If you worked for a big Bitcoin company and was given 10 or so bitcoins to donate to Bitcoin projects, development, research, marketing or whatever, what would you do with it?
I think first of all, I would take half of it and put it away until next cycle. Expect that half to at least double. (More than triple would just bring us to previous ATHs.)
I really see promise in Lightning splices. Dusty is working on it. Batching spliceouts creates a coinjoin-like collaborative transaction cheaper than a normal on-chain payment. When a privacy-preserving payment is cheaper than a normal on-chain payment, it can become the standard way to do an onchain payment.
Fedimint is another project that shows promise. As it stands, theses no way to tell if there is too much e-cash being minted. If a cryptographic proof could prove the right amount is being minted, that would be a game changer.
Rene Pickhardt is working on a way for Lightning Payments to split up in to tiny increments which take different routes to get to their destination. At the moment, wallets optimize for maximum reliability by using the fewest hops possible. This causes the centralizing of the network by most payments taking wide channels belonging to exchanges and custodial wallets. 'Pickhardt Payments' can make even larger payments to be routed over less-traveled, less-funded and probably less-surveiled pleb channels.
The Salvadorian 'Bitcoin Beach' model is also a great way of bootstrapping grassroots adoption and is being implemented other places.
Opensats, maintained by matt Odell is a collection of opensource Bitcoin programmers that one can donate to and the fund splits up. It's also a tax deductible donation.
Anyway, just some ideas.
P.S.
This is hypothetical, I don't have 10 bitcoins.
The Bitcoin Beach model is a no-brainer. Projects like that need a benefactor to "prime the pump" in the community by giving out sats to get the circular economy rolling. Pick a locality with some sort of x-factor and you're off to the races.
Probably donate to privacy focused projects, which allow plebs to managed their UTXO and Bitcoins tx in a private way without even realizing it. Wallets with Payjoin integrated by default, Coinjoins made as easy cheap and decentralized as possible, alternatives to Tor, submarine swaps protocols etc....
I would fund a marketplace that enabled people to trade digital assets (gold in mmo games, gear, trading cards and so on from steam, for btc/sats) it would completely cut out the fiat middle man and allow ppl to stack sats by farming these items and selling them. Grey area sure but it's a market with potential imo.
Honestly, love this idea. The history of Bitcoin and digital assets is indeed a rich one. (Mt.Gox was originally meant to be a Magic the Gathering Online Xchange, of digital trading cards) You know, back in the day, there was a time where a way to get Bitcoin involved first buying "Linden Dollars" and then "selling" (trading) it for Bitcoin. I think the person selling Bitcoin was unable to accept cards or something.
Brock Pierce, early Bitcoin foundation leader, EOS scammer and weird Burning Man dude/presidential candidate/OG Tether Founder was first exposed to digital currencies by starting a World of Warcraft chinese gold farming operation that he sold on a website that had the highest Paypal revenue second to only Ebay for years.
But yeah, most of the earliest usecases of Bitcoin were digital/virtual assets. In-game currencies, vpn services, data hosting services (Eddie Snowden's data dump was hosted on servers bought with Bitcoin) and gift card/phone codes. (I think Bitrefill is still the biggest Bitcoin merchant).
Imagine if Silk Road (Bitcoin's first major real life market) didn't ever need to mail drugs anywhere. If you were able to close it down, another could pop up. Virtual Assets are a natural fit with Bitcoin.
I feel like Jack's (Dorsey) TBD could be great for this. Its an uncensorable open-source exchange protocol I am looking forward to being released. Most people will use it 'white-market' style employing deventralized IDs (DIDs) but I'm sure there will be some gray- and black-market forks popping up.
A grant to develop an existing open source Bitcoin/LN wallet - not a new one, we have already great ones like OBW and Blixt - to support users with different experiences via an evolutive user interface/UX that mix semplicity, powerfull functions and didatic in a single tool that adapts to the user grow.
This could help because the newcomers and the "experts" will share the same wallet, so the later can easily help the former. Wallet diversification is important, but a this stage joining the forces on a unique tool could boost the adoption.
P.S. This is hypothetical, I don't have 10 bitcoins.