2. • The vote wasn’t close. In early June, 62 of the 84 members of El
Salvador’s Legislative Assembly – a whopping 74% – voted to
make bitcoin official legal tender. “History!” tweeted Nayib
Bukele, the bitcoin-happy president of El Salvador. He’s not
wrong. The nation’s stunning embrace of crypto, regardless of
what happens next, is arguably the most influential event in
bitcoin’s history.
3. • Look closer. This didn’t happen because El Salvador farmers are hoping
their Blockfolio balances will go “to the moon.” This wasn’t fueled by
dreams of a BTC index fund. This wasn’t about price speculation. In a
nation with a 70% cash economy, villagers and farmers are
actually using bitcoin, sending small amounts of satoshis (or “sats”) to buy
fruits and vegetables, embracing the original peer-to-peer vision of bitcoin
that would make the actual Satoshi smile.
• For this, we can thank the Strike app, from Jack Mallers, which makes it
fast and cheap and easy to send and receive tiny amounts of bitcoin. Now
look even closer. Strike, in turn, is powered by the Lightning Network,
which crypto-geeks know as the “layer 2” protocol that basically settles
transactions “off-chain,” through a growing network of user-hosted
channels and nodes, that exponentially cuts down the time and fees to
send bitcoin.
4. • Lightning is the engine that’s driving this burst of bitcoin
adoption. And you could make a good case that the Lightning
Network is the most important project for the most important
asset in all of blockchain. Yet the team at Lightning Labs, led by
CEO and co-founder Elizabeth Stark (which is building the most
widely used Lightning implementation) is almost oddly off the
radar. Lightning even somehow feels … underrated? After early
spurts of publicity in 2017 and 2018 (such as Leigh
Cuen’s Bitcoin’s Warrior Queen profile for CoinDesk, or
the Lightning Torch experiment of 2019), Stark has generally
avoided the press, burying herself in the work.
