Bitcoin spiked earlier this week following an escalation in tensions between the U.S. and Iran, with analysts once again linking bitcoin to so-called safe haven assets like gold.

After the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' elite Quds Force, general Qasem Soleimani, was killed by U.S. forces in Iraq it was widely reported the bitcoin price in Iran had soared to around $24,000this is, however, based on a common misunderstanding of exchange rates in Iran.

Some think that bitcoin could eventually join gold as a safe-haven asset, though it has yet to ... [+] consistently perform like one.

Iran-based bitcoin sellers on peer-to-peer trading platform LocalBitcoins were seen to be pricing bitcoin at around 1 billion Iranian rials, worth some $24,000 based on the official exchange rate set by Iran's central bank.

However, the official exchange rate set by the Central Bank of Iran is only ever used by the government and a handful of businesses. Almost all people and businesses in Iran use a market set exchange rate when converting rials to U.S. dollarsthat currently has rials priced at around a third of the official exchange rate.

"The going market rate for the U.S. dollar to the Iranian rial is one dollar to 136,500 rials," explained Mehran Jalali, an Iranian national who follows the crypto market and splits his time between the U.S. and Iran.

"The current bitcoin to rial rate posted on Iranian crypto exchange websites is around one bitcoin to 984,000,000 rials, equal to $7,208 per bitcoin in Iran, which is very close to the going rate everywhere else."

"The official rate is what the central bank says. But literally, no one except some government organizations can get that rate while no one can use it," crypto expert Ali Beikverdi told bitcoin news site Cointelegraph. "Its a joke."

Bitcoin has been known to trade at a small premium in some places around the world, though never at the levels incorrectly reported in Iran.

In South Korea, the bitcoin price traded around 10% higher until early 2018 when the country introduced tighter regulation.

Elsewhere, bitcoin can regularly see a premium of around 4% in Hong Kong due China's strict bitcoin trading ban forcing people who want to buy bitcoin to use the stablecoin tether.

Meanwhile, some bitcoin and cryptocurrency watchers dismissed suggestions bitcoin was acting as a safe-haven asset in response to the U.S. killing of Iran's general Soleimani.

"Heightened geopolitical risk has resulted in both gold and bitcoin moving higher, but for different reasons," Peter Schiff, the chief executive of Euro Pacific Capital and outspoken bitcoin critic, said via Twitter. "Gold is being bought by investors as a safe haven. Bitcoin is being bought by speculators betting that investors will buy it as a safe haven."

The bitcoin price leaped this week but has been steadily falling for the past six months.

Last year, some in Iran turned to bitcoin to try to evade U.S. sanctions on the country.

"With exchange offices closed, sanctions and the rial dropping like crazy it seems like a good idea to use bitcoin," one person in Iran, who wished to remain anonymous, said at the time, adding bitcoin was "literally the only way to get money out of the country."

See more here:
No, Bitcoin Isnt Going For Anywhere Near $24,000 In IranHeres Why - Forbes

As a fervent bitcoin enthusiast, I frequently come across the following objection: In contrast to physical, analog things, bitcoin and similar crypto assets are completely virtual and digital. As such, they are neither tangible nor graspable and would thus lack any real basis of value.

Because of their digital nature, many people still object to bitcoin, refuse to take it seriously or consider it altogether too scary. Some even lump the crypto asset in with other eerie and unsavory developments in tech and the ongoing digital transformation.

Among greatest digital threats seems to be the phenomenon of deepfake media. This is a term that has been in common use since 2017 for the technology used to create deceptively authentic-looking images and videos. Many politicians, actors and other celebrities have already fallen victim to this practice. Deepfake videos put words into their mouths that they never said or make them perform actions they never did. What is real and what is not?

Some technophobes fear that because the capabilities of the digital world are increasingly blurring our notions of reality and what is artifice, political as well as societal life could become ever more confused and agitated. Democracy hinging on the fact that civil discourse and public debate happen among educated and enlightened citizens is very much in danger because the fake will become indistinguishable from the truth.

Within the reactionary mistrust of all things digital, bitcoin is getting its share of blowback as well. If this sort of mistrust resonates with you, I am here to tell you some of these hazards associated with an increasingly digital world are certainly true. But Bitcoin is your ally, not your foe in this.

When looking at bitcoin, the juxtaposition of analog and digital might seem obvious at first glance dissecting it further though reveals some interesting twists. Although bitcoin is virtual and non-corporeal, as a new manifestation of money it has actually overcome many characteristics of what is typically associated with the digital realm.

Interestingly, bitcoin as an asset does experience increasing marginal costs in production, a feature that can be seen in conjunction with gold, a tangible asset of the corporeal world. The more gold is produced, the more expensive it becomes. In the case of bitcoin, the production of new units is algorithmically set to a maximum per block/time interval. In other words, no matter how hard one tries, one can never produce more bitcoin within a period of approximately 10 minutes than the amount specified by the code. It is this digital scarcity imported via the real world that makes bitcoin potentially valuable.. The potentiality of value is being actualized as more people are persuaded of its absolute digital scarcity, since any realized value is always the result of subjective value judgements by individuals.

A bearer instrument refers to an instrument that is payable to anyone possessing the instrument and is negotiable by transfer alone.

Bitcoin is not only digitally scarce but, by its very nature, is similar to a bearer instrument another feature where bitcoin contradicts the usual notion of digital goods. Because bitcoin resembles a bearer instrument, it can be held independently and apart from any third party. While holding bitcoin does not give a bitcoin holder any rights against any tangible issuer, possessing bitcoin does indeed entitle a bitcoin holder to have them spent univocaly that is, the bitcoin protocol automatically and undeniably executes a bitcoin transaction once initiated by a rightful owner. This goes to show that having bitcoin is associated with some sort of underlying right against some sort of issuer, the bitcoin protocol.

Thus the crypto asset has proved for the first time in history that bearer instruments no longer have to be printed on paper to have these characteristics. Bitcoin has solved the double-spending problem and cannot be copied. Its the perfect combination of the advantages from the analog as well as the digital world.

Many still do not appreciate the ingenuity of this combination. However, it is important to recognize that it is based on a way of thinking that is increasingly losing its validity. For more and more people, the digital has become a matter that is taken for granted. While older generations may still make excursions into digital spheres as tourists of an analog world, Gen-Z, millennials and even the slightly older Gen-Xers have long been at home in a digital world where bits dominate atoms.

Having grown up mostly as digital natives, they have cultivated a digital lifestyle from the ground up. This gives them a completely different attitude toward the digital world than people who have been socialized knowing only the analog world. One of the most impressive examples of this development is the video game Fortnite.

For so-called Google kids, Fortnite is much more than a video game it is the reality of their lives in which they socialize and spend more time than in the real world. February 2019 was the biggest moment in Fortnites young history: The American electronic music producer DJ Marshmello gave an in-game concert. His performance took place completely virtually on a stage within the computer game. Fortnite players could participate only as their virtual avatars. And thats what they did: Almost 11 million mostly young people danced as their game characters in the digital concert.

Such events may seem surreal and curious to older generations, but for these Google kids, they are completely normal. Similarly, V-Bucks, the currency within Fortnite, are valuable assets for them. From this famous in-game currency, it is only a small step to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This digital mindset also explains why some female millennials may be just as happy to receive a digital bouquet of flowers on their smartphones on Valentines Day as they are to receive roses that have grown in the soil. Similarly, the day is soon approaching when digital gold will seem more real to this generation than physical, precious metal.

As a species, we are in the process of digitizing our reality. This is probably just another iteration, not the last, of a cultivation process that humanity has been going through since time immemorial. We learn to think in gradually more abstract categories and tap into new potentials again and again. The process of cultural adaptation to fully adopt digital values has only just begun.

What makes it more difficult with bitcoin adoption, however, is the fact that it is an exponential phenomenon. Our brains, on the other hand, are designed for linear interpolation. We instinctively understand that if we take 30 one-meter steps, we can travel 30 meters in total. If we could somehow not take linear but exponential steps, the situation would be completely different. The same 30 steps, exponential in nature translating to 2^30 steps would take us around the world 26 times, a fact that we can hardly picture rationally.

Because our thinking is not one of an exponential mindset, exponential technologies have always overwhelmed us. One only needs to think of the internet or the smartphone: These technological advancements seemingly appeared all of a sudden, but shortly afterward, they had conquered the world. Bitcoin is now the next exponential technology to thrive on the back of these two (and other) exponential technologies. Just like the internet or the smartphone before it, the crypto asset is likely to produce second-round and third-round effects which will fundamentally change the world.

With each passing day, it makes less and less sense to perceive the virtual and physical worlds as separate spheres of human action. Our reality is getting evermore digital and, with it, physical atoms might be more and more dominated by digital bits. If you are intimidated by this, this is totally fine. But let me reiterate what I said in the beginning: Because bitcoin is a digital thing without the problems inherent to the digital world, it is your friend and not your foe.

This is an op ed by Pascal Hgli, author of the book Ignore at Your Own Risk: The New Decentralized World of Bitcoin and Blockchain. Views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Bitcoin Magazine or BTC Inc.

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Bitcoin and the Primacy of the Digital World - Bitcoin Magazine

Potentially the world's biggest bitcoin mine is said to have signed up two top corporate customers, SBI Holdings and GMO.

The Japanese corporate giants will be renting mining capacity at the facility in Rockdale, Texas, recently put into construction by Whinstone Inc., according to Bloomberg sources. The firms are to begin mining "within coming months," the report says, adding that the firms involved would not comment when asked.

As CoinDesk reported in November, when the facility gets up and running it will likely be the biggest bitcoin mine in the world, starting at 300 megawatts and expanding to 1 gigawatt by the end of 2020.

That puts the rival mine being built by Bitmain also in Rockdale and touted as the biggest in the world in the shade. That's planned to start at a capacity of 25-50 MW and possibly expand to 300 MW.

Internet giant GMO was also said to have been involved in setting up the Rockdale facility, as per CoinDesk's earlier report. In November, Whinstone estimated the data center will cost $150 million to build and fit out. The initial 300 MW of power was expected to come online in the first quarter, with 1 GW planned to be achieved late in the year.

Soon after Whinstone broke ground on its Texas project the company was acquired by Germany-based Northern Bitcoin, which already runs a bitcoin mine in Norway that harnesses renewable power. Similarly, Texas may have been chosen as the site for this major venture in part due to its availability of cheap wind power, according to Bloomberg.

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

Read more here:
SBI, GMO to Rent Capacity at Massive Bitcoin Mine in Texas: Report - CoinDesk

The Internet isnt invincible. Governments the world over are restricting access to the world wide web; Russia is erecting a China-style firewall, Iran switched off the Internet during recent protests and India makes a habit of it. Intentional shutdowns have more than doubled since 2016, according to Access Now, a non-profit advocating for Internet access.

Then there are man made disasters (missile strikes) and natural onessuch as wildfires in California and Australia, or other scenarios that limit access to electricityas well as the prohibitive cost of Internet use in many parts of the world, lack of security and, of course, Internet surveillance.

The Internets vulnerability isnt great for advocates of cryptocurrency. A single day without access to the Internet can cost crypto exchanges, miners and traders millions. You cant buy, send or steal bitcoin if the Internet is down. Or can you?

Neil Woodfine, director of marketing at Bitcoin development firm Blockstream, took to Twitter on Monday to deliver a blistering riposte to those who believe Bitcoin is reliant on the Internet, based on a presentation he delivered in Zurich, Switzerland last October.

Woodfine admitted that delivering transaction data to miners requires an Internet-connected device. Therefore, any offline solution is really only Internet-minimized, but the scope is still huge.

"Bitcoin endures because the engineers that build it expect the unexpected. Money is a dangerous game, and any weaknesses, no matter how small, will be exploited, he wrote.

His first bit of advice is that people should get into the habit of going offline, and that means looking after their own private keys instead of entrusting them to an exchange or other custodian.

But the first step to really using bitcoin offline is to have your own full node. At first, it seems counter-intuitive; running a Bitcoin node requires serious bandwidthwhich requires a connection to the Internet, which is linked to an IP address, which in turn can be linked to a physical address.

Thats where Blockstream Satellite comes into play. The startup uses teleports around the world to beam bitcoin blockchain data to four geostationary satellites around the Earth. These satellites then broadcast the data to almost all populated regions in the world, said Woodfine.

Currently, Blockstreams satellites transmit only one way, for download only, so its not possible to use the network to transmit transaction datayet.

But its free, theres no bandwidth limit, and to pick up the signal you need less than $100 of equipment, said Woodfine. That consists of a standard TV satellite dish, an SDR (software defined radioavailable for $24 on Amazon), and a basic computer, such as a Raspberry Pi.

This is where things gets really interesting. Because a single node connected to a satellite can provide bitcoin blockchain data to a whole area via Wi-Fi rebroadcasts using simple, low-cost, equipment.

For sharing transactions, mesh networksa network of nodes that are not centrally-owned or controlled, connected directly to each otherare the best known option. They relay transactions data from and to other nodes in transmission range. Only one node needs to be connected to the Internet in order to relay the data to the rest of the mesh.

To hook up to a mesh network, a popular option is an inexpensive, low-powered messaging system called goTenna. It has a range of approximately four miles, which can be extended via a relay method. But mesh networks are not infallible, the technology is still nascent and its impractical in confrontational situations, say protestors.

One option thats quickly catching on is the so-called Low Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN). Widely used for IoT applications, LoRaWAN chips work in extremely low-power devices, and offer a four mile range. However, bandwidth is tiny, and transactions need to be broken up and sent slowly, said Woodfine.

Another alternative is relaying transactions via mobile text messages to Internet-connected devices. Tools to enable this include Samurai Wallets Pony Direct, txTenna, a collaboration between goTenna and Samurai Wallet, and SMSPushTX.

Using these various methods, one satnode and one Internet connected device can produce an entire network, said Woodfine.

There are other methods for getting transactions data through, he said.

Using amateur radio, users can transmit low-bandwidth transaction data around the world on very little power.

Satellite phones, such as Iridium Go, allow users to send and receive low bandwidth data anywhere in the world.

And, if all else fails, theres Opendime, a small USB stick that allows you to physically spend Bitcoin, just like a dollar bill, and pass it along multiple times.

But hang on a minute. Isnt that going back to where we all started?

Follow this link:
What good is Bitcoin if the Internet fails? - Decrypt

According to recent reports, Nasdaq recently notified Golden Bull Limited, warning the company that it is no longer compliant with listing rules due to the lack of Form 6-K.

Golden Bull Limited, a company that operates as an online finance marketplace and a lending firm, was recently contacted by Nasdaq with a warning. According to the firms announcement, Nasdaq notified Golden Bull that it failed to provide its Form 6-K financial statements for the period of six months prior to June 30th, 2019.

The lack of the financial statement interferes with Nasdaqs listing rules, which may lead to Golden Bulls removal from Nasdaqs listing if the company fails to deliver the necessary data.

However, Nasdaq will not react immediately, and has given Golden Bull Ltd a 60-day deadline to create and deliver a plan on regaining compliance with the listing rules.

The company responded to the notification by claiming that it intends to deliver the necessary information before the end of January 2020.

As mentioned earlier, Golden Bull Limited started out as a finance marketplace and a lending firm that provided short-term loans to individuals and small businesses. The company serves customers in China, where it recently announced that it had decided to shut down its peer-to-peer lending business.

Since then, Golden Bull focused on becoming a car rental business but also a Bitcoin mining firm. The firm started this transition back in March 2018, right after cryptocurrency prices crashed after reaching its all-time high (ATH) in December 2017/January 2018.

However, this is also not the first time that the firm received a warning from Nasdaq. Previously, it was reported in late September 2019 that the company received Nasdaqs notification letter due to deficiency in the minimum bid price requirements.

According to reports from that time, Nasdaq states that the minimum bid price per share for the firms ordinary shares have been under $1 for over 30 consecutive business days. This is not in compliance with Nasdaqs listing rules, and Nasdaq sent a warning, which did not have an immediate effect either.

Instead, the company was given until March 24th, 2020 to execute a plan that would allow it to regain compliance. In other words, Golden Bull Ltd. needed to raise the closing bid price of its ordinary shares to at least $1 for 10 consecutive business days, or longer.

Now, the Bitcoin mining firm once again seems to have problems with compliance on Nasdaq, and while it will not be unlisted immediately, it will have to work for the privilege of staying on Nasdaq.

What do you think about the Golden Bulls situation? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Images via Shutterstock

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Nasdaq Issues Warning to Bitcoin Mining Company - Bitcoinist

LONDON, Jan. 8, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Yesterday, the Canadian listed crypto mining giant TAAL, announced it was to lowering its mining transaction fees for the BSV network to support enterprise blockchain applications that generate high transaction volumes. In response, CoinGeek Mining has decided to follow suit and match these fee reductions:

CoinGeek will regularly review these fee rates with respect to fiat equivalents in order to maintain a fiat stable transaction fee rate; this will provide the price predictability that enterprises want for their data applications.

Recently, Bitcoin SV (BSV) application development has exploded globally, including across Europe, Australia and China, to take advantage of BSV's greater data capacity and micropayments capability. Growing usage has led BSV to show consistently more transactions and consistently bigger average block size than BTC: https://coin.dance/, and recently surpass the Ethereum network on some days.BSV is also the only project that adheres to the original design of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. In short, BSV is Bitcoin.

Calvin Ayre, owner and founder of CoinGeek Mining, commented: "We are following TAAL in reducing these transaction fees in order to support long-term growth of applications which generate high volume transactions on the BSV blockchain. We are doing this in order to generate, and highlight, the ability of BSV to accommodate a huge volume of transactions to sustain blockchain profitability for both miners and enterprise applications - in the years to come."

Additionally, CoinGeek Mining will follow TAAL's lead to increase the restrictive limit (inherited from Bitcoin Core) of unconfirmed transaction ancestors on BSV from 25 to 50. Although this change is unrelated to the reduced transaction fees, it has a similar goal to support big enterprise applications on BSV. A higher limit of 50 unconfirmed ancestors will enable business applications to create longer sets of chained transactions before they are mined in a block.

Precautions for BSV network participants

It should be noted that until a lower relay fee rate is widely adopted, it is NOT zero-confirmation safe to send transactions with a fee rate below the old default rate of 1 satoshi/byte. For transactions that involve two parties without trust, the fee rate should remain at 1 satoshi/byte until after the Genesis hard fork of the Bitcoin SV network (scheduled for February 4, 2020). Transactions that do not involve a counterparty (e.g. data transactions from applications like WeatherSV who negotiated BSV transaction fee deals directly with miners) can take advantage of the lower fee rates immediately.

For more on BSV, visit BitcoinSV.comand come to the next major BSV event the CoinGeek conference in London, February 20-21, 2020.

SOURCE CoinGeek

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Bitcoin SV Mining Fees Just Got Even Lower: CoinGeek Follows TAAL Mining With Fee Reductions - PRNewswire

The conversation about whether bitcoin is a safe haven asset continues in the wake of Iranian missile strikes, which saw the price of BTC both surge and retrace in parallel with crude and gold. To help explain whats going on, we feature comments from Ikigai Asset Managements Travis Kling.

Also in todays episode, we look at newly published priorities from the SEC around crypto including investor suitability, trading practices and compliance program effectiveness. We also discuss former Bakkt CEO and now U.S. Senator Kelly Loefflers appointment to the committee that oversees the CFTC. Is it a conflict of interest, something good for the crypto industry or both?

Bitcoin as a safe haven asset as it follows crude and gold after Iran missile strikes

SEC publishes 2020 crypto priorities

Kelly Loefller appointed to committee overseeing CFTC

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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Travis Kling on Bitcoin as a Safe Haven Asset - CoinDesk

Trading guru Peter Brandt is apparently among those who believe that a new Bitcoin bull market has already started. In his new tweet, he gives three reasons why this might be the case.

Must Read

As reported by U.Today, BTC was trapped in the six-month falling channel after reaching its 2019 high of $13,700. However, the top cryptocurrency managed to print a daily close at $8,160, thus finally breaking out of the bear channel. This "pending penetration"gives more power to the bulls that have been on fire as of recently.

Bitcoin's multi-year support also remains intact, which means that BTC could continue its parabolic uptrend that started in January 2015. Over the past few months, Bitcoin has touched this support on multiple occasions but the bears are yet to break below it.

To top that off, the trading vet also noticed that Bitcoin was inching closer to reach the head-and-shoulders (H&S) bottom on the daily chart. The narrative that BTC was about to break out of an inverse head-and-shoulders (iH&S) pattern was predominant on the Crypto Twitter as of recently.

Must Read

The cryptocurrency community looks like a ghost town after Bitcoin's explosive rally in December 2017 went south. According to BitInfoCharts, the number of Bitcoin-related tweets is currently at the 2014 level (let that sink in).

While it might seem like crypto has lost its appeal for the average Joe, this shakeout of "cryptocultists" is actually a good thing, according to Brandt. Earlier, he claimed that the bulls must be fully purged on Twitter for the BTC price to hit $50,000.

Link:
Bitcoin (BTC) Bull Market Has Already Started. Trading Legend Peter Brandt Explains Why - U.Today

LAS VEGAS "Bitcoin as an asset class has proven that mathematical scarcity can support an incredibly exciting asset," Dante Disparte, vice chairman of the Libra Association, said Tuesday. "It's not a means of payment. It just isn't."

Disparte spoke at the Digital Money Forum at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, making his argument to gadget fans and technology's early adopters.

"The bottom rung of the ladder of economic mobility is payment access," Disparte said. And so far, he said, crypto just isn't cutting it on payments. Disparte said that's why he became interested in what Facebook was building with Libra.

The Libra Association is a consortium of large companies that aims to eventually launch the Libra stablecoin, a federated cryptocurrency designed by Facebook for the millions of people who don't have access to banking services. Each company involved would run a node, but only those approved by existing members can join. Though it is more decentralized than existing finance, it is not permissionless, like bitcoin or ethereum.

Libra is trying to solve a complex problem. "How do you drive mass adoption?" Disparte said. "How do you remove insidious levels of friction that basically make it cost-prohibitive to give people access to payments?"

"I'm not convinced that a council of self-interested companies can do money better than a decentralized system," Akin Sawyerr, a strategy lead on the Decred project, said on the Tuesday panel. "The only way to really get there is to empower the individuals to have some base-level sovereignty."

By sovereignty, Sawyerr meant a level on which a person has uncensorable control of their money. In bitcoin terms, as long as a person controls their keys, no one can take away their bitcoin. He expressed doubt that a permissioned system run by dozens of large organizations would be very censorship-resistant. Notably, the payments companies initially involved in the Libra Association including PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and others departed en masse in October.

But Disparte countered that until permissionless crypto projects deliver a payments system that people in the developing world actually use and that shows it can scale, it's not fair to subject Libra to what he called, "a crypto purity test."

"It's not one or the other. The world is not zero sum," Disparte said.

Disclosure: CoinDesk is a media partner of the Digital Money Forum.

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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Libra Association Exec: World Needs Us Because Bitcoin Is 'Not a Means of Payment' - CoinDesk

What happened

Shares ofGrayscale Bitcoin Trust (OTC:GBTC)popped 12.3% on Monday, as the price of bitcoin rebounded sharply over the weekend.

Bitcoin's price climbed to more than $8,000 on Monday, up from about $7,300 at the close of the U.S. stock markets on Friday.As it typically the case with cryptocurrencies, pinpointing the exact reason for the move is difficult if not impossible.

One theory is that bitcoin's role as a hedge against geopolitical turmoil is helping to drive its price higher. The upward move coincides with the death of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike. Many investors are concerned that rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran could lead to escalating military conflict in the Middle East, destabilizing the region and global oil supplies in the process.

Image source: Getty Images.

Another theory is that bitcoin reached technical support levels near $7,000 and has since rallied off these prices.

Both of these factors, along with many others, are likely contributing to bitcoin's recent gains at least to some extent.

The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust an imperfect proxy for the price of bitcoin. The trust is currently trading at a nearly 30% premium to the value of the underlying cryptocurrency that it holds.

However, unless a bitcoin exchange-traded fund is approved by regulators, investors who do not wish to deal with the security and other operational challenges that come with holding actual bitcoin will probably continue to use Grayscale Bitcoin Trust as a means to gain exposure to the cryptocurrency. As such -- and despite its sizable premium to the value of its underlying Bitcoin -- the price of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust will probably continue to mimic the price movements of bitcoin in the days and weeks ahead.

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Why Grayscale Bitcoin Trust Surged Today - Motley Fool