Author: The Independent

Bitcoin is experiencing a period of remarkable price stability, despite major developments within the crypto space in recent days. With BTC returning above $40,000 on Wednesday, it is currently in the upper bounds of the $33,000-$44,000 window that it has been trading within since early January. There have been a few minor surges and crashes in that time, driven by major geopolitical events like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though a long-term trajectory is yet to emerge. The broader cryptocurrency market has largely mirrored bitcoin’s price movements, though some leading cryptocurrencies like Ethereum (ETH), Cardano (ADA) and Solana (SOL) have suffered slightly heavier losses…

With a documentary about his life coming to HBO, the ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ creator is a wildly successful elder statesman of comedy. So what’s he doing advertising cryptocurrency?  There are few people who have had such an outsize influence on TV comedy as Larry David. It’s only fitting then that one of the medium’s true geniuses is now getting the full HBO documentary treatment.  The Larry David Story, set to air Stateside this March, will see David sit down with longtime friend and collaborator Larry Charles to talk about the early lows and many subsequent highs of his career. As an avowed…

After the worst start to a year since the so-called Crypto Winter of 2018, bitcoin has begun to show some signs of recovery. Its price rebounded from $33,000 at the end of January to above $37,000 at the start of February, with some analysts claiming that certain market trends hint at a return above $40,000. One such indicator suggests that bitcoin is currently oversold. The 30 per cent price drop last month was reflected across the broader crypto market, which has lost close to $1.3 trillion from its overall market cap since peaking at an all-time high of close to $3 trillion…

A crypto group wants to genetically engineer mice so the animals can carry Bitcoin inside them. The project, BitMouseDAO, launched on 25 January with two investors – both of which have only put in 0.01 ether into the scheme. A DAO is a ‘decentralized autonomous organization’, a group that is represented by rules encoded as a computer program. Participation in a DAO is usually done through ownership of a token and smart contracts, rather than a top-down hierarchy. The person behind the project, according to the blog post, compares the experiment to artist Eduardo Kac who used a fluorescent protein to make rabbits glow under…

Bitcoin has surged to a two-week price high, leading a crypto rally that has added more than a quarter of a trillion dollars to the overall market. The price movement follows the worst month for the cryptocurrency since March 2020, when pandemic-induced panic selling pushed it below $5,000. After surging to a new all-time high of close to $69,000 last November, bitcoin crashed close to $30,000 in January before staging its latest comeback. On Tuesday, bitcoin was trading back above $39,000. The price recovery comes after El Salvador rejected a plea from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to drop bitcoin as legal tender,…

Bitcoin’s plummeting price in January means El Salvador’s BTC reserves are now worth considerably less in US dollar terms than they were when they bought them. Despite this, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele is confident that the latest mini price recovery is just the start of something significant for the cryptocurrency. He cites the inbuilt scarcity of bitcoin, which means only 21 million BTC will ever exist. It means there is not enough bitcoin for even half the world’s millionaires to own a whole coin. https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1488018025223704583?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1488018025223704583%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fd-854007034881461389.ampproject.net%2F2201141909003%2Fframe.html Read full story on The Independent

More than half of academics and crypto experts polled say the downturn marks a good buying opportunity. A panel of crypto market experts and academics have revised their bitcoin price predictions following the recent price crash, though still predict record highs for the cryptocurrency in 2022. A weeks-long downtrend has seen bitcoin fall to its lowest price in six months, with it currently trading at roughly 50 per cent of the all-time high it experienced in November. After reaching as low as $33,000 at the start of the week, BTC has recovered slightly and is now worth around $37,000. When asked whether…

Tumbling tech stocks and cryptocurrencies have seen the fortunes of some of the world’s richest people take a hit over the past week. Bloomberg reports that Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk lost $25.1bn, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos saw a $20bn drop in his fortune, Changpeng Zhao of Binance lost $17.7bn, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is $10.4bn worse off. It was the worst week for the stock market since the crash at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Big-name companies suffered, with Peloton falling below its IPO price and Netflix suffering its steepest drop in a decade. Stocks in chipmakers also struggled. At Friday’s close, the tech-focused Nasdaq was down 7.6 per cent for…

Hundreds of bitcoin donations have been made to a Tonga relief fund set up to aid recovery efforts following a devastating volcanic eruption. Set up by Tongan politician and crypto advocate Lord Fusitu’a, the BTC wallet received more than $40,000 through 250 separate donations within three days of going live. The full extent of the damage inflicted by the underwater eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano on Saturday is still not known, though there are fears of a possible humanitarian crisis developing in the tiny Pacific nation. The ash cloud that has blanketed the country is hampering flights to the country, while the eruption also…

Melania Trump expressed her support for Bitcoin during the 13th anniversary of its launch, weeks after she launched her own non-fungible token (NFT) endeavour. In a tweet, Ms Trump noted that Bitcoin had surpassed $1 trillion (£742.3bn) in market value. “It is widely reported that Bitcoin’s market cap exceeds USD$1 Trillion.  Today marks the 13th anniversary of the Bitcoin Genesis Block.  Happy Anniversary, #SatoshiNakamoto #MelaniaNFT,” she said in the tweet. Ms Trump’s tweet came as Bitcoin’s mining hashrate – a metric to measure computational power used to process transactions – soared to an all-time high over the weekend ahead of the 13th anniversary. Bitcoin was launched by…