TWIB hundreds of central bankers from around the world gathered at the Fed for a keynote speech by Adam Ludwin, CEO of Chain. Ludwin gave an excellent overview of bitcoin that included a demonstration transaction to Wikimedia. Undoubtedly Ludwin pandered to the yearnings of bankers to secure his speech, so it should come as no surprise that he suggests banks create their own blockchains and mint their own cryptographic tokens. Redditor Dude-Lebowski’s comment was perfect: “Nothing like lipstick on a pig to fix the real problem with central banks.”

Congrats to u/Dude-Lebowski, who is my Bitcoiner Of The Week! When the White House asked the FAA to Oversee Mining Asteroids for gold, he said: “That’s interesting, man. That’s fucking interesting. Asteroids have zero Bitcoin, so we are good at 21 million.”

TWIB Oleg Andreev reopened the bitcoin scaling issue by arguing bitcoin cannot be fairly compared to cash, since cash is centrally-created and employs police to suppress counterfeiters, both of which incur costs on users. This contrasts with gold and bitcoin, both of which are produced de-centrally and cannot be counterfeited. No one knows how many transactions are settled in chunks of gold, but it seems likely that bitcoin’s transaction rate is competitive. Meanwhile, developers smarter than me continue to research and build bitcoin so it can scale to the masses.