Bitcoin Dips on Almost Reaching $50,000

Bitcoin rose to $49,700 on a raft of news indicating growing adoption of digital gold with the currency dipping after almost taking $50,000.

A three days weekend still had bullishness for bitcoin which nonetheless gave us a valentines red with it falling to $45,800 overnight.

The currency now trades at almost $48,000 this bank holiday with its market cap at $888 billion.

The dip was to be expected, but the attempt at taking $50,000 so soon maybe wasn’t as it’s considerable resistance.

That it tried shows this is very bullish, with plenty of reasons for it, starting with Morgan Stanley which apparently is thinking of bitcoining.

“A $150 billion Morgan Stanley investing arm known for its prowess in picking growth stocks is considering adding Bitcoin to its list of possible bets.

Counterpoint Global, a unit of Morgan Stanley Investment Management that’s racked up wins in mutual-fund rankings, is exploring whether the cryptocurrency would be a suitable option for its investors, according to people with knowledge of the matter,” says Bloomberg.

Then there’s this from Econometrics which in some ways doesn’t make much sense, but who knows, we could well have $100,000 by April although that’s maybe a bit soon.

Yet there’s some optimism in the air coupled with disbelief, so we get Apple Pay becoming compatible with BitPay’s prepaid Mastercard.

BitPay is the biggest bitcoin payments processor, announcing “BitPay cardholders can make secure purchases in stores, in apps, and online.”

They also plan to add support for Google Pay and Samsung Pay later this quarter, indicating a continued integration of bitcoin in traditional systems.

Sunny Miami plans to offer its employees the option to get paid in bitcoin, to allow its constituents to pay fees in bitcoin, potentially also taxes, and most crucially, “Investing City treasury in Bitcoin,” says their mayor Francis Suarez.

The Miami county has a GDP of about $300 billion. That’s not far off from the GDP of Belgium. Them holding bitcoin in their treasury reservers therefore would be a gamechanger in some ways because it could well mark the beginning of bitcoin as the reserve.

Currently they’re analyzing how to do this, so no concrete step has been taken yet, but that they’re so fully thinking of it, shows clearly that bitcoin has prominent political support in the halls of power.

“Purpose Investments Inc. (“Purpose Investments”) is pleased to announce that it has been cleared by Canadian securities regulators to launch Purpose Bitcoin ETF (the “ETF” or “BTCC”), the first direct custody Bitcoin ETF in the world. The ETF is designed to provide investors with exposure to the leading cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, by investing directly in physically settled Bitcoin,” so they say in a statement.

This is the third or fourth stokenized bitcoin product on Toronto’s stock Exchange, on top of the many bitcoin and crypto miners that seem to be listed there as well as Mogo, the only publicly trading bitcoin service provider after Square and nowadays even PayPal.

As millennials are just learning about stocks, this is giving TSX an edge and must be putting immense pressure on the new Biden administration which presumably of course wants to be economically competitive.

In other years we could have suggested Biden is too busy with other things to bitcoiny, but after Bolton revealed Trump said “go after bitcoin,” it is perhaps no longer unthinkable that the president himself has some say in crypto policy.

Biden is seen as a centre ground president, and the centre is neutral at worst or bullish on bitcoin, so his appointment for SEC chair of someone that knows what bitcoin is even at a technical level, is promising because at the very least we should expect him to not be stupid when it comes to this space, as his predecessor arguably was.

It may also well indicate where the priorities are. The new chair is a reformer, and SEC badly needs reforms to be dragged into this 21st century.

Taken as a whole, it is obvious something is going on here, and what that something may be is that long term sophisticated money is entering this space for the first time.

This is disrupting gold, which ethereum is just about surpassing in price, not least perhaps because the gold market is somewhat cornered by bankers.

This has considerable repercussions, which are not felt like we don’t feel the air, but even someone like Putin is ultimately at the mercy of bankers if he wanted to transact in gold as sometime may well be necessary at a state to state level.

For bitcoin it is quite a bit different because it is coders that created it, and students were the first mass adopters thanks to some guy giving away on Reddit what then was worth $2,000 bitcoin to the wow of everyone.

From those students and coders which often overlap, it then spread to wider society, the classic example here being the son of billionaire Tim Draper getting him to buy a lot of bitcoin back in 2014 or so.

Bitcoin then moves to merchants and from there we get the mainstreaming to the professional class through the blockchain. Bringing its rise as digital gold because it acted better than gold in late 2020 and for much of this year when it was needed to do so, attracting the interest of treasury reserve managers.

Even now however Rothschilds bought 27 bitcoin, while Tesla buys $1.5 billion and Microstrategy bought $1 billion.

Meaning the bankers may well be the last adopters where the asset class is concerned, perhaps because they’re the most disrupted in some ways and thus are probably still in denial.

They’ve succeeded in getting China to effectively ban it, and now they’re trying to get India to ban it too, but even if it does, it would just show denial is strong among the disrupted.

The only way to succeed is to compete, for it is not the strongest that survives nor the most intelligent, but the most adaptable to change.

And change is coming as the arrival of the 90s to this space gives indications of broadband perhaps finally coming, although a code bug in this intriguing new blockchain gives wonder to whether it could possibly be real that base layer scalability could be solved.

In any event, summer is coming, and therefore perhaps we shouldn’t have been too surprised that bitcoin tried to take that $50,000 in this year of the bull (pictured, Malaysian Pavilion).

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