- 2019 return +95%
- 150 days where bitcoin moved less than +/- 1%
- Maximum one day move 17.4%
- Minimum one day move -14.1%
- Average absolute daily move 2.4%
- 90% of returns between -4.7% & +6.1%
- 2,863,775.0 bitcoins left to be mined.
- 144 blocks per day are mined on average
- 1,800 new Bitcoins per day
- 83.636% of Bitcoins issued
- Total Bitcoins mined today is 18,136,225 BTC
- There have been 610,898 blocks mined
- Around 30,000-60,000 people with more than $1 million worth of bitcoins
- Bitcoin has been declared dead for 379 times



Feel free to add any other stats you find interesting

There are myriads of crypto lending platforms out there these days, I’ve been trying to figure out where to lend my BTCs so here are some numbers I’ve pulled for comparison, so if you’re also thinking about hodl anyway, these may be some numbers you can reference.

CoinList and Genesis requires a higher deposit minimum, so I didn’t look much into them, I also did not look into sites that would require me to look into someone’s profile, way too much work and risky. Other than these I didn’t find many I feel I can trust, if anyone wants to suggest a certain platform I can dive into it and put it here for comparison.

Celcius Network
Team credential : Founder has proven record of growing early stage startups, CEO was one of the inventors of VOIP and exited multiple times
Funding : ICO, ~50m USD value of tokens sold
Minimum deposit : None
BTC lending rates : 3.35% (higher if you accept CEL the platform token)
Deposit fees : None
Withdrawal fees : None
Lockup : No lockup
Wallet/Custodian provider : BitGo
Insurance : lenders and borrowers are insured for up to $100,000,000.00 by Lloyd’s -- a London-based bank --  in case of a hack or bankruptcy.
Payouts : Weekly

BlockFi
Team credential : Founder & CEO was in sales roles in multiple high growth startups, one acquired by Google
Funding : Backed by Peter Thiel, Coinbase Ventures, Consensys, Fidelity, Windlevoss Capital and many other well known investors, raised over $20 million
Minimum deposit : None
BTC lending rates : 6.2% APY at the point of this article (Best so far, under 10 BTC), over 10 BTC it drops to 2.2%
Deposit fees : None
Withdrawal fees : one free withdrawal per client per month. After that, our custodian Gemini passes on a withdrawal fee of 0.0025 BTC.
Lockup : None
Wallet/Custodian provider : Gemini
Insurance : Not FDIC insured
Payouts : Monthly

Sia seems to be gaining some traction here and there with steady growth, does anyone know who are their main target users and use case?

I want to get some thoughts from the community about this perspective,
I have a simple structure looking at decentralized projects

               Good government  |  Bad government
—————————————————-————————
For        |                             |
—————————————————————————
Against  |                             |
—————————————————————————-

For good government one can help with catching illegal behaviors, against good government include money laundry, gambling so on and forth
Against bad government is helping Venezuela escape its hyperinflation, we can put intentions in places we see fit.

And of course one can replace government with other centralized entities, governments are just easier for all to imagine

The tricky part is how is good and bad decided? What do you guys think?

It’s always been puzzling to me why there hasn’t been much adoption other than speculation for cryptocurrency outside of Bitcoin.
Ethereum is great, but things built on top so far has really low usage, including Defi platforms who claims to be the next big wave but has fallen short so far, growth for most of them simply doesn’t seem as impressive, that might mean there’s no market demand for it, like “who has to make a loan on Defi platforms?” I can’t think of a solid answer.
But I do feel censorship resistant websites can be the next one, built on IPFS and Filecoin, with other decentralized services, what’s the opinion of this community?

[China Government Policies & Past Examples]

The short answer is no, but they do use crypto, and here’s how

Due to China’s foreign exchange control, foreigners who work in China, Chinese residents who are exposed to political risks, and those who wish to make investment (either for tax evasion or not) or large sum payments abroad are limited to a quota of only 50,000 USD foreign exchange per year, government regulations are much more strict in 2019, but crypto has given some room for international transfers, we are hoping to understand how stable coins is playing a role in this.



China Government Policies & Past Examples

2019 Feb Chinese government declared new rules on foreign exchange control, in previous years, individuals buys foreign currency in various ways, if seller profit above 100K CNY or total exchange amount beyond 5 million CNY, it’s considered criminal activities, other than fines, individual could be sentenced to jail up to 5 years, the bigger the amount, the longer the sentence..

Individual quota for foreign exchange is 50,000 USD per year.
In China, transaction beyond 50,000 CNY, bank transfer beyond 200,000 CNY will be directly monitored by People’s Bank Of China, the central bank.

2018 first half there were 13544 violations, fines amounted to 345 million CNY, starting this year with the new rules, making these fund transfers will only be harder.

Before Crypto

Some examples include individuals use children’s bank accounts when they’re studying abroad, pay for goods with Alipay, WeChat, and as for refunds in foreign currencies, some do this through travel agencies, and myriads of different ways, now mostly under Chinese government’s supervision.

Corporations also have their ways, with almost all of them have bank accounts in Hong Kong, they send CNY to a dealer within China, and the dealer sends them USD in Hong Kong, this is so far most prominent, and least risky too, yet other ways include price manipulations on import export, making loans, invest through offshore funds, etc.

Chinese Government Analyze Patterns

The Chinese government also have countless counter measures, including detecting bank transfer & account opening patterns, matching transaction pattern to company activities, tracing criminal accounts, and limiting company’s abilities to for example, making loans offshore.

The Crypto Way

The advantage of cryptocurrency is that it provides a perfect “gap” to cut off tracking, which is what all the old ways are trying to get at, other advantages include speed (faster than international transfers), trustless (If one chooses to hold crypto by themselves) and simpler (than using trades to cover up or using deposit and loans to cover up)

But the key for most, is still the cost of such transfers, which crypto actually doesn’t have much of an edge, some old ways has on par or lower fees depending on the amount.

We’ve been told by some sources that traditional financial services have been suggesting clients to talk to USDT OTC dealers for transfers under the table, but this is not yet proven on a scalable way.

So as you can see, Bitcoin is not mentioned here, these fund transfers are mostly being done in USDT (dominantly) because of stability, individual or companies do not want to lose value in the process of the transfer.

Basically all of the OTCs quote Huobi for the prices, individuals because of the smaller amount, usually go through OTCs, corporations on the other hand go directly through Huobi’s own OTC.

Private OTC desks do work, but requires much trust, and now the money mostly only go to Hong Kong.

Pricing Breakdown

Because individuals and corporations take very different paths here, we talk about them separately here

For individuals who mostly go through private OTCs, buying USDT with CNY costs approximately 1.5~2%, converting USDT to USD on the other side usually takes 0.5%~1%, total cost around 2~4%, which is not subject to taxes under current law, comparing to underground transfers which are usually 5~8%, this is considered a pretty good deal. These individuals find OTCs from personal connections, nothing public or advertised.

For corporates who usually go through Huobi OTC directly, it costs around 0.5% to buy USDT, and 0.2% to convert back to USD offshore (or in Hong Kong), but is often subject to business taxes, HK 16.5%, Singapore 24%, Taiwan 22%, US 27.5%.

There isn’t much to say about Huobi OTCs, it’s quite straightforward, the private OTCs are more interesting. For Chinese corporations or individuals seeking USD in Hong Kong, these private OTC desks has a partner who are both incorporated in Beijing and Hong Kong, they simply transfer CNY to this partner in China, and partner transfers USD to client account, with a 2% fee, they often compare this to USDT solution considering the rate of USD and USDT of that day, for well established OTCs, former has a higher chance to be cheaper, for smaller ones, latter is usually cheaper. Decision of which route to go is made by clients. A lot of these transfers are still being made in the old way, however if the fund source is considered illegal under Chinese laws, then they usually go to the crypto way.

The joint study — commissioned by Grayscale and conducted by financial market research firm Q8 research — shows that women represent a significant market for Bitcoin as investors.

63% of female investors appreciate the ability to invest in fractional amounts of Bitcoin (compared to buying a whole coin or a full share of a stock), vs. 56% of male investors.
60% of female investors like the liquidity offered by direct Bitcoin investments, vs. 56% of male investors.
More female investors indicated that they lack familiarity with Bitcoin (76% female vs. 52% male investors), but an overwhelming majority of female investors (93%) noted that they could be more open to the asset class if they had more educational resources available to them.

Link to the full report is here https://grayscale.co/insights/bitcoin-female-investor-study/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=dedicated&utm_campaign=121019_btc-fem-inv-study_non-in

What do you guys think?

[Hedge with our gold-backed token]

I just left the job for a couple of months and I’d like to share some of my learnings as an end to that part of the journey, hopefully would help some of you in certain ways.

The product was a gold-backed token, I’m not going to name names but you know there are a bunch of us, none of us gained any traction, looking back the answers seem quite easy, but at the time it was not clear, we hope to not make the same mistakes again and here’s how.

The project started out with promise, gold has proven to be one of if not the most stable asset In human history, the founders were experienced and resourceful, we’ve gotten enough funding even without an ICO, and our partners including an independent gold vault is internationally Well-established. Despite all these, apparently we did not succeed, before I get into the lessons learned I’ll talk a little about the journey, that being the main use cases we have tested (we tested way more than these but these seem to be the major ones)

Hedge with our gold-backed token
We assumed since gold worked well as a hedging vehicle in the traditional world, it can probably play the same role in the crypto world, we went to hedge funds, family funds, crypto companies, traditional finances, crypto funds and many more, and came to similar conclusions. If one has put money into crypto, he probably doesn’t care much about risk with that part of the portfolio, and with companies who are born in crypto, they don’t understand what gold can do to them, which in all honesty is nothing, gold has a negative correlation with USD, but not crypto, when recession comes, it hedges perfectly, but when crypto market is going down, gold doesn’t go up. Case one closed.

How about making this token an investment (or savings account)
We then think there’s so much interest for gold as an investment tool for individuals in the traditional world, especially China and South America, how about making it an investment vehicle instead, we collaborated with some wallets and provided attractive yields, but in the crypto world we’re comparing ourselves with 10x 100x 1000x returns, if someone puts money in crypto that’s what they would be expecting, not 20% annual growth. A savings account then seem more like a possible scenario, but the crypto community has so much faith in Bitcoin, they say BTC is not fluctuating, USD is, and for ones who still think USD is the most stable currency, they save in USDT.

Use gold to pay for something
Of course we’re not talking about buying coffee here (but you’d be surprised how much this comes up in our discussion), we collaborated with some gambling platforms to see if we can become one of their unit of accounts, they agreed and we went on trial, these are gamblers from the traditional world, not Dapp users, to them the exchange calculations between one gram of gold and dollars is way too troublesome, and isn’t the unit of account they’re used to, to them USD will always be the most stable because they are used to calculate and price things in USD, the entry barrier is too high, this is same for bitcoin, if not enough pain is pushing people to change, they’ll stick to what they’re comfortable with.

These all seem quite obvious when looking back, but at that time we were buried in wishful thinking and refuse to see reality as early as possible, here are some of the things I learned
- What worked in traditional world, doesn’t always work in crypto
- Find a problem then build products to solve it, not the other way around
- Stability is relative and only exist in people’s minds, it’s what people are used to, not what professionals think what haven’t changed for 2000 years

Hope this is useful to some

I’m trying to gather some data that shows large demand of BTC is coming from the traditional world

Institutions :
Grayscale certainly is gaining traction from traditional institutions
https://grayscale.co/insights/grayscale-q3-2019-digital-asset-investment-report/
In 3Q19, they saw the heaviest quarterly inflows to Grayscale Bitcoin Trust in the product’s six-year history, including nearly $75 million in a single day.

Individual investors :
Square users bought $148 million of Bitcoin in Q3 2019, 244% YoY growth
https://twitter.com/kerooke/status/1192188599632121861?s=20

Borrowers :
Companies like BlockFi, CoinList and others seem to be doing well with strong initial launch, we don’t see much public data now, does anyone have access?

What other sources do you guys have to strengthen such signal

Just want to get people’s thoughts on the service

I understand places like Venezuela is due to hyperinflation, anywhere else where this use case thrives?
I’m not talking about the crypto communities by the way.