Running Hal Finney

For years, Bitcoiners pushed exchanges to adopt Lightning. And guess what? It worked. Public Lightning volume is up 266% in about a year. A few interesting insights from our new @River report: Our previous Lightning research in 2023 showed a 1212% increase in transactions. Many of these were low value, as people experimented with new apps & business models. Now, a new wave of bigger volume has come in, driven by exchanges. We used the same methodology for our estimates as in 2023, but instead of having data on 52% of public capacity, we now got up to 79.4% A massive thank you to Acinq, @npub1geta...0nfm, Bitfinex, @Breez ⚡️, C=, @LNBϟG, Kraken, LQWD, NiceHash, OKX, Cyberdyne, Sunny Sarah, @npub1hm63...zr0p, and @Wallet of Satoshi for sharing data. The Lightning industry continues to grow We’ve updated our map, adding 46 new companies and removing 12. We expect Lightning to continue growing: - On-chain fees remain low, slowing adoption. - USDT on Lightning may increase activity. - Dozens of scaling proposals continue to build on Lightning. More Lightning + Bitcoin adoption trends in our new report 👇

River Intelligence

What’s Driving Bitcoin Adoption in 2025? - River Intelligence

Explore River's latest report on Bitcoin's rapid growth, unique adoption trends, institutional impacts, custody evolution, and the Lightn...

10 years ago on this day, I built up the courage to give my first presentation about Bitcoin. It was quite the rollercoaster 😅 but more rewarding than almost anything I've done in my life. Let me tell you 👇 Someone in my class asked if I'd be up for presenting at an innovation event for travel agency Thomas Cook. I'd never given a public presentation before, but I reluctantly gave it a shot. My gut told me to just do it. I spent days on my slides and rehearsing. The slides looked terrible, and presenting to ~25 people for an hour didn't go much better. They looked at me like I was an alien. About 15 mins into my presentation, my laptop, which had been struggling for months, crashed. It took me another 10 mins to get it back up 😬 After the presentation, I got a bunch of questions and probably some sighs of relief that it was over. But I felt exhilarated. I had never felt the thrill of presenting before, and I loved it, despite being an introvert. Even though I knew I did a poor job, I realized I could get way better. Over the next years (2015-2018), I gave 100+ presentations about Bitcoin and the blockchain at all kinds of public events, in board rooms for private companies, etc. Zero nerves when I get on stage now, all excitement. As a thank you from Thomas Cook I got a gift card for €200 to spend on their website. I tried to trade the gift card for cash (student life), and the best I could get for it was €100. Instead of putting it towards a new laptop, I put it into 0.13 BTC, worth $12669 today. That's an amazing amount for a bad presentation, but it's nothing compared to how much Bitcoin and all of the people I've met in this space have enriched my life in so many ways.

Since first joining River 2 years ago, I was always hoping we’d do proof of reserves one day. Many Bitcoiners just aren’t ready to self-custody yet. Super pumped to see it come to reality! View quoted note →

I see many Bitcoiners give up on Bitcoin education and blame it on people being ignorant. Consider the possibility that you have room for improvement, and get better 🫵 Below my talk at @The Bitcoin Conference + new article with practical tips on how to get people to listen to you.

River Intelligence

How To Make Friends and Family Listen to You About Bitcoin - River Intelligence

Struggling to explain Bitcoin to others? River's latest guide and Bitcoin 2024 talk share practical tips to improve your Bitcoin education ski...

Came across this lil’ bro today on a bike path. He was cray cray.

Made a new graph. It’s a nice graph. One of those rare moments to cover something other than Bitcoin. But this one’s good for Bitcoin. Nature is healing.

3 years ago, Bitcoin's market cap was ~$750B. Same for all the crypto stuff w/o stablecoins. Today, Bitcoin's market cap is up 53% ($1.15T) And the other stuff? 0.58% (not adjusted for inflation) It’s a good stat to mention to people who “diversify”.

Bitcoiners are increasingly setting up their inheritance, but they often overlook this critical step.

It’s been a busy year so I figured let’s take a break on a lake for my own sake. Looking forward to all the content we’ll be releasing at @River in the next half 😄

We're hiring a Product Marketing Manager at @River to work with me on our go-to-market for new products, and our product marketing as a whole. Because we build #Bitcoin  products, we need a Bitcoiner for this role! Come join our awesome team 🧡 Job description for Product Marketing Manager: https://boards.greenhouse.io/riverfinancial/jobs/5195403004 We're hiring for more roles, check them out: https://boards.greenhouse.io/riverfinancial

With the Bitcoin halving almost upon us, I made a fun little treat 😄 Here is how much miners/pools have been earning in USD over the past 4 Bitcoin epochs! These are actually animated race charts across 15 years, but my Nostr client keeps crashing when I try to upload those, so I’ll just link to then here.

X (formerly Twitter)

Sam Wouters (@SDWouters) on X

With the #Bitcoin halving almost upon us, I made a fun little treat 😄 Here is how much miners/pools have been earning in USD over the past 4 Bi...

https://twitter.com/SDWouters/status/1780594557853577610 Hope you enjoy, took a lot of time to make these 🙂

If Bitcoin was a country, it would rank somewhere between 10-20 in population size. Something tells me we're going to enter the top 10 very soon 👀 If you're curious to learn more, you can find the analysis here

River

How Many People Use Bitcoin? | River Learn - Bitcoin Basics

An estimated 1% of the global population uses Bitcoin today, we dive into how we measured this.

#Bitcoin has already reached all-time-high prices in 3 of the top 20 global currencies. The rest will follow as governments continue to print money to cover for their deficit spending. People are opting out of this madness around the world, and we get called crazy for it 🙋‍♂️

I added a new section to @River's Lightning report on how much space the Lightning Network⚡️takes up on the #Bitcoin blockchain, and how many Lightning payments have been made with that space. Key findings: - Lightning's on-chain footprint was ~0.08% of all on-chain transactions in the past 7 years, or about 617k transactions. - The average on-chain transaction has historically facilitated at least 50-53 routed Lightning payments, which can increase significantly. (168 in Aug 2023) - In August 2023, Lightning increased Bitcoin's transaction throughput by at least 47.2% with just 0.06% of all on-chain transactions in that month. I go deeper into the stats in a video on Twitter

X (formerly Twitter)

Sam Wouters (@SDWouters) on X

I added a new section to @River's Lightning report on how much space the Lightning Network⚡️takes up on the #Bitcoin blockchain, and how many L...

and what they mean in practice. These findings don't change Lightning's challenges or Bitcoin's UTXO challenges, but they may give some insights to developers. You can find the full report below, the new part is on P29. https://river.com/learn/files/river-lightning-report-2023.pdf

A while ago I had my last day at @River as a Bitcoin Research Analyst. I had an amazing time creating reports that will hopefully continue to be useful to many people. Management asked me to head up marketing; a big honor and responsibility, and a unique opportunity to help Bitcoin win! This doesn't mean no more research from River. We'll be expanding the team with outstanding people and I'll keep diving into areas that deserve attention. Thanks to everyone who has been supporting me! And thank you to our management for their faith in me.

Is there a best time and day to DCA #Bitcoin ? Could you stack more sats by choosing carefully? With @River's zero-fee recurring orders, we get these questions sometimes, now we also have answers! Based on our research, we found that: 1. Historically, the daily high price happened within a 4-hour window 38.5% of the time, and the daily low price happened within that same 4-hour window 39.4% of the time. This pattern has shifted over time and the window has shrunk. 2. There is a one-hour window with over 3 times as many price bottoms than peaks in the past twelve months. 3. Mondays have historically had the highest odds of having the weekly low price relative to the weekly high price falling on this day. 4. The first and second days of each month have historically had the highest odds of having the lowest price relative to the monthly high price happening on those days. 5. Due to the variance of the exact moments when price peaks and bottoms happen, the achievable practical advantage on timing a recurring order is around 1.2%. You can read more about this in the report here

River Intelligence

Is There a Best Time and Day to DCA Bitcoin? - River Intelligence

River’s research reveals subtle timing advantages for recurring bitcoin buys.

We’re hiring a Content Strategist at @River to work with me on leveling up our content. It’s a fantastic company full of smart and awesome people 🧡 You can apply here if you have a portfolio of content https://boards.greenhouse.io/riverfinancial/jobs/5012722004

What's more fun than doing #Bitcoin research? Sharing the results in person! My deadline for the research on 1212% growth in Lightning activity was Bitcoin Amsterdam. If you're not much of a reader, you can get a bunch of insights from the presentation. It's been a wild ride. I hope the report continues to be a useful tool for people around the industry to show the activity that is happening and combat misinformation.

As part of the new Lightning research, I’ve attempted to map out and categorize all companies in the Lightning space. 179 companies across 28 categories 🤯 If you’re interested in the full research on how the Lightning Network has been growing, you can find it here

River Intelligence

The Lightning Network Grew by 1212% in 2 Years - River Intelligence

Critics say Lightning is stagnating, but River’s new report shows explosive growth in users, transactions, and volume. Download the full breakdown.