Bitvice Expect BIG things this week at the Bitcoin Conference
The biggest annual Bitcoin conference kicked off yesterday and will run until 9 April. You can catch the live stream here.
Less than a year ago, news broke out at the end of the conference that a country had finally adopted Bitcoin as a legal tender – El Salvador. A lot has happened with Bitcoin and the world since then.
This week, news also broke that Lightning Labs has raised $70million to bring tokens and stable coins on to the Lightning Network.
Since January 2017, the stable coin marketcap has grown from $20Million to $181Billion. This is not something that the kids play with anymore – it is a very serious instrument on a global scale.
After having around 24 hours to review all of their documentation – it seems that the Lightning Labs initiative, Taro, will allow users to issue and transfer digital assets across the Lightning Network that are not native Bitcoin UTXOs. If this turns out to be true, it completely falsifies the entire altcoin narrative and use case. There is no more reason to buy another altcoin for their specific use case, only for pure speculation. Keep any eye on this, we definitely will.
We can expect to hear a lot more news this week and the organisers have confirmed that this year’s conference will be much bigger than last year – including the announcements.
Since the team at Bitvice don’t like to predict the Bitcoin price (we have better things to do), it’s still quite fun to predict what announcements might be made.
There might be an announcement of another country adopting Bitcoin (Paraguay etc.).
And there’s something brewing with Strike and Apple. There might be a partnership that will be announced or at least some kind of integration with Apple Pay – which has millions of users worldwide.
Lastly, expect a lot of institutional interest and announcements at the conference – banks, hedge funds and alike are continuing to adopt Bitcoin at an exponential pace.
German food retailers to raise prices by 20-50%
This is a story that I simply couldn’t glance over. This is an insane price increase at such a quick pace – it left me flabbergasted. How can prices increase up to 50% immediately and not in increments?
Well, it’s certainly because Germany is so utterly dependent on energy from Russia due to the mismanagement of its domestic energy supply over the past decade (thanks Merkel).
Before the war broke out, average prices on goods had risen by around 5%
But, it simply cannot be blamed on that alone when there is definitely a lagging effect to the Russian situation which only began a few weeks ago.
Germany’s overall inflation is pretty astounding as well:
There have been recent photos shared of grocery stores in Berlin without oil and flour. Regulators are beginning to implement rationing on these types of goods.
If you read some articles from a few years ago, most analysts deem that the Arab Spring kicked off with food prices going out of control (especially wheat).
I simply don’t see the populace condoning NATO’s stance on the current war, where they are continuing to stoke the fire. Somewhere, somehow – a critical mass will be met.
19 million and onwards
And lastly, on Saturday, the 19 millionth Bitcoin was mined!
Let’s look at what’s left:
2,000,000 left to be mined.
After 2030, there will be less than 499,999 Bitcoin.
After 2040, there will be less than 99,999 Bitcoin.
After 2050, there will be less than 19,999 Bitcoin.
It will take another 118 years to mine the last 2 million Bitcoin.
If you find these numbers interesting, below is some more detail:
Bitvice Podcasts and Media
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Last night we hosted an open discussion on Twitter spaces for the South African Bitcoin community. If you missed it, you can catch the recording here.
In our latest episode of By the Horns, Ricki chats to Andrew Patterson about his epic experience of climbing to the top of Table Mountain every single day for a year.
They chat about what he learned from it and how hard it was to accomplish. They also got into what it was like to live in New York during the covid lockdowns, Andrew’s perspectives on the clown world and shared some of their crazy stories from the mountains.
Check out the full episode here and subscribe to our channels to get notified as soon as a new pod is released!
You can read More about Andrew on his website.
By The Horns is a Bitcoin podcast from a South African perspective. You can watch our discussions on YouTube and Rumble or listen to the audio version on Breez, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts or via our RSS feed.
Enjoy the rest of your week and stay tuned for our next blog on avoiding scams after a massive scam broke out last week, where many users of Trezor hardware wallets were affected.
