Ep. 171 Canadian Candy Man
On this episode of the Unhashed Podcast, we ask if Bryan is scamming people with his NFT shilling, Facebook gives up on stablecoining, “solo” miners winning the lottery, and S2F being invalidated (yet again).
MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR), the business-intelligence software company that has taken to accumulating bitcoin, said it bought approximately 660 bitcoins for around $25 million between Dec. 30, 2021, and Jan. 31, 2022. The company paid an average price of $37,865 per bitcoin, it said in a statement. The 660 BTC acquired across the 32-day period equates to an average of 21 a day. That's a markedly lower rate than in December, when the firm bought 1,914 in the 20 days ended Dec. 29 – an average of 96 a day – and that was itself slower than the 1,434 bitcoin it bought in the first nine days of the month. The slowdown may point to MicroStrategy exercising greater caution in its bitcoin acquisitions given the market's recent downturn. The world's largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization hit a record high near $69,000 in November and is now trading around $39,000.
Not one, nor two, but three small bitcoin miners were able to find valid block hashes and add new blocks to the Bitcoin blockchain while mining solo in a two-week span last month, a string of events with such small odds of happening that many in the Bitcoin community were left wondering how it could even be possible. Bitcoin Magazine talked with Con Kolivas, the creator and administrator of Solo CK Pool (https://solo.ckpool.org/), a bitcoin mining pool software project geared toward workers interested in mining solo rather than contributing their hash rate into a pool, which all three of the lucky miners were using. Despite widespread belief that Solo CK Pool must be special to have been a central part of such a phenomenon, the reactions to these successful mining events have shown that there are clearly still some misconceptions about bitcoin mining. Having more hash rate increases the chances that you will be the lucky miner adding the next block to Bitcoin and receiving the corresponding block reward in the coinbase transaction; but it is not deterministic, meaning that it doesn’t guarantee that you will, in fact, be the miner to do so. The three small miners that recently found valid hashes illustrate this concept, as they beat the odds and took home over $200,000 in bitcoin each.
In March 2019, an anonymous individual by the pseudonym “PlanB” astonished investors when he published “Modeling Bitcoin Value with Scarcity,” and introduced his now famous Stock-to-Flow (S2F) model. The model predicted exponential growth of the bitcoin market value, with what purported to be sound scientific methods. A year later, he introduced the Stock-to-Flow Cross Asset (S2FX) model, which includes gold, silver, diamond and real estate data. Unfortunately, PlanB’s models are scientifically invalid and don’t have the confidence level he claims they do. According to PlanB's March 2019 article: The possibility of a power law with 95% R2 over 8 orders of magnitude, adds confidence that the main driver of bitcoin value is correctly captured with SF.” In layman’s terms PlanB is essentially asserting that “Stock is a function of Stock.” A tautology is a trivial statement that is true under any circumstances. It’s like saying a banana is a kind of banana. Of course Stock is a function of Stock. This is why the data fits, but is scientifically worthless. Tautologies are true but do not tell us anything useful. Rather, they are true because of the meanings of the terms. This means the model is autocorrelated (i.e. invalid). When you adjust for that, the R-Squared (R2) value is zero. Thus, scientifically speaking, Stock-to-Flow is nonsensical and cannot be used to model price.
The controversial cryptocurrency project that Mark Zuckerberg once defended in front of Congress is unraveling after regulatory pressure. The Diem Association, a cryptocurrency initiative once known as Libra backed by Meta Platforms Inc., is weighing a sale of its assets as a way to return capital to its investor members, according to people familiar with the matter. Diem is in discussions with investment bankers about how best to sell its intellectual property and find a new home for the engineers who developed the technology, cashing out whatever value remains in its once-ambitious Diem coin venture, said the people, asking not to be identified because the discussions aren’t public. Without a green light from the bank’s regulator, Silvergate was left unable to issue the new asset with confidence the Fed wouldn’t crack down, and so the Diem effort had no coin. A Fed spokesman declined to comment on the agency’s talks with the Diem advocates. The Diem Association declined to comment. Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. It’s unclear how a potential buyer would value Diem’s intellectual property, or the engineers that helped develop it. Discussions are early, the people cautioned, and there’s no guarantee Diem will find a buyer.
GOOGLE CARDS TO STORE BITCOIN AND CRYPTO – 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.
Google Cloud is launching a new dedicated Digital Assets Team – Blockchain technology is yielding tremendous innovation and value creation for consumers and businesses around the world. As the technology becomes more mainstream, companies need scalable, secure, and sustainable infrastructure on which to grow their businesses and support their networks. We believe Google Cloud can play an important role in this evolution. Blockchain and distributed-ledger-based companies like Hedera, Theta Labs, and Dapper Labs have already chosen to build on top of Google Cloud for scalability, flexibility, and security. Moving forward, Google Cloud’s Digital Assets Team will undertake a number of short- and long-term initiatives to support companies in the digital assets/blockchain ecosystem, including: - Providing dedicated node hosting/remote procedure call (RPC) nodes for developers, allowing users to deploy blockchain validators on Google Cloud via a single click (“click to deploy”). - Participating in node validation and on-chain governance with select partners. - Helping developers and users host their nodes on the cleanest cloud in the industry, supporting their environmental, social, and governance initiatives. - Supporting on-chain governance via participation from Google Cloud executives and senior engineers. - Hosting several public BigQuery datasets on our Marketplace, including full blockchain transaction history for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Litecoin, Zcash, Theta, Hedera Hashgraph, Band Protocol, Polygon, XRP, and Dogecoin. – https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/financial-services/google-cloud-launches-dedicated-digital-asset-tea