarters of the galactic Stacks empire. At least for a few more weeks that is. Our brave soldier @heynky is in a different timezone where it’s midnight and great horned owls and coyotes are out and about. The job is thankless but mission critical. To be one of the few mythical creatures known as a core dev who can fix a consensus bug if one ever shows up live on the network. Think of them as Jedi, rare souls who through sheer natural talent and intense training have attained a level of expertise and power in computer programming that mere humans can’t fully comprehend it. These core devs, or Jedi for the dramatic effect, have called a meeting aptly named the War Room. There is no end time for the meeting. Because if this breaks into a war then who knows what will actually happen. It’s not their first rodeo. There was Bitcoin block 666,050 (5 years ago), and Bitcoin block 867,867 (2 years ago) where a similar in magnitude upgrade went live. Elder Jedi like @AaronBlankstein who’ve seen it all since the beginning are in the War Room. There is complete silence in the room. They’ve tested the shit out of the software to an extent that there is no blind spot left. Building these consensus critical distributed systems is like building rockets. Extremely complex engineering that must all come together. And you get one shot at launch. The $250M of STX capital, plus much more, is at stake. (Arguably similar cost at stake for an actual rocket launch.) A blow up can be for any tiny reason. A failure can come from any angle but success only if nothing goes wrong. Not even any small thing. Bitcoin block 960,230 hits. The matrix style neon-on-black terminal screens of the core devs is running a zillion scripts to monitor this rocket launch. All is going smoothly. My heart rate is elevated just by being in the room. Even in silence. Satoshi Upgrades part I is officially live. They did such an amazing job building, and testing the living hell out of this upgrade that it happened with no glitches. Kudos to @AdrianoDiLuzio’s leadership! The world has no idea what just happened and why it matters. The biggest unlock for Bitcoin, the only true freedom money for humanity, just went live. Remember when the Ethereum merge happened to enable staking? Everyone in the industry knew about it. A far technically superior system for a $2 trillion asset BTC just silently went live: BTC now has native BTC staking & yield. History books will later write that this was the moment Bitcoin went from being a passive store-of-value to an income-generating productive asset. But we are not there yet. Far from it actually. Where we are in the timeline today is that Binance has placed a “risk monitoring tag” on the only project in this industry that did a qualified SEC offering and ran our shop like a public company with transparent reporting. The blue chip project that did everything right from day 1 to now. The situation is mildly amusing to me. The only thing the (currently humble) galactic empire of Stacks lacks is a good story/narrative to fuel the fire. I plan to contribute to that directly. It will be epic. Today, we thank these unsung heroes for keeping the night’s watch. Today, we celebrate the hardwork and foresight. Now, it’s time to get to work for institutional adoption and getting this project into orbit. We are the best hope for accelerating Bitcoin’s adoption. And Bitcoin is the best hope for financial freedom and individual sovereignty in the world. Onwards!

NEWS: stacks brainiacs release overview of a *fully self-custodial* sBTC upgrade. you thought stacks nakamoto was a big deal? get ready for the stacks satoshi upgrades 🔥🚀 with the satoshi upgrades stacks will get: - fully self-custodial sBTC while it’s at rest on the L2 wallets or used in L2 payments. - when sBTC moves into smart contracts default owner of underlying BTC is a decentralized signer set but we can do better! enter bitcoin post conditions: the underlying BTC can be in L1 scripts that work with L2 contracts to precisely define when and where the L1 BTC can move. - self-custodial sBTC minting opens up doors for institutional players who want to mint from their own segregated custodial addresses (for compliance requirements). - trustless sBTC L2 payments like lightning (unilateral withdraw) without any liquidity or routing challenges of lightning. - ability to pay network fees in sBTC, which also result in increased protocol revenue while maintaining STX as underlying infra asset (sBTC swaps for fees underneath). - consensus upgrades for dual staking where both BTC and STX can provide economic security for fast consensus (after 1 bitcoin block, security remains 100% bitcoin hashpower). bitcoin holders can earn BTC on BTC yield from consensus and can boost the yield by locking STX on top. - value accrual mechanism for STX where gas fees increase protocol revenue & STX demand, and dual staking gives increased utility for STX (for yield boost). - faster and more reliable consensus rails, stacks VM upgrades for performance and dev UX. And much more. A more detailed overview in the link I’ll post below in a few hours. are you ready anon? stacks satoshi upgrades are coming! the bitcoins must flow 🟧