Archive January 2021

If we are to understand bitcoin’s meteoric rise, we must return to 2008. After all, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization is a child of the global financial crisis (GFC). 

Once Lehman Brothers went into bankruptcy, many banks and financial institutions across the globe followed. Governments all over the world soon stepped in, bailing them out. Three days after Lehman went bust, Hank Paulson, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve, went to President George W. Bush and him, “We need a trillion dollars in cash, and we need it by five o’clock,” as Steve Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker and advisor to President Donald Trump, recalled in 2018.

After Bush shrugged them away, Paulson and Bernanke went to Congress, where they repeated their plea: “If we don’t have a trillion dollars by today, the American financial system will melt down in 72 hours. The world financial system will melt down in two weeks, and there will be global anarchy,” Bannon recounted.

Continue reading at bitcoinmagazine.com

If 2020 has taught us anything, it's that the world is growing increasingly unpredictable. Be it from pandemics, market swings, wildfires, and more, we’ve gone through global shocks that we never dreamed would happen in our lifetime. The insurance industry needs to prepare itself for this increasingly volatile future with a reliable infrastructure that can quickly and objectively settle claims around even the most unforeseeable events. 

Recent advances in blockchain technology, combined with increased demand for insurance products across the world, has set the stage for the rise of parametric insurance, or insurance that automatically pays out when certain events occur. The rise of smart contract technology along with increased demand for insurance products in the developing world could make 2021 the year that parametric insurance model finally moves from pipe dream to production. 

The Advantage of Parametric Insurance

Today, the insurance claims payment process still largely relies on an adjuster’s subjective assessment of damages and loss. Everyday people can’t afford to challenge a large insurance company in court, so most customers are ultimately forced to trust their insurance providers to pay out fair claims. 

Continue reading at nasdaq.com

It is important to have a recap of the world’s monetary system because we need a basis to justify global acceptance of Bitcoin as payment money, there should be a yardstick to know if a decentralized currency is worth spending in urban and rural market; can citizens of the world (first and third) use it for day-to-day payment of goods and services? This article is going to empower you with relevant information about money and Bitcoin potential in the world.

In the last 5,000 years, money has evolved slowly, it started from barter trading which was the only means value can be exchanged between our ancestors. For example, a tuber of yam could be exchanged for a bowl of oil. This means is somewhat not accurate considering how much the world’s financial industry has grown. But ‘medium of exchange’ is just one of the other important features of money.

The world quickly moved to other kinds of money like cowry shells, animal bones, and rare stones. They agreed that it is money, they placed value on it and it quickly became a medium of exchange in addition to the fact that these commodities are divisible. Yes, there is a new need, an addition that humans craved for, they want the money that will be portable, and they deserve to have money that can be moved easily between cities, kingdoms, and empires. Aside from divisibility, there was a need for portability.

Continue reading at nairametrics.com

The campaign includes street advertising, a plane, stickers, a hashtag and a website.

According to the president of the NGO Bitcoin Argentina, it is “a message with a sense of urgency.”

A massive dissemination campaign for Bitcoin (BTC) was launched on January 28, 2021 simultaneously in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico, with the name It’s time for Bitcoin. It includes, among other actions, advertisements in the streets and on public transportation.

“It is a guerrilla marketing strategy where everyone can be a part by pasting stickers and tweeting with the hashtag #eshoradebitcoin,” said Rodolfo Andragnes, president of the NGO Bitcoin Argentina, when consulted by CriptoNoticias. He clarified that “it is a move by the Latin American bitcoiner community and not by someone in particular.”

Continue reading at explica.co

Crypto traders and global investors are rushing to have a stake in this fast-growing crypto, on the account that it has the unique endorsement of the world’s richest individual presently worth $199 billion.

What you should know: The tenth most valuable crypto has a market value of $7.3 billion. It presently has a circulating supply of 128,136,378,598 DOGE coins, and the maximum supply is not available.

Dogecoin (DOGE) is based on the popular “Doge” internet meme and features a Shiba Inu on its logo.

Continue reading at nairametrics.com

This was the week that the stock market became the stonks market. For those of you unaware, “stonks” is an internet meme, an absurdist play on the word “stock” that’s now almost unavoidable on social media. On Jan. 26, Elon Musk, recently the world’s richest man, tweeted “Gamestonk!!”, and received more than 200,000 likes. It included a link to the WallStreetBets forum on the internet message-board platform, Reddit.

WallStreetBets has become the communications hub for a phalanx of bored-at-home, stick-it-to-the-man retail traders who have cast themselves as the heroes in a David-vs.-Goliath battle against hedge funds, big banks and other avatars of America’s elite. These include the “blue checks” on Twitter, talking heads on CNBC, even Robinhood, the trading platform on which many of them had been buying options, until it halted some of those trades Thursday morning. (The financial machinations of this battle have been described in fascinating detail by my colleagues, including an interview with the man who started, then subsequently lost control of, WallStreetBets.)

But this is a tale of something much bigger and more consequential than the fate of a single stonk, I mean stock, or even, as homebound day traders look for other quick wins, a handful of them. What’s happening on WallStreetBets is of a piece with other internet phenomena, from bitcoin mania to the online conspiracy theories of QAnon, and the events leading up to the Capitol riot.

Continue reading at wsj.com

Bitcoin has seen one of the more logic-defying weeks of its 12-year existence, and the trend seems far from over—what could be next?

In as much a transformative week for sentiment as for the BTC price itself, Bitcoin has gone from plumbing monthly lows to setting its sights on new all-time highs. 

Modern Consensus recaps what led Bitcoin to its current position over the past week and considers what might lie in store for the coming days. We also publish a markets outlook every Monday.

Setting the tone for much of the past few days, Bitcoin began the week in the shadow of another asset, Ether. The largest altcoin by market cap had little time for the lackluster price action displayed by BTC/USD, and instead bulls seized an opportunity to deliver new historic all-time highs of $1,475.

Continue reading at modernconsensus.com

The US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) announced that it had given conditional approval to Anchorage Trust Company, a chartered trust firm, to become Anchorage Digital Bank. This has made Anchorage the first cryptocurrency services provider to have received the national bank charter in the United States. The company was quick to announce that it intended to launch innovative digital currency-based financial products in the near future.

Such recognition for the use cases of cryptocurrency in the financial sector has been pouring in over the past couple of years. In 2019, Visa, in partnership with Coinbase, released a debit card backed by cryptocurrency, which lets users convert digital currency into fiat currency to make payments. In 2020, JPMorgan and PayPal joined in, to permit crypto-based payments on their platforms.

Institutional acceptance of cryptocurrencies has also come in the form of an explosion of DeFi projects. DeFi or Decentralised Finance refers to financial products that are created on a decentralised network, not controlled by any large corporation or government. It is being viewed as a worldwide move to open financial systems. These projects have also received an endorsement from large financial institutions. On December 1, 2020, Visa announced that it had entered into a partnership with BlockFi, a DeFi startup, to offer credit cards that would reward users in Bitcoin.

Continue reading at newsbtc.com

Is the presumed proliferation of market bubbles just speculative froth among amateur traders or is concentrated institutional money blowing big soapy spheres that interconnect and may inevitably burst each other?

The two factors are certainly at play as savings balloon amid massive government and central bank support for confined populations during the pandemic.

Over-caffeinated day traders with whizzy new stock market apps and punting from bedrooms during lockdown get most blame for some of blinding single stock surges of the past six months.

The parabolic price surges include seemingly unrelated booms in anything from carmaker Tesla to cryptocurrency Bitcoin, Big Tech ‘disrupters’ or barely profitable internet startups.

Continue reading at reuters.com

The world’s oldest cryptocurrency, bitcoin, continued to fall as big investors sold off their positions. The crypto asset logged a 24-hour high and a low of $32,939.54 and $30,875.63, respectively. However, it was trading higher by 0.52% at $31,768 at around 12.45 pm (IST) on Wednesday, as per data available with crypto exchange WazirX.

“Bitcoin prices have slipped by 4% after hitting the $35,000 level on Monday. The price of the most popular cryptocurrency fell to $30,875 and then recovered to above $32,000. Experts claim that many holders and whales have sold off their positions. On the other side, DeFi is making some noise as the amount of bitcoin locked into DeFi is at the highest for the month. Close to 42,604 bitcoins are locked into DeFi. On the institutional side, Marathon, a crypto mining company has invested $150 million into bitcoin and aims to be the largest miner in the world," said Ashish Singhal, chief executive officer and co-founder, CoinSwitch Kuber, cryptocurrency investment platform.

Continue reading at livemint.com