The bitcoin network saw its sixth consecutive upward difficulty adjustment this week to another all-time high, as total network hashrate has now jumped by ~100 EH/s in just under three months.
The upward whipsaw in traditional markets continued this week, as the S&P 500 made new YTD highs and bond yields continued their aggressive retracing of last month’s upward spike. The US 10 year yield, the world’s reserve asset, once again traded like an illiquid pre-mined altcoin, declining over 80bps in ~6 weeks after running up by about that same amount in the preceding 6 weeks. Despite the rally, new data out this week from the FDIC pointed to renewed pain on bank balance sheets, with unrealized losses on securities increasing more than 20% sequentially through Q3 and returning to the highs that touched off the collapse of SVB and several other major banks earlier this year. Among other metrics making new highs was bitcoin’s total network hashrate, which pushed close to 500 EH/s, nearly a 5x increase from the summer 2021 trough that followed China’s mining ban. With bitcoin’s price up well over 100% YTD, institutional and sovereign interest accelerating, and infrastructure to accommodate the next wave of adoption improving rapidly every week, we expect this trend to continue advancing up and to the right for the foreseeable future.
Giga Energy is a bitcoin miner and infrastructure provider focusing on stranded energy and waste gas opportunities. The company helps oil and gas producers use bitcoin mining to optimize production and monetize gas resources that would otherwise be wasted, through both proprietary mining deployments and the provision and operation of tailored power generation equipment including generators, data centers, and electrical infrastructure. Giga sits at the forefront of the convergence of the energy production and bitcoin mining industries, a trend we expect to gain significant momentum over the coming decade.
Strike rolled out new lightning address capabilities, including the option for users to send bitcoin, fiat, or stablecoin balances directly to lighting addresses:
Strike also added on-ramp capabilities in several more countries around the world:
Unchained announced major new improvements to its trust account onboarding process:
Primal’s iOS app – which now includes an integrated lightning wallet – launched on the main App Store:
Start9 launched its Restart Program, which will offer powerful, refurbished servers pre-loaded with StartOS at discounts to the company’s flagship devices:
Giga Energy co-founders Matt Lohstroh and Brent Whitehead were featured in this year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Matt McManus, Head of Product at Unchained, joined the TFTC podcast to discuss the development of distributed networks of bitcoin key agents.
Ten31 Managing Partner Marty Bent published an essay in the latest edition of the Bitcoin Times taking on the “ESG” narrative and arguing for a return to expansion of reliable energy production.
Satoshi Energy Co-Founder and CEO Andrew Myers also published a piece in the bitcoin times delving into his vision for decentralized, permissionless power markets.
The latest reading for the personal consumption expenditure (PCE) price index – ostensibly the Fed’s favored metric for gauging inflation – rose 0.2% M/M and 3.5% Y/Y, in line with expectations and down from the prior month. Markets reacted favorably to the update as decelerating growth in inflation may bolster the case for Fed rate cuts in the near term.
Following the PCE print, both San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly and New York Fed President John Williams suggested that the central bank isn’t considering cuts soon, and Fed Chairman Jay Powell’s latest word salad indicated “it would be premature to conclude with confidence that we have achieved a sufficiently restrictive stance.”
The market, for what it’s worth, does not seem to agree.
News of cratering existing home sales last week was followed this week by new data showing that pending home sales also declined to the lowest level since 2001 (i.e. lower than both the post-GFC and spring 2020 troughs) in October.
The multi-decade highs in mortgage rates that have driven a standstill in the US housing market have also increasingly weighed on the banking sector, as new FDIC data from this week showed a 23% Q/Q increase in unrealized losses for securities on bank balance sheets to levels in line with the highs that precipitated this spring’s banking crisis.
The bitcoin network saw its sixth consecutive upward difficulty adjustment this week to another all-time high, as total network hashrate has now jumped by ~100 EH/s in just under three months.
The US Department of the Treasury sent a memo to several Congressional committees this week recommending that “DeFi service providers, noncustodial wallet providers, miners, and validators” all be treated the same as financial institutions and banks, even though many such actors do nothing but publish open source software.
While these comments have no legal impact today, this is a trend that bears monitoring and opposition based on substantial legal and regulatory precedent.
Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo noted this week that non-US issuers of dollar stablecoins should be held to higher standards of regulation and anti-money laundering oversight.
DEMAND, a company focused on solo bitcoin miners, launched the first mining pool incorporating Stratum V2. Elsewhere in mining, Eligius Pool was relaunched this week as OCEAN Pool in an effort to improve miner decentralization and long-term censorship resistance of the bitcoin network.
AntPool – currently the largest pool on the network with ~28% of hashrate – announced it would refund 83 bitcoin erroneously paid as a fee (likely in conjunction with a wallet hack), which amounted to the largest fee ever paid on the bitcoin network.
In the latest reminder that the gaslighting will continue until the reserve currency improves, The Atlantic ran an article this week reminding its readers that “inflation is your fault.”
Originally published on Ten31 Timestamp
