Bitcoin Press Releases

Governments around the world are careening toward a period of dramatic spending.

The U.S. Federal Reserve announced another $2.3 trillion in lending programs on Thursday to stabilize America's coronavirus-stricken economy. The Bank of England announced it would likely extend billions of pounds to directly finance the government's crisis response.

All this inspires inflation concerns around the globe, which appear to be driving demand for bitcoin (BTC) in some corners.

"The non-stop quantitative easing process will finally impact the mid-term and long-term market," said Danny Deng, a leading member of both the China Blockchain Application Center and the National Internet Finance Association of China. "Bitcoin is designed for this kind of situation. So I'm optimistic about bitcoin's future."

China is also expected to announce a stimulus package of its own. Deng said he expects the People's Bank of China to use a digital currency to distribute a stimulus package, which he sees as a complementary catalyst to the bitcoin mining industry.

While central banks continue printing money, there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. The halving of bitcoin miners' block rewards is scheduled for May in what some are calling an act of quantitative tightening.

Broadly speaking, dozens of nations are reevaluating which currencies and industries they depend on. Bitcoin fits into this broader spectrum as some nations with strong central governments, like China, shore up hard assets and digital infrastructure. Meanwhile, there has been a surge in retail crypto investors from nations with unstable currencies, such as Argentina and Russia.

"We see that interest in cryptocurrencies has grown significantly in Russia … due to the economic situation in the country," said Gleb Kostarev, Binance's head of operations in Russia. "The ruble has tumbled a lot in 2020. In addition, authorities are introducing a new tax on income from bank deposits from next year, which encourages people to withdraw funds from banks."

Bitcoin is hardly the most important asset in the broader economic turndown. However, recent bitcoin trends highlight the local impact of global developments. In places where distrust of banks historically runs high, many households now consider bitcoin among the assets they trust more than the local fiat currency.

Speculator's market
Some critics may see decline in bitcoin's wild volatility during the start of the coronavirus economic crisis, including what crypto traders called Black Thursday.

But the institutional sell-off and subsequent trading rush stimulated more diverse distribution, usage and liquidity options, all while making crypto companies a hefty profit.

Marius Reitz, general manager at the African crypto exchange Luno, said there was a 25 percent increase in new signups during Q1 2020 compared to Q4 2019. This includes "thousands" of new users from Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and Uganda. He added there was a 100 percent increase in trading across the continent.

"People saw an opportunity to recover some of their earlier [traditional market] losses in bitcoin," Reitz said. "It's very much still a speculator's market."

According to the asset manager and research firm Bitwise, nearly all exchanges experienced an increase in volume during March. North American exchanges including Coinbase, Kraken and Gemini saw the most growth in trading volumes. Kraken's bitcoin strategist, Pierre Rochard, said the exchange saw a 300 percent increase in new users getting verified in March, compared to the previous month.

"These are new users who didn't have any crypto beforehand," Rochard said.

Fiat-denominated prices aren't the only way to measure bitcoin's performance. The number of active bitcoin wallet addresses is now comparable to metrics during the sky-high prices of September 2017, according to Coin Metrics, which estimated roughly 770,915 active accounts on March 30, 2020 compared to 718,184 on Sept. 29, 2017.

Although the price of bitcoin briefly dropped 40 percent, down from $9,160 in early March, it recovered to roughly $7,300 as of press time. As such, Luno's Reitz said bitcoin suffered less of an impact, and recovered faster, than many other asset classes.

Institutions that sold off in early March quickly bought back in, according to Diogo Monica, co-founder of crypto custody firm Anchorage. Plus, BitGo CEO Mike Belshe said his custody startup saw such high demand for bullish loans in March that he will double the size of the team handling crypto loans. Exchanges and custodians are actually making more profit during the recession.

Read more: Retail Investors Are Buying the Bitcoin Institutions Are Selling, Traders Say

When the market crashed, speculative crypto trading and demand for custody options soared. Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier said hardware wallet sales saw "double-digit growth" in Q1 2020 compared to the same time last year, with sales still accelerating.

"We are increasing our hardware [wallet] production as a result," Gauthier added.

As speculative traders rush in, Latin Americans increasingly turn to bitcoin for savings and loans.

Latin America
"The main usage is to save. … People are seeking safety," said Ripio CEO Sebastian Serrano, whose Latin American company offers both crypto loans and an exchange. "Argentina was on the brink of default and that happened on Sunday."

Argentina isn't the only country to default, either. Lebanon, Ecuador and Venezuela are also on the brink. Bitcoiners in Lebanon often focus on savings because they, like Latin Americans, share a distrust in banks.

Cryptobuyer CEO Jorge Luis Farias said orders for crypto point-of-sale (POS) devices doubled in March, mostly in Venezuela. He's also shipping three new bitcoin ATMs to Chile, where the local currency hit a historic low in March.

Subsequently, by the first week of April, Chilean activity on LocalBitcoins reached an all-time high of $371,063.

"More people are looking for options to receive payments," Farias said on April 7. "We received 100 new [POS device] requests only last week."

Bitcoin Beach
@Bitcoinbeach
My daughter buying veggies from the latest business in our community in #ElSalvador accepting Bitcoin.  300 families received BTC stipends last week and BTC is keeping families fed and businesses going in this time of crisis @b4_humanity @bitcoinmom @crypto_birb

"I think the economic situation has to do with it, in Argentina and Mexico. Mexico had a run-up in exchange-rate disparity," Bartolomeo said. "We expect to see a lot of demand from Latin America to save in options that aren't their local currency."

If the rate of bitcoin savings and reliable loans remain steady throughout the broader economic crisis, that may arguably be a more bullish signal than fiat-denominated price increases.

Asian alliance
Meanwhile, several Asian nations are reacting to the recession by increasing their economic interdependence.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization with China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan agreed in March to work with local currencies, instead of U.S. dollars, when conducting bilateral trade and issuing bonds. Deng said the Chinese government aims to make its currency regional tender, "then a global currency" like dollars.

"China's national digital currency will accelerate this process," he added.

The crypto industry could provide the infrastructure for this distribution. Kazakhstani entrepreneur Tilektes Adambekov said in April he is still working to launch a regional crypto exchange that will eventually include "fiat trading and security tokens," although these aren't plans specifically focused on China's digital currency.

"This region will accommodate global initiatives under the 'Belt and Road' global development strategy," Adambekov said during a meeting with Chinese business associates in January.

As for bitcoin itself, traders from the above-mentioned markets sometimes liquidate their crypto by investing in real estate, especially now that oil and bond markets are highly volatile.

Middle East
Gold, oil and real estate investments appear to increase, along with bitcoin transactions, when stocks and bonds dip.

Arms & McGregor International Realty CEO Makram Hani said his company is working to close a Dubai property purchase, worth $140 million, using multiple cryptocurrencies from a single Asian buyer.

Out of the hundreds of prospective customers who expressed interest in potentially buying real estate with cryptocurrency, Hani said the most popular property locations are Dubai, London and Berlin. It appears bitcoiners in nations with increased surveillance may be seeking a liquidity hedge with traditional assets, while others in the Middle East are willing to accept large amounts of cryptocurrency.

"We have seen a significant growth in real estate transactions that have been paid for, in one way or another, with funds originating as bitcoin or other currencies," Hani said.

Rain co-founder Yehia Badawy, who also serves bitcoiners in Dubai via his Bahrain-based exchange, said trading volumes increased 200 percent from January to March 2020, with 34 percent more new user signups driven by "high-volume retail."

"People are still trying to figure out how permanent the [economic] changes will be," Badawy said.

Due to the oil market slump, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have struggled to retain investor confidence in their debts. The oil market collapse could have more dire impacts on weaker states like Lebanon and Iraq, which were already saddled with crippling foreign debts before the pandemic hit.

Mikhail Kholodov, an oil market expert at MOL-Russ LLC, described the global market these days as "all speculation" and "hot money in a casino-like arrangement" that won't regain balance "anytime soon."
When spooked investors diversify, some now rank bitcoin alongside tangible investments like gold or real estate.

At least in the short term, Gabor Gurbacs, director of digital asset strategies at investment firm VanEck, wrote, "bitcoin correlation to gold has increased significantly" during the coronavirus pandemic.

Greenidge Generation, an upstate New York power plant that's using proprietary facilities to mine bitcoin (BTC), has sold up to 30 percent of its computing power to institutional buyers.

The firm said in an announcement on Friday that the deal, brokered by BitOoda Digital, proceeded the sale of 106,000 terahashes per second (TH/s) of bitcoin mining power to undisclosed buyers consisting of hedge funds and family offices.

The sale was enabled through the execution of BitOoda's hash contracts, which allow institutional buyers to get exposure to bitcoin mining without having to go through the process of purchasing and setting up equipment.

At the Bitcoin network's current mining competition level, 1 TH/s of computing power would be able to produce about 0.00001709 BTC in a day. As such, the deal would give the buyers a daily yield of about 1.8 BTC – worth around $13,000 – in addition to having the corresponding hardware pledged as collaterals.

That said, with the Bitcoin network's halving event approaching in about 30 days, the total newly minted BTC in 24 hours will be reduced from right now around 1800 units to 900 after mid-May.

Greenidge said in the announcement it benefits from locking in profits and receiving an upfront source of capital to continue expanding its operations. The firm declined to disclose the amount earned in the deal. But major bitcoin miner manufacturers have been recently advertising around $23 per TH/s for several of their newest machines.

"Providing the same kind of time-tested hedging capabilities seen in traditional commodity markets, such product brings the benefits of clean and energy-efficient bitcoin mining from Greenidge to institutional investors throughout the United States," Greenidge CFO Tim Rainey said in the announcement.

In early March, it was reported that Greenidge was producing on average 5.5 BTC a day by utilizing 14 megawatts of its total 106 megawatts capacity.

The Bitcoin network's total hashrate back then was around 118 million TH/s on average, which means the firm possessed roughly 357,000 TH/s of computing power at the time. It has plugged in additional equipment over the past several weeks.

Last month's crash in cryptocurrency prices has prompted manufacturers to sell inventories at a discount, in some cases as steep as 20 percent, over the past few weeks. Both the newest models and slightly older machines have been marked down.

Complicating the matter is the imminent bitcoin halving in May that will reduce the network's mining reward by half, causing most miners to be less profitable if bitcoin's price doesn't increase significantly by then.

For instance, DJ Miner, an overseas distributor for Shenzhen, China-based MicroBT, was advertising about $2,500 per unit of the manufacturer's flagship WhatsMiner M30S early last month. After bitcoin's March 12 crash – the worst sell-off in seven years – the price is now cut by 20 percent to $2,000 per unit.

The WhatsMiner M20S, a less advanced but popular model that boosted MicroBT's market share against major rival Bitmain in 2019, is also seeing a 20 percent price cut from $1,679 to now $1,340, DJ Miner's website shows. Pangolinminers, another distributor for MicroBT shows similar pricing rollbacks on its website.

Similarly, while Bitmain is advertising $1,567 for its AntMiner S17+ with a computing power of 67 terahashes per second, various resellers are posting quotes on WeChat seen by CoinDesk at around $1,300 per unit.

The Beijing-based mining giant has previously announced the pricing for its latest flagship AntMiner S19 Pro at about $2,900 per unit but the shipment won't take place until May and so far is only available for investors inside China.

See also: How Bitcoin's Price Slump Is Changing the Geography of Mining

Efficient market
It is important to note that most specialized bitcoin computers, known as ASICs, had already been dropping in price since the fourth quarter of last year, as the manufacturers adjusted their strategies in line with bitcoin's price swing.

These machines are priced assuming it would take the buyer on average 15 months to make back their equipment investment. Holding the payback period relatively constant, manufacturers would adjust the prices of their equipment according to bitcoin's market price and the level of competition on the network – the two factors that determine how much revenue a miner can generate in a day.

Miner pricing data compiled by research startup TokenInsight shows that, for example, the Whatsminer M20S and the AntMiner S17 Pro were priced at around $2,400 and $3,000, respectively, in mid-October 2019. The price for both had dropped to around $1,500 as of March 10.

"ASIC miners have experienced a relatively large market devaluation since Q4 2019. However, the miner market has found some level of price floor during Q1 2020 despite the recent crypto market downturn," said TokenInsight analyst Johnson Xu. "Some experienced miners are currently looking to purchase some secondhand ASICs at a significant discount … based on their carefully structured model."

Blockware Solutions, a reseller of bitcoin ASIC miners in North America that also operates mining facilities, said in a recent research report that the market crash in March, together with the coming halving, has led to a significant decrease of bitcoin's mining computing power – which in the long run, could be an encouraging sign for the market's efficiency.

"If Bitcoin remains at lower price levels for 2-4 months, post-halving, many miners operating at a loss will be forced to shut off," Blockware said. "After all the miners that are operating at a loss shut off, the miners that survive experience significant margin relief. We will witness a network in short-term chaos, but difficulty adjustments will reinstate stability once the inefficient miners shut off."

Telegram can't seem to catch a break, and the social communications company embroiled in a lawsuit with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) might need to rethink its defense tactics. The SEC has continuously asserted that Telegram is offering illegal securities through the sale of its Gram digital currency, while the company counters that the tokens are not a form of security. Judge P. Kevin Castel, who is presiding over the case, has already determined that the SEC is most likely correct, and ordered Telegram to halt its token sales. Telegram wasn't ready to give in, though, and wanted the judge to determine that sales to investors outside the U.S. could proceed, since the SEC doesn't have jurisdiction over those individuals. That attempt has now fallen flat.

The SEC scoffed at the suggestion made by Telegram, and Castel agrees. The company is now forbidden, with complete clarity, from offering any Gram tokens to anyone – inside the U.S. or out. The judge explained that the ruling centers on the purchase agreements themselves, not who may or may not be a purchaser of the tokens. He added that the scheme includes, by Telegram's admission, subsequent sales on a secondary public market, which would, by default, require the company to obtain permission to hold a securities offering.

Telegram had hoped it could win court support by proposing the introduction of safeguards that would keep U.S. retail investors out of the picture, as well as prevent them from using the digital currency wallet associated with the Telegram Open Network (TON), the blockchain Gram sales were going to support.

However, the court determined that Telegram only now is trying to introduce the changes, not two years ago when the sales process was first implemented, and that the safeguards contradict TON's assertion of anonymity to investors who buy and sale the tokens. As a result, the court was forced to conclude that "any restriction as to whom a foreign Initial Purchaser could resell Grams would be of doubtful real-world enforceability. As to the TON Wallet, Telegram maintains that the TON Wallet is distinct from the TON Blockchain and is a useful but non-essential feature."

Telegram now finds itself in an incredibly tenuous situation. The TON blockchain has been moving forward while it fought the SEC, and was being developed with investor funds. However, these investors could now begin to request refunds, an idea that has already been floated, that would see Telegram lose 72% of the money collected. At this point, Telegram may have to concede defeat and salvage whatever is left to continue with its blockchain efforts. 

For governments, fighting the coronavirus pandemic is like fighting a war.
The leaders of Italy, Spain and Germany have used the analogy – along with the CEOs of Bank of America and the U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T – to describe the mass-scale efforts needed to combat the disease: mobilizations of the health care industry, a retooling by factories to produce masks and makeshift morgues to accommodate a fast-rising death count.

During a televised press conference this week, U.S. President Donald Trump characterized himself as a "wartime president."

Now, it's becoming clearer that the economic toll of the virus, as in a war, is likely to be dire. In the U.S. alone, a record 3.3 million jobless claims were filed last week. Deutsche Bank predicts the country's job losses might exceed 15 million, with Europe approaching a similar level. Countries are prepping aid and stimulus packages into the trillions of dollars, stretching already heavily indebted government balance sheets. Central banks led by the U.S. Federal Reserve have pledged nearly unlimited support to financial markets. Investors have flown to safety in U.S. dollars, and in doing so driven down emerging-market currencies, inflicting additional economic damage on some of the world's poorest countries.

So with officials starting to envision what it might take to rebuild damaged economies and restore society to a semblance of normal, speculation is mounting that seismic shifts might be in the offing for the global monetary system — a phenomenon that historically has occurred in the wake of world wars.

Think Bretton Woods, the historic gathering in 1944 at a mountaintop resort in New Hampshire, which set the template for the current system and entrenched the dollar's near-century-long reign as the world's dominant currency.

"I wouldn't rule out anything at this point," says Markus Brunnermeier, a Princeton University economics professor who has advised the International Monetary Fund, Federal Reserve Bank of New York and European Systemic Risk Board.

Questioning dollar dominance
Even before the coronavirus hit, questions were percolating among some economists and monetary officials over whether the dollar-based system could last through the 2020s.

One concern is that monetary policy in the U.S. – actions by the Fed to maximize domestic employment and keep prices stable – reverberates through countries all over the globe, often saddling them with higher inflation whenever their currencies weaken versus the dollar; while exporters of raw materials or manufactured goods might become more competitive, consumers feel the pinch from higher prices for imported goods. Another factor is that so many commodities such as oil, copper and gold are priced in dollars, leaving producers including Russia, Brazil and South Africa at the mercy of foreign-exchange markets.  

Bank of England President Mark Carney floated the idea of a "synthetic hegemonic currency," possibly based on new digital-asset technologies, to reduce the dollar's "domineering influence" on global trade. China, the world's second-largest economy, has been pressing forward with a digital version of its yuan that might be used more widely in global trade. Facebook, the social network, proposed last year to create its own payment token, libra. Bitcoin, launched in the throes of the 2008-09 financial meltdown, offers another alternative.

"Eventually we're going to get past this crisis," said Tim Shaler, a former portfolio manager at the bond fund Pimco who now serves as chief economist for iTrust Capital, which allows clients to buy cryptocurrencies and physical gold through their retirement accounts.  "If there's a possibility to create some digital currency not tied to any domestic economy, there might be an opportunity for somebody to figure that out."

The Fed helicopters in with trillions
It's little surprise the Federal Reserve is intervening so deeply in U.S. markets during a time of crisis. That "quantitative easing" (QE) playbook was put in place by former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, who garnered the moniker "Helicopter Ben" thanks to his advocacy for plying the financial system with large quantities of much money when needed. In a matter of months in 2008, from August to December, the Fed's balance sheet doubled in size to more than $2 trillion. It doubled again during the next few years to over $4 trillion.

On Monday, the U.S. central bank, now led by Chair Jerome Powell, made an unprecedented pledge to buy bonds in unlimited amounts to support markets, while reviving 2008-era QE emergency-lending programs to ply banks, Wall Street dealers and even corporations with fresh liquidity. The new efforts could quickly balloon the Fed's balance sheet to north of $8 trillion, says Stephen Cecchetti, who headed the monetary and economic department at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, in the early 2010s.

IF THERE'S A POSSIBILITY TO CREATE SOME DIGITAL CURRENCY NOT TIED TO ANY DOMESTIC ECONOMY, THERE MIGHT BE AN OPPORTUNITY FOR SOMEBODY TO FIGURE THAT OUT.

On Wednesday, lawmakers in Washington were negotiating a $2 trillion aid package, but the investment-research firm Evercore ISI predicted this week in a report that another $3 trillion might be needed. Some of the Treasury bonds issued to finance surging U.S. government budget deficits might get sopped up by the Fed.  

"The central bank has to be a part of the war machine," said Cecchetti, now a professor of international economics at Brandeis University.

The dollar's inflationary threat
Despite the flood of new dollars, the U.S. currency has surged in recent weeks to its strongest levels in three years. Inflation is muted, and the economy's weakness means prices in the U.S. won't be pressured upward anytime soon.

But the Fed's trillions could eventually lead to higher inflation. There also might be a renewed outcry that such money injections merely bail out bankers and rich people, with few of the benefits going to the middle or lower classes – similar to the arguments of the Occupy Wall Street movement that followed the 2008 crisis.

Outside the U.S., central banks might emerge from the coronavirus shock with a stronger appetite for independence from American influence over the global monetary system.

"It's going to be interesting to see how it plays out when we have at least two major financial players that are going to emerge from this," said Omer Ozden, CEO of RockTree Capital, a merchant bank with expertise in blockchain technology. "China will have its own thoughts and may take a different direction from, let's say, a Bretton Woods-style global organization."

Trustless world, trustless systems
It's highly unlikely the global monetary system would see a negotiated accord along the lines of the Bretton Woods accord, which was joined by 44 countries, said Edwin Truman, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who oversaw the Federal Reserve's division of international finance from the late 1970s through the late 1990s.

Trump's brash, freewheeling style and protectionist impulses in recent years have alienated former allies in Europe, and his border wall campaign has ratcheted up tensions with Mexico. He demonized China in last year's trade war and recently referred to the coronavirus as the "China virus."

"One of the big challenges of today, in contrast to 2008-2009, is that the state of national cooperation is pretty low," Truman said. "In order to do, collectively, a big change in the system, people would have to agree, and everyone seems to be fending for themselves."

For George McDonaugh, CEO and co-founder of Isle of Man-based KR1, a publicly traded cryptocurrency investment company, it's the head-scratcher of "helicopter money" that might ultimately raise fundamental criticisms of the current monetary system. Deep interest rate cuts and central bank money injections in ever-growing quantities appear to have become the default solution whenever a market crisis hits every seven to 11 years.  

The Fed's trillion-dollar money injections during the 2008 financial crisis did little to weaken the dollar's dominance in the years since, but this time might be different.

"If someone on TV says we can have infinite money, someone on the other side of that TV screen says, 'Why have I been working my ass off for the past 40 years?'" McDonough said.

Smart contract development platform sCrypt Inc. has dispelled the notion that Bitcoin contracts are limited compared to other currently popular platforms such as Ethereum and EOS. In a post detailing how complex contracts can be written and run, the company said Bitcoin scripting is "extremely extensible, versatile, and future-oriented," with "unbounded" scaling.

Bitcoin was always designed to run smart contracts
A common myth in the digital/blockchain industry is that Bitcoin can't run the kind of sophisticated smart contracts that Ethereum and others were "designed" to handle, or that smart contracts were never part of Bitcoin's original purpose.

Quite the contrary, sCrypt founder and CEO Xiaohui Liu says—any perceived limits stem from a lack of deep understanding among developers of Bitcoin's full functionality, or on the artificial limits imposed on alternate versions of Bitcoin such as BTC. Moreover, Ethereum may even be fundamentally flawed by attempting to perform complex computation on-chain—this could prevent it from scaling to enterprise-tier requirements, and presents several security risks.

Bitcoin, by design, does not run "Turing-complete" scripts in its transaction outputs, and this is mainly where it differs from Ethereum. However developers may still create Turing-complete processes with an off-chain agent for computation, and using the Bitcoin ledger as a "ticker tape" to store its results. Attempting to perform actual computation on-chain places a huge burden on transaction processors, and is where Ethereum has most frequently run into problems (and will continue to in the future).

'States' in smart contracts
In a post on Medium, Liu detailed "a general mechanism to maintain state in Bitcoin smart contracts." States are necessary in automated smart contracts, as they record details of changing circumstances/stages over time that determine the end result. In business and law, these could include whether a task has been performed or a payment made, or any other event in the world external to the contracting parties has (or hasn't) occurred. The ultimate result would differ depending on a complex combination of these outcomes. Think of insurance, gambling, wills, real estate and other major deals, elections/voting, property ownership, and pretty much everything else.

Each Bitcoin transaction, Liu said, consists of an output that "locks" funds in place, and some future input that "unlocks" those funds if the contract obligations have been met. In a simple financial transaction, the outputs and inputs check whether a party has the right to send or receive Bitcoins. A smart contract would need to check whether the contract obligations have been met according to its original conditions.

A developer could record changing states by separating data (information about the current state) from code (the actual functionality of the program) in the locking script—echoing techniques used in object-oriented programming. The "code" part of the script cannot change, while the "data" part may—but only in accordance with the rules the code has set for state transition.

Doing this can maintain the current status of changing circumstances across multiple transactions, which are necessary to run smart contracts. For a more detailed technical description and an example, read Liu's post here.

sCrypt and Bitcoin's full potential
sCrypt Inc. encourages more developers to innovate on Bitcoin, particularly with smart contracts. It provides an integrated development environment (IDE) and a more familiar linguistic interface to Bitcoin's native scripting language. The Bitcoin development platform is unrelated to the "sCrypt" hashing function used by some proof-of-work altcoins, including Litecoin and the lesser-known "Bitcoin-sCrypt" blockchain project.

First introduced at CoinGeek Seoul in October 2019, it is a development platform aimed at making some of Bitcoin's more complex functionality more accessible to programmers and businesses. Bitcoin's Forth-like scripting language itself (simply called "Script") can be complex and difficult for the inexperienced to grasp at first, which Liu said has historically presented a barrier to Bitcoin innovation.

Unlocking the full potential of Bitcoin Script is only possible on BSV, with its unlimited transaction block sizes and full set of scripting functions. BTC in particular has crippled Bitcoin's usefulness as a smart contract platform with its artificially-limited transaction block sizes, and deprecation of some of Satoshi Nakamoto's original set of functions.

Celebrities and digital currencies have not augured particularly well, with many of them having to part with huge sums of money just to get the authorities off their backs. One celebrity is however out to change all this and is building a futuristic city powered by blockchain technology and digital currencies. Grammy-nominated singer Akon believes he can change millions of lives in Africa with his Akoin currency, but is it all just a dream or can the real-life Wakanda be actualized?

Born Aliaume Damala Badara Akon Thiam, Akon relocated to the U.S from Senegal at seven where he went on to release chart-topping hits. He, however, never forsook his roots and has invested a lot of resources into several initiatives in Senegal and beyond. His most prominent is the Akon Lighting Africa Initiative, one that seeks to bring clean energy to millions of African homes.

 In his most daring project yet, Akon announced in 2018 that he would be launching Akon City, a utopian city which would avail all sorts of opportunities for the African youth. The city will be built in a 2,000-acre land gifted to him by Senegal's president and will be just a 5-minute drive from a newly-built international airport as well as the capital of Dakar.

Akon City will be powered by Akoin, a digital currency named after the 'Locked Up' and 'Lonely' singer. Akoin will purportedly be a trusted digital currency that will stimulate revenue-generating opportunities which will "support and empower youth entrepreneurship, economic stability, and growth across Africa and the world."

If you don't know more about the currency, that's because there isn't much more to know as up till now, Akon and his team are yet to release the project's whitepaper. Anyone in the digital currency industry knows just how important a whitepaper is – it introduces the public to your project, including its goals and milestones and how you intend on achieving them.

Akon has kept us in the dark on this. And it's not because he hasn't been asked about it. In an appearance last year, he was asked why he has yet to release a concrete plan on how his city will operate. His response:

"I come with the concepts and let the geeks figure it out."

In addition to the lack of a whitepaper, Akoin has also missed some of the milestones it has put up so far. Akon had pledged to release the token in July 2018, a deadline he has now missed by close to two years. Granted, developing a functional digital currency is a tough ask. However, Akon has failed to keep his fans on the loop on the progress, and this void has been filled with all manner of theories.

With huge pledges but little tangible effort, the project has shifted focus to the big picture and the incredible future that could be if everything went according to plan. Damoy Robertson, the project's marketing advisor in an interview stated, "The key thing we are focusing is getting the public, potential users and investors to understand just how important Akoin is and the size of the opportunity."

While he's right about the need for market sensitization, the product is just as crucial, and this hasn't been forthcoming.

Noble as the idea is, Akoin is still just a concept, and as Silicon Valley has come to prove, most concepts die out fast if they aren't accompanied by diligent and strategic moves. As it stands, Akoin is nothing more than a digital currency project that's clinging on the fame of a celebrity to make a splash.

The outgoing governor of the Bank of England has warned of the risks of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), highlighting the potential impact of CBDCs on fiat currency and the wider financial system.

Mark Carney, who is due to leave his post on Friday, addressed the risks posed by central bank digital currencies, highlighting the "significant challenges" that could be posed to financial stability.

First reported by Reuters, the comments come at a time when the bank is reported to be considering the feasibility of issuing its own digital currency on the blockchain:

While CBDC poses a number of opportunities, it could raise significant challenges for maintaining monetary and financial stability…and would need to be very carefully designed if it were to be introduced.

Carney said there were likely implications for commercial banks, should significant balances move towards CBDCs: "If significant deposit balances are moved from commercial banks into CBDC, it could have implications for the balance sheets of commercial banks and…the amount of credit provided by banks to the wider economy."

The comments come in the final days of Carney's tenure at the bank, as he prepares to take up post as the U.K. government's Finance Adviser for COP26. He is set to be replaced by Andrew Bailey, the current head of the U.K. financial regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

In the report, the bank also addressed the decline of cash, with consumers and businesses alike increasingly opting for digital payment alternatives.

The Bank of England is scheduled to meet, alongside representatives from five other financial regulators, to discuss models for issuing a digital currency. On its preferred approach, the bank said that any digital currency would be denominated in Sterling, and would not be allowed to entirely replace cash notes.

It comes as other central banks are already testing their own digital currencies. In Sweden, for example, the central bank is running tests on issuing a digital currency dubbed the 'e-Krona', while other central banks are known to be running their own feasibility assessments on the technology.

Banking giant JPMorgan Chase has reached a settlement in a lawsuit over changes to the fees for purchasing digital currency on its credit cards, bringing an end to legal action over the matter.

The unannounced fee structure changes were introduced in 2018, which the plaintiffs said was a violation of its cardholder terms of service. Chase bank customers Brady Tucker, Ryan Hilton, and Stanton Smith brought the action after the bank implemented the new fee structure without providing any advanced warnings to its customers.

Notably, Chase applied cash advance fees for digital currency purchases, a position it has previously defended. In a prior hearing, Chase argued digital currency purchases could be characterized as "cash-like transactions," and as a result, the fee change was not a breach of its terms.

In August, a judge upheld the arguments of the plaintiffs in demonstrating the definition of "cash-like" as referring specifically to instruments tied directly to fiat currency, including money orders, cash and traveler's cheques.

Chase also pointed to a change in merchant category code at Coinbase, which switched from "purchases" to "cash advances," thereby shifting the applicable fee structures to digital currency transactions on Chase cards.

The plaintiffs claim to represent a large number of affected Chase customers, and are seeking full refunds of all charges it alleges have been wrongly applied. This is alongside a claim for $1 million in damages in connection with the charges.

The parties now have a further 75 days to consider their next move, before the plaintiffs will be able to apply for restoration of the action.

It comes at a time when JPMorgan is exploring blockchain technology in more depth. In the last month, the bank published a 74-page report on the state of the industry, concluding that there was still some time to go before the technology reached mainstream adoption.

Nevertheless, the bank has been among the quickest of the mainstream institutions to get behind stablecoins. Its JPM Coin was trialed as early as February 2019, becoming the first U.S. commercial bank to successfully demonstrate its stablecoin in practice.

The settlement for an undisclosed amount brings the case to its conclusion without an admission or denial of wrongdoing on behalf of the bank.

Two co-founders of an alleged crypto Ponzi scheme have pleaded not guilty to a range of charges, following a criminal indictment on money laundering and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

John Caruso and Zachary Salter of Zima Digital Assets have been accused of running a crypto scam responsible for defrauding some $9 million from its customers, in a structure defined as a "classic Ponzi scheme."

The first $1.9 million of deposits into the scheme were returned to early investors, validating the scheme and its claims for significant investment returns. These payments were allegedly used to encourage more investment in the scheme.

The following $7 million invested was purported to have been spent frivolously by the founders, including on luxury vacations, private jets and casino trips. The founders themselves claimed no taxable income during the period, despite showcasing their monied lifestyle on their social media profiles.

Some 90 investors were conned by the scheme, including former athletes and some elderly victims. The pair were arrested by law enforcement authorities on January 30, with an initial plea hearing for Salter taking place earlier today.

Caruso entered his not guilty plea on February 26, having previously been released from prison in 2017.

The case will now move to trial in front of a jury, scheduled to begin on July 4. If either party is convicted on the charges, they will be required to return all assets acquired through the scheme or from the proceeds of their crimes.

Among the charges on the indictment are allegations of false statements in investor contracts, alongside misrepresentations through direct messages to investor clients.

At a hearing in February, the prosecution said, "There is no evidence any of the investment funds that have been provided to Caruso and Salter have gone to any cryptocurrency/digital asset investment, or to any investment of any kind, as fraudulently misrepresented by both Caruso and Salter."

On the date of the hearing, Zima Digital Assets was still receiving new funds from investors, which the co-accused were personally misappropriating to fund their own lavish lifestyles.

An unknown group of hackers breached Trident Crypto Fund, stole the data for over 250,000 users and leaked it online. According to a recent report, the hackers were able to access email addresses, cellphone numbers, passwords and more. The hack comes hot on the heels of yet another data breach at Digitex Futures Exchange.

The hackers managed to access the persona data for 266,000 users, Russian outlet Izvestia reported. Speaking to the outlet, Ashot Oganesyan, the technical director at cybersecurity firm DeviceLock, revealed that the hackers posted the data on a number of file-sharing websites. They exploited a vulnerability on the fund's website, which they openly claimed as they leaked the data.

The hackers managed to access email addresses, phone numbers, passwords in encrypted form, countries of residence and IP addresses. Two weeks after they leaked the data, they then decrypted the passwords for 120,000 users. Armed with the usernames and the passwords, the hackers can easily access their victims' accounts, Ashot stated. And while some crypto accounts require two-factor authentication, hackers have been known to use social engineering techniques to overcome such hindrances.

Of the 266,000 users whose information was leaked, close to 10,000 were Russian, Ashot told the outlet, making this the largest leak about crypto investors in Russia. The Russian authorities are not taking the matter lightly and already, the Roskomnadzor is seeking legal redress against the firm. The report claims that the agency, which is in charge of IT and media in Russia, will file a lawsuit against the company for dissemination of personal data.

Izvestia reached out to one of the victims using the leaked data who confirmed his association with the fund. He, however, wasn't an investor in the fund. Rather, he had registered with the firm to participate in a training seminar. He was outraged at the reckless nature the fund had handled his data.

Trident is yet to respond to the data breach or to issue any statement regarding the same. The firm keeps a very low profile, with little online presence. Even its physical offices are unknown, with Crypto Fund Research placing them in Malta. It allows its clients to invest in the top 10 cryptos, claiming to have raked in 1,400% in returns in 2017 when BTC returns stood at 800%.

Just recently, Digitex exchange suffered a data leak as well, but unlike with Trident, it came from within the firm. A disgruntled ex-employee by the moniker 'Digileaker' claimed to have stolen personal data of 8,000 users and threatened to leak it unless his demands were met.