Jasmine Telecom Systems has announced its ambitious Bitcoin mining plans to become the largest BTC miner in Southeast Asia.
The Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) listed subsidiary of Jasmine International (JAS), called Jasmine Telecom Systems (JTS) has announced ambitious Bitcoin mining plans. JTS plans to become the largest Bitcoin miner of the ten nations comprising the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
The Thai telecom operator will install 500 Bitcoin mining machines over the course of the third quarter this year. In the following year, JTS aims to scale its mining operation ten-fold, installing a further 5,000 machines in partnership with the Jastrel Network at industrial locations around Thailand.
On the timing of this bullish expansion from integrated telecommunications and IT services, President of JTS, Dusit Srisangaoran said, “Now is a good time for JTS to invest in Bitcoin mining, given its widespread adoption and the incident in China that caused the hashrate to drop to an eight-month low.”
Based on these remarks it is clear that Mr. Srisangaoran has been planning to mine Bitcoin for some time, getting in at what many miners would consider an opportune moment, just after the Chinese ban and major hashrate decline.
JTS looks to bring 50,000 machines online, scaling its operation by 100x before the next Bitcoin halving. This would bring about 5 exahashes of power onto the network, which, even by the next halving’s standards, would be an impressive percentage of global mining power, and would make JTS the largest Bitcoin mining operation in Southeast Asia. At this scale, JTS could mine about 16,000 bitcoin per year.
Bitcoin mining is likely to act as the backbone to the JTS strategy of developing “new service businesses that will help to generate stable income and continuous growth.”
Hester Pierce – playfully known as the “Crypto Mom” thanks to her loose attitude towards digital currencies – has had it with the government agency she works with – the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) – and all the people in it working to prevent a bitcoin or crypto-based exchange-traded fund (ETF).
Hester Pierce: The SEC Is Too Slow
Bitcoin ETFs have been all the rage for several years amongst crypto heads. They all think an ETF will be the next revolutionary step to take and will ultimately bring bitcoin and crypto closer towards mainstream territory. Unfortunately, not everyone thinks that way, and several of these individuals are employed by the SEC. As it turns out, the organization has been rather obstinate towards permitting such a product, claiming that the crypto space is too wrought with fraud and other problems.
Several companies – including Bitwise and Van Eck – have tried hard for a period of four years or even longer to get a bitcoin ETF approved by the SEC, though their efforts have proven fruitless, as the SEC practically throws their applications back in their faces or the companies wind up having to cancel out their applications themselves due to a lack of action.
Pierce has had enough. She points out that the SEC has been so slow in the past that other nations have ultimately beaten the U.S. to the punch. Regions such as Canada have unveiled bitcoin and even Ethereum-based ETFs first, meaning the U.S. may be losing its competitive edge.
In an interview, she states:
I would never have imagined that I would be in this situation where we would not yet have approved one and other countries are moving ahead… We’re not a merit regulator, so we shouldn’t be in the business of deciding whether something is good or bad. An investor is thinking of their entire portfolio and sometimes we’re thinking in one-off terms of a particular product standing on its own and we forget that people are building portfolios.
The situation does not appear to have improved much this year. On the one hand, there are approximately nine separate companies right now that have bitcoin ETF applications on the desks of SEC office officials awaiting approval. At the same time, it appears the organization has delayed making decisions (once again) on all of them.
Will Other Things Get in the Way?
In addition, the bitcoin and crypto space has been ravaged by bears over the past three months. Bitcoin, for example, was trading at a new all-time high of approximately $64,000 per unit but has since dropped down by half. Several other altcoins have lost value as well, and it is possible the SEC may see this as a clear excuse for further rejection.
Either way, Pierce has made it clear that she thinks the U.S. is past due when it comes to providing approval.
The last week has held many bullish events and occurrences, and the price of bitcoin reflected that!
Last Week In Bitcoin is a series discussing the events of the previous week that occurred in the Bitcoin industry, covering all the important news and analysis.
Summary
It’s been quite the week for bitcoin. Elon Musk revealed that SpaceX, in addition to Tesla and himself, holds bitcoin with no imminent plans to sell. Jack Dorsey pushed a bitcoin positive agenda onto Twitter shareholders, recommending an “aggressive” approach to investing in bitcoin. Besides a lot of other news, the week ended with reports that Amazon would accept bitcoin payments before the end of the year, sending bitcoin on a run toward $40,000. All in all, not a bad week for HODLers.
Besides bullish market sentiments, there are more than enough movements in the market to indicate an upward breakout is coming. Besides El Salvador beginning its nationwide rollout of bitcoin in September 2021, there is Tesla likely accepting bitcoin for payments again; Twitter and other companies’ “aggressive” investment in bitcoin; and rumors of both Amazon being interested in either accepting bitcoin payments or investing in it outright.
Overall, it is likely that bitcoin’s current trajectory should follow the same path as in November and December 2020 given current developments. If that does in fact happen, bitcoin could very well breach $100,000 sometime in the fourth quarter of 2021, which means Christmas is coming early for hardcore HODLers and those who bought recent dips.
Bullish News
Let’s start with the bullish reports that pushed bitcoin to $40,000 over the last few days.
Amazon seems to be interested in integrating bitcoin payments into their platform, you know the global marketplace with over 310 million users worldwide. Should this pan out, and Amazon starts accepting payment in bitcoin, the market will react very favorably if rumors were able to push the surge on Sunday.
Bitcoin warlock Jack Dorsey also indicated to Twitter shareholders that the company should “invest aggressively” in bitcoin. Interestingly, Dorsey repeatedly avoided Elon Musk’s questions about Twitter integrating bitcoin into its platform during The B Word earlier in the week which featured Dorsey, Musk and Cathie Woods.
Speaking of The B Word, during the discussion, Elon Musk made two important statements. The first was confirming that SpaceX holds bitcoin on its balance sheet, in addition to Tesla and Musk himself. The second was that, although he “pumps” the market, he would never “dump,” leading many to take that as an admission that neither he nor his companies intend to sell any of their bitcoin holdings. With Musk’s epic trolling over the last few months, this was about as bullish as anything that comes out of his mouth.
Finally on the bullish front, there’s FTX’s recent funding round in which the global exchange raised $900 million in funding, the largest ever for a crypto exchange, leading to an $18 billion valuation and reaffirming that interest from large investors in the crypto space is as high as ever. Bullish indeed.
Bearish News
Last week, the European Commission proposed a law to KYC all transactions involving digital currencies in the European Union. If passed, this could very well negatively affect wallet manufacturers such as Ledger and Trezor, both of which are based in Europe. Although bearish in the long run, there are still some hurdles to clear for the law and it may not end up being passed.
Luckily for us, there is relatively little bearish news from the week otherwise. Let’s hope it stays that way.
Verdict
Once again, I am still hyped on bitcoin’s future. In terms of fiat pricing, it’s going up over the next few months and will likely be fueled further with high inflation rates in the U.S. and U.K., further adoption by large corporations and an overall change in market sentiment.
I firmly believe we’re in for a wild week in the coming days as the recent surge will either see a decent correction, or push bitcoin past the $40,000 resistance and back up in the mid 40s. Of course, nothing is set in stone and if you’ve been in the market for only a short while, its volatility and uncertainty can be a cause for concern.
Hardcore HODLers and true bitcoin believers will agree that the way to approach bitcoin is with a long-term view. Short-term fluctuations are common, but, of course, had you bought bitcoin anytime in the 11 years leading up to 2021, your stack would be nice and deep in the green right now.
Many would agree with me that we are still in the early days of bitcoin. So far only one of the 195 countries worldwide has adopted bitcoin and we’re still 119 years from the last bitcoin being mined. There are millions of companies that have yet to embrace the beauty that is bitcoin and billions of people to do the same.
This is a guest post by Dion Guillaume. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
The IRCI Singapore found that 90% of citizens have heard of Bitcoin while 40% own it, with 39% of Singaporeans seeing it as an investment.
An independent research survey published today examined Singapore’s awareness, adoption, trust, and confidence in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, finding a 63 of 100 rating for the Asian country.
The Independent Reserve Cryptocurrency Index (IRCI) is a research survey performed by the Australian bitcoin exchange Independent Reserve. The company attempts to measure how diffused bitcoin and cryptocurrency are in a particular country by evaluating a set of criteria.
Regarding awareness, the study found that 90% of Singaporeans have heard of Bitcoin, while nearly 40% own it. It also found that 57% of respondents have a preferred cryptocurrency, out of which 45% consider Bitcoin their favorite.
When it comes to adoption, 82% of Singaporeans that own cryptocurrencies HODL bitcoin. Of all bitcoin owners, around 45% are male investors, while almost 30% are female investors, the study found.
But the most compelling data point the survey showed probably relates to how Singaporeans view Bitcoin. The majority of respondents consider it an investment asset, 39%, while 25% see it as a store of value. Only 12% of Singaporeans see Bitcoin as money.
Singaporeans’ stance towards Bitcoin. Source: IRCI
The above numbers are interesting because they accurately reflect Bitcoin’s current stage of monetization. Bitcoin is arguably moving from a collectible asset to an established store of value as adoption grows and the market matures.
Vijay Boyapati demonstrated in The Bullish Case for Bitcoin that we cannot expect any nascent money to be considered a complete monetary good right off the bat, citing marginalist economist William Stanley Jevons. It takes time for it to become established in society.
The natural course for the total monetization of monetary goods consists of four steps as adoption increases. It starts as a collectible good, moves to become a store of value, then a medium of exchange, and lastly a unit of account. The last step can only be achieved once that money becomes widely adopted in the world.
Although Bitcoin’s value proposition may look evident for those that have put in work to study and understand it, on a global scale, it is still far from being so.
But as Bitcoin adoption grows worldwide, more people may start realizing that it is not only money but the hardest one ever created. They will drop the “Bitcoin is a non-correlated asset” point of view as Bitcoin perception fluidly shifts towards, and follows, its full monetization.
Bitcoin is a paradigmatic transformation of humanity’s oldest technology: money. This guide is for those willing to view it through that lens.
The below is a response to professor Fabrizio Carmignani’s interview, titled “Dummy’s Guide To Crypto,” which I found was genuinely written by a dummy, for dummies.
It’s always fascinating when experts of the old comment on the new paradigm that makes their old paradigm obsolete.
The classic meme that comes to mind depicts Paul Krugman, who said that, by 2005, the internet will have no greater impact on the global economy than did the fax machine, and who also told people that bitcoin was a bubble at $1, $10, $100 and ever since.
Trying to make sense of the new using the lens of the old is about as effective as asking a car mechanic to perform heart surgery, or asking a heart surgeon to fix a car. They’re both operators of some kind, but the domains are different.
So, let’s get a Bitcoiners view on Bitcoin. Notice I said “Bitcoin,” not crypto. Why? Because crypto is far more akin to the legacy financial system, whereas Bitcoin is an entirely new beast.
It’s a superior form of money that does not rely on a central authority for issuance or maintenance of the ledger. It’s a money rooted in the second law of thermodynamics, that transforms energy into a fixed, incorruptible unit of account. It’s an immutable network enforced by hundreds of thousands of nodes around the world, simultaneously. It’s a set of rules without rulers that any human can participate in voluntarily, and enforce at the level of the individual. It’s a substance that embodies each of the attributes of money (divisibility, portability, cognizability, fungibility, divisibility and scarcity), and thus perfectly performs the three functions of money:
It’s the perfect store of value because I know exactly how much I have in relationship to the whole, and I know that it cannot be diluted or altered.
It’s the perfect medium of exchange because I can send what I want, to whom I want, whenever I want and there is no power in the universe that can stop me from doing so.
It’s the perfect unit of account because it’s infinitely divisible and I can thus measure all other goods and services in it. As its purchasing power grows, one can continue to sub-divide the units to measure smaller goods and services, forever.
In other words: Money is the technology that a sentient species uses to transmit information relating to energy, time and matter. Bitcoin is a perfect money and monetary network.
Why Are Some People Attracted To It?
While I agree with professor Carmignani that crypto is just about blindly gambling, hoping to make more fiat, legacy money, those who understand Bitcoin’s raison d’être are attracted for far deeper reasons.
Not only is the legacy financial system a disaster, but more importantly, the legacy monetary system is completely broken and thermodynamically fraudulent.
Money fundamentally measures three things: time, energy and natural resources. Three fixed quantities that we cannot create out of thin air. Participants in an economy (a closed system) perform work (which is derived from time and energy) and, depending on the subjective value of the product of their labor in the marketplace, trade it for a thing called money which they can either save for future transactions or use today.
As a result, for money to function properly and to accurately measure the product of our labor, it must represent time, energy and natural resources as closely as possible. This primarily means that it should be a fixed quantity that cannot be changed or adjusted at the whim of some “ruler.” Changing the quantity moves the goalposts and distorts the game right in the middle of play.
Furthermore, because the legacy financial system assumes money equates to wealth, they just keep inflating the total amount of “money” without there being an equivalent increase in productive output or capital. As a result, we have way more money chasing the same output and capital, thus diluting the purchasing power of everyone’s money.
Their policies are impoverishing anyone who is prudent enough to work hard and save, and giving anyone who’s holding any form of hard asset the illusion that they’re getting rich.
Savings being the cornerstone of civilization, when you disincentivize it, you begin to break the foundation upon which individual humans build.
This has disastrous consequences and is the real reason why people who understand it deeply are attracted to Bitcoin (not crypto).
Do You Invest?
One does not ”invest” in a superior form of money.
In the same way that the person who holds the Zimbabwean dollar or bolívar doesn’t “invest” in USD, but flees to it as a superior money that has a better guarantee, people who understand Bitcoin are moving out of traditional government-issued currencies not as an investment but as a migration to superior money.
Traditional fiat currencies are as good as the promise and military might of those who “back” it. The world is changing. I will put my trust in the immutable laws of mathematics and universal physical laws long before I place it in the promise of some bureaucrat.
Mining
Mining is the name given to the validation process nodes on the Bitcoin network that are used to both validate transactions and, more broadly, thermodynamically secure the network.
Anyone can do it. You just need access to electricity, the internet and a computer. Yes, to produce a meaningful amount of bitcoin, you’ll need a more powerful or specialized computer, but that’s perfectly fine. The network is built on “proof of work” and the output is commensurate with the input.
That’s actually the great equalizer. You cannot fake “work.”
Why Is Bitcoin Valuable?
For all of the reasons I mentioned above. And this is only the beginning.
Gresham’s law states that good money pushes out bad money. Any sane human saves the good money while spending the inferior money. As more people understand what money is (this is severely lacking in the world) and they then discover that bitcoin is not just the best money humanity has ever had, but perfect money, they too will want to protect their wealth and measure the product of their labor in bitcoin.
This will continue for decades to come and bitcoin’s purchasing power will continue to rise.
A good way to think about it is the following:
Money is the biggest market. It represents everything.
Bitcoin is perfect money. On a long enough timescale, everyone will use it.
Bitcoin will represent not only everything there is, but everything that there ever will be.
So, technically speaking, the equation for the value of a single bitcoin is “infinity divided by 21 million”. That’s a much bigger number than today’s $30,000.
Should I Invest?
As mentioned earlier, the onus is on you to understand money first, and then Bitcoin.
This is a subject that will take you at least 1,000 hours, and likely the classic 10,000 hours of study across math, physics, economics, human action and praxeology, philosophy, anthropology and human evolution.
And that doesn’t include the technical side.
Once you’ve got a grounding in the philosophy and history of money, and you understand Bitcoin’s raison d’être, you won’t be asking this question. You will have answered it for yourself.
The Downsides
The only real downside that exists is being the one holding the equivalent of “sea shells,” whilst everyone is using gold.
From an evolutionary perspective, Bitcoin will do to fiat money what gold did to all other monies, including shells, rocks, stones and salt. Except that it will compress 5,000 years into a few decades.
There is a lot of talk about “energy consumption bad,” and while I’d love to debunk that here, I don’t have the space. So, I hope the following suffices:
Money is central to the operation of civilization and the capacity for free individuals to perform work and store the product of their labor. As humans, we’ve built huge edifices in order to enable money to function, such that society can operate. The latest incarnation is the fiat system which requires the collective energy use of the military industrial complex, the entire global banking system, payments systems, legal systems, courts, buildings and infrastructure, manned by millions of people just to maintain.
Bitcoin can do the same job, in a way that is orders of magnitude better, and with the same rules for everyone, for the same energy usage as what we as humans collectively use for washing machines, driers and toasters.
There is nothing more important today for the environment, equality of global economic opportunity, the transformation of the economic system and the clean up of the financial system that impacts us all, than the move into Bitcoin.
Human action is the basis of speech. I’ve said this on many a podcast: “Don’t tell me what you believe, show me your bank account and I’ll tell you what you believe.” In a world where money is controlled, there is no freedom of speech, nor freedom of individual action. That’s not a world we want to leave to our kin.
So, yes, you will become wealthy by being in Bitcoin early, in much the same way as anyone who found gold early on and held onto it saw their purchasing power increase. But more importantly, you will be accomplishing a historical good and a moral duty by moving into a better, fairer, sounder money.
This is a guest post by Aleks Svetski, founder and CEO at www.amber.app and on Twitter @GhostOfSvetski. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
We all know Elon Musk, he is a pretty famous person in the world, and also one of the most influential people in the world. And, we also saw, with just a few tweets, how he changed the world. However, because of that, many people did not trust him, saying that he had abused his influence to manipulate the market to benefit himself. What a bad idea!
And we, the supporters of Elon Musk, have launched the platform we are about to talk about below. In this article, we will explain all about the platform that we have launched. Let’s dive in!
First, we’ll come to the reason this foundation was built. The question that everyone wants to know first:
“Why Elon Musk and not someone else?”
And here is the answer:
Elon Musk, a billionaire worth over $39 billion, has rewritten the language of creativity and founded a host of companies that power his future dreams – from PayPal to Tesla to SpaceX or SolarCity.
Thanks to Musk, we have entered a new era of space exploration
Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX, recently made the remarkable feat of delivering NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) for the first time. ) on a privately manufactured spacecraft.
High-speed public transport system
Hyperloop is a new transport system with a maximum speed of more than 1,000km/h. SpaceX holds an annual Hyperloop cabin design competition. The closest winning team is a group of students from Germany with a train with a speed of 482km/h. The ship’s compartment needs to move in the vacuum pipeline, without worrying about traffic and weather conditions.
Still not enough?
You can go online, type in the google search bar a few words like “What technologies does Elon Musk have?” or something like that, and you can get what we wanna say.
What do people think about how we have stalled in the management of car emissions every year, and then when the whole world has not found a solution, Elon Musk launches Tesla electric cars ?
Or when we are still confused because of lack of cash when paying, or having dozens of problems with money transfer, and Elon Musk has successfully built a PayPal system?
After all, $MUSK & MuskSwap wants to build a community to follow & support not only Elon Musk but also many billionaires who believe in the development of blockchain & crypto market, which can help to increase the value of many potential coins & tokens.
Now, we will learn about what MuskSwap has.
Transaction fees are very low
MuskSwap is built on the BSC protocol, one of the most modern protocols today that leading platforms have converted to use.
BSC has only been available for a short time, but its benefits have been proven by the users themselves. Transaction speed is increased much higher than many other protocols that were once popular, and transaction costs are greatly reduced.
That’s the first point for MuskSwap.
“How can users get profit from the platform?”
This is the question we will answer below.
Yield Farming and Staking
As a cryptocurrency platform, we couldn’t help but have for ourselves the basic features of a decentralized trading platform. As mentioned above, users only need a simple operation to be able to activate this feature, which is to become LPs.
LPs, or fully known as liquidity providers, are users who have provided liquidity to pools that we have locked up with smart contracts. These contracts are automatically manipulated using pre-established algorithms, and all elements in the pools are automatic. With smart contracts and advanced algorithms, users will be guaranteed a level of security for all activities, and can also earn profits even if they are not directly involved in those activities. .
One more point for MuskSwap.
“So how about swap?”
So after becoming LPs, what other features can users participate in? The answer is MuskSwap.
Immediately after providing liquidity and becoming LPs, users will receive LPs tokens, and they can completely use LP tokens for many different purposes, typically for farming and staking. But apart from those two features, users can also participate in MuskSwap, and get profit from automated trades that they don’t even need to participate in, we call it transaction fees.
We would also like to introduce the MUSK token & farming program with high APY.
In this regard, we affirm that the platform’s MUSK token has a larger investment than many other platforms. Staking MUSK and other ecosystem’s tokens TESLA, STARLINK, SPACEX can help users get APY up to 500%, or even much higher.
But we would like to note that the platform only accepts BSC tokens for all operations, tokens with other protocols will not be valid in the features we offer. We also support all other BSC tokens by leaving APY at least 300%, which is as high as many reputable platforms.
Token CrowdSale
Then let’s come to the Token Sale, where users can own tokens without participating in features on the platform. And please emphasize: the amount of tokens that we sell is a huge number, everyone can participate without worrying about not being able to buy in time. Details of the rounds will be provided below
o Pre-sale (01 Aug ~ 31 Aug, 2021): 50,000,000,000,000 MUSK, price : $0.000000025
o Public sale round 1 (01 Sep ~ 30 Sep, 2021): 50,000,000,000,000 MUSK, price : $0.000000035
o Public sale round 2(01 Oct ~ 31 Oct, 2021): 50,000,000,000,000 MUSK, price : $0.000000045
o Public sale round 3(01 Nov ~ 30 Nov, 2021): 50,000,000,000,000 MUSK, price : $0.000000055
o Public sale round 4 (01 Dec ~ 31 Dec, 2021): 50,000,000,000,000 MUSK, price : $0.000000065
In each round, we will sell 50 billion tokens, a large enough amount of tokens to serve the needs of users.
Swap price : 0.0000001$ up
But don’t assume we have sold such a large amount of tokens that there will be less tokens in the features for user participation. No problem! The amount of tokens we launched is up to 1,000,000,000,000,000 MUSK! The number in the token sale is only a very small part!
And members can get free 200,000,000,000 MUSK (~$20) via Airdrop and bounty programs, which will be announced via our social channels.
Wanna deep dive into the platform? Click on these link now!
Not long ago, cryptocurrency was pushed by an event that took place online. The event saw three major bitcoin bulls – Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, and Cathie Wood – chatting online in an open forum to discuss the future of the world’s number one digital currency.
Elon Musk Has a Lot to Say About BTC
Just hours after the meeting took place, bitcoin saw its price bouncing back above $32,000 per unit, up $2,000 from where it had been just a couple days ago. While the move doesn’t seem like much, many analysts are just happy that the currency has had a moment of getting back on track.
In the meeting, Musk confirmed what many people have been thinking – that it is not just Tesla that has added bitcoin to its roster of assets in the past year. Rather, SpaceX is an owner of BTC as well. He said:
Bitcoin by itself simply cannot scale to become the monetary system for the world at base layer. There may be some merit in combining something like Ethereum and Dogecoin… I might pump, but I don’t dump. I don’t believe in getting the price high then selling [and] I would like to see bitcoin succeed.
While bitcoin has ultimately made a move, it is not the giant jump that a lot of crypto heads were hoping for. Nevertheless, Musk has commented that he is now opening the door for Tesla to show crypto support again in the future. He stated:
There’s some merit in considering something that has a higher max transaction rate and lower transaction cost and seeing how far you can take a single-layer network with exchanges acting as a de facto second layer. I think you could take that further than people realize and as bandwidth increases over time, latency decreases… SpaceX and Starlink are playing a role in this, and long-term people will have worldwide access to gigabit-level connectivity at low latency and low cost. So, then your base layer could do a lot of transactions if you take that into account.
Starlink is a new project brought about by SpaceX. As a satellite internet network, the project boasts more than 70,000 users across 12 countries and is designed to “fill geographic gaps” between regions by providing cell phone coverage and ground-based internet connections.
Could Doge Become the Ultimate Crypto?
Musk said:
If someone else doesn’t do it then Starlink certainly will. I have high confidence you will be able to maintain a decent finance system while still having a much bigger blockchain. You can make a hash ledger bigger without suffering from decentralization as average connectivity improves.
Last month, Musk tweeted that he agreed with Vitalik Buterin – the co-creator of Ethereum – who stated that Dogecoin could ultimately be upgraded and even tied to Ethereum to “beat bitcoin hands down.”
North American cryptocurrency mining company Core Scientific has announced plans to be listed publicly on the Nasdaq.
Core Scientific Will Trade on the Nasdaq Soon
The company is the latest in a huge string of crypto and blockchain-related companies to become publicly traded entities. Popular cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase arguably started this trend in mid-April and debuted on the Nasdaq with stock shares trading for more than $300 each. From there, several others decided to follow suit, with digital payment platform Circle being the next in line, and most recently crypto trading app Robinhood saying that it will do the same.
Core Scientific will merge with a company known as Power & Digital Infrastructure Acquisition Corp., thereby bringing its valuation to more than $4 billion. At the time of writing, details are scarce, as not even the ticker name or an initial trading date has been announced, though traders can likely expect things to ramp up in the next few months.
At the time of writing, Core Scientific boasts data houses in several states including North Dakota, Georgia, North Carolina, and Kentucky. It is one of the largest suppliers of digital mining power and equipment in North America and faces major competition from only two separate entities including Riot Blockchain and Marathon Digital, which are valued at just over $2 billion each.
Darin Feinstein – co-founder and co-chairman of the company – explained in a recent interview:
[Core’s] blockchain infrastructure business is unparalleled, backed by more than 70 blockchain and infrastructure-related patents and applications.
North American bitcoin mining operations are likely to become much larger over the coming months now that they are facing significantly less competition from the likes of China, their rival to the east.
China has been on a serious mission to become more environmentally friendly over the past few months and is purging itself of all crypto mining operations thanks to new orders from the country’s capital of Beijing. The maneuver has left many operation managers displaced, and several are looking at states like Florida and Texas to set up new companies.
In 2021 alone, Core minted more than 3,000 new bitcoin units, over 1,600 of which went straight to its corporate account. Co-chairman Mike Levitt explained in a recent discussion that this is considerably more than many other bitcoin operations on the continent, with the likes of both Marathon and Riot Blockchain, for example, producing only 846 and 1,167 new units, respectively.
More Popular Than Ever?
The company has also sold out of nearly all its mining rigs, and customers will need to wait until the following year if they are to obtain more. Levitt says:
We are all sold out. Every bit of infrastructure we can build – and we are the biggest – we have demand for. We are basically sold out of capacity through 2022, and we are building more.
Tim Draper has earned a reputation as being one of the world’s biggest bitcoin bulls. He is always there to defend the currency and inform people about how they can potentially take advantage of its growing list of benefits.
Tim Draper On the Future of BTC
In a recent interview, he spoke briefly about where he thinks the currency’s price is headed in the coming weeks and months. This has been something of a hot debate at the time of writing, as bitcoin is presently down more than half its value since mid-April, when it reached its new all-time high of approximately $64,000 per unit.
Nowadays, bitcoin is trading in the low $30,000 range, which is still quite high when compared with where it was even last year, but the asset has ultimately experienced another 2018 in the year 2021, and things are not looking good for the world’s primary form of digital currency.
Draper has often stated that bitcoin is set to reach a price of $250,000 by next year or the year after. Given the recent price drops that the currency has experienced, the asset would need to spike tenfold for this to happen. The currency would need to add more than $200,000 to its price within the next six to 18 months if Draper is going to make good on this prediction.
In the interview, despite being up more than $1 billion on his BTC purchases, Draper mentioned:
I’m wrong more than I’m right.
When considering new coins to invest in, Draper says that he usually checks to see if the coin in question provides a certain sense of freedom to its users. He also wants to know that it is trustworthy. He says:
I’m always thinking if it works. Free speech is incredibly valuable for people all over the world.
In addition, he says that he’s always being asked if or even when he will potentially sell his bitcoin stash. At this time, he has no interest in selling given that he feels the currency is more useful than ever. He compared selling his bitcoin with selling euros for an old currency that is no longer in commission. He claimed this would be a rather foolish move to make, commenting:
It just doesn’t make sense. Why would I ever trade in my bitcoin, which is the currency of the future? We have a new currency.
More Retailers Need to Get Involved
He also had some negative things to say about fiat. He mentioned that standard money is too often tied to politics and can lead to inflation as it is doing now due to overprinting. He does not trust standard fiat and is instead putting all his hope and faith in BTC.
Lastly, he said he would like to see more retailers accept BTC in the long run, as this is the only way the currency can ever become fully legitimate.
This writing mirrors the exact chronological structure of Beyond Order offering reflection through a Bitcoin lens. This is chapter 8 of 12. If you read the book it adds a second dimension. All quotes credited to Jordan Peterson. All reflections inspired by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Cleaning Your Room Is Not Enough
“Making something beautiful is difficult, but it is amazingly worthwhile. If you learn to make something in your life truly beautiful — even one thing — then you have established a relationship with beauty… That is an invitation to the divine.”
Bitcoin has inspired artistry including memes, GIFs, paintings, sculptures, music, literature, and decorated hardware wallets. There’s no denying the artistic expression runs deep.
“If it is a genuine artistic production, it will invade your life and change it.”
Bitcoin is the original, the immaculate conception. It is a genuine artistic production that is invading our lives and changing them. There are many pretenders attempting to siphon your money and attention. Be careful what you allow into your life, enabling the wrong product to invade your life will change it for the worse. The consequences of incorrectly allocating your time and money are dire. Simply knowing Bitcoin exists teaches you, whether you choose it or not. Time is the ultimate scoreboard, and Bitcoin is time. That is the power of a genuine artistic production.
“A real piece of art is a window into the transcendent, and you need that in your life… Unless you can make a connection to the transcendent, you will not have the strength to prevail when the challenges of life become daunting.”
Bitcoin’s design is striking: elegant, simple, powerful. Transcendent works speak to something deeper within us. Real art leaves us speechless because the way it makes us feel we lack the words to fully convey to do it justice. These qualities make it timeless. And Bitcoin will be a conversation piece for programmers, poets, journalists, and artists alike for decades to come. Once you think you’ve figured it all out a series of new paths take you deeper. We start by answering “what is Bitcoin,” mature into explaining “how Bitcoin works,” then graduate into “why Bitcoin matters.”
And the deeper your connection to this transcendent force, the more likely you will have the strength to prevail when the market correction becomes daunting. HODLers don’t flinch in an -80% fiat correction because our belief is anchored by the knowledge that there is no better alternative. Glassnode’s HODL Waves show the conviction of long term HODLers who set the new floor with each halving cycle.
Memory And Vision
“Perception has been replaced for me with functional, pragmatic memory. This has made me more efficient, in some ways, but the cost is an impoverished experience of the richness of the world.”
Society teaches us to trust data over our own feelings. So we lose our instincts as we age. We focus on what’s factual rather than subjective. Life narrows human effort into streamlined operations seeking maximum speed and lowest cost. But in this race to the bottom, we end up with an impoverished experience of the richness of the world. The Bitcoin community shares core beliefs yet expresses them on a spectrum of form factors adding dimension and richness.
“… left as we are with the pale reflection of our surroundings that our increasingly restricted mature perceptions deliver to us.”
Older generations are calloused in their ways, often perceiving Bitcoin with apprehension when in reality they are holding a dollar-based bag that is a pale reflection of its former glory.
“… museums, those asylums for genius: we isolate everything that is great — everything that could in principle be distributed throughout the world. Why cannot every small town have a shrine devoted to one great piece of art, instead of having every piece collected in a manner impossible for anyone ever to take in at once?”
Each of us is unique but society makes sense of us not as individuals but as a collection that fulfills various roles. Rather than try to cage all the talent in a centralized place wouldn’t it make more sense to decentralize talent and enable each to shine uniquely in its own space? Bitcoin allows people to contribute without geographical concerns. Developers, nodes, coin holders, and miners all operate throughout the world. And each Bitcoiner has a unique perspective to bring to the table. If money is sane it may just give us all a chance to breathe and remember what it is to be uniquely human rather than cogs in a centralized machine.
I deeply believe each Bitcoin pleb has one great piece of artwork within themselves if only they had the courage to take it upon themselves to let out. Your “you-ness” is not meant to be bottled up and sat in a cubicle from 9 to 5. It’s no wonder we feel like sardines in the office, each person elbowing their way up the ladder often forced to step on others in said mission. The future that Bitcoin offers is unclear but there are pathways ahead that will reward individuals for being individuals. That is something the internet era has shown is possible. But the vast majority of people make their living by being disgruntled middlemen when in reality we all wish to devote our lives to one great act unique to ourselves that nourishes our soul. I may be swinging for the fences but I believe Bitcoin opens that door for many millions of people.
The Land You Know, The Land You Do Not Know, And The Land You Cannot Even Imagine
“Artists are the people who stand on the frontier of the transformation of the unknown into knowledge. They make their voluntary foray out into the unknown, and they take a piece of it and transform it into an image.”
By this definition all Bitcoiners are artists. We are frontiersmen venturing boldly into the unknown in an attempt to define the future. This is why we are often misunderstood by normies. The general population sees crazy people taking outsized risk beyond society’s comfort zone. If you are a Bitcoiner who feels misunderstood you are not alone.
“That edge, where artists are always transforming chaos into order, can be a very rough and dangerous place. Living there, an artist constantly risks falling fully into the chaos, instead of transforming it.”
No-coiners are rightfully fearful of Bitcoin. It represents precisely a rough and dangerous frontier land. It has been said that when explorers of old reached the edge of their known map the common saying was “here be dragons.” Bitcoiners stand at the edge of monetary chaos in an attempt to transform it into something better.
“That is the role of the artist, occupying the vanguard… They are the initial civilizing agents… The artists do not understand full well what they are doing. They cannot, if they are doing something genuinely new.”
Bitcoiners may seem like cowboys to the rest of the world but we recognize ourselves as the initial civilizing agents. We are all attempting to reconcile the old with the new but we do not understand full well what we are doing because this is uncharted territory for every living human. No one in our lifetime has witnessed the reinvention of money.
“Artists must be contending with something they do not understand or they are not artists.”
Everyone daring enough to create on Bitcoin is contending with something we understand but don’t understand and that takes artistry.
“They are likely, when genuine, to be idiosyncratically and peculiarly obsessed by their intuition — possessed by it, willing to pursue it even in the face of opposition and the overwhelming likelihood of rejection, criticism, and practical and financial failure. When they are successful they make the world more understandable.”
This is what motivates Bitcoiners in a nutshell.
One Room
“I can tell you that the art shines through the propaganda as the years pass.”
How many Bitcoin copycats have come and gone? Many replicated Bitcoin’s codebase promising something better but few have stood the test of time. And after 12 years there is still only one Bitcoin. And the “next Bitcoin” will be Bitcoin.
“We need the new, merely to maintain our position.”
Step back and consider the bigger picture. Fragmented groups in America are at one another’s throats. China is at full force breathing down our neck. It is not enough to simply stand in place or redistribute wealth without. We need to revitalize our society to maintain our position. It isn’t enough to just tax money from one group and give it to another. We need a new mindset, and Bitcoin is capable of delivering.
Not Decoration
“… when impressionists first displayed their paintings… the pieces were met with laughter and contempt. The idea of perceiving that way… was so radical that it caused people to have emotional fits.”
When you have something that makes people wildly emotional (see Peter Schiff, Nouriel Roubini, Steve Hanke, etc.), that’s when you know it’s a work of genius. It’s ahead of the critics’ time. In the words of Victor Hugo, “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” And Bitcoin’s time is now. Silicon Valley has learned that special products originated from highly divided opinions. Ideas that are too agreeable are usually too obvious. The genius ideas are often met with deeply polarizing responses.
“Artists teach people to see. It is very hard to perceive the world, and we are so fortunate to have geniuses to teach us how to do it., to reconnect us with what we have lost, and to enlighten us to the world.”
We lost sound money. Lost in the annals of history are all the known civilizations whose money was debased leading to societal collapse. Americans have strong amnesia so we must be reminded. Bitcoiners are teaching people to remember what took thousands of years for humans to figure out — that sound money is intertwined with societal prosperity.
“Beauty leads you back to what you have lost… forever immune to cynicism… Beauty… straightens your aim. Beauty reminds you that there is lesser and greater value.”
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Until Bitcoin came around I never thought I’d describe money as beautiful. But how can it be anything but beautiful once you understand the balance between miners, node operators, and developers; the elegance of Bitcoin’s design; the harmony Bitcoin offers humanity. Any one solution with the capacity to benefit multiple wildly complex social issues is a creation of genius. Bitcoin reminds us that there are greater and lesser forms of value. And most importantly, it sets the bar for the greatest value in our species’ history.
Try to teach one no-coiner in your life “Why Bitcoin.”
This is a guest post by Nelson Chen. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC, Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
Source: Bitcoin magazine
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