1/ LIDAR is uncovering civilizations we never knew existed throughout the Amazon and other heavily forested areas. What is LIDAR, how does it work, and what’s it going to tell us? 2/ LIDAR stands for LIght Detection And Ranging, it’s like RADAR, but uses lasers instead of radio waves. A LIDAR sensor sends out light pulses and detects when they return to the sensor. The known speed of light allows the distance of the reflecting surface to be calculated.

1/ Imagine you’re an opportunist who got into “crypto” to make a buck. You open an exchange and start operating normally 2/ One day you realize that there’s no way people will withdraw 100% of the coins from your exchange so you get an idea

1/ Real talk: There's a new (last few years) wave of Bitcoin maximalist marketing types who lack deep technical knowledge and simply autistically screech at every non-Bitcoin project. 2/ Articulately criticizing scammy projects is commendable. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending that nothing but Bitcoin is interesting or disruptive is very low IQ.

1/ This is massive news for Bitcoin. An insurance company buying Bitcoin from its general account is one of the biggest stamps of approval possible. wsj.com/articles/massm… 2/ The funds in an insurance company's general account are usually invested very conservatively, as these funds are used to pay policy holder claims.

1/ #Bitcoin tech thread time! Here is some of the Bitcoin research and technical work that we're excited about at @RiverFinancial (river.com/request): 👇 2/ Erlay: Significantly decreasing the bandwidth and increasing the connectivity of the Bitcoin P2P network

https://twitter.com/Leishman/status/1133404078413713408

1/ With all of the exciting 1st and 2nd layer protocol advancements in Bitcoin coming, I’d like to take a minute to point out some of the less sexy work that is just as game-changing. Thread: 2/ In my opinion, some of the most underrated recent advancements in Bitcoin have been transaction and script format standards, specifically PSBTs/BIP 174 and script descriptors. Why?…

Erlay, by @pwuille, Gmax, Gleb, et al is a big deal. TL;DR it DRASTICALLY reduces bandwidth requirements of running a full-node compared to the current flooding approach. Bandwidth no longer scales linearly with peer count, decreasing the cost of running well connected nodes. 1/5 Take a look at this figure from their paper (arxiv.org/pdf/1905.10518…). With Erlay, a node with 32 peers uses only marginally more bandwidth than a node with 8 peers. With BTCFlood (the current approach) the node uses 4x the bandwidth! 2/5