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Blockchain

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In plain dollar for dollar terms, Bitcoin moved more in terms of price in 2021 alone than its entire history before it. The cryptocurrency closed the year in 2020 with a new high over $20,000, but from the start of 2021 to the high of the year, Bitcoin grew another $45,000 per coin.

It has since dropped more than 50% of that all-time high price, leaving crypto market participants wondering why the crash happened, and if the bull run is over. But before that can be understood, we have to first understand what caused the spike in Bitcoin price in the first place.

Getting an in-depth look at all the factors that prompted the uptrend can help shed light on if the rally is over for good and a new bear market here, of it this is merely a pause before another leg up and more all-time highs.

Why People Invest In Bitcoin And Cryptocurrencies

Time and time again, it has been proven that Bitcoin can be a worthwhile investment and a great, uncorrelated addition to a savvy investor’s portfolio. In fact, it is among the best performing investments in history, despite still being considered a dangerous and sometimes risky asset class. The risk is associated with the cryptocurrency’s volatility which is amplified by being a speculative asset. Speculative assets are highly susceptible to changes in sentiment, making the resulting changes in price action that much more powerful.

It has gone from virtually worthless and of interest only to hobbyist cypherpunks to being a highly sought and scarce asset that everyone in the world wants to own a piece of. The ROI is in the hundreds of thousands, if not more, but the cryptocurrency keeps on climbing.

Knowing the asset’s potential is one of the main reasons the price spiked in 2021. Any financial market prices in all available data, including news, and even the expected future results of an asset. In fact, most assets trade at the prices they will be worth in the future, and not at their actual valuation. Crypto is no different, and possibly even more departed from its value – because no one truly knows what the value should be.

Future Price Predictions Fuel Rally

But Bitcoin is one of the few cryptocurrencies with enough price history to predict future outcomes, and almost all analysts who have looked at a Bitcoin price chart see big things in the cryptocurrency’s future.

The cryptocurrency is projected by many ranging from the likes of Max Keiser to Tim Draper and Cathie Wood to reach hundreds of thousands of dollars per coin in the next several years. With expectations like that, crypto investors are hard to break and it took a major 50% correction to get some long term holders to finally capitulate.

The spike was driven in large part by the expectation that the price of Bitcoin would rise in 2020, but the expectation itself was driven by a variety of other factors.

Digital Gold Narrative Floods Crypto Market With Trillions

The digital gold narrative was one of the primary factors in Bitcoin’s parabolic climb in 2020. The cryptocurrency was designed by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto to share many of the same attributes as the precious metal, such as scarcity.

Gold has long been used as a monetary standard, however, Bitcoin is better than gold in every way. The cryptocurrency can be sent across communications channels due to having no physical footprint, and requires no space to store. It is even more scarce than gold, with a fixed supply that can never be increased.

The gold market is worth more than ten trillion dollars, and even just a small amount of it coming out of precious metals and flowing into the ultra scarce, low liquid crypto market sent speculative asset prices soaring. Bitcoin reached more than $1 trillion itself, with the crypto market reaching nearly $3 trillion in total value. But then a crash happened, and the entire crypto market is now less than $2 trillion with Bitcoin included.

The Bitcoin Halving Crushes Supply When Demand Is Highest

The cryptocurrency’s hard-coded halving in May of 2020 was another major factor in causing the spike. Demand for the cryptocurrency had been rising naturally after a long bear market. When demand was at the highest in years, the supply was slashed in half by the cryptocurrency’s underlying protocol.

With less BTC flowing into the market from miners, and no more holders willing to sell, the price per Bitcoin rose exponentially, and it carried the rest of the crypto market up with it. DeFi coins exploded, and Ethereum set a new peak also. The entire market was soaring.

Capital seemed to be flowing into crypto from every angle, and it was. Which leads us to another primary factor in the cryptocurrency’s epic rise to stardom in 2021.

Stimulus Money, The Fail of Fiat, And The Future Of Bitcoin

The rise began with Black Thursday, and the massive stimulus rolled out since to save the economy and keep markets afloat. Central banks and governments have collectively added trillions of dollars to the global money supply, all while the total supply of BTC has stayed the same, and the incoming supply has dropped.

The fall of fiat currencies could soon arrive, and inflation is already running wild and causing consumer prices to skyrocket across the board. If this happens, the true value of cryptocurrency scarcity could show its hand in the coming years.

With the economy still on thin ice and unprecedented money printing failing to hold up the stock market, another big crash is imminent. If and when central banks again try to prop things up, Bitcoin will spike yet again, and the bull market will continue. Buying Bitcoin in many ways, is an insurance policy against any potential outcomes where the US dollar fails, and a new currency prevails.

The rest of the year of 2021 is bound to be an exciting one as bulls and bears collide to decide the future fate of the crypto market.

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Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s decision to stop accepting BTC payments due to the digital currency’s “rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining” has culminated into what could be the world’s most expensive breakup ever, with the BTC price dropping costing the cryptocurrency market more than $365 billion. Until now, BTC has not yet fully recovered from the price drop.

But the ramifications of these events did not stop here. Now, digital currencies are being seen as wasting a massive amount of energy like BTC. This is because Bitcoin mining uses Proof of Work algorithm (PoW), which is integral to the original Bitcoin design. According to the Bitcoin white paper published by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, all miners who act as nodes on the network must “vote with their CPU power,” expending a huge amount of electricity in the process. Now, all people are talking about is how Bitcoin is inefficient and not environment-friendly.

And this is where the big misunderstanding lies. While BTC is indeed wasting energy due to its massive energy consumption that only benefits the few rich who can afford to store it in order to sell it when its value goes up, the same is not true for all digital currencies, especially BSV, which can actually be considered the green Bitcoin.

“I think what [Elon] got right is that BTC is not efficient and it does not, I think, have a good ratio of what it costs to use and the environmental cost relative to its utility. I think what people get wrong though is then that’s true for all Proof-of-Work blockchains, that’s true for all versions of Bitcoin, that’s true for crypto in general,” Zach Resnick, managing partner of BSV-focused Unbounded Capital, said during a panel discussion at the CoinGeek Conference in Zurich that includes nChain CTO Steve Shadders, TAAL Distributed Information Technologies CMO Angela Holowaychuk and Kristeen Harrison, environmental & sustainability advisor to the board of UK-based wallet Zumo.

“You cannot just look at the power consumption in isolation, you have to look at what is the utility, what is this thing providing and how much power does that cost, and looking at the net metric—not just how much power, which I think is a pretty horrible metric for analyzing this,” Resnick added.

And in this true measure of sustainability, which accounts for the energy consumed in proportion to the benefit and utility it provides, it can be said that BSV is the real green Bitcoin. How so? BTC can only process five to seven transactions per second (tps) and its blockchain only has a maximum of 3MB block sizes due to its refusal to scale. At this rate, where one BTC is mined at 5,500 kilowatt-hours, half the consumption of an average American household in a year, it certainly is a waste of electricity.

Now, compare that to BSV, which continues to scale. At present, its test network has already surpassed 9,000 tps. Last March 14, TAAL mined 2,674 transactions in a 638MB block. And with the release of Teranode later this year, the BSV network can process more than 50,000 tps—a figure that rivals that of VISA. The numbers speak for themselves. And the conclusion can only go one way—BSV is the green Bitcoin and is energy efficient.

“And you know, 50,000 is just the starting point, we’re talking about millions, billions of transactions per second. It’s only one angle to it, but there’s this total energy aggregate cost for Bitcoin, which you can divide amongst five transactions per second, or you can divide that cost amongst millions or billions,” Shadders explained.

“I think there’s a meaningful chance that when we look back 20, 30 years in the future back to now or over the next five to 10 years, there’a a very good chance that BSV adoption is synonymous with our transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy and potentially the largest driver of that revolution,” Resnick concluded.

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Hashim Hasabelrasoul Hashim & Jimmy Nguyen (Image source: Bitcoin Association)

Bitcoin Association, a Switzerland-based non-profit organization that advances the adoption of the Bitcoin SV blockchain is leading the Blockchain for Government Initiative by successfully finishing a week-long official visit to the Republic of the Sudan last April. Bitcoin Association was invited and hosted by the country’s Ministry of Telecommunication and Digital Transformation to explore how blockchain technology can aid the African nation advance into the digital world. The highlight of the visit was a two-day event that was Sudan’s first-ever Blockchain Summit & Workshop.

“In Sudan, we are in a transition period after thirty years of sanctions and thirty years of a bad regime. Now we are in a transition period in which we want to reform our country and reform the government. Digital transformation is a key pillar in this reformation. We are working on building a national strategy for digital transformation that aims to change the government from manual to digital, to make sure that the government will be more efficient, more smart, more in control and more transparent,” Hashim Hasabelrasoul Hashim, Minister of Telecommunication and Digital Transformation for the Republic of the Sudan, said in an interview.

Civil wars, armed conflicts against neighboring countries and an authoritarian president who ruled the country for three decades have hindered the country’s growth. As Sudan transitions into a democracy, its government is doing its best to propel the nation forward into the digital age in order to uplift its people and economy. And the Bitcoin SV (BSV) blockchain is certainly the most innovative and effective way to do it.

“I can clearly see a role for blockchain throughout different verticals within the government; digital identification is one of many, financial inclusion, digital certifications and many more to come, where we can benefit from blockchain. We want to be the first and lead on this technology in the country because it will enable us to really depend on real data that is secure,” Hashim added.

The delegation, headed by Bitcoin Association Founding President Jimmy Nguyen, was composed of CEOs and founders of businesses from various industries that have successfully built platforms on the BSV blockchain. Aside from the two-day workshop, the BSV delegation, who are all experts in their fields, also conducted separate meetings with the Central Bank of Sudan, the Ministry of Telecommunication & Digital Transformation, the Ministry of Interior Affairs, leading telecommunications company SudaTel, and the 249 Startups hub for Sudanese entrepreneurs.

“Blockchain can help us to build a better world and our trip to Sudan left us feeling even more inspired to make that vision a reality… As we explore opportunities for initial blockchain projects in Sudan, we know that BSV’s massive scaling and focus on data network capabilities can provide the blockchain power needed to advance digital transformation for Sudan and greater Africa,” Nguyen said.

BSV’s Blockchain for Government Initiative is geared towards providing accurate Bitcoin education and the global adoption of blockchain technology by national governments, NGOs and the public sector with the ultimate goal of advancing digital transformation and inducing economic growth. Because Bitcoin SV has restored the original Bitcoin protocol and unleashed the unlimited scaling potential of its blockchain through the release of the Genesis Upgrade last year, it is more than capable of handling the big data being generated by governments on a daily basis. Instant microtransactions allow it to be cost-efficient; and data is secure, transparent and clean.

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The question of survival is omnipresent for businesses in 2019. In recent years, employee-centered business models have emerged. Companies recognize that work improvements lead to higher quality production.

Also prevalent is a focus on customers. Industries face the challenge of relating to an audience that demands more transparency. What we know is that the business landscape will continue to grow and change.

Keep reading to discover how business trends 2019 are changing the global market.

African Economic Revolution

The continent of Africa has seen the economy of only a few of its countries rise with the discovery of oil. Now, free trade agreements, industrialization, and technological advances are creating opportunities for others.

Industries like Ethiopia’s car manufacturing will continue to grow across the continent. This will create a surge of jobs and increase the number of households with disposable income. The advent of solar electricity panels will illuminate millions of homes without power. Electrification can only lead to increased internet access, learning, and wide-spread skills acquisition.

Bubble speech with cut out phrase “trends” in the paper.

Business Automation

Automation in business software has been a growing trend for years. As companies try to do more with less, specialized software rises to the occasion. For example, before, bookkeeping information had to be entered manually into accounting software. Now the fields auto-populate when you make a sale or scan a receipt.

2019 will see this trend rise in customer communication. Customer relationship management (CRM) tools will become a business necessity in the connected age. CRMs for small business collect customer data and facilitate automated communication through email.

Automation allows companies to maintain relationships based on a client’s position in the sales funnel. Better relationships lead to increased business success.

Customer Data Regulations

A connected society demands a personalized approach to marketing and communication with customers. To this end, collecting customer data has been the key to unlock success for large and small businesses alike. This also comes with increased threats to privacy and personal information.

Information security threats led Alabama and several other states to pass regulation. Legislators are looking at how companies protect and obtaining consumer information. As tech advances continue to connect us, regulators will be forced to keep up.

Remote Workers

4.3 million Americans reported working remotely at least half the time in 2016. 3.2% seems small until you consider that this is a 114% increase from 2005.  Employees who work remotely benefit from lowered stress levels and higher productivity levels.

Telecommuting is most popular in the finance, technology, and design industries. The trend has created opportunities for baby boomers, working mothers, and the disabled.

The number of people telecommuting is only expected to increase in coming years.

Mobile Banking Flexibility

The traditional form of banking is in for a major rejuvenation. Blockchain, mobile payments, and alternative lending are the new kids in class.

Blockchain is a system for tracking the spending of cryptocurrency. Compare it to a banking statement. Instead of using your personal information, it uses a digital signature. A digital signature is like a username.

Blockchain offers more security for the buyer. It may also be the answer to personal data security. We will see it continue to grow as the technology and use of bitcoins grow.

Mobile banking will see a growth in the coming years also. Customers who prefer different payment options now have a choice of hundreds of banks all over the country. If they don’t qualify for in-person loans, there are alternative lenders online with fewer restrictions.

Business Trends 2019

You don’t have to be the CEO of a public corporation to feel the changes in the market. A more connected, global economy means that everyone has a chance to compete for the same employees and customers.

Business trends 2019 will see a rise in banking flexibility and personal data security. Add to this flexible employment and the rise of new economies.

Proper market research can keep your business ahead of the trends. Click here for common mistakes to avoid.

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