Category Archives: Bitcoin

Some financial publications around the world are touting the "shortest bear run in history" for U.S. equities, as if the dark days of the coronavirus sell-off are behind us.

Markets in the U.S. are beginning to show signs of life thanks to the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing plus the recently enacted $2 trillion U.S. stimulus package. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 23 percent and the S&P 500 index has gained around 20 percent from their respective March 23 bottoms. Yet, a conclusion to the wide-reaching COVID-19 pandemic is far from over.

Australia's equity benchmark ASX 200 index is off by 31 percent and Japan's Nikkei 225 has lost 21 percent from their February highs as the COVID-19 outbreak went from bad to worse over a month ago.

Government measures in Australia got a whole lot more stringent overnight. The country's prime minister announced gatherings were to be restricted even further to a maximum of two people in order to slow the spread of COVID-19 from within its borders. The unprecedented measure were agreed to by the newly created "national cabinet," comprised of the premiers of all the states and territories plus the prime minister and convened to coordinate a battle plan against the virus.

So far, the ASX has been slow to react. The index is up by about 2.3 percent on the day. However, pressure toward the downside is apparent. Gains may require significant positive day-on-day returns over the course of this week if they are to signal confidence in the country's latest measures.

Jehan Chu, co-founder and managing partner at Hong Kong-based blockchain investment and trading firm Kenetic, said that despite the turmoil the "corona moment" would be the moment we learned to be truly digital.

"While all market signs point to a long and lean winter, the silver lining is that remote working and especially socializing is clearly the catalyst to mainstream the digital experience," Chu said.

"From church services to dance parties, group meditation to infant play groups, the digital experience is normalizing for all sectors of society. This experimental phase, driven by a survival instinct, is fundamentally ushering the masses to the "digital-first" future," Chu added.

In commodities, oil is trading at lows not seen since February 2002. Gold is down half a percent from March 27's close and is showing signs of extreme volatility amid the uncertainty, currently changing hands for around $1,616 per troy ounce.

Bitcoin struggles to gain higher ground

Bitcoin prices' resistance near $6,900 is presenting a significant hurdle for the world's bellwether cryptocurrency. The cryptocurrency suffered continual losses last week, with prices down $1,000 from that local peak. Bitcoin is currently changing hands for around $5,900.

Further, two long-term moving averages (MAs), the 200-day and 100-day, are beginning to converge once more. That indicates the potential for a deeper drawdown from Feb. 13's high of around $10,500, reflecting sentiment on current global market conditions.

The last time these two MAs crossed was back in November 2019, when prices fell nearly a quarter to a local bottom of around $6,425 from $8,500.

Elsewhere in crypto, XRP is down 3.6 percent over the weekend. Ether (ETH) is currently trading 4.1 percent lower than March 27's close of around $131.

Global financial sentiment will need to continue to improve significantly in the coming week if there is any real chance of staving off a deeper recession. In the past week, almost all markets have suffered daily lower highs, taken by technical traders to be a negative signal.

With coronavirus-related updates changing daily at a rapid pace, a conclusion to the uncertainty and fear in markets may be far from over.

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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Bear Market Over? Charts on Bitcoin and ASX 200 Suggest Otherwise - CoinDesk

The creator of Cardano says the smart contract platform will become technologically superior to Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP and every other blockchain in the industry this year.

In a new Periscope video on the future of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson says advancements in smart contracts and wallets in recent years have been revolutionary, and he believes Cardano is pulling all the pieces together to become the most advanced blockchain in existence.

The improvements are poised to make Cardanos native crypto asset ADA the best cryptocurrency on the planet, according to Hoskinson, who also co-created Ethereum.

These are amazing achievements in a very short period of time. They were incredibly expensive in terms of thought, time and money. But they were achievements nonetheless. And they are achievements that have moved the entire state of the industry forward.

So this year is the year you see all those components come together and this is the year you see Cardano basically ascend to the best cryptocurrency in the world. There really is going to be nothing on market thats as good as what were delivering this year. Because at the end of the day we have it all.

Well have a loading system. Well have a smart contract system. Well have a multi-asset standard. Well have an identity standard. Well have the scalability required to meet all of the growth demands that we need. We have a very clear interoperability story. We have a clear idea of how were going to communicate with other systems. We have a great way for academics to get involved. We have a great way for the community to get involved.

And no matter what group youre in, whether youre in the group of people who buy ADA or trade it, whether youre in the group of people who develop on the platform, the people who govern the platform or the people who operate the platform, were going to be best in class in all of those things. And thats what were delivering, and thats what were committed to deliver throughout 2020.

As confident as Hoskinson is in the operational superiority of Cardano, he cautions that this doesnt mean it automatically becomes the most popular or widely used platform in the industry.

That, he says, will depend on the success of the Cardano Foundation and the commercial venture incubator Emurgo.

Its an open debate about what makes us competitive and what will bring new users into the ecosystem and whats commercially critical infrastructure. And thats an ecosystem play. So it means Emurgo has to step up. It means the Foundation has to step up, and this is what they were funded for and why they exist.

Featured Image: Shutterstock/zhu difeng

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Better Than Bitcoin? Charles Hoskinson Says Cardano Will Become Best Cryptocurrency in the World This Year - The Daily Hodl

The number of retail investors registering for an account with Japanese cryptocurrency exchange bitbank spiked by 40% in the week after the Bitcoin bloodbath.

The March 12 meltdown saw the price of Bitcoin (BTC) drop to a new 2020 low at $3,775. An official blog post by bitbank market analyst Yuya Hasegawa reveals that Bitcoin trade volume and account registrations both saw a significant surge in the wake of the crash.

Even the number of users going through KYC was above average on the day of the BTC downturn and the following couple of days.

Hasegawa contrasts the current situation to the period between November to December 2018 when the price of Bitcoin ground down. In that case, interest in the crypto market as a whole went down and bitbanks daily account registrations took a hit.

However, the price saw a 60% rebound while sustaining high volumes soon after the recent crash, which suggests to Hasegawa the intent to buy the dip is quite obvious:

When we take the increased daily account registrations into consideration, we can once again deduce that the current market recovery is driven largely by retail investors. Furthermore, as Forbes reports, this phenomenon is likely to be global, as Kraken, a San Francisco-based crypto exchange, experienced a steep increase in account registrations after March 12.

In just under 49 days, BTC will experience a halving where the block reward will decrease to 6.25 BTC. The last time this happened was in 2016.

Hasegawa writes that data from Google Trends suggests that investors in Japan and around the world are well aware of the possible price impact of the halving and will seize on any price drop to add to their holdings:

There is a good chance that, for this time around, there are many retail investors who want to buy Bitcoin or stack up their holdings at the cheapest price possible before its halving.

The rest is here:
Japanese Investors Rushed To Buy The Dip After Bitcoin Bloodbath - Cointelegraph

Byrne Hobart, a CoinDesk columnist, is an investor, consultant and writer in New York. His newsletter, The Diff (diff.substack.com) covers inflection points in finance and technology.

Bitcoin (BTC) was designed for many reasons, but one of the most important was to be a safe-haven asset during times of financial distress. From the genesis blocks coinbase parameter (The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks) to today, bitcoins fans have treated it as something worth owning when the market goes crazy.

So its disappointing, to say the least, that after the fastest market rout in recent history, an asset built to be a safe haven dropped 31 percent while the S&P dropped by a quarter. The daily correlation between the S&P and bitcoin went from slightly negative in February to 0.6 in March. Bitcoin barely responded to the Federal Reserve cutting rates to zero, and shrugged off other monetary interventions.

This is painful to anyone who owns bitcoin, especially to anyone who bought it as a hedge against exactly this kind of sell-off, and exactly this kind of central bank response. The money printer went brrr, and yet the store-of-value lost value.

When we talk about safe-haven assets, were really talking about three different kinds of assets, for three kinds of scenarios:

Safer versions of risky bets, of the sort youd invest in to hedge against a mild recession. These might include less-levered companies in a given industry, high-margin companies, corporate bonds rather than equities or any investment in a consumer staples company. When the economy shrinks, its bad news for companies in the champagne and luxury hotel business, but doesnt really dent sales of toothpaste and canned food.

Assets people borrow during good times: Yen and U.S. Treasurys are classic safe assets, in part because investors borrow them to make other bets. If you buy a 10-year corporate bond, youre making a bet on the creditworthiness of the company, and a bet on interest rates. Most of the people who are good at credit analysis are not experts in predicting the future course of monetary policy, so many of them buy the corporate bonds and bet against Treasurys of the same maturity to control their interest rate risk.

Its not the safe haven for this particular kind of crisis.

The yen is a similar case: Since yen rates have been so low for so long, a classic forex trade is to borrow yen and invest in a currency with higher rates. In both cases, when the trade unwinds when you sell your corporate bond or close out your bet on the Turkish lira or the South African rand, you end up buying the safe asset. Anything boring and borrowable goes up in price in response to bad news.

Things you want to own if the world is about to end. The best way to illustrate this is with a story: The financier Felix Rohatyn grew up in France in the 1930s. When Germany invaded, his family fled they had enough time to pack their bags, but they lost almost everything. He recalled his parents putting gold coins in tubes of toothpaste before leaving. Everything else they owned, they left behind. If youre living through a moment thats going to be in the history books, the only assets you can take with you are the ones in your head or the ones you can smuggle out. (A USB drive, conveniently, fits into a variety of toiletry containers.)

One interpretation of bitcoins price performance during the COVID-19 crisis is that it wasnt such a safe haven after all. But another is that its not the safe haven for this particular kind of crisis. The math of epidemics and immunity is such that, however bad they are, they eventually burn themselves out given a low mutation rate. Once the percentage of the population that has been infected is greater than 1 / R0, cases begin to fall even in the absence of countermeasures. With a case fatality rate of 2 percent, thats an extraordinarily painful process to go through, and it ends up being a disaster for humanity on a historic scale.

An intense disaster, but not one that lasts forever. The 1957-58 flu pandemic may have led to the sharpest postwar recession in U.S. history (at least as of Q4 2019), but the subsequent recovery was equally swift.

Right now, thats how most investors are thinking. Whether they think COVID-19 is overblown or underblown, they still think of it as a temporary problem from which well recover in short order. In fact, the very bailouts that Satoshi referenced in the Genesis block point to an argument in favor of the recovery consensus. Conventional wisdom among investors and policymakers today is the government didnt react fast enough in 2008 to forestall a deflationary spiral. This time around, central banks are moving fast to supply cheap capital to financial institutions. In that scenario, governments and economies dont collapse, and nobody has to flee their home hours ahead of disaster.

They do, however, need to scramble for dollars to service debts, so theyll sell anything stocks, bonds, real estate, crypto and convert it into an asset they can use to pay the bills.

Bitcoins drop doesnt disprove the safe haven argument. It just shows us bitcoin is designed to be a safe haven from a worse storm.

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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Bitcoin Is a Safe Haven for a Worse Storm Than This - CoinDesk

Alex Dovbnya

Bitcoin (BTC) is struggling to recover after a string of losses over the past few days

According to prominent cryptocurrency trader Scott Melker, Bitcoin (BTC) has just formed an 'ugly' candle on its weekly charts after the flagship coinfailed to surge above $7,000 and witnessed a substantial price drop.

However, the bulls should take comfort in the fact that Bitcoin did manage to print both daily and weekly closes above $5,873, which was identified as a key support level by Melker.

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Despite the convincing comeback of the bears that made many traders dust off their $2K charts, Bitcoin managed to hold above its 200-day moving average, which is arguably the most important trendline.

Trader Big Cheds noted thatBTC had formed an inverted hammer on the weekly chart. This candlestick pattern, which can be identified by a long upper shadow that dwarfs the size of the body, isoften treated as a bullish reversal pattern that marks the end of a downtrend.

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So far, Bitcoin has managed to hold the $5,800 support despite the recent onslaught of the bears. At the time of writing, Bitcoin is actually up by almost six percent, changing hands at $6,221.

U.S. stock market futures are currently in the green after U.S. President Donald Trump extended federal social distancing, which indicates that equities are going to have a less-than-awful day. This is bullish for Bitcoin given its recent correlation with stocks.

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Bitcoin (BTC) Price Prints 'Ugly' Weekly Candle, but All Is Not Lost for Bulls - U.Today

What happens to your bitcoin after you die?

This is more than just a philosophical question: It could involve a substantial amount of currency.

The question of crypto and the Great Beyond is what prompted about 20 or so developers to get together in London recently to experiment with repurposing the current lightning protocol to send private messages as a dead man's button, a system that can't be censored and would keep your crypto safe for your heirs.

Lightning Labs infrastructure engineer Joost Jager has been exploring using lightning for messaging over the past year. At the Advancing Bitcoin conference in London, Jager hosted a workshop to explore building a dead man's button with lightning. The mission was to show that lightning can be used as messaging system as well as a payment network.

These buttons are not new. At the workshop, Jager noted Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower, used one in case he died before journalists could reveal the contents of the documents he wanted to make public.

The goal of the workshop was to explore one of lightnings relatively new features, "keysend" (formerly known as spontaneous payments). Its so experimental it isn't even described in the lightning specifications yet. But it does offer a way to send data (called "custom records" in LND, the lightning implementation Jager works on) along with a transaction.

Heres how it might work: Imagine a user who wants to pass on a bitcoin (BTC) inheritance. That user would communicate with a "service," pushing a "button" that would send a message every week or so to signify that the user is still alive.

If the button isn't pressed one week, it is assumed the bitcoin user is dead or incapacitated and it's time for the bitcoin to be passed on, at which point the service automatically dispenses a "secret," which can be used to retrieve the crypto.

Beyond that, Jager thought some additional features should be added, even if they could make the program trickier to implement. The program should maintain the privacy of the sender and the receiver, he said, and should allow the sender to get proof the service still has the secret.

Developers split into small groups to think about how to build a service that would meet all of these and other goals. The workshop developers came up with some ideas, which Jager published to GitHub. He included a rough implementation, which puts several of the ideas into practice, though he said the code "is extremely limited and does not implement everything described."

This design isn't necessarily the best way forward, Jager said, but it's a proof of concept he hopes can inspire other implementations.

Imagination versus loss

Jager told CoinDesk the "primary" reason he chose the dead man's button for the workshop was it is complex enough of a use case that it can show off what lightning can do as a messaging system.

But he also thinks a dead man's button could be a real use case for lightning down the road.

"Many people try to arrange their crypto inheritance and need to make up their minds about who they trust. This could be an alternative, assuming that wrinkles are ironed out and the whole process is hidden underneath a user-friendly shell," he said. This is "unlikely to happen short term, but I hope people see the possibilities."

Lawyer Pamela Morgan, an expert on crypto inheritance and author of a book dedicated to helping people develop a plan to pass on their crypto, agrees with Jager the technology is far from ready. But she said she would not encourage users to put any money into any experimental dead man's button systems just yet.

"Dead man's switches are fun projects that excite our imaginations but fail to solve the complex and multidisciplinary challenges of crypto asset inheritance distribution. Relying on such solutions for something as important as inheritance is likely to cause catastrophic loss," she told CoinDesk.

However, she said the technology has promise. Since few crypto enthusiasts have any sort of a plan for what to do with their currencies after they are gone, she's happy to see people exploring ways to make crypto inheritance a more common practice.

"If adding a dead man's switch makes more people actually do inheritance planning for their bitcoin, then I'm all for it because so few people actually do anything," she told CoinDesk.

In the meantime, Jager is pressing on with beefing up lightning's messaging system to make it easier to send messages across the network.

Correction (Feb. 24, 22:52 UTC): This article has been updated to clarify the intent of the workshop.

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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How to Protect Bitcoin for Your Heirs With the Push of a 'Dead Man's Button' - CoinDesk - Coindesk

Bitcoin, along with the surging wider cryptocurrency market, has had an incredible start to the year.

The bitcoin price has rallied around 50% since January 1, with some smaller cryptocurrencies making surprise triple-digit percentage gains, and many bitcoin bulls think it still has further to gothough problems could be on the horizon.

Now, Changpeng Zhao, the widely-respected founder and chief executive of the world's biggest bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange Binance, has broken his rule against market forecasting to predict "the bitcoin price will likely increase."

Binance's chief executive is feeling bullish on the bitcoin price ahead of bitcoin's upcoming ... [+] halving event, expected in May.

"I personally believe the halving has not been priced in," Changpeng Zhao, often known simply as CZ, told bitcoin, cryptocurrency and blockchain video news site BlockTV this week, adding he "doesn't usually give market predictions" because he will be wrong "50% of the time."

Bitcoin traders and investors have begun gearing up for the looming May bitcoin halving event, among other positive bitcoin developments expected this year, when the coin reward for mining new bitcoin blocks is scheduled to drop from 12.5 bitcoin to 6.25 bitcoincutting the supply of new bitcoin coming onto the market by half.

There have already been two bitcoin halvings since bitcoin launched in 2009, one in 2012 and another in 2016. Bitcoin halvings are scheduled to continue roughly once every four years until the maximum supply of 21 million bitcoins has been generated by the network, something that won't happen until well into the next century.

Whether the upcoming bitcoin halving has been "priced in" by the market has become a controversial issue among investors. Generally, in well-developed markets, equity, commodities and currencies are priced based on future expectationssuggesting that as bitcoin traders and investors are aware of the May halving, the price will have already made the gains related to it.

CZ disagrees, however, telling BlockTV: "The market is not efficient. Most people don't get information quickly. People need a lot of time to let concepts sink in and adjust."

Many are hoping the 2020 bitcoin halving will see a repeat of the last cut to supply. Bitcoin prices doubled in 2016 and soared 13-fold the following year.

However, CZ warned that "historic events do not predict future events, so don't take that too literally," but explained the bitcoin halving will mean "it costs miners almost double what it does now to produce one bitcoin. Psychologically, those miners won't be willing to sell below that price."

The bitcoin price has soared so far this year but has swung wildly in recent weeks, bouncing around ... [+] the psychological $10,000 per bitcoin mark.

"New bitcoin coming to market will be severely limited and at the same time we're seeing more users and traders coming in."

"Economic theory tells us that the bitcoin price will likely increase but this is just the theory and hard to predict," CZ said, adding he's feeling "pretty positive."

Meanwhile, the number of people searching Google for the term "bitcoin halving" has been steadily rising along with the bitcoin price.

Analysts at Arcane Research found last monththat an increase in searches could be a sign bitcoin's halving will recapture the wider public interest in bitcoin and crypto that catapulted the bitcoin price to around $20,000 in 2017.

Many other bitcoin and cryptocurrency market watchers share CZ's enthusiasm, though some think it could be other factors that push up the bitcoin price.

"I still think that bitcoin will hit $100,000 by end of December 2021," Anthony Pompliano, the cofounder of bitcoin and crypto investment group Morgan Creek Digital, said last month, pointing to bitcoin's "fixed supply" and "increasing demand" as the reason for bitcoin's performance.

Elsewhere, others are not so upbeatwith the the chief executive of China-based investment advisory group RockTree Capital last month forecasting we could see the bitcoin price dip.

Continued here:
Binance CEO Makes Rare Price PredictionSays This Is When To Buy Bitcoin - Forbes

Justin Sun, the founder and CEO of Tron (TRX), the 15th biggest cryptocurrency by market cap, is investing in a number of cryptos other than Bitcoin (BTC).

In a Feb. 23 interview with CNN, Tron CEO said that he is a long-term believer in cryptocurrencies and owns a stake in many altcoins, including the two largest coins after Bitcoin Ether (ETH) and XRP.

When asked whether Sun has its crypto portfolio diversified, the Tron CEO answered:

I own a lot of XRP and Ethereum, too. Im like a long-term believer of the crypto so I want all crypto assets to succeed. So thats why I own a lot of other different cryptos as well.

As a major believer in crypto, Sun is bullish on the price of cryptocurrencies and confident that cryptos like Bitcoin are the future of money. In the interview, Tron CEO predicted that Bitcoin will cross $100,000 mark in 2025, emphasizing that other cryptocurrencies will follow the trend.

Justin Suns $100,000 Bitcoin prediction in his own words:

I definitely believe Bitcoin will pass $100K in 2025. I believe we can achieve this price before 2025. At the same time, I think a lot of other crypto projects like Tron, Ethereum and XRP will also see bull market.

In line with his bullish stance on crypto, Trons Justin Sun claimed in the interview that he invests all of his money to crypto. However, Sun still converts his crypto in fiat currencies like the United States dollar. In the interview, Tron CEO said that he only withdraws crypto to fiat when he needs to spend money in his daily life.

The news comes about a month after Sun had his charity lunch with Berkshire Hathaway chairman and known Bitcoin critic Warren Buffett. On Jan. 23, Tron CEO met with Buffett to finally have a long-awaited luncheon after postponing the event for medical reasons previously in 2019.

In the latest interview, Tron CEO revealed that he didnt exactly try to convince the famous billionaire investor that crypto will massively surge in the coming years. Instead, Justin Sun was trying to explain some crypto potentials to Buffett as he wanted him to understand basic fundamentals of blockchain and crypto such as instant crypto transactions.

Tron CEO also outlined that Buffett was very open to new technologies like crypto and blockchain, noting that the the known investor accepted Bitcoin and TRX from him. However, Buffett has claimed that he doesnt own any cryptocurrency and doesnt plan to invest in any crypto in a Feb. 24 interview with CNBC. In the interview, the billionaire investor reiterated his negative stance on crypto, arguing that cryptos have zero value and dont produce anything.

In another CNBC interview in 2018, Buffet predicted that crypto will come to a bad ending, declaring that Bitcoin is "probably rat poison squared.

Cointelegraph reached out to the Tron team for additional comments on the matter and will update if we hear back.

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Tron CEO: Bitcoin to Break $100K in 2025 and Pull Up Other Coins - Cointelegraph

Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, decentralization, China's digital yuan, Facebook's librathe U.S. is understandably worried about the dominance of the almighty dollar.

Last year, U.S. president Donald Trump slammed bitcoin as based on "thin air," while his Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin branded bitcoin a "national security threat."

Now, the U.S. has admitted bitcoin and cryptocurrency could undermine the dollar's status as the worlds reserve currencyand it wants to find out exactly how bad for the country, its economy, and security that could be.

The rise of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies has caused some to fear the dominance of the U.S. dollar ... [+] might be under threat.

"Many cryptocurrency enthusiasts predict that either a global cryptocurrency or a national digital currency could undermine the U.S. dollar," the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence wrote in a job listing earlier this month, calling for two researchers to evaluate the impact of the U.S. dollar losing its status as the world reserve currency.

"If either of these scenarios or others come to pass, the U.S. would lose both its status in the world and its global authorities."

The two roles, looking for a postdoc Ph.D. graduate and a U.S. university or government laboratory employee research assistant, are with the U.S. Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program through the Department of Energys Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Technology.

Back in 2018, the Department of Energys Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Technology conducted research that found that the creation of new bitcoin, along with smaller cryptocurrencies ethereum, litecoin and monero, used more energy than mineral mining to produce the same market value.

The Department of Energys Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Technology did not respond to a request for comment.

"There are many advantages for U.S. national security to have the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency," the job post, which has a deadline of the February 28, read, pointing to the combat of financial crimes, the prevention of terrorism and the development of weapons of mass destruction, the ability of the U.S. to sanction other countries, cause financial instability in global markets.

"The U.S. maintains international dominance in no small part due to its financial power and authorities."

Meanwhile, calls for the U.S. to begin development of a so-called digital dollar have been growing louder over recent months.

Christopher Giancarlo, former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, recently set up the Digital Dollar Foundation to work on the design and potential framework of a digital dollar.

The bitcoin price,which has failed to return to its all-time highs set in late 2017 despite it climbing around 50% since the beginning of the year, was given a substantial boost in the first half of last year by Facebook's plans for a bitcoin-like rival.

The bitcoin price has soared in recent years, making bitcoin easily the last decade's best ... [+] investment.

Many have long expected governments to eventually try to undermine bitcoin's network to halt its adoptionthough bitcoin's decentralized nature makes it remarkably resilient.

"We can win a major battle [with governments] in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years," bitcoin's mysterious creator Satoshi Nakamoto wrote in 2008. "Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure [peer-to-peer] networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own."

Bitcoin now stands with these networks in resistance to government control.

Link:
The U.S. Is Very Worried About BitcoinAnd Its Finally Doing Something About It - Forbes

One of the earliest Bitcoin proponents is facing criticism for publicly endorsing an alternative crypto asset. Trace Mayer, who recommended people buy Bitcoin back in 2010, appeared on a recent YouTube interview talking very highly of Mimblewimble Coin.

Industry observers have taken issue with the fact that Mimblewimble Coin launched with a 50 percent pre-mine. Many in the crypto industry believe Mayers sudden endorsement of the recently-launched project is aimed at his own personal enrichment.

Investor, entrepreneur, and general advocate of freedom Trace Mayer was one of the first people to openly promote Bitcoin. According to the Bitcoin Knowledge podcast hosts website, he actually started in 2010, when the entire BTC market cap was less than $2 million.

As well as hosting his own podcast on Bitcoin, Mayer has appeared on countless YouTube channels to talk Bitcoin. Being involved with BTC from almost the very beginning, and him not using his credibility in the industry to promote questionable initial coin offerings during the 2017 bull market, earned Mayer the respect of many.

So too did his efforts at promoting Bitcoin as the ultimate asset by which to realise true monetary sovereignty. Starting in 2019, Mayer advocated an annual bank run of sorts on crypto asset exchange platforms on Bitcoins birthday. The idea behind proof-of-keys was to simultaneously promote self-custody of digital currencies, as well as to check on the solvency of the exchange platforms themselves.

Recently, Mayer appeared on yet another crypto-focused YouTube channel. Only this time, he didnt just champion Bitcoin.

The interview with World Alternative Mediaopened with questions about the Bitcoin halving and its likely impact on price. As you might expect from one of the most enduring Bitcoin advocates, Mayer thinks the supply shock will result in a higher Bitcoin price.

The Bitcoin Knowledge host then, seemingly out of nowhere, starts to laud more privacy-focused projects, in particular Mimblewimble Coin. He describes it as potentially more disruptive than Bitcoin:

. scalability increase, privacy, fungibility, anonymity, they think Bitcoins a problem? You can actually see whats happening on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Mayer makes a clear effort to promote Mimblewimble Coin in the above interview. Even after the presenter attempts to change the subject away from the relatively new altcoin, Mayer brings it up again.

He suggests that Bitcoin and Mimblewimble Coin are actually complimentary to one another, describing the pair as a two-headed dragon.

Mimblewimble itself is a privacy and scaling protocol that coins like Grin and Beam use. Many long-time Bitcoin proponents are interested in the technology since it may solve perceived issues with the leading crypto asset if implemented in the future.

Although it shares the name, many have dismissed Mimblewimble Coin as a scam. Those critical of it have drawn attention to major red flags within the projects whitepaper.

The chief of these, as highlighted in the below tweet, is a massive pre-mine of around 50 percent of the 20 million tokens that will exist. The rest of the supply will reportedly be released over time in the form of mining rewards.

The projects website gives little information as to the actual distribution of the pre-mined coins. It states only that 7.4 million are currently circulating.

NewsBTC could not confirm whether Mayer himself was an actual beneficiary of the pre-mine or otherwise. However, many of the industrys most prominent names believe the sudden shilling of Mimblewimble Coin is for Mayers own financial benefit. Some go as far as to suggest that Mayer himself is in someway connected with the project:

Some within the cryptocurrency industry confirm that Mayer promoted Mimblewimble Coin directly to them. Popular author and economics professor Saifedean Ammous replied to someone asking if he knew that Mayer had been attempting to pump the crypto asset:

Above, Ammous says that advised Mayer to keep his interests in the altcoin quiet. He says he warned him that public shilling of the pointless scam would result in the destruction of his reputation. If true, with hindsight, the advice was right on the money as per the criticism Mayer now faces.

Related Reading: Bitcoin Craters to $9,500 After Fakeout: Heres Why Its Time to Pay Attention

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The Knives are Out on Crypto Twitter as Bitcoin OG Turns into Altcoin Shill - newsBTC