The Bitcoin Clock ticks on—less than 52 days now before the next halving—and let’s hope that Bitcoin still has value when that happens. Trader Peter Brandt isn’t optimistic. He sees Bitcoin in a race with gold to hit $1,000. Then again, in January, he thought BTC wouldn’t reach $6,000. And there has been something of a rebound. After diving to $3,700, Bitcoin did climb back, along with stocks, in response to the government’s coronavirus response package. Tim Draper believes that when the dust settles (and no one coughs), it will be blockchain that builds the new world—not banks and governments. In the meantime, of course, the Federal Reserve will do what the Federal Reserve does. It’s slashed interest rates to zero and is restarting Quantitative Easing. It’s printing money—something you just can’t do with a blockchain.
And the government is giving money away. The Trump administration has said that it is going to send out checks for $1,000 to U.S. citizens. What would happen if everyone uses that money to load up on Bitcoin? Some people have been crunching the numbers. They think it would send the price of BTC back past $20,000. Which would be nice, but it ain’t gonna happen like that.
Congressman Darren Soto, the co-chair of the Congressional Blockchain Caucus, has been talking about getting the blockchain into the federal budget, the status of Libra, and why President Trump hates Bitcoin so much.
US Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, might be coming around though. Though he’s long been a crypto skeptic, Mnuchin just appointed Brian Brooks as one of the country’s top banking regulators. Brooks, who will be Chief Operating Officer and First Deputy Comptroller of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, was the chief legal officer at Coinbase. During his tenure with the company, Brooks called for a tokenized version of the dollar.
A dollar token would free up financial transactions, but the blockchain can do so much more. Chinese journalist, Sarah Zheng of the South China Morning Post, has used a blockchain to bypass Chinese government censorship. Her interview with Dr. Ai, a medical doctor from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, contained QR codes and used the Ethereum network to store content online.
But any tool can be used for evil as well as good. A Dutch national known as Mr. Dark has been indicted for selling “real rape” and child pornography videos on the dark web. Blockchain payments made to his site were analyzed by law enforcement, and helped lead to his arrest. Once he’s locked up, that would be one key we’d be happy to see lost.
And an employee of Chinese search engine Baidu has been jailed for mining on the company’s servers. He managed to pick up about $14,300 worth of Monero by running scripts on about 200 Baidu servers. He received three years in prison for his actions. What will Bitcoin be worth when he is released?
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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.