Only a few more days to go now before the halving! Less than a week and all those miners will be taking a giant pay cut. And it comes after a great week for Bitcoin. The price has risen by more than 6 percent over the last seven days and is now getting close to five figures again.
Will the price fall when the returns decline? It’s not clear. Previous halvings have triggered declines that took months to recover from as investors “sold the news.” Some traders, though, believe that if the recovery is fast, Bitcoin could enter a whole new price cycle.
In Europe, interest in the halving is heating up. According to Google Trends, the most searches for “blockchain halving” were in Austria, Estonia, Slovenia, Holland, and most of all, Switzerland. Google is blocked in China, where much of the mining industry is located.
And as if miners didn’t have enough to worry about, it appears that there are problems with Bitmain’s new Antminer products. Miners are complaining of failure rates as high as 30 percent with the new Antminer S17+. All of this is taking place in the context of stock market volatility caused by the coronavirus. Bitcoin no longer has a short-term correlation with the US stock market but Warren Buffett isn’t optimistic about the recovery, and a slow return could affect digital currencies.
The Libra Association is trying to engineer its own recovery. After criticism from regulators and the departure of a number of partners, the association has appointed Stuart Levey as its first CEO. Levey was previously President Obama’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, with a responsibility for countering money laundering.
It’s not just terrorists who have been up to no good, though. An anonymous blogger has accused Craig Wright, who once claimed to be Satoshi Yakamoto, of plagiarizing his doctoral dissertation. The accuser, PaintedFrog, has previously accused Wright of plagiarizing his 2008 law degree dissertation. Wright is known to be litigious.
PewDiePie has turned his back on blockchain-based video platform Dlive, and returned to YouTube. The videomaker left YouTube for Dlive last April. His Dlive channel picked up 820,000 followers. His YouTube channel has 104 million subscribers.
The blockchain might be getting a more serious break though. US Senate staffers have suggested using the technology to secure voting if its members need to vote remotely. And in Ukraine, the government is considering nuclear-powered mining. The coronavirus pandemic has caused an energy glut. The government thinks that plugging mining hardware into the nuclear power plant might just help it to make some money back.
The pandemic has been good for cryptocurrencies in India. Volumes are up as people stuck at home learn about digital coins and start trading. Investors in TON, the Telegram Open Network, won’t be able to start trading though. Telegram has missed its April 30 launch date and has now repealed the option for investors to hang in for another year and receive a 110 percent refund. Regulatory uncertainty in the US means that investors will now only get a 72 percent repayment. They’ll still be better off than Bitcoin miners next week.
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Joel Comm is an internet pioneer, New York Times best-selling author, futurist speaker and co-host of The Bad Crypto Podcast. That’s a fancy way of saying he writes words, says things and loves to play with cryptos.
The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
