The price decline comes as the global financial markets suffer a wider sell-off, with Brent crude oil dropping over 30 percent on Sunday, its biggest single-day decline since 1991.
The price of bitcoin has fallen to a one-month low below $7,900, amid a wider sell-off in the global financial markets.
As of writing, the price of the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization is changing hands at $7,837, the lowest in the past 30 days and a 10 percent decline on a 24-hour basis, according to CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index.
Underscoring the severity of the global flight from assets perceived as risky is the drop in the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield below 0.5 percent for the first time ever, down over two percentage points from a year ago.
Bitcoin’s sudden price dip also comes as the network’s computing power and mining difficulty (a measure of competition among miners) are both expected to reach a new high in just five hours.
With more processing power chasing a less-valuable asset, mining farms that are using old mining equipment are in for an even tougher time.
Data from the mining pool Poolin shows that the most widely used mining computers such as the AntMiner S9 and Avalon 851 are all at a critical breakeven point, meaning they are not generating any daily profits at bitcoin’s current price, amid all-time-high mining difficulty.
Is Bitcoin Safe in a Market Crash? Look to Gold for Signs, Feat. Delphi Digital’s Kevin Kelly
Bitcoin’s (BTC) price has cratered but that’s nothing compared to the broader market havoc. From the coronavirus scare to an oil price war, a confluence of factors is aligning to make it a very rough Monday.
On this episode of The Breakdown, @nlw is joined by Delphi Digital’s Kevin Kelly to discuss:
- Why the stock market is just catching up to what the bond markets have been saying
- Why the bond markets have been a better reflection of potential economic pain
- Why we need to pay attention to what happens in the credit markets
- The role of the oil price war in today’s market drop
- What the declining bitcoin price means for the safe haven and uncorrelated asset narratives
- Which assets are actually acting like safe havens
Aspiring CME Director Wants Exchange to Mine Bitcoin and Issue Tokens
A nominee for a CME director role believes the exchange, one of the few regulated providers for crypto derivatives, should issue its own tokens and mine bitcoin with renewable energy.CME B-shares were distributed to CME members – the exchange’s main market participants – after demutualization in 2000. Compared to the publicly tradable A-shares, B-shares are only available to CME members and offer special voting-rights to elect six people to the board of directors, including one of the positons Federighil is standing for.
Federighil, a CME member since 1997, argued the exchange would need to create as many as 9,600 CME tokens, each representing 1/100th of a B-share. The blockchain could replace complicated legacy structures, with tokens redistributed to existing B-share holders, he said.
«Digitize and fractionalize B-shares into hundredths of a membership. Let them trade freely on a blockchain where all transactions and ownership are recorded,» Federighil said in his proposal. Tokens would «enable future owners to gradually buy into a membership over time.»
Federighil also proposed that CME should build its own renewable energy plants to power operations and «divert the excess energy to mine Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies,» which could be «immediately converted» into fiat.
Not only would that create a new environmentally-friendly revenue stream, but it would also help familiarize the exchange with a new technology and asset-class, he argued.
«While this seems outside of our core competencies, I’d argue this is our business: we, like the miners, match and clear trades,» he said.
A footnote says the proposals were not checked by CME management and «some may not be feasible.»
Asked if he considered his measures radical, Federighi told CoinDesk that he stood by all of his proposals. He declined to comment further, citing the rules of the election process.
