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As part of their compensation, certain CoinDesk employees, including editorial employees, may receive exposure to DCG equity in the form of stock appreciation rights, which vest over a multi-year period. CoinDesk journalists are not allowed to purchase stock outright in DCG. Moreover, the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange caught the industry off guard and dealt hefty blows to several crypto firms.
With Bitcoin Core 24.0, peers now download block headers twice. In the first run, headers are downloaded and discarded until a sufficient amount of work is found — which suggests the chain the peer has been following is valid. In that case, the peer then restarts the process, but now, in bitcoin addition to downloading, the peer also saves the block headers on disk. By only saving headers to disk once the peer is certain they are part of a chain with significant proof of work, the peer avoids using up large amounts of storage in an eventual attack such as a resource exhaustion.
Deutsche Bank conducted a study with a panel of prominent bitcoin investors, a quarter of whom firmly believed the cryptocurrency would hit the $100,000 mark in the next five years. The Association supports Bitcoin SV as the original Bitcoin, with a stable protocol and massive scaling roadmap to becoming the world’s new money and global blockchain for enterprise. The organisation seeks to build a regulation-friendly ecosystem that fosters lawful conduct while encouraging digital currency and blockchain innovation. UK Government ministers said that they want Britain to become a global crypto hub by allowing stablecoin regulation. The value of bitcoin peaked at $69,000 (£57,000) in November 2021 before falling to its current price of $17,800. Its supporters believe it will begin to rise again following turmoil caused by the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange.
If it is hit, MicroStrategy CFO Phong Le expained during the company’s first-quarter earning calls that it would use some of its uncollatoralised BTC holdings to pay it. Either way, it would be a disaster for CEO and co-founder Michael Saylor, who has pledged his reputation on the belief that bitcoin’s price will go up in the long term. There has already been $1.1 billion liquidations of leading cryptocurrencies over the last 24 hours, according to data from Blockworks, but the mass sell-off appears to have subsided. MicroStrategy, the world’s biggest corporate investor in bitcoin with holdings of roughly $4 billion at current rates, has so far refused to sell any of its crypto stockpile.
One metric that investors can take encouragement from is that long-term holders of bitcoin do not appear to be selling their crypto stash. The market indicator – which analyses data from cryptocurrency exchanges, Google Trends, social media posts and price volatility – is used to measure current market sentiment. For some investors, the metric is also used as a gauge for whether to buy or sell, with ‘extreme fear’ seen as a strong buy signal and ‘extreme greed’ as a signal to sell.
The famous bitcoin.conf file is the holy grail of Bitcoin Core configuration, but again it was tweakable mainly through the command line. An option did exist to tweak settings in the GUI, but a warning made it clear that bitcoin.conf took precedence over the GUI in the event that both the file and the GUI attempted to set data for the same configuration. Therefore, while the GUI provided a simple option to change settings, the configuration file was still the most reliable way to go about customizing one’s Bitcoin Core client. Bitcoin Core’s newest version brings a new menu item on the GUI that lets users restore a wallet from backup, making it easier for non-technical folks to restore backups. A changeless payment combats this issue by creating a transaction that spends the entirety of the selected UTXOs.
The algorithmic decentralized stablecoin modeled after Terra's now-defunct UST lost its dollar peg last month as the collapse of FTX dented investor confidence in digital assets. In time, most people expect Bitcoin to rise, given its limited supply and the ever-present demand from new users, retail investors and institutional buyers. However, the key is to do your own thorough research and only invest what you can afford to lose. Therefore, investors should be cautious while allocating their portfolios.
TORONTO—The Canadian province of Quebec wants to stop selling cheap power to cryptocurrency miners amid the global energy crunch. The deglobalization of supply chains and credit will be as closely linked on the way down as they were on the way up. A feedback loop of rising risk leading to shorter supply chains and less credit creation. Breakdowns in global trade and credit call for money that doesn’t depend on trust.
Starting with version 24.0, the Bitcoin Core wallet will pick a random number between the payment size and three times the payment size. This effectively means that sometimes the algorithm will pick a UTXO whose value is closer to the payment and other times it will select a UTXO whose value is closer to that upper bound of three times the payment amount. The former scenario will produce the typical change-output-lower-than-payment scenario while the latter will produce the inverse — a change output that is larger than the payment. Given that there is no way for a blockchain observer to tell when each scenario happens at a given time, the user should be able to enjoy greater privacy assurances. Usually, when there isn’t a UTXO with the payment’s exact amount, most wallets and users intuitively opt for the one closest to that number.
The descriptor solves this problem by being descriptive about what derivation path the backed-up wallet uses, greatly improving user experience. The idea is that a descriptor wallet backup self-contains all the necessary information for it to be correctly restored by any software client (provided the client is descriptor-enabled). Bitcoin Core 24.0 is introducing support for Miniscript by extending the wsh() output descriptor.