Crypto Long & Short: Why Bitcoin’s Taproot Upgrade Matters

Unlike the laser eyes, they are not directly about the price – they signal support for the proposed Taproot upgrade for the Bitcoin network.

And achieving consensus among such a diverse and dispersed group of participants is a challenge, to say the least.

What has turned out to be contentious, however, is the method of the upgrade.

From that moment, Bitcoin miners had until the next difficulty adjustment to signal support for the Taproot upgrade in their mined blocks.

On Tuesday, however, it became apparent that this signaling round wasn’t going to be successful.

This is not a big deal – rather than rejection of the idea, it’s more likely that miners hadn’t yet gotten their heads or their software tweaks around the necessary steps.

When you buy gold, you don’t wonder how it will evolve while in the vault.

Also, since there is no central body to decide on Bitcoin upgrades, they need to be agreed on by all the key stakeholders, and consensus is always extremely difficult to achieve.

This is a good thing.

Taproot drives home that bitcoin may be an excellent store of value, and it may provide good returns for speculators – but the cryptocurrency also represents the opportunity to get in early on a transformative technology investment.

So Taproot will not only improve Bitcoin’s usability, which could have the effect of broadening its market and therefore potentially its value as well.

You may be sick of hearing about it, but we can’t not talk about dogecoin this week.

What’s more, it seems like both access to the asset and its potential use case are broadening.

If all these questions are giving you a headache, imagine how those of us that need to explain this feel.

Personally, I believe that the fears that the regulators will come down hard on the crypto industry are overblown.

So the deepening relationship between the two is an intriguing development that will help crypto reach more mainstream markets, and help sports teams and athletes appear more “cutting edge.” And, of course, there’s the potential income.

Might the SEC approve a BTC and ETH ETF at the same time? It’s possible, but the organization has spent years getting familiar with the bitcoin markets – its surveillance, price transparency, liquidity, etc.

There are several institutional-grade crypto-first services that have good track records, but let’s face it, many institutions are going to prefer to deal with a name they already know, trust and have accounts with.

Digital Currency Group , up from a $250 million level previously announced.

Listed fintech company Mogo revealed that it has bought approximately $405,880 worth of ETH and almost $600,000 worth of BTC as part of its plan to allocate up to 5% of its cash and investment portfolio in cryptocurrencies.

S&P Dow Jones Indices has launched its first three cryptocurrency indexes: SPBTC .

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