Caitlin is a crypto evangelist with a deep curiosity and passion for learning and writing about everything to do with cryptocurrency. She has a background as a performing artist and songwriter and is a digital media enthusiast, with a bachelor degree in Multimedia.
— Bitcoin Fear and Greed Index (@BitcoinFear) May 24, 2021
This indicator shows the current sentiment of the Bitcoin market into a simple meter from 0 to 100. Zero means ‘Extreme Fear’, while 100 means ‘Extreme Greed’.
From Greed To Fear
The lowest it has ever been was back in August 2019, hitting a point of 5. Just earlier this month however, it was at 73, indicating a rating of greed, coming down slightly from extreme greed highs of 95/100 earlier this year.
Tools like the Fear and Greed Index can help traders gauge market sentiment and react to ever-changing patterns and trends.
Triggering Trading Emotions
GREED – People tend to get greedy when the market is rising which results in huge FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). The general pattern emerges as more and more buyers come into the market, it eventually tops out and a correction follows after a period of too much greed.
FEAR – When the market turns and more and more traders sell, FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) sets in and this cascades downwards. When this bottoms out, some traders then see this as a buying opportunity and the cycle changes and repeats.
Warren Buffet’s Famous Saying
The investment godfather Warren Buffet was famous for the following quote.
We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.
Warren Buffet
This advice from Warren Buffet suggests that we could use the Fear and Greed Index indicator as a tool to assist us when we are trading and investing cryptocurrencies.
Crypto lending platform BlockFi has blundered a campaign they ran in March, offering users bonus payments of 1:1 dollar-backed GUSD (a stablecoin built by cryptocurrency exchange Gemini), mistakenly crediting accounts in Bitcoin instead.
700 BTC Promo Credit
One user posted on Reddit that he had been credited with over 700 BTC (amounting to more than $25 million at the time).
BlockFi has confirmed this in a statement on Reddit.
“On May 17, 2021, fewer than 100 clients were incorrectly credited with cryptocurrency associated with a promotional payout that did not belong to them. BlockFi has contacted these clients and is working with them to rectify the issue.
The situation does not affect any of BlockFi’s ongoing operations and measures have been taken to ensure that an error like this will not be possible in the future. BlockFi’s latest publicly reported AUM is $15B as of Q1 2021. Client funds are not impacted and are safeguarded.”
BlockFi Staff Member
Reward For Returning Funds
The company is now desperately trying to reverse the damage of these generous deposits, reportedly even offering rewards ranging from $500 to $1,000 for returning the lost funds and even threatening legal action against users.
Found on Reddit. They're offering mass rewards for the return of funds ($500-$1k) as well as threatening criminal actions. pic.twitter.com/LZUoIlF5Js
— James ☂️ Lawblock ⚔ 🟩 (@JamesLawblock) May 19, 2021
Bitcoin Pizza is the first decentralized pizza brand, uniting favourite neighbourhood pizzerias under one crypto roof.
For years, companies like Domino’s and Pizza Hut have ruled the pizza industry, displacing many small businesses, much like Uber Eats and Deliveroo type apps have challenged independent restaurants in the food delivery business.
Today I am announcing Bitcoin Pizza – a new national pizza brand that is launching in 10 cities.
The first pizzas will be delivered this Saturday, which is the 11 year anniversary of the infamous bitcoin pizza transaction.
Eleven years ago, the first real-world purchase was made with Bitcoin, to order pizza online. A man named Laszlo Hanyecz famously traded 10,000 Bitcoins for two Papa John’s pizzas. May 22, 2010 is now a highly celebrated date on the crypto calendar, coined “Bitcoin Pizza Day”.
That first pizza order would be worth over $450 million AUD today given the Bitcoin (BTC) price at the time of writing. A few years later, a pizza delivery driver received a tip in Bitcoin and story kept feeding the Bitcoin & Pizza lore.
Pizzerias, united
Bitcoin Pizza is a new US pizza chain that allows you to enjoy pizza, while supporting Bitcoin developers. Customers would visit eatbitcoinpizza.com to order pizzas and have it delivered to their door in a specially customised designed Bitcoin pizza box.
The actual pizza would be prepared by selected restaurants that have partnered with Bitcoin Pizza, with customised pizzas added to the menu. The service is launching initially through ten cities in the USA: Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, Houston, Boston, New York, Washington DC and Miami.
Your purchase of Bitcoin Pizza will support the HRF’s Bitcoin Development Fund research and advocate for people’s rights and liberties across the earth.
eatbitcoinpizza.com
Bitcoin Pizza is supporting the Human Rights Foundation, which has launched a fund to support open-source software developers who are making the Bitcoin network more private, decentralised, and resilient. Profits from pizza orders contribute to the HRF’s Bitcoin Development Fund.
It seems that Elon has done a complete backflip on his bullishness towards Bitcoin and is now asserting his power and influence to wage war against the very asset that has made him and his company billions.
Elon launched a negative attack on Bitcoin’s fundamentals to stir mass hysteria and fud on the entire crypto industry.
Michael Saylor has joined the debate to shed some light on the truth and offer some real facts over claims that Bitcoin is “bad for the environment”.
Michael Saylor intelligently articulates that while Bitcoin mining does use energy, it is actually powered by “wasted energy”: the 30% of lost excess energy generated by the world’s power grid. He argues that stopping Bitcoin mining would have no effect on reducing the amount of energy already being wasted in the world.
“The least energy intensive, most efficient technology that we have perhaps discovered, ever, in the history of the human race.”
Michael Saylor
The beneficial advantages that the blockchain solves in our society makes it’s energy usage justified. For Bitcoin, this energy expenditure is a small price to pay for a censorship-resistant digital bearer asset, one that lets citizens of the world to escape a broken centralized financial system and improve people’s lives exponentially.
He also explains that Bitcoin mining will decrease in the near future; as the last of the 21 million Bitcoins in existence are mined. Every four years, the revenue and the block rewards for Bitcoin are falling, so by the year 2035, 99% of the world’s Bitcoin will have been mined. This means that over time, Bitcoin brilliantly becomes less energy-taxing on the environment.
If you take all the energy of used in the Bitcoin network it amounts to 25 basis points of all the wasted energy. So 1/4 of 1% of the wasted energyin the world, offers the hope of a decent life to 8 Billion people and solves an economic problem”.
Michael Saylor
To slander crypto-mining as an inherently dirty business, appears intellectually dishonest and deliberately deceptive. Is Elon looking to get enter the cryptocurrency market himself and partner with Dogecoin to save the world from the ‘harmful environmental impact’ of Bitcoin mining? For starters, if Dogecoin was ever to be a serious contender for the ‘currency of earth’, or mars for that matter, it would want to be deflationary (as Bitcoin is) and also decentralised (as Bitcoin is), ie: not having 30% of the circulating supply owned by one person (as Doge is).
Following a bizarre poll on Twitter on May 11, asking followers if they wanted Tesla to accept Doge; Elon took to Twitter again on May 13- this time to condemn Bitcoin, renouncing BTC purchases for Tesla due to ‘environmental concerns’. As cryptic as Elon’s tweets often are, you don’t have to be a genius to read between the lines; as he clearly hints at an alternative cryptocurrency being a more favourable alternative; stating: “we are looking at other cryptocurrencies that use <1% of Bitcoin’s energy/transaction”.
Working with Doge devs to improve system transaction efficiency. Potentially promising.
What is Elon Musk’s agenda here? Is he really concerned about the burning of fossil fuels, in particular coal, used to mine Bitcoin, or is he carefully turning the debate to focus on something much bigger? Is it about creating further hype around Dogecoin, or something else that would hugely benefit Tesla’s financial interests?
If you’re going to focus on environmental issues, particularly those centred around the world’s consumption of coal, there are a lot of other places to start, than criticising the use of energy required to mine Bitcoin.
Will we see Bitcoin go to a proof of work model like Ethereum 2.0 which is greener and better for the environment.
Fox Entertainment has created a new company called Blockchain Creative Labs to create NFT’s – with the aim to help fans connect directly with their TV shows.
The American broadcaster’s NFT studio will launch with the premiere of new animated series Krapoplis – an animated comedy set in mythical ancient Greece from Emmy Award-winning creator Dan Harmon (Rick and Morty, Community).
First Ever Blockchain TV Show
It will be the first series ever to be curated entirely on the blockchain.
Fox’s adoption of NFTs is a great way to cash in on the show’s popularity, giving fans the opportunity to become collectors, through by buying NFTs based on characters from the show. It’s also about advertising:
“Just as we’re doing this for our own animation, we will also help your brands connect directly with fans and enthusiasts through NFTs. With and for you, Fox will help art meet brands meet technology.”
Charlie Collier, Fox CEO
NFT TV Characters
Fox could release “trading card” like NFTs based on their TV shows such as The Masked Singer and Rick and Morty. Fans can then collect these NFTs and buy, sell and trade them on open NFT marketplaces.
Example of Fox NFT – The Masked Singer
Look’s like the NFT craze is not over yet, as we recently saw Melbourne Street Artist Lushsux Has Made Over $500,000 From NFTs and Edward Snowden Sells NFT For $5.4 Million To Raise Funds For Freedom Of Press Foundation.
Craig Wright is in the news again, this time with his ongoing court case to get access to 111,000 Bitcoin (over $7 Billion AUD) held in two digital addresses – he claims the private keys were “stolen” earlier this year.
The Australian computer scientist who now lives in the UK, claims he is Satoshi Nakamoto who created Bitcoin, and has launched a London high court lawsuit against 16 Bitcoin Core software developers in an effort to secure his “lost” Bitcoins.
“Our client has always maintained that he created Bitcoin to operate within existing laws and that in the event of loss or theft, where legitimate ownership can be proven, the developers have a duty to ensure recovery,”
Paul Ferguson, lawyer representing Wright
The case is largely centred on who wrote Bitcoin’s whitepaper, which first outlined the vision of Bitcoin and was published under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008.
It does seems odd, that a person so deliberately private and anonymous would suddenly feel the need to burst into the spotlight and claim the title as the great Creator of Bitcoin.
Reached by email, Cobra from Bitcoin.org said:
“We’ve been threatened to take down the Bitcoin whitepaper by someone who obviously isn’t the inventor of Bitcoin (if he was, that would make him the 25th richest person in the world, which he obviously isn’t).
Cobra
It remains to be seen if the courts will decide in favour of these seemingly absurd and highly controversial claims. It smells a bit like the old classic, “the dog ate my homework”. If you can’t prove it, then you don’t own it. The true power of the blockchain is that it is so beautifully open and transparent.
If Craig Wright really is Satoshi Nakamoto, could he retrace the breadcrumbs and provide real evidence to back up his claims?
QuickSwap: A new DEX built on Polygon (formerly Matic)
Low fees and high yield opportunities pushed QUICK price above the $1,500 mark as the Polygon-based layer-two solution sees adoption from new blockchain projects.
QuickSwap is a next-generation layer-2 decentralized exchange (DEX) and automated market maker (AMM). QuickSwap is a fork of the number one automated market maker, UniSwap. Other than their logos, each DEX looks practically identical. However, the difference is that UniSwap runs on the Ethereum Network, whereas QuickSwap runs on the Polygon (Matic) Network.
Fast and Cheap Trading Fees for ERC-20 Tokens
QuickSwap allows users to be able to trade any ERC-20 asset at lightning-fast speeds with near-zero gas cost. Because Polygon’s Network is much faster and cheaper than Ethereum, swapping tokens and yield farming on QuickSwap is extremely cost-effective. As more tokens become available through the decentralized exchange, we can expect increased adoption of the platform.
Because QuickSwap makes use of layer-2 scaling solutions, it ensures the speed and cost of transactions don’t increase substantially with higher network activity. Also, users can earn a passive income with crypto using the QUICK token: By becoming a liquidity provider on QuickSwap, users will receive LP tokens and a percentage of transaction fees. Although similar to many other automated market models (AMM), the scaling solutions provided by QuickSwap means gas fees for unstaking and receiving rewards are far lower than other AMMs on Ethereum.
QuickSwap is not the only DEX to move to the Polygon chain. SushiSwap (a fork of UniSwap) has also announced that it will become a multi-chain DEX, now offering contracts on Fantom, Binance Smart Chain and others.
The expanded adoption of the Polygon network has seen a 420% price increase. While QuickSwap is currently down -61.7% from it’s all time high just a week ago, QUICK has dropped from $1,590 to just under $600usd in the past 7 days.
As DeFi activity begins to rise again and a growing number of analysts begin to predict that a new altcoin season is in the works, the Polygon ecosystem and its QuickSwap DEX could pull in more liquidity, especially if Ethereum users choose to use Polygon’s MATIC bridge to shift over to a layer two-based, low-fee environment.
They are the King and Queen of the crypto market and for very good reasons, and can’t really be compared directly because they have very different uses cases – as explained below.
Bitcoin is a store of value asset
Ethereum is a framework powering crypto projects
Both BTC and ETH adoption is now going mainstream and it’s important that we understand the purpose of them so we don’t compare apples with oranges when deciding between them.
Bitcoin is a store of value asset
Bitcoin was originally designed to be a transactional peer-to-peer cash system as per Satoshi’s Bitcoin whitepaper. However, it has since been altered into a store of value as it cannot cope with the scaling of transactions as transaction fees soar.
Having a limited supply of 21 million Bitcoin on the BTC blockchain, and a decreasing supply – this makes it a scarce asset, and therefore, valuable to investors. Learn more about Bitcoin.
Ethereum on the other hand, was developed to address the “flaws” of Bitcoin and has evolved dramatically over the past few years into “programmable money”, as per the Ethereum whitepaper.
Ethereum also is set to become a deflationary asset as it upgrades to Ethereum 2.0 hardfork in July 2021. This will see some Ether “burned” on every transaction, decreasing it’s supply.
Mastercard announces it will release the first credit card with direct cryptocurrency rewards.
Mastercard and WebBank to partner with cryptocurrency exchange Gemini to offer a first-of-a-kind cryptocurrency rewards credit card, with up to 3% in crypto on qualifying purchases. Introduced earlier this year, the Gemini Credit Card has already amassed more than 140,000 people on its waitlist.
“connecting consumer needs with next-generation assets and delivering a ground-breaking experience that redefines the future of card rewards and benefits.”
Linda Kirkpatrick – president of North America at Mastercard
About the Gemini Credit Card
Gemini is a cryptocurrency exchange, founded by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss twins in 2014, has now grown into one of the leading exchanges worldwide.
The Gemini rewards card is different to other cards such as the Crypto.com CRO VISA card because it currenty will act as just a credit card, whereas the CRO card acts more like a pre-paid debit card.
Crypto rewards on purchases: 3% back on qualifying purchases in any of over 30 cryptocurrencies available on Gemini. Rewards will be automatically deposited into cardholders’ account
Real-time rewards: Delivery of crypto rewards in real-time (unlike most cards, which pay rewards out monthly)
No annual fee: Combined with 24/7 live customer support to deliver a superior cardholder experience.
Design: A sleek metal card, available in black, silver, or rose gold, with only the cardholder’s name appearing on the card for added security.
World Mastercard® Benefits: Exclusive offers for cardholders with select merchants such as DoorDash, HelloFresh, Lyft and ShopRunner.
“As more consumers look to enter the crypto ecosystem, the Gemini Credit Card gives them an easy point of entry and an effortless way to earn crypto as a reward without changing their daily spending habits.”
A recent report by Nine News claims as much as 26% of Aussies are trading cryptocurrencies.
“Ca$h is King” has been replaced with “Bitcoin is King”, as more and more average people jump on to ride the new wave of digital gold and seek financial freedom.
Market volatility and wild fluctuations in Bitcoin’s price are proving no deterrent for newcommers looking to get into the cryptocurrency space. The industry continues to thrive, despite governments and major corporations around the world continuing their attempts to stifle the innovation of decentralised finance, through rules and regulations; with discussion of some countries even wanting to ban cryptocurrency altogether.
Aussie Crypto Entrepreneur Sergei Has Made Over $100 Million in Bitcoin
The Nine News story also covers Russian born Sergei Sergienko and his Bitcoin fortune. The popular Clubhouse speaker invested into Bitcoin when it was as low as $6 and has been accumulating and trading it ever since, taking his profits into the millions.
Breaking new records and hitting all time highs, Cryptocurrency Market Capitalization has surpassed $2 trillion. There is now more money circulating in cryptocurrency in this quarter alone, than in the entire preceding year of 2020.
