Crypto hedge funds and mining regulations: Bad crypto news of the week
Check out this week’s Bad Crypto podcast.
It’s been a difficult week for Bitcoin this week. The price has fallen about 5 percent over the last seven days to drop beneath $10,400. It could bounce but if it continues downwards, it might drop below $10,000 and get dangerously close to the CME gap.
One sign that the price might fall further has been a decline in the number of Bitcoin addresses holding a single Bitcoin. They’ve reached a four-month low. But Tyler Winklevoss still thinks that Bitcoin is better than gold, and Microstrategy CEO Michael Saylor has moved from bear to bull. His company recently bought almost 16,800 Bitcoins over 74 hours, spending about $175 million. Paypal is bearish too. The payments firm is working on a way to allow merchants to accept cryptocurrencies.
In Brazil, fund manager Hashdex has made an agreement with Nasdaq to launch the world’s first crypto asset exchange-traded fund. The fund will trade on the Bermuda Stock Exchange. And while Hashdex is deepening crypto trading, meat processing firm JBS is using the blockchain to monitor its supply chain and ensure that none of its suppliers are raising cattle on illegally deforested land.
Australia also sees an opportunity to secure food supplies with the blockchain. The government-backed agricultural supply chain platform, Entrust, will use Hedera Hashgraph to ensure that wine from the Clare Valley region isn’t counterfeit.
In Russia, the government has said that it will prioritize the development of blockchain technologies, while in Venezuela, the Maduro government has issued a decree to regulate crypto mining. Miners in the country now need a license.
If you want to buy a country, or at least parts of one, a new partnership between Upland and Tilia, the makers of Second Life, lets players sell their virtual property and turn digital cash into fiat. Alternatively, you can hang around in Bakersfield. A Bitcoin Cash fan has been leaving stickers around the city with QR codes, enabling people to download gifts of up to $500 worth of the cryptocurrency. The “Bitcoin Man of Bakersfield” is trying to encourage the take-up of cryptocurrencies.
The Bitcoin Man has already given away $1,100 and plans to give away another $2,000 but the airdrop of 28,000 MEME tokens has helped to push the price of the token up to $1,175. The giveaways were made up of batches of 250 tokens each.
Craig Wright could have done with some of that luck this week. The Satoshi-pretender lost a plea for summary judgment and will go to trial in January in a billion-dollar Bitcoin lawsuit. And finally, Brock Pierce is hoping to do better. The former Mighty Ducks child star and Bitcoin billionaire has managed to get onto 15 states in his run for the presidency. He believes that cryptocurrency is the 21st-century cure for America’s 21st-century problems.
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Joel Comm is an internet pioneer, New York Times best-selling author, futurist speaker and co-host of The Bad Crypto Podcast. That’s a fancy way of saying he writes words, says things and loves to play with cryptos.
The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
