Bitcoin suffers a “halving dump” after testing $10,000, what the event means for miners, and the latest predictions of where prices will be in 2021 and beyond.
Coming every Sunday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link.
We’re less than 48 hours away from “the halvening” — and there’s been no end of drama over the past week. Initially, there was hype as Bitcoin soared, with the world’s biggest cryptocurrency testing $10,000. But over the weekend, a dramatic and sudden sell-off began — a sharp correction that caused BTC to slide all the way back to $8,100. Bitcoin plunged by 9% in a single hour as it failed to tackle the $10,200-to-$10,500 range, which has historically served as a strong level of resistance. Some analysts had been arguing that a sell-off was inevitable because BTC was overbought, but even they were predicting that this would happen after the halving. The big question now is whether that “fear of missing out” remains, whether Bitcoin can bounce back, and whether crypto executives, such as Decred Founder Joseph Young, believe prices will “roughly double” in the short term.
It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the impact that the halving will have on miners. A supply shock is imminent — and once it’s taken place, only 900 new Bitcoin will be entering circulation per day, a sharp decrease from the 1,800 we’ve had for four years. Data suggests that miners are hoarding BTC ahead of the halving, with ByteTree suggesting that higher prices are ahead of us. Many miners will see the expense associated with mining a single Bitcoin rise substantially, far beyond the average of $6,851 reported earlier this year. Some estimates suggest that it could cost anywhere between $12,000 and $15,000 in the not-too-distant future, and this means prices would have to rise if miners have any hope of breaking even.
There are several one-off factors that make this halving different from the ones we saw in 2012 and 2016. One of them is the coronavirus crisis — and as countries around the world print trillions of dollars in new money to save their economies, some pundits believe investors will plow into Bitcoin as a hedge against inflation. There’s also substantially more institutional interest in BTC than there was before. Even senior analysts at Bloomberg, such as Mike McGlone, are bullish — arguing that Bitcoin has a big advantage over long-established assets such as gold. “Restricted supply means adoption is the metric that matters, and most indications remain positive in an unprecedented environment where virtually every central bank is aggressively adding liquidity,” he said.
Telegram suffered a massive slap to the face this week when an independent group of software developers, validators and users launched the “Free TON Blockchain.” The rival platform comes as the messaging app continues to be embroiled in a long-running legal dispute with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This breakaway community says Telegram “can no longer be involved in the project.” The launch came after U.S. investors who invested in TON were told that they won’t be eligible for a 110% refund of their money in April 2021 — and instead, they’ll only get 72% of their capital back now. Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, has reacted furiously to the legal battles brought by the SEC, describing the U.S. as a “police state” and discouraging entrepreneurs from moving their businesses to Silicon Valley.
YouTube has signed a new deal with one of the world’s most popular content creators. PewDiePie has been wrestled away from the blockchain platform DLive, meaning he’ll be broadcasting exclusively on the Google-owned video-sharing site. Although PewDiePie was full of praise for DLive because of how they didn’t take large chunks of his revenue as commission, he failed to build anywhere near as much of an audience — attracting barely 1% of the 104 million subscribers he had on YouTube.
Winners and Losers
At the end of the week, Bitcoin is at $8,747.34, Ether at $189.88 and XRP at $0.19. The total market cap is at $240,096,291,123.
Among the biggest 100 cryptocurrencies, the top three altcoin gainers of the week are 0x, Crypterium and ABBC Coin. The top three altcoin losers of the week are Quant, EOS and Ethereum Classic.
“BTC has just scraped above $10,000 for the first time since mid-February, and an understated aspect of this impressive price surge (overshadowed by halvening news) is the fact that Bitcoin’s development activity rate has grown notably throughout 2020.”
“I definitely think that there’s a role for blockchains — and Ethereum in particular — to play in being this kind of neutral global player role [for] these systems, currencies, and applications to interact. I think anything created and maintained by nation-states can’t play that role.”
“If this relationship holds... bitcoin would peak at $115,212 /BTC… I realize that price may sound ludicrous to some today... Just sayin’ that there’s more than a 50-50 chance bitcoin goes up – and goes up big.”
“Now that Buffett is out of the game and stock buybacks are rightly being called out as fraudulent, investors will ask... If Buffett was dead wrong about so much, was he also wrong about #Bitcoin and Gold? ANSWER: YES. Buffett killed his reputation by being stupid about BTC.”
The chances that Bitcoin will hit $40,000 and even $1 million have “risen dramatically” after it hit $10,000, according to Global Macro Investor CEO Raoul Pal. The sky-high figures fall in line with similar findings by PlanB, who has projected that BTC/USD could hit $288,000 between 2020 and 2024, with the potential to at least double that as a maximum. There have been plenty of other upbeat predictions this week. Morgan Creek CEO Mark Yusko believes Bitcoin’s price will shoot up by more than 1,000% as early as next year — adding that, if BTC’s market cap achieves the same value as that of gold, Bitcoin could soar beyond $100,000 at some point between 2021 and 2022. That forecast was echoed by Pantera Capital Founder and CEO Dan Morehead, who said there’s more than a 50/50 chance that Bitcoin goes up “and goes up big” — with $100,000 possible by August next year.
Analysis of Jeb McCaleb’s wallets appears to show that the Ripple co-founder sold off at least 54 million in XRP over the course of April. According to The Crypto Associate, McCaleb is liquidating his supply of tokens on a regular basis — and on average, he flogged 1.8 million XRP every day in April. The proceeds from these sales would come to a grand total of $11.7 million. McCaleb is a key figure in cryptocurrency’s history, having created the Mt. Gox exchange and co-founding Stellar. He also co-founded OpenCoin in 2012, which later became Ripple, and was allocated 9.5 billion XRP when the 100 billion supply was pre-mined.
It’s a case that’s gripped the crypto community for years. Now, we know that the trial between self-proclaimed Bitcoin investor Craig Wright and the brother of his former business partner is going to begin in July. Ira Kleiman lays claim to half of the 1.1 million BTC that the Australian entrepreneur allegedly mined with Dave Kleiman before his death. Wright, one of the crypto world’s more colorful characters, has certainly had quite a week. He has faced yet another allegation of committing plagiarism — this time, in his doctoral thesis. A blogger has posted purported screenshots of Wright’s 2017 thesis that appears to show similarities with other publicly available sources.
A teenager is being sued for $71.4 million in damages for allegedly stealing $23.8 million in cryptocurrency from an investor in 2018. Ellis Pinsky was just 15 at the time of the alleged crime, and it’s claimed he and his co-conspirators pulled off the theft by swapping Michael Terpin’s SIM without his knowledge. Terpin says that he has managed to recover $2 million — but now Pinsky is 18, and he has filed a lawsuit to sue for the remaining funds, plus damages. The plaintiff has already managed to win a $75 million civil case against an alleged co-conspirator, and according to court documents, he says: “On the surface, Pinsky is an ‘All American Boy.’ The tables are now turned.”
Regulation is one of the biggest hurdles for crypto in India as exchanges continue the legal battle to establish a clear framework, as Jinia Shawdagor explains.
Mathematicians use AI to identify emerging COVID-19 variants
Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants…
Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants and could help with other infections in the future.
Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants and could help with other infections in the future.
The framework combines dimension reduction techniques and a new explainable clustering algorithm called CLASSIX, developed by mathematicians at The University of Manchester. This enables the quick identification of groups of viral genomes that might present a risk in the future from huge volumes of data.
The study, presented this week in the journal PNAS, could support traditional methods of tracking viral evolution, such as phylogenetic analysis, which currently require extensive manual curation.
Roberto Cahuantzi, a researcher at The University of Manchester and first and corresponding author of the paper, said: “Since the emergence of COVID-19, we have seen multiple waves of new variants, heightened transmissibility, evasion of immune responses, and increased severity of illness.
“Scientists are now intensifying efforts to pinpoint these worrying new variants, such as alpha, delta and omicron, at the earliest stages of their emergence. If we can find a way to do this quickly and efficiently, it will enable us to be more proactive in our response, such as tailored vaccine development and may even enable us to eliminate the variants before they become established.”
Like many other RNA viruses, COVID-19 has a high mutation rate and short time between generations meaning it evolves extremely rapidly. This means identifying new strains that are likely to be problematic in the future requires considerable effort.
Currently, there are almost 16 million sequences available on the GISAID database (the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data), which provides access to genomic data of influenza viruses.
Mapping the evolution and history of all COVID-19 genomes from this data is currently done using extremely large amounts of computer and human time.
The described method allows automation of such tasks. The researchers processed 5.7 million high-coverage sequences in only one to two days on a standard modern laptop; this would not be possible for existing methods, putting identification of concerning pathogen strains in the hands of more researchers due to reduced resource needs.
Thomas House, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at The University of Manchester, said: “The unprecedented amount of genetic data generated during the pandemic demands improvements to our methods to analyse it thoroughly. The data is continuing to grow rapidly but without showing a benefit to curating this data, there is a risk that it will be removed or deleted.
“We know that human expert time is limited, so our approach should not replace the work of humans all together but work alongside them to enable the job to be done much quicker and free our experts for other vital developments.”
The proposed method works by breaking down genetic sequences of the COVID-19 virus into smaller “words” (called 3-mers) represented as numbers by counting them. Then, it groups similar sequences together based on their word patterns using machine learning techniques.
Stefan Güttel, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester, said: “The clustering algorithm CLASSIX we developed is much less computationally demanding than traditional methods and is fully explainable, meaning that it provides textual and visual explanations of the computed clusters.”
Roberto Cahuantzi added: “Our analysis serves as a proof of concept, demonstrating the potential use of machine learning methods as an alert tool for the early discovery of emerging major variants without relying on the need to generate phylogenies.
“Whilst phylogenetics remains the ‘gold standard’ for understanding the viral ancestry, these machine learning methods can accommodate several orders of magnitude more sequences than the current phylogenetic methods and at a low computational cost.”
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
DOI
10.1073/pnas.2317284121
Article Title
Unsupervised identification of significant lineages of SARS-CoV-2 through scalable machine learning methods
While the size of the United States makes it hard for it to compete with the inter-city train access available in places like Japan and many European countries, Amtrak trains are a very popular transportation option in certain pockets of the country — so much so that the country’s national railway company is expanding its Northeast Corridor by more than one million seats.
Running from Boston all the way south to Washington, D.C., the route is one of the most popular as it passes through the most densely populated part of the country and serves as a commuter train for those who need to go between East Coast cities such as New York and Philadelphia for business.
Veronika Bondarenko captured this photo of New York’s Moynihan Train Hall.
Veronika Bondarenko
Amtrak launches new routes, promises travelers ‘additional travel options’
Earlier this month, Amtrak announced that it was adding four additional Northeastern routes to its schedule — two more routes between New York’s Penn Station and Union Station in Washington, D.C. on the weekend, a new early-morning weekday route between New York and Philadelphia’s William H. Gray III 30th Street Station and a weekend route between Philadelphia and Boston’s South Station.
According to Amtrak, these additions will increase Northeast Corridor’s service by 20% on the weekdays and 10% on the weekends for a total of one million additional seats when counted by how many will ride the corridor over the year.
“More people are taking the train than ever before and we’re proud to offer our customers additional travel options when they ride with us on the Northeast Regional,” Amtrak Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Eliot Hamlisch said in a statement on the new routes. “The Northeast Regional gets you where you want to go comfortably, conveniently and sustainably as you breeze past traffic on I-95 for a more enjoyable travel experience.”
Here are some of the other Amtrak changes you can expect to see
Amtrak also said that, in the 2023 financial year, the Northeast Corridor had nearly 9.2 million riders — 8% more than it had pre-pandemic and a 29% increase from 2022. The higher demand, particularly during both off-peak hours and the time when many business travelers use to get to work, is pushing Amtrak to invest into this corridor in particular.
To reach more customers, Amtrak has also made several changes to both its routes and pricing system. In the fall of 2023, it introduced a type of new “Night Owl Fare” — if traveling during very late or very early hours, one can go between cities like New York and Philadelphia or Philadelphia and Washington. D.C. for $5 to $15.
As travel on the same routes during peak hours can reach as much as $300, this was a deliberate move to reach those who have the flexibility of time and might have otherwise preferred more affordable methods of transportation such as the bus. After seeing strong uptake, Amtrak added this type of fare to more Boston routes.
The largest distances, such as the ones between Boston and New York or New York and Washington, are available at the lowest rate for $20.
I am a conservation biologist who studies emerging infectious diseases. When people ask me what I think the next pandemic will be I often say that we are in the midst of one – it’s just afflicting a great many species more than ours.
I am referring to the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza H5N1 (HPAI H5N1), otherwise known as bird flu, which has killed millions of birds and unknown numbers of mammals, particularly during the past three years.
This is the strain that emerged in domestic geese in China in 1997 and quickly jumped to humans in south-east Asia with a mortality rate of around 40-50%. My research group encountered the virus when it killed a mammal, an endangered Owston’s palm civet, in a captive breeding programme in Cuc Phuong National Park Vietnam in 2005.
How these animals caught bird flu was never confirmed. Their diet is mainly earthworms, so they had not been infected by eating diseased poultry like many captive tigers in the region.
This discovery prompted us to collate all confirmed reports of fatal infection with bird flu to assess just how broad a threat to wildlife this virus might pose.
This is how a newly discovered virus in Chinese poultry came to threaten so much of the world’s biodiversity.
Until December 2005, most confirmed infections had been found in a few zoos and rescue centres in Thailand and Cambodia. Our analysis in 2006 showed that nearly half (48%) of all the different groups of birds (known to taxonomists as “orders”) contained a species in which a fatal infection of bird flu had been reported. These 13 orders comprised 84% of all bird species.
We reasoned 20 years ago that the strains of H5N1 circulating were probably highly pathogenic to all bird orders. We also showed that the list of confirmed infected species included those that were globally threatened and that important habitats, such as Vietnam’s Mekong delta, lay close to reported poultry outbreaks.
Mammals known to be susceptible to bird flu during the early 2000s included primates, rodents, pigs and rabbits. Large carnivores such as Bengal tigers and clouded leopards were reported to have been killed, as well as domestic cats.
Our 2006 paper showed the ease with which this virus crossed species barriers and suggested it might one day produce a pandemic-scale threat to global biodiversity.
In the past couple of years, bird flu has spread rapidly across Europe and infiltrated North and South America, killing millions of poultry and a variety of bird and mammal species. A recent paper found that 26 countries have reported at least 48 mammal species that have died from the virus since 2020, when the latest increase in reported infections started.
Not even the ocean is safe. Since 2020, 13 species of aquatic mammal have succumbed, including American sea lions, porpoises and dolphins, often dying in their thousands in South America. A wide range of scavenging and predatory mammals that live on land are now also confirmed to be susceptible, including mountain lions, lynx, brown, black and polar bears.
The UK alone has lost over 75% of its great skuas and seen a 25% decline in northern gannets. Recent declines in sandwich terns (35%) and common terns (42%) were also largely driven by the virus.
Scientists haven’t managed to completely sequence the virus in all affected species. Research and continuous surveillance could tell us how adaptable it ultimately becomes, and whether it can jump to even more species. We know it can already infect humans – one or more genetic mutations may make it more infectious.
At the crossroads
Between January 1 2003 and December 21 2023, 882 cases of human infection with the H5N1 virus were reported from 23 countries, of which 461 (52%) were fatal.
Of these fatal cases, more than half were in Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Laos. Poultry-to-human infections were first recorded in Cambodia in December 2003. Intermittent cases were reported until 2014, followed by a gap until 2023, yielding 41 deaths from 64 cases. The subtype of H5N1 virus responsible has been detected in poultry in Cambodia since 2014. In the early 2000s, the H5N1 virus circulating had a high human mortality rate, so it is worrying that we are now starting to see people dying after contact with poultry again.
It’s not just H5 subtypes of bird flu that concern humans. The H10N1 virus was originally isolated from wild birds in South Korea, but has also been reported in samples from China and Mongolia.
Recent research found that these particular virus subtypes may be able to jump to humans after they were found to be pathogenic in laboratory mice and ferrets. The first person who was confirmed to be infected with H10N5 died in China on January 27 2024, but this patient was also suffering from seasonal flu (H3N2). They had been exposed to live poultry which also tested positive for H10N5.
Species already threatened with extinction are among those which have died due to bird flu in the past three years. The first deaths from the virus in mainland Antarctica have just been confirmed in skuas, highlighting a looming threat to penguin colonies whose eggs and chicks skuas prey on. Humboldt penguins have already been killed by the virus in Chile.
How can we stem this tsunami of H5N1 and other avian influenzas? Completely overhaul poultry production on a global scale. Make farms self-sufficient in rearing eggs and chicks instead of exporting them internationally. The trend towards megafarms containing over a million birds must be stopped in its tracks.
To prevent the worst outcomes for this virus, we must revisit its primary source: the incubator of intensive poultry farms.
Diana Bell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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