With Ethereum lately having put a gleam in investors’ eyes, thanks to the much-anticipated promise of its technology, Bitcoin underwent a technological upgrade of its own at the weekend.
It’s too early to say whether the Taproot upgrade may be followed by similar appreciation, given the Bitcoin blockchain’s lack of utility compared to other, younger networks such as Ethereum and Solana.
And despite the bearish mood that appears to have taken hold of the broader crypto market since Monday, bets on its oldest token still comfortably pass the sanity test.
VanEck’s new fund, trading under the ticker XBTF, closed at US$59.73 on its first trading day, down 1.94% from its US$60.91 open.
The SEC has rejected every application for a Bitcoin spot ETF since 2013, approving only funds based on futures contracts — and even then only recently.
The SEC has repeatedly cited its concern over the potential for market manipulation as the reason a spot ETF is unlikely to see the light of day in the United States.
Since its debut last month, ProShares’ futures-based Bitcoin Strategy ETF has amassed some US$1.4 billion in assets, demonstrating that the market has an appetite for exposure to Bitcoin.
The last major upgrade to Bitcoin was SegWit in August 2017, when Bitcoin was trading just above US$4,000, enabling the layer-2 protocol Lightning Network for faster transactions.
However, upgrading a blockchain worth more than US$1 trillion only every few years is emblematic of what happens when a network relies on a vote for every single change.
According to Bitnodes, which tracks the versions of the network miners are running, only one in three are using the latest software, which compounds the difficulty of upgrading the network.
Although Bitcoin’s ponderous approach to upgrades has for now been accepted, decentralized finance is rapidly eating into the original crypto’s market share.
Now, warnings against engaging in mining are being reiterated, most recently by the National Development and Reform Commission — a macroeconomic management agency — which is considering levying punitive electricity tariffs on recalcitrant crypto miners.
The Bitcoin mining saga in China is full of twists and turns.
But a different part of China’s crypto industry — mining rig manufacturing — is untouched by government crackdowns and appears to be more profitable than ever.
Although the U.S.
Recent hashrate increases in Ireland and Germany are probably the result of this use of VPNs and proxy servers, according to the Cambridge research.