Yeah somehow it’s crazy it ain’t being bought more with all the shit of these days….

Google is tiptoeing into Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as the company’s payments division struggles to gain significant market share in the payments industry and touts adding custody capabilities of such assets to its digital cards, according to a report by Bloomberg.

“Crypto is something we pay a lot of attention to,” said Bill Ready, Google’s president of commerce, per the report. “As user demand and merchant demand evolves, we’ll evolve with it.”

According to the report, Google has formed partnerships with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Inc. and cryptocurrency payment processor BitPay to enable the new functionality. The executive told Bloomberg that his team is looking for additional partnership opportunities, though the company still isn't accepting bitcoin for transactions.

The European Union should ban the energy-intensive system used to mine Bitcoin, one of the bloc's leading financial regulators has said.

In an interview with the Financial Times, vice-chair of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) Erik Thedéen called for a bloc-wide ban on "proof of work" crypto mining, saying the industry's energy usage was becoming a "national issue" in his native Sweden.

A group of community banks is poised to fulfill a high-tech goal it set last year: to let customers buy and sell bitcoin on mobile banking apps.

An estimated 300 banks, some of which unveiled their plans in June, will go live in the first or second quarter with this service with the help of the fintech NYDIG. The banks, the American Bankers Association and the Independent Community Bankers of America have made investments in the company as part of the effort.

I'll believe it when I see it. Intel has their own fabs so in theory they could have a huge advantage over Bitmain and other peasants waiting in line at TSMC but they just recently deployed 7nm technology that's been mainstream in ASICs for a few years now. And it isn't even "real" 7nm - the official line is that Intel employs some magic geometry to pack more stuff into a 10nm die that makes it "equivalent" to 7nm but their consumer CPUs use more power than e.g. AMD CPUs (TSMC 7nm) so it remains to be seen how well those tricks can work for SHA256 ASICs.

It appears that Intel is about the enter the Bitcoin-mining hardware business, but not with its new upcoming GPUs. The ISSCC conference is a yearly gathering of the best and brightest minds in the chip industry. This year, Intel has a presentation scheduled in the 'Highlighted Chip Releases' category to outline a new "Bonanza Mine" processor, a new chip described as an "ultra-low-voltage energy-efficient Bitcoin mining ASIC." That means Intel could soon compete with the likes of Bitmain in the market for specialized ASICs for Bitcoin mining.

Yes.  $40k bitcoin is such a huge disappointment. 

Based on Phil_S's notorious chart, I've made three basic scenarios for the next 4 years. (I'm not a PS or chart expert, so if anyone can make better charts, feel free to do it.)

I tried to make a functional prediction based on previous data. The big question is will we face a deviation below the low orange line in the next 4 years. IMO, this may happen for 2 reasons: severe shorting manipulation and adoption levels worldwide above 75%. I highly doubt that the manipulations can hold the price that long and that the 75% saturation point could be reached without breaking 100K.  

So, here are the variants. The blue one is mildly bullish and I find it highly probable to happen. The green is very bullish, but a bit less probable than the blue one. And finally, the pink scenario I find extremely unlikely to happen. It just shows that even in a series of black swan events, Bitcoin will touch 100K until the end of 2025. There might be various modifications of any of the plans, including the pink one: If 100K is delayed so much, only another black swan event can prevent a top above 200K in 2025.

A lot of newcomers to Bitcoin don't know this, and a lot of the past gets memory holed and forgotten.

In the first year or two when Brian A. was getting Coinbase up and running, he was interviewed on a few occasions. I remember one interview very clearly where the interviewer asked him point blank if he had any interest in altcoins (this was even before the term "shitcoin" became a thing), and Brian flat out, without hesitation said "No, because I don't think that they have any value beyond what Bitcoin offers." He then went on to say that Coinbase would be exclusively focused on Bitcoin and nothing else.

So he was either lying then, or he his lying now. Perhaps the plan all along was an eventual bait-and-switch of the public. Or perhaps he has never been in control of his platform, and it was always the VCs calling the shots behind the scenes (my bet is on this). No matter what he might now say publicly, I don't believe that deep down inside he thinks that shitcoins have any real value at all.

Either way, I agree with you that offering and promoting shitcoins has definitely hurt the Bitcoin movement, and is completely antithetical to Bitcoin's long-term mission. His platform of promoting and selling shitcoins will continue to distract and lead the dumb, get-rich-quick mass public away from Bitcoin, and they will continue to get scammed and lose their wealth.

An analogy is that it's like a website that supposedly promotes health and fitness, but also selling heroin and donuts on their platform.

It's also why you can't place trust in any celebrity or personality that's a backer of Bitcoin; you can only place trust in the asset itself.

Tonga to copy El Salvador’s bill making Bitcoin legal tender, says former MP.

In a ruling that is “almost identical to the El Salvador bill,” Tongan bigwig Lord Fusitu’a anticipates that his country could adopt Bitcoin by November.

Time and again proven to work
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35007072/

Authorities in Iran are preparing to allow the employment of cryptocurrencies for international settlements. According to local media, central bank and government officials have given the green light to adopt a mechanism using digital coins in the field of foreign trade.