Monthly Archives: April 2022

Alena Vorobiova hadn't thought much about bitcoin before Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Fast forward to border closures and shelling on her hometown, cash shortages at ATMs across the country, and the central bank suspending electronic cash transfers and she decided to give bitcoin a try.

Whereas money providers often charge transfer fees of 10% or more when you send $100 from the U.S. to Ukraine, bitcoin's Lightning Network, which is a payments platform built on bitcoin's base layer, slashes the cost of transactions to virtually zero.

Vorobiova and CNBC decided to put Lightning payments to the test with the expertise and translation skills of bitcoin developer Gleb Naumenko, who is currently hiding out in the western part of Ukraine as the war rages on.

The bottom line? It really does work as well as bitcoin boosters say it does.

The process of downloading a crypto wallet onto Vorobiova's phone, transferring bitcoin over the Lightning Network from the U.S. to Poland, and withdrawing the equivalent in Polish currency from a bitcoin ATM from the southwest city of Wrocaw took less than three minutes.

Alena Vorobiova withdraws Polish zloty from a bitcoin ATM in Poland.

Last August on a road trip from Houston to Dallas, Peter McCormack founder and host of the popular What Bitcoin Did' podcast taught CNBC how to use the Lightning Network to make instant payments to anyone in the world.

The tutorial took less than 60 seconds and involved four basic steps: We downloaded the Blue Wallet app and generated a one-time invoice in the form of a QR code. McCormack scanned that QR code using a similar app on his own phone, and then transferred 100,000 satoshis, or sats (the smallest denomination of bitcoin, about 0.00000001 BTC) from his account to ours. The total transfer was equivalent to about $50.

Eight months later, from a hotel room in Miami on the sidelines of the Bitcoin 2022 conference, CNBC decided to pay that knowledge and some of those sats forward.

On a three-way video call with Naumenko in Western Ukraine, Vorobiova in Southwest Poland, and CNBC in Miami, we followed a very similar sequence of events.

With the guidance of Naumenko, Vorobiova downloaded the Muun wallet app, a different type of self-custodial wallet for bitcoin and Lightning, made a four-digit pin, and generated an invoice as a QR code. CNBC then captured that QR code using the scan mode in the Blue Wallet and transferred over 50,000 of sats from McCormack. The fees amounted to fractions of a penny. (For purposes of the experiment, Naumenko transferred another 50,000 because the bitcoin ATM had a minimum withdrawal amount.)

Bitcoin developer Jeff Czyz tells CNBC that Lightning wallets are compatible because they all have to implement the Basis of Lightning Technology, or BOLT, specification, which defines a layer-2 protocol for sending payments across the Lightning Network.

"A Lightning wallet app is akin to a bank, in that sending money between banks requires them to speak the same language," said Czyz, a developer with Jack Dorsey's team known as Spiral (formerly Square Crypto). That common language is the BOLT specification.

"The Lightning Network consists of nodes connected by payment channels, which are used to forward payments across the network without the need to trust intermediaries," continued Czyz.

Alena Vorobiova withdraws Polish zloty from a bitcoin ATM in Poland.

Just like the tutorial in the car, the process of transferring sats from Miami to Wrocaw also took about a minute.

From there, Vorobiova who followed her sister and niece to the Polish city of Wrocaw to help them get settled went to one of the fifteen bitcoin ATMs in Wrocaw and requested a withdrawal.

She accomplished this by using a QR code that the ATM spit out. She scanned the QR code into her phone using the Muun app, transferred her bitcoin into the ATM's account, and the ATM in turn issued the money. She ended up with 170 zloty, the Polish currency, worth about 100,000 sats or $40. The ATM company took a fee of 10 zloty, or about 5.5% of the total transaction.

"That's the same flow as making a payment for a good or service using Lightning," explained Czyz.

For Vorobiova, this was more of a fun experiment. She is able to go back and forth from Ukraine to Poland, and she tells CNBC that she is following the guidance of Ukrainian regulators to just use credit cards for the time being.

But the process illustrates how refugees with no cash and no way of accessing their belongings can use crypto wallets for banking.

Some Ukrainians use it to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions, while others have found that Lightning is a cheap and fast way to receive donations and remittances from anywhere in the world. In Poland, for example, there are more than 175 bitcoin ATMs, allowing refugees who fled with bitcoin to cash it back out for fiat currency.

"Me sitting in California, I can still send you any amount of money instantly to your phone anytime," said Gladstein.

"We don't have to worry about the fact that you're a refugee. It doesn't matter that you don't have a Polish passport or a bank account. None of these things matter," continued Gladstein.

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We sent bitcoin from Miami to a Ukrainian in Poland who withdrew it as cash, all in less than three minutes - CNBC

One spring day in a village just west of London, residents saw a man being muscled into a car in front of a nearby house. He reappeared with cuts and bruises 13 hours later, but the cops had already discovered the house was a cannabis-growing operation. A separate search of the mans home in a nearby town turned up something more intriguingsome of the first cryptocurrency that would ever be seized by U.K. police.

That era-defining 2017 case yielded a safety-deposit box containing jewelry, gold bars, 263,000 ($345,000) in cash, and an item that flummoxed the lead investigator, Matthew Durkin, a 19-year veteran of the Surrey police. It was a USB device found in the suspects study. The gadget was wrapped in a small notebook, which contained two strings of 12 random words. A young probationary officer recognized the device, a KeepKey, as a virtual currency holder and the words as seed phrases to access crypto wallets. Eventually, police discovered it held 295 Bitcoin.

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What Happens When Cops Seize Crypto and Bitcoin? - Bloomberg

Bitcoin( BTC 2.85% ) is one of the fastest-appreciating assets in the history of the world.

The original cryptocurrency was invented by the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009, and reached a market value of $1 trillion by 2021, though it has since fallen below that mark.

The question of how much Bitcoin, as an asset class, should be worth has long been debated among its backers, and is front and center to Bitcoin's purpose, which most bulls tend to see as a form of digital gold.

Like gold, a precious metal whose volume is restricted by its rarity, the supply of Bitcoin is capped at 21 million units, though all Bitcoins won't have been mined until around 2140 because of the mathematical halving of Bitcoin rewards for miners.

Because of the argument that Bitcoin is a form of digital gold, many believe that Bitcoin's total value should approximate that of all the gold in the world, which is around $12 trillion today. With Bitcoin's market cap at $770 billion currently, reaching the total value of the world's gold would give Bitcoin holders a return of more than 1,600%, but one billionaire investor thinks Bitcoin should be worth way more than that.

Image source: Getty Images.

At the Bitcoin 2022 Conference in Miami earlier last week, Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of Paypaland early investor in Facebook, argued in the conference's keynote address that the global equity market, not gold, is the best analog for Bitcoin's market cap potential.

Thiel said, "The real competitor for Bitcoin is not Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) -- that's a payment system. It's not even gold. It's something like the S&P 500. It's the stock market as a whole." He continued, "The benchmark for Bitcoin is not gold but equities, and the question is why can't there be parity between Bitcoin and equities. Why shouldn't we be talking about something more like 100 to 1?"The 100-to-1 was a reference in his slide to global equities being worth $115 trillion, while Bitcoin is worth a little less than $1 trillion.

Image source: Getty Images.

Thiel has been a key player in the way money functions in the global economy since 1999 when he co-founded Paypal, so it's worth listening to his thoughts on Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that some expect to be the next iteration of money. But it's important to understand that the argument that Thiel is making for Bitcoin reaching $115 trillion isn't based on its intrinsic value. It's an argument that Bitcoin should be an equally valid asset class for institutional investors, and therefore it should receive an equal level of investment. Thiel underscored this later in his address when he attacked business titans including Warren Buffett, JPMorgan ChaseCEO Jamie Dimon, andBlackrock CEO Larry Fink, saying, "If you have these large institutional investors, they need to be allocating some of their money to Bitcoin when they manage state pension funds in the U.S., or they get trillions of dollars in assets. When they choose not to allocate to Bitcoin, that is a deeply political choice. We need to push back on them."

As Thiel sees it, Bitcoin isn't yet worth $115 trillion because money managers aren't investing enough in it, and he calls that a political choice because the well-known libertarian sees Bitcoin as a crusade against fiat currencies, or government control.

But there's something backwards about the argument. Global equities, meaning all the publicly traded companies in the world combined, are worth $115 trillion because those equities represent businesses, like Apple orBuffett's Berkshire Hathaway, that generate trillions in annual profits. They're not worth $115 trillion because institutional investors have trillions of dollars they need to put somewhere, and they've arbitrarily chosen equities.

Thiel also ignores the fact that Bitcoin isn't a productive asset in the way that equities are. Its valuation, like gold or even an NFT, is an article of faith. A Bitcoin is only worth around $40,000 today because a group of people, many of whom are speculators, have decided that it is. There's little practical value to it.

Image source: Getty Images.

Bitcoin's founder is anonymous, and there's no CEO to pitch the cryptocurrency. In that void, Thiel's keynote address takes on added significance as he's one of the highest-profile backers of the cryptocurrency. But the speech was equally notable for what it lacked as for what Thiel discussed.

He never once addressed Bitcoin's utility as a medium of exchange. In fact, he ceded that quality to Ethereum, arguing that Bitcoin was the "gold" of crypto, representing a store of value, while Ethereum was the "Visa" of crypto, used to make financial transactions.

Most of Thiel's speech was spent trashing Bitcoin detractors and making the case for the $115 trillion valuation. Thiel played to the masses by pumping the currency and offering the astronomical $115 trillion price target. Like others before it, the speech revealed that Bitcoin may be better understood as a cult rather than an asset class. In other words, it's an article of faith -- and one that can make you rich if you persuade enough people to buy it -- rather than an object of real value. His primary argument for Bitcoin was more political than economic. A well-known libertarian, he sees Bitcoin as a way to escape government control and skirt the deflationary nature of fiat currency and taxes.

That political point is a well-worn argument for Bitcoin by now, and it's true that Bitcoin has been used in countries like Venezuela that have been embroiled in civil unrest and hyperinflation. But that's much different from Bitcoin substituting for stable currencies like the dollar.

It's also notable that Bitcoin tends to trade as a risky asset rather than a store of value, notably plunging when the war in Ukraine broke out. When investors "flee to safety," they flee from Bitcoin.

Where Bitcoin's price goes from here is anybody's guess, but the tailwinds that supported its rise in 2020-2021 like pandemic lockdowns and the increase in money supply are now fading.

Thiel seems to believe that the next significant rally in Bitcoin will require buy-in from institutional investors, but there are two major obstacles to that happening anytime soon. The crypto is too volatile for most money managers to invest in, and Bitcoin has yet to prove why it should be worth $1 trillion, let alone $115 trillion.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Were motley! Questioning an investing thesis even one of our own helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

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Could Bitcoin 100x? This Billionaire Investor Thinks So - The Motley Fool

KuCoin, a leading cryptocurrency exchange, recently released a report titled Into The Cryptoverse where they discussed the penetration of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies into populations of varying countries. Most notable among them is Nigeria; 35%, or 33.4 million, of its adults aged 18-60 owned or traded bitcoin or some form of cryptocurrency in the last 6 months.

This staggering amount of 35% of adults becomes even more bewildering when one recognizes that as of January 2022, only 51% of the entire population of Nigeria has access to the internet, according to the report. Of that 51% of the population, 86% of Nigerian internet users are familiar with cryptocurrency as an investment vehicle. The report also states that according to Google Trends, Nigeria hosted the highest number of searches for Bitcoin in early 2021.

A survey conducted of the penetrated 35% shows that 70% of those users intend to increase their holdings within a short period of time. Another 6% of the population not currently invested were surveyed and said they are interested in investing within the next six months.

Over a course of six years, Nigerias currency, Naira, has depreciated 209%, according to the report. The adoption rate of Bitcoin is far more substantial in populations that have a need for Bitcoin, rather than just a want for it. The failing Naira led to earlier adoption that most, as 37% of those currently involved in bitcoin have been invested or trading in the asset for more than 3 years, with another 27% having just started within the past 6 months.

A need to opt out of the existing structure is being driven by the youthful population of Nigeria as its median age sits at 18.4 years old, according to Statista cited in the report. This drives the statistic in which 52% of Nigerians invested in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies under the age of 30.

One interesting statistic KuCoin uncovered in a survey of those currently vested in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies showed 50% gender parity. Nigeria seems to be proving that when economic need, youth of a population, and innovation collide, gender plays no role in the adoption of an emergent monetary system.

Low-time preference seems molded with entrepreneurial spirit in Nigeria with 62% of investors believing this emerging system is the future of finance and 50% of investors saying they are in it for the long run. 40% of investors look to use their gains to start a business, 36% are looking for another revenue stream, and 26% seek to rely on their investment as primary income.

The portfolio diversification, or the lack of diversification in some cases, is a fascinating statistic among Nigerian investors. On average, these investors allocate 60% to cryptocurrency, 20% to cash or bank deposits, and 7% to foreign currencies with additional financial instruments closing the gap, which means over 52% of investors are allocating over half of their portfolio to cryptocurrencies, according to the report.

A little over one-fifth of these investors (22%) store over 90% of their assets in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency. This minority group tends to be slightly older and less familiar with other financial products with a focus on money transfers and transactions, rather than trading.

As of February 2022, 65% of these investors utilize peer-to-peer trading to deposit fiat for cryptocurrencies after the Central Bank of Nigeria barred banks from enabling crypto transactions in February 2021, according to another survey conducted by KuCoin cited in the report.

Further KuCoin data shows a 1,386.7% increase in monthly transactions across African countries from January 2021 - January 2022. During the same period, active users also increased by 2,467.2%.

Countries like Nigeria showcase the need of a new monetary system that allows cross-border payments with minimal fees and global access in its most reliable form. The central authorities of Nigeria have failed to properly care for its citizenry and its youthful population has taken it upon themselves to enforce needed change. While bitcoin certainly serves as a store-of-value for many in more developed places of the world, the humanitarian and altruistic use cases of Bitcoin are what truly make it inevitable.

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Report: Over A Third of Nigerians Are Invested in Bitcoin, Crypto - Bitcoin Magazine

As one of a number of Cointelegraph representatives attending the Paris Blockchain Week Summit (PBWS) at the historic Palais Brongniart a neoclassical building that had been the headquarters for the Parisian stock exchange from 1826 to 1987 European news reporter Joe Hall sat down for an in-depth interview with the chief technology officer of Bitfinex and Tether, Paolo Ardoino.

Previously ranked 88th in Cointelegraphs prestigious Top 100 2021 for his influential impact on the growth of the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, Ardoino spoke on an array of topics, including the adoption of Bitcoin and Tether de facto legal tenders in the Swiss city of Lugano, the scalability concerns of popular blockchain networks and the potential for new countries to accept Bitcoin in the future.

In early March, the Swiss city ofLugano which is also a major financial hub in Switzerland formed a collaborative partnership with stablecoin operator Tether to launch a 3 million Swiss franc initiativedesigned to encourage the adoption of blockchain technologies and the use of digital assets.

Utilizing Bitcoin (BTC), Tether (USDT) and the native citizen loyalty token, LVGA Points, the assets can be transacted by locals for activities such as taxation and purchasing of public goodsand services.

In addition, the project has also pledged to create educational scholarship programs within the three universities in Lugano, a blockchain summer camp and a maximum-valued 100 million Swiss franc ($107.2 million) pot to foster the growth of blockchain start-ups:

Ardoino noted that these companies relocated their operations from both within Switzerland as well as from countries such as India and Singapore. He stated that their intention is to "use these few startups as a template to pave the path for others in the future.

Related: Paris Blockchain Week, day 1: Latest updates from the Cointelegraph team on the ground

Referencing his tweeted picture of a Lugano newspaper article with the headline Citt affamata di bitcoin, which means city hungry for Bitcoin, Ardoino said that stablecoins are the perfect Trojan horse for Bitcoin in that they can serve as the initial mechanism for adoption before exploration into more complex, regulatory-stringent cryptocurrencies.

When questioned about the possibilities of new European countries adopting Bitcoin,Ardoino said that "we're looking at different other jurisdictions," and that some people within "the parliament are interested to talk to us as they would like to educate themselves to create a case for internal adoption."

In saying this, he was keen to stress the importance that the vision of wide-scale Bitcoin adoption throughout Europe would not be achieved overnight but through a bottom-up, community-first approach, such as that witnessed in Lugano.

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Stablecoins are the perfect Trojan horse for Bitcoin, says Tether CTO - Cointelegraph

Inflation is front-page news again after the Labor Department revealed this week that the United States consumer price index soared to 8.5% year-over-year in March the highest in over four decades. According to crypto industry veteran and Morgan Creek Capital founder Mark Yusko, price increases arent the real problem.

This isnt inflation. This is currency devaluation, Yusko told Cointelegraph business editor Sam Bourgi in an exclusive interview at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami. Currency devaluation directly impacts consumers purchasing power, which refers to how many goods and services a unit of money can buy.

Yusko was also asked about Bitcoins (BTC) lackluster performance over the past six months and whether he expects this phase of price discovery to continue indefinitely. In his view, $100,000 BTC is a strong likelihood eventually, but investors need to be patient as adoption continues to grow.

Yusko and Bourgi also threw shade at traditional portfolio management strategies that teach investors to allocate 60% of their holdings to stocks and 40% to bonds. Who in their right mind is holding bonds right now? Bourgi asked. Only central banks, Yusko replied. You wont want to miss his full explanation.

You can watch the full interview on Cointelegraphs YouTube page. Be sure to hit those like and subscribe buttons for all our future videos and updates. You can also watch our full lineup of interviews from the Bitcoin conference.

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Mark Yusko explains the real problem with Fed policy and why Bitcoin matters - Cointelegraph

Ubersmith, a leading service provider in subscription management for cloud-based platforms, announced an integration with BitPay, one of the world's leading providers of bitcoin and other cryptocurrency payment processing.

With the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies, we want to provide our users with this option in addition to other currencies we support, said Kurt Daniel, CEO of Ubersmith, in the announcement. As leaders in delivering a recurring and usage-based billing system, we are pleased to support cryptocurrency for our current and future customers.

Ubersmith brings a hosted or self-hosted software suite to its customers and Bitpay now functions as an add-on to the software that processes customizable billing, taxes, account credits and discounts. More than 100 companies across six continents currently utilize Ubersmith for business transactions, infrastructure, and operations. This partnership with BitPay displays a deviation from its parent company's stance towards the Bitcoin sector in previous years.

On July 1, 2021, Ubersmith was acquired by Lumine Group, which is a division of Volaris Group, a subsidiary of Constellation Software Incorporated. On October 21, 2021, Constellation Network, Inc. acquired Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider Dor to scale blockchain-based products.

In the Dor acquisition announcement, Constellation Network said Bitcoin has scalability issues, which is why they were working with Dor to develop their own blockchain database that they believe is more scalable, which eventually led to them creating their own token.

Ubersmith seems to recognize that Bitcoin is scalable with its most recent innovation in partnering with BitPay, even though its parent company seems to feel differently.

New York-based Ubersmith allows their customers access to over 100 built-in software, hardware and service integrations while also providing an application programming interface (API) enabling a high level of customization for its clients.

Services included with the software contain billing, customer management, quoting, order management, device monitoring, help desk ticketing, and a customer portal. Specific to cloud-based infrastructure, Ubersmith also manages turnkey billing, bandwidth, virtualization, backup, power, support, and other services.

Ubersmith customers include Digital Realty, Namecheap, and Sitey.

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Ubersmith Partners With BitPay To Accept Bitcoin Payments - Bitcoin Magazine

Tesla Megapacks at Saticoy, a 100MW/400MWh BESS site in California. Image: Arevon Asset Management.

Teslas Megapack battery energy storage system (BESS) solution as well as the companys solar PV will power a Bitcoin mining facility in a proof of concept (POC) project in the US.

Bitcoin mining and services company Blockstream Mining began construction earlier this month on the open-source, solar-powered facility at an undisclosed location.

The project is being built in partnership with financial services and digital payments company Block, Inc, which has Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey as its CEO.

Blockstreams CEO and co-founder Adam Back meanwhile said that the facility will be a step to proving our thesis that Bitcoin mining can fund zero-emission power infrastructure and build economic growth for the future.

The site will pair a 3.8MW solar PV array with 12MWh of Megapacks, enabling a 30 Petahash hash rate a measure of the computational power used by the cryptocurrency minings proof-of-work. A dashboard will be made publicly available as the plant runs, showing real-time metrics of performance, such as power output and the amount of mined Bitcoin.

By collaborating on this full-stack, 100% solar-powered Bitcoin mining project with Blockstream, using solar and storage technology from Tesla, we aim to further accelerate Bitcoins synergy with renewables, Blocks global ESG lead Neil Jorgensen said.

The off-grid site aims to prove 100% renewable energy-powered Bitcoin mining is possible, hopefully providing an example to the industry.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk famously said in the past that his company would row back on its interest in Bitcoin due to the use of fossil fuels in mining, despite other attractive characteristics that crypto has. In May 2021 the company stopped accepting it as payment over those concerns.

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Green Bitcoin mining proof of concept using Tesla solar and battery storage - Energy Storage News

Bitcoin is all-set to rise and become the crypto king again, at least for now

In recent weeks, Bitcoin is marching forward towards redeeming its lost market recognition and value. For Bitcoin, the year 2021, was quite successful given the fact that single crypto drove the value of the entire crypto market to new highs. Since this feat, traders and business leaders have been quite optimistic about the prospects of BTC and its dominance in the economic and financial markets. So much so that El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as legal tender! However, BTCs prospects ran their full course, and then came the reality. The prices dropped exponentially. Investor speculation about Ethereum taking Bitcoin grew, making investors and business leaders quite worried about their investments. BTCs price continued to fall in early 2022. Investors turned to assets that performed well in a time of a slowing economy, higher inflation, and rising interest rates, further causing a dive in the Bitcoin price. In late February, BTC prices fell as low as US$36,000, from their November 2021 peak which was US$68,000. Concerns over sustainability and high electricity use associated with Bitcoin mining, and the banning of cryptocurrency transactions in China also caused the Bitcoin price to fall.

Over the past week, Bitcoin has been regaining its value. Analysts believe that the crypto will eventually reach the US$100,000 mark by the end of the year. But as of April 4, 2022, its price has recovered considerably. It finally crossed the US$47,000 mark, reaching as close as possible to US$48,000. The prices consecutively dropped after April 5, 2022, but it continues to soar above US$43,000. This comes off as a positive indication of a possible Bitcoin surge this year.

BTCs upward trend continued through the entire week, nevertheless, investors are hawkish about its market movements. The coin is trending in recent weeks, but the current surge might also be the result of the Biden governments executive order initiating methods to enhance crypto adoption. But as crypto analysts continue to expect a massive Bitcoin price hike in the near future, key indicators have spoken up. They predict that if Bitcoin fails to break the US$47,000, it might again dive back to a crypto slumber and would eventually, and finally, lose its market dominance.

As more companies continue to adopt BTC as a method of payment, its value is expected to stabilise. With this expanded room for Bitcoin trading, the market scope is increasing for investors and traders, and other governments, to explore the crypto domain for investments in the long run.

For now, Bitcoin is set for upcoming surges. But the market is still volatile. A price hike does not bring stability to the market. Hence, before investing in Bitcoin, investors should make sure that they are ready for the volatility and mentally prepared to face losses.

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Bitcoin Remains Intact as it Continues to Surge Above US$43,000 - Analytics Insight