Bitcoin previous 24 hour performance Bitcoin price We shut the afternoon, July 30 2020, in a price of $11,111. That’s a little 0.10 percent boost in 24 hours, or $11. It was the maximum final price in three hundred and one-hundred times. We’re still 44 percentage under Bitcoin‘s all-time high of $20,089 (December 17 2017). Bitcoin market cap Bitcoin‘s market cap ended the day at $204,969,047,788. It now commands 63 percent the total crypto market. Bitcoin volume Yesterday’s volume of $22,857,247,901 was the lowest in three days, 1 percent above last year’s average, and 69 percent below last year’s high. That means that yesterday, the Bitcoin network shifted the equivalent of 360 tons of gold. Bitcoin transactions A total of 327,654 transactions were conducted yesterday, which is 2 percent above last year’s average and 27 percent below last year’s high. Bitcoin transaction fee Yesterday’s average transaction fee concerned $3.69. That’s $0.22 below last year’s high of $3.91. Bitcoin distribution by address As of currently, there are 18,282 Bitcoin millionaires, or addresses containing more than $1 million worth of Bitcoin. Furthermore, the top 10 Bitcoin addresses house 5.1 percentage of their entire supply, the top 100 14.3 percent, and the top 1000 34.9 percent. Company with a marketplace cap closest to Bitcoin With a market capitalization of $204 billion, The Coca-Cola Company has a market capitalization most similar to that of Bitcoin at the moment. Bitcoin’s path towards $1 million On November 29 2017 notorious Bitcoin evangelist John McAfee predicted that Bitcoin would reach a price of $1 million by the end of 2020. He even promised to eat his own dick if it doesn’t. Unfortunately for him it’s 97.6 percent behind being on track. Bitcoin‘s price should have been $475,347 by now, according to dickline.info. Bitcoin energy consumption On a yearly basis Bitcoin now uses an estimated 62 terawatt hour of electricity. That’s the equal of Kuwait’s energy consumption. Bitcoin on Twitter Yesterday 32,625 fresh tweets about Bitcoin were sent out into the world. That’s 63.0 percent over last year’s average. The maximum amount of tweets per day last year about Bitcoin was 82,838. Source: https://fintechzoom.com/

Miner profitability metrics are based on a handful of factors regulating difficulty and emission, which are hard-coded into the blockchain’s attributes, making it predictable to work with. While predictability does not always immediately translate into profitability, it gives a blockchain certain parameters to rely on when predicting when mining cryptocurrency will become profitable, at which price level, and at which difficulty level during the emission cycle. Some cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin (BTC), go through emission cycles with events such as the halving. In Bitcoin’s case, halvings occur once every 210,000 blocks — roughly every four years — until the maximum supply of 21 million Bitcoin has been mined. This feature, self-adjusting difficulty, provides an incentive for an individual miner to join or leave the network depending on the current Bitcoin price level. Together, these incentives create a logarithmic price regression curve, which represents a probable Bitcoin exchange rate and, therefore, predictability of profitability in the current emission cycle. If Bitcoin’s price falls under this regression curve where the bottom line is roughly around the 200-week moving average in this emission cycle, nearly all of the miners should be at a net loss. If the price stays above this figure, at least some of the miners should be at a net profit. Bitcoin mining difficulty is currently at an all-time high between 110 and 120 million terahashes per second, indicating that a lot of new mining capacity has been added to the network, but since the price hasn’t fully recovered from the dip caused by the emergence of COVID-19, we should expect most of the miners being temporarily at a loss. However, should Bitcoin’s price rise back up again into the current emission cycle and go into a bull run, the economic risk miners would have taken at that point should be greatly rewarded. Ethereum mining has been, for a while, among the most profitable in the altcoin space primarily because of the high average price of its token. However, Ethereum as a network has a primary focus on building a blockchain with a slightly different purpose compared to Bitcoin. Ethereum is a smart contract platform. While mining has previously supported the network in the phase where it isn’t widely used for transactions, in the future, the network will be compelled to take on staking nodes as validators in order to provide sufficient transaction capacity. In the long run, this may have a positive effect on mining if we assume that mining will be phased out gradually. A substantial amount of coins are predicted to be locked in staking, which is going to drive up the price. Staking is a mechanism that allows users to deposit some of their coins into a staking address owned by a validator node and locks them for a period of time. The validator node then secures the network by producing blocks relative to the number of coins deposited in it. The blocks are produced according to a hard-coded voting mechanism that calculates the staking reward from the total amount of coins staked in the network for each node. The price of electricity is a defining factor in miner profitability. Currently, most industrial miners reside in countries with cheap electricity on power purchasing agreements with electricity producers ranging from hydropower to solar. However, most retail miners mostly depend on retail price fluctuations and have to calculate this factor into their investments. Moreover, the price of electricity isn’t a factor when mining profitable altcoins with GPU rigs. Equipment prices tend to fluctuate according to price cycles. At the bottom of each cycle, buying equipment is relatively affordable, but toward each cycle peak, equipment may not be affordable but also unavailable. At this point, it would likely be profitable to take a moderate risk in mining, especially in GPU mining. Regarding profitability alone, mining Bitcoin would probably require an investment beyond the reach of most retail miners on the initial cost to be remarkable at the peak of this emission cycle. Apart from only turning a profit, mining is a way to produce coins with no prior history. For users who care about their privacy, mining represents economic freedom, making a means of payment with no ties to a specific entity accessible. This unique feature is only present in proof-of-work cryptocurrencies and connects many people on the fringes of society with often legitimate use cases to the wider world, acting as a guarantor of human and social rights. For some organizations, maintaining a blockchain at a nominal loss can act as an investment either by supporting profitable services or by maintaining infrastructure to run services for public use. In legacy systems, this type of arrangement is comparable to public service, or a utility. Source:cointelegraph.com

A report from consultancy company Elsewhen has measured the appetite for adopting crypto among traditional banking institutions. While, overall, the report concludes that the establishment has opted to service the sector in limited quantities, recent developments from the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve suggest that more mainstream integration may not be far away. “We are looking at the question of, should we create a Bank of England digital currency,” commented Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England. “[...] It does have huge implications on the nature of payments and society.” Similarly, Federal Reserve Board Governor Lael Brainard stated that, owing to COVID-19-related disruption and the reminder that strong payment infrastructure is a necessity, “the Federal Reserve is active in conducting research and experimentation related to distributed ledger technologies and the potential use cases for digital currencies.” Considering the best approach One of Elsewhen’s primary observations is that no bank is currently focusing on every aspect of crypto equally. The answer appears to lie in specialisation; careful concentration on particular business segments will ultimately be more rewarding. Also, despite some material differences, the report indicates that crypto banking doesn’t differ significantly from traditional retail banking, at least in terms of best-practices: customer-centricity, digital onboarding processes, automated KYC (know your customer) and CDD (customer due-diligence), etc. This means that organisations can operate in a familiar way while simultaneously offering opportunities to segments historically underserved by retail banks - the report cites SMBs (small-medium businesses) as a prime example: “SME owners traditionally struggle from a lack of time and knowledge, so the increasingly advisory role banks, crypto or otherwise, are having could prove pertinent here.” Overcoming the opposition “Crypto companies find themselves in a particularly inhospitable banking environment, in part because of the regulatory hurdles retail banks themselves face in adopting new technology, but also due to the understandable fear and suspicion those banks feel about the cryptocurrency phenomenon in general,” states Elsewhen. This, perhaps, isn’t so surprising: the decentralised nature of cryptocurrency mitigates the processing and transaction admin of fiat currencies and reduces dependency on banks and governments to guarantee the money’s value. However, now that the public’s interest has been piqued and consumers are finding value in the utilisation of crypto, it is not difficult to imagine that the banking establishment will start calculating how best to approach the issue. Now that major entities like the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve are exploring the possibilities in the post-COVID-19 world, it may be that crypto is finally gaining broad favour. Source: https://www.fintechmagazine.com/

There’s a way to destroy the economy of the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum—and it’s a scheme not dissimilar to a trading strategy used by billionaire investor George Soros in the 1990s, who made billions of dollars by shorting the British Pound. That’s according to researchers from crypto finance firm Amber Group, which earlier this week published its findings on the matter in a Medium post. The Ethereum network is fit to burst; as of September 4, 97.16% of the network is used up. It’s not hard to think of reasons why: in the past three months, users have poured $8 billion into so-called decentralized finance protocols, such as lending services. But the DeFi boom of 2020 and the massive influx of both money and activity on the Ethereum network could have some intended consequences. All Ethereum protocols are powered by “gas,” the name for the fuel that pays for smart-contract transactions. It’s paid in ETH, the native currency of the Ethereum blockchain network. Gas fees are now ridiculously high—getting your transaction processed within 30 seconds now costs about $5, according to Ethereum block explorer Etherscan. And there’s a way to push those fees even higher, postulates Amber Group. One way to do it could be to hoard Gas Tokens, a special type of token that are “essentially tokenized rent for block space,” wrote the research group. Amber Group continued: “They take advantage of the storage refund mechanism in Ethereum; when you mint gas tokens, you are saving data into contract storage, and when you free (spend them), you are burning the tokens and freeing up the storage element previously saved.” If someone bought a whole load of Gas Tokens, this could waste even more space on the blockchain, and make gas so scarce that the price would go up and up. “As fees continue to increase, demand for gas tokens increase, pushing prices higher, which in turn creates more minting. The minting process consumes more block space…which results in higher gas fees…and so on,” wrote Amber Group. Eventually, Ethereum would become unusable, and the price of ETH would plummet. But if someone shorted ETH—i.e. stood to profit from its collapse—they could make a lot of money. That’s similar to what billionaire investor George Soros did in the 1990s. He bought up all British pounds he could, so that the pound became overpriced. Then the Bank of England was forced to buy up pounds itself, further overvaluing the pound. So when the pound started to fall in value, Soros, who had shorted the pound, made lots of money.   So, does the Amber Group’s “George Soros scenario” theory hold water? Eden Dhaliwal, the global managing director of Conflux Network, told Decrypt that “there are real concerns of large scale acquisitions of gas tokens that would lead to wasted block space and thus even higher gas prices. Adding speculative pricing to the mix would again result in upward price pressure in my view.” But Eric Wall, CIO of Arcane Assets, is not bowled over by the thesis. “I don't think it's going to cause any big feedback loop pressure on the system,” he said. “We're already suffering from insanely high gas costs right now. If this would cause people to flock to gas tokens in such droves that it would squeeze people out of the chain, it would probably already have happened by now.” Ethereum The great big DeFi bubble—will it burst? Decentralized finance (DeFi) is booming. In the last two months, the amount of value locked up in DeFi protocols has shot up from $1 billion to $4 billion, thanks largely to a new concept call... Wall said that the strategy makes sense only “if you think gas is going to go up even more.” But anyone trying this strategy must keep in mind that software to scale Ethereum—thus potentially freeing up space on the network—may come out in the next couple of months. ”Whoever buys them now will definitely fear a collapse in their value when scaling solutions hit,” he said. “Whether that fear is justified is a bit too complex to answer in my opinion. But yes, it is likely.” Still, investors and the markets in which they operate aren’t always rational—a dictum that often rings more true in crypto than in most other markets. Source: https://decrypt.co/