According to an Expert, Saylor and Musk Were Wrong about Bitcoin but will Get Labeled as Geniuses

Jenson Nunez
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According to an Expert, Saylor and Musk Were Wrong about Bitcoin but will Get Labeled as Geniuses

Scott Melker highlighted that eventually, even the most critical users would praise these chairmen. Melker compared the vast investors with the small ones and said they are not different.

Successful business people have become the standards of investment in bitcoin for now. This situation happens in space in frank expansion, such as digital assets, where institutional players are reaching high rates in quantity and capital used for investments.

Of these investors, three individuals stand out: Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy; Elon Musk, creator of Tesla and Twitter; and the former owner of the social network who retired to focus on Bitcoin through his entity called Block (formerly Square), Jack Dorsey.

According to Scott Melker, These chairmen may have a wrong stance about the exact moment to consolidate their respective BTC acquisitions. However, they would still get labeled geniuses for their thoughts on digital currencies.

In a recent bulletin, the analyst called Wolf of All Streets on Twitter studied acquisitions of entrepreneurs from public opinion. He stated that one might expect entities to be almost perfect when they acquire digital currencies, mainly because they are whales with granted access to endless resources.

Melker kept saying that not even the leading entities could time a maximum or minimum of bitcoin’s price last year despite that stance. He confirmed that CEOs get considered geniuses when they publicly reveal their purchases and prices reach new high peaks, but bitcoin’s corrective nature might harm them.

These entities got impacted by the negative performance of bitcoin lately. However, the standard purchase prices of the commodities still linger below the actual ones.

An Incredibly Foolish Way

For Melker, thinking about these entities’ investments in bitcoin from a short-term or timing point of view is ridiculous for looking at operations and investments.

The specialist desires to see these aspects from a perspective aimed at the long term. The analyst then thinks that given enough time, these three entrepreneurs and their entities will probably get labeled as geniuses even by their reliable thoughts.

Melker also set a comparison between the investments of these large companies and those of any individual. Traders and investors do not share differences because they conduct financial activities on a smaller scale.

The report highlights that regretting the exact moments and not having acquired them before is a wrong move. It all depends on the precise time for the businessman to invest, whether large or small. It isn’t effortless to predict the price fluctuations of any currency, even for very experienced traders.

By: Jenson Nuñez

After its Adoption in Galicia and Burbank, the Central Bank of Argentina Warns About Bitcoin

Jenson Nunez
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After its Adoption in Galicia and Burbank, the Central Bank of Argentina Warns About Bitcoin

The warning from the Central Bank is not of a normative kind. Bitcoiners responded massively to the Central Bank and highlighted that the problem relies on the pesos.

The Central Bank of the Argentine Republic alerted the citizens of that nation that it considers the use of bitcoin (BTC) and cryptocurrencies to be a potential risk for the nation. It did so two days after Banco Galicia and Burbank started bringing investments with these financial items on their networks.

The communication from the BCRA happened around noon this Wednesday, May 4, through two tweets on the entity’s official account. In the first of them, a prudent stance to mitigate a possible set of vulnerabilities for users and investors got highly recommended.

In the second tweet, the Central Bank highlighted the reason for its fear. As they explain, crypto-assets show some challenges for their users, investors, and the financial structure in general. They add that the speed of development and the growing interest make it necessary to show a conservative attitude.

The first tweets came with a link to a statement that the BCRA revealed in May 2022. It exposes seven factors that the agency sees as risky in digital assets: they are not legal tender in Argentina; they present prominent volatility; these items are vulnerable to operational disruptions and attacks; digital assets lack safeguard; they don’t have enough transparency; allow to be helpful to launder money, and their transactions may be cross-border.

In the messages from the Central Bank of Argentina, there are zero references to the inclusion of investments with bitcoin in Banco Galicia and Burbank. The news got revealed just two days after the aforementioned private banks released their new service with digital assets.

Bitcoiners Responded that the Problem is the Pesos

The recent BCRA tweets became viral and received many responses from bitcoiners and others who stand for the free choice of currency. For example, the Twitter account of “La Libertad Avanza,” a political space to which the libertarian deputy, Javier Milei, belongs, got replied with an emoji.

Several tweeters argued that the struggle does not rely on bitcoin or digital assets but pesos, the national currency of Argentina.

Also, on Twitter, history professor Pablo Báez commented that, despite everything, it seems that bitcoin presented less risk than the peso and highlighted some features of that fiat currency like not getting accepted outside the nation, its high volatility, and the lack of transparency.

In terms of value reserves, effectively keeping savings in Argentine pesos has been a bad idea. While the national currency is constantly depreciating and has lost more than 95% of its value in the last ten years, bitcoin has proven to be a better option in the long term, beyond its high volatility in short periods, as seen in the graph above.

By: Jenson Nuñez

Europe Sets its Sights on Professionals who Can Help Boosting Money Laundering with Bitcoin

Jenson Nunez
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Europe Sets its Sights on Professionals who Can Help Boosting Money Laundering with Bitcoin

MONEYVAL labeled bitcoin as a “challenge” in the war against illicit activities like money laundering. Europeans now receive bitcoin in the face of increasing inflation in the region.

The European Union (EU) continues to discuss that bitcoin (BTC) and digital assets are a risk due to the alleged ease they bring for money laundering, but now it has included a factor that must get watched.

The entity against money laundering and the financing of terrorism of the Council of Europe, MONEYVAL, not only proposes more rigorous regulations towards bitcoin but also on the specialized professions that serve as “guardians”.

The regulator asks to take a close look at professionals from different areas such as lawyers, accountants, and other service providers who often help money launderers, including those who carry out activities within the crypto sector, according to a statement released this 4 of May.

They also re-indicated that virtual assets and the growing use of crypto are becoming a significant challenge to fight against illicit activities like money laundering.

According to the regulator, this situation happens in the crypto active sector because they are financial items, available through the Internet from anywhere in the world, while banks and institutions have higher control over fund flows.

The organization also pointed out that its member states continue to demonstrate a low level of effectiveness in the fight against money laundering and the financing of terrorism and that they are below the satisfactory doorstep in the supervision of the standards set up by the FATF.

European Regulators and the IMF in Tune

MONEYVAL’s stance on digital assets is the same as that highlighted by Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), earlier this year. According to Lagarde, bitcoin represents a risk whose regulation must get applied on a global scale; otherwise, it could serve as an escape valve.

The head of the financial organization assures that there are criminal investigations, and they will surely continue, that “clearly” demonstrate the use of bitcoin for illicit purposes.

It possibly refers to reports from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an organization that Lagarde also directed between 2011 and 2019, in which they ensure that the use of cryptocurrencies is significantly and positively linked to a significant perception of corruption and more intensive capital controls.

This situation is, in part, driven by the war between Russia and Ukraine and the impact on the energy supply. Much of the continent depends on Russian gas and the sanctions against that country forced European nations to go to other markets that have more expensive products on sale.

Bitcoin is not the Favorite crypto for Money Launderers

Although different sectors of the regulation went against bitcoin for its use in money laundering, the reality is slightly different.

The blockchain analysis firm, Chainalysis, in a report highlighted earlier this year, explained that both fiat money and altcoins are much more used than bitcoin to launder funds.

This information got exposed by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) in a 2020 report, where they highlighted that crypto-assets play a little role in money laundering and confirmed that cash is still the most commonly used method for such purposes.

By: Jenson Nuñez

Billionaire Warren Buffett Said He Would not Acquire All the Bitcoin in the World for $25

Jenson Nunez
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Billionaire Warren Buffett Said He Would not Acquire All the Bitcoin in the World for $25

Warren Buffett keeps saying that Bitcoin has zero value. He would not spend even $25 to pay for the entire amount of Bitcoins spread in the World. Other billionaires scoffed at his stance.

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett has long since consolidated his stance against Bitcoin. Remember that he was the author of the “famous” phrase: “Bitcoin is rat poison squared,” which he repeated in 2018.

Considered by Forbes magazine as the 5th man with the most money in the World, with a fortune estimated at USD 116.6 billion, Buffett, 91 years old, has not been criticizing the leading crypto that other billionaires like him defend. He still sustains that he cannot invest in digital assets due to the lack of an intrinsic value.

All Existing Bitcoin for Less than USD 25

While speaking during Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting, Buffett talked about Bitcoin’s lack of tangible value and pointed out how sectors like agriculture and real estate have more solid returns, unlike Bitcoin. He expressed that even if he got offered all of the Bitcoin for the lowest price, he would likely sell it again, given the asset’s lack of utility.

Buffett expressed that if people told him they had all the Bitcoin in the World and offered it for $25, he wouldn’t go for it because he’d have to sell it back to them one way or another so it is not gonna change anything; apartments are going to produce rents, and farms will produce food so bitcoin would remain useless.

In addition, the media, such as Finbold, highlight that Buffett seemed to discuss the origin of Bitcoin as the product of an individual, Satoshi Nakamoto, who remains anonymous. Despite Bitcoin becoming a form of payment, Buffett observed that while more digital financial assets would get created, the dollar still reigns as real money.

Siding with Buffett is the company’s 98-year-old vice president, Charlie Munger, who expressed that Bitcoin is stupid and its evil attributes make America look bad. In 2018, Munger had called crypto disgusting.

Other Millionaires on Twitter

Buffett’s words got observed by many famous millionaires. The venture capitalist, Marc Andreessen, shared the video where Buffett’s intervention appears, expressing the following terms: It is so far-fetched that he says these things while openly accusing diabetes.

According to Buffet, Bitcoin is not a “yielding” asset, unlike land or corporate stocks. As a result, investor demand is the sole determining factor of price, making the digital currency a valuable tool for “quacks,” in their own words.

By: Jenson Nuñez

Bitcoin Controversy: What Are the Technical Reasons Against?

Jenson Nunez
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Bitcoin Controversy: What Are the Technical Reasons Against?

BIP-119 has not received a proper study on a technical basis. The covenants hide various risks that sometimes go unnoticed.

The Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 119 or BIP-119 is a foundation of the developer Jeremy Rubin, who desires to implement advanced parameters for Bitcoin operations. For example, various bitcoins can only get sent to a specific address and not to others.

But, in addition, it can also condition the spending of those assets in the future so that once they get sent to an initial address, from there, they can only get sent to other specified addresses.

These types of restrictions got called covenants and were implemented under the OP_CTV command, which in its two primary use cases, it allows the creation of some vault. With this instruction, funds from a cold or hardware wallet could only get issued to another address under the control of the fund owner.

In addition, BIP 119 could allow batch transactions to happen with regularity or rhythm in a more balanced way. It would be possible that when a certain amount of bitcoins gets housed in a wallet, other payments get applied from it to different addresses.

Thus, the owner or manager of a business could deposit the number of bitcoins necessary to pay their employees. The payments would happen in an automated way to each of the workers’ wallets or purses from this wallet.

These batch transactions can also get scheduled to run with other parameters when network fees average less than four satoshis per byte (vbyte, the data weight of these transactions).

OP_CTV Might Experience a Safe Development

Discussion about OP_CTV, the feature introduced by BIP-119, continues through the Bitcoin developer mail. From a technical point of view, these are some of the recent opinions of some of these programmers.

First of all, developer Anthony Towns considered that, according to his analysis, most of CTV’s test transactions appear to get developed with Sapio, a language created by Jeremy Rubin with the sole intention of making smart contracts in Bitcoin. Towns think that CTV hasn’t had much public scrutiny yet for this reason.

He believes that introducing BIP-119 can create risks for all Bitcoin users, even those who do not desire to use its functionalities, due to the changes that must happen in the consensus procedure.

On the other hand, Russell O’Connor, a developer, highlighted that there is not enough compatibility of the OP_CTV script or command with other Bitcoin scripts such as base58check, bech32 (SegWit), or bech32m (Taproot).

There would be a need for wallets to develop tools that allow the use of BIP-119 without coordination problems between the wallet addresses used.

David Harding expressed his concern that CTV may be a type of agreement or covenant not widely used in the long term, either due to low demand from users or because other types of better-designed covenants emerge.

This series of opinions is the most relevant on a technical level, unlike the political views covered in previous reports, and tend to be seen more often on social networks. Bitcoin Core developers are still unsure about the necessity and feasibility of BIP-119.

By: Jenson Nuñez

Bitcoin Price Consolidates Below $40,000

Audy Castañeda
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Bitcoin Price Consolidates Below $40,000

Whalemap repeats its earlier claim that the area between $25,000 and $27,000 will be the “ultimate pain” for Bitcoin hodlers.

The price of Bitcoin (BTC) consolidated below $40,000 on May 5, after US economic policy spiked to one-week highs.

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView confirmed an overnight high of $40,050 on Bitstamp following comments from the Federal Reserve and Chairman Jerome Powell.

Fed Causes Little Reaction from Cryptocurrencies

The US central bank had adjusted to market expectations with a 0.5% rise in the key interest rate, also suggesting that similar increases would repeat.

With it, a modest market rally left Bitcoin with a disturbing lack of volatility, in contrast to previous Fed pronouncements on topics such as inflation.

While many expected risky assets en masse — including cryptocurrencies — to deflate under the new policy, not everyone believed that such a scenario would cause maximum investor discomfort.

“With so many people calling for melds and meltdowns, perhaps the pain trade is to cut risky assets sideways for a long time,” economist Lyn Alden argued.

Bitcoin circles were also not expecting big trend reversals. Ben Lilly, a token economist at Jarvis Labs, highlighted the low funding rates in the BTC derivatives markets.

“The market saw some relief thanks to Powell’s comments. However, will it continue for the crypto market? Funding rates have been negative for a long period, to begin with. This tends to happen at range lows,” he wrote in a series of tweets.

“A good structure for any bullish momentum that starts here.”

Lilly added, however, that the lack of accumulation of whales at current price levels “wasn’t what we expected to see.”

“Ultimate Pain” for Bitcoin Still Far Away

Focusing on lower periods, popular Crypto trader Ed grabbed on to fresh momentum above the $40,000 mark on May 5.

For him, the BTC/USD pair was in line to hit $40,800, and while there were “plenty of reasons” to rule out a more significant rally, it was still an option.

On Twitter, Ed posted the following, “Nice bounce last night, I remember some bears laughing about my targets last week (40.8k). I still think we go for that zone. However, let us not get too euphoric, past months we constantly saw deep retraces after every bounce.

He added that “No, this is not a bold call for $43.5k in 1 go and before the end of the week. Will explain the chart above in today’s video. This is the ideal scenario while there are plenty of reasons to think this is impossible. Will try to do YT before 10 am, otherwise early afternoon.”

In terms of BTC price capitulation scenarios, on-chain monitoring resource Whalemap repeated its earlier claim that the area between $25,000 and $27,000 would constitute the “ultimate pain” for Bitcoin holders.

“A lot of liquidity and stop losses are stacked there,” he explained as part of his Twitter comments.

By Audy Castaneda

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