Stefan Thomas has just two chances left to get his hands on his $240m (£175m) fortune.
Thomas is a San Francisco-based computer programmer, and a decade ago he was given 7,002 bitcoins as a reward for making a video explaining how the cryptocurrency works.
The bitcoin and cryptocurrency community has been set alight by news payments giant PayPal PYPL+0.6% will allow its 346 million users buy and spend bitcoin and a handful of other major cryptocurrencies.
LAGOS/LONDON: Four months ago, Abolaji Odunjo made a fundamental change to his business selling mobile phones in a bustling street market in Lagos: He started paying his suppliers in bitcoin.
Every crypto user will agree that Bitcoin mixers are some of the essential tools today. Unless you have no interest in protecting your digital assets, you probably use a bitcoin mixer while making transactions.
The Bitcoin was mined within Bitcoin’s first month—and hadn’t moved since then. There are suggestions that the wallet was owned by Satoshi Nakamoto, or a close friend.
Bitcoin’s third halving happened a few days back. Bitcoin block mining reward got reduced from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC. Bitcoin’s transaction fees are already high and with the inflation reduction, the mining fee to process the transactions may go higher only. Many layer 2 Bitcoin scaling projects are coming up nowadays to solve Bitcoin’s transaction speed & transaction fee issue. Lightning network is such a layer 2 technology for Bitcoin to scale up the blockchain’s capability by the use of micropayments. By taking the transactions away from the mainchain, lightning network targets to decongest the Bitcoin network and provide instant transactions with nominal fees. But there have been issues with lightning network as it is vulnerable to hacking. Lightning network didn’t find much use also after raising initial expectation.
If you don’t believe markets should be regulated then, if you trade or invest in crypto for a year or two, you soon will. While the financial press has always been flooded with histories of dodgy dealings in finance, many of the old scams have long since been driven out of the mainstream system. They are however alive and well in crypto.
In 2017, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a ‘fraud’ and threatened to fire all employees who were trading it. Yesterday JPMorgan added two bitcoin exchanges – Coinbase and Gemini as their corporate banking customers. They would help these two exchanges to manage the cash in the US. It is good news for the crypto industry. Let’s come back to the title topic of the post. The third bitcoin halving happened on 11th May, 2020. I got calls from some of my friends. They wanted to understand the halving thing! No, one bitcoin didn’t become ½ bitcoin. Bitcoin block mining reward got reduced from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC. This was the third bitcoin halving in the history and it took place at the block height of 630,000. The first halving happened on 29th November, 2012 and the second halving took place on 10th July, 2016. Generally halving schedule is 4 years. In every halving event, bitcoin’s inflation or supply rate gets reduced. After the latest halving, bitcoin’s inflation drops from the previous rate of 3.6% to 1.7%. Okay cool! 1.7% is quite low. Bitcoin’s inflation rate is almost comparable to gold’s inflation now. But what happens to the miners?
Michael Terpin, who is the co-founder and CEO of the Transform Group, says that in 2018 his phone was hacked and $24 million of Bitcoin was stolen. Terpin says that a group of 20 teenagers led by Ellis Pinsky were responsible. In 2018, Pinsky was only 15 years old.
After the halving, crypto exchanges selling Bitcoin, which they collected in trading fees, may pose the biggest threat to the ongoing Bitcoin rally as miners earn less BTC.