Friday Focus: When Saturn Crosses Mercury
Study the charts but astrology says otherwise.
Good morning. It’s the end of the work week. What are you going to do this weekend? If you are wondering why there are celestial bodies being alluded in the post title, read on.
Welcome to Friday Focus, part of our new series: BitPinas Daily. We will look at the price of Bitcoin, Ethereum and the major cryptocurrencies. Crypto is global, but sometimes news that matters happens while we sleep. So we bring to you what’s happening in our space here and abroad.
Market Price as of January 15, 2021:
| Bitcoin | $39,233 | 4.74% |
| Ethereum | $1,216.91 | 7.5% |
| Tether | $0.99 | -1% |
| Polkadot | $14.39 | 30.58% |
| XRP | $0.295977 | -1.34% |
| SLP | $0.013 | 0.0% |
Bitcoin closed January 14, 2021, at $39,233 per BTC. We’re down 0.6% in the last 7 days and up 35% since the year began. This is 6.45% below the previous all-time high of $41,940, which was hit on Jan. 8, 2021.
Bitcoin’s market capitalization stands today at $730,651,308,099 which is 67.65% of the entire cryptocurrency market. The entire crypto market, by the way, now has a market cap of $1,077,570,167,161.
On the table above, there’s the cryptocurrency SLP. If you wonder what that is, check out this article: Playing Axie Infinity vs Minimum Basic Salary in the Philippines.
Bitcoin Core
Institutions buy while Bitcoin dipped this weekend
(By Colin Harper, Coindesk) Not headlines grabbing, but Colin Harper detailed out some of the improvements to the Bitcoin Network in his latest article.
First, Taproot, which will allow for more complex smart contracts, is now fully live on Bitcoin’s signet, a sandbox for testing before they get pushed to the mainnet.
Users can also now set manual fees denominated in satoshis. “Before, Bitcoin Core relied on a fee estimator for transactions, and these fees were set by specifying a bitcoin amount (say, 0.00001 BTC) instead of satoshis (1000 sats),” Harper explained.
Other changes or improvements include:
- Support for privacy browser Tor’s V3 address
- New block-filtering system for “light clients” — wallets that do not keep a full history of Bitcoin’s transaction ledger, only those that are needed.
- Signet – the new testing network
Read more here.
Astrology
The planets can predict the price of Bitcoin according to this astrologer
Should we trade Bitcoin? When is the right time? According to astrologer Maren Altman, who has millions of followers on Tiktok, we should trade when Saturn crosses Mercury. I am not kidding. Altman predicted a price correction on January 11. It happened. Mercury, apparently, represents Bitcoin’s price while Saturn is the restricting indicator.
Altman does say she’s not a financial adviser so we should not misconstrue her celestial predictions as investment advice. But here’s what astrology said the future of Bitcoin will be.
“I see some favourable indicators at the end of the month and especially February and early March. However, getting into mid-March, I see a big correction. Mid-April is also really less optimistic. May is bullish,” Altman said. (Anna Irrera and Tom Wilson, Reuters)
Do give the article a read. It’s actually good. As always, price predictions are non-investment adcvise so always do your research.
Ethereum
Exchanges are running out of ETH
(By Samuel Haig, Cointelegraph) Data from Glassnode indicates that Ether reserves on centralized exchanges have not been this low since July 2018. As of this writing, only 7% of Ether’s circulating supply is held on exchanges.
Saunders interprets the data as suggesting an explosive bull-run into new all-time highs is imminent for Ether, stating “We all know what happened when demand outstripped supply of $BTC. It quadrupled in 90 days.”
Exchanges
Winklevoss Twins considering to take Gemini Exchange public
(By Olga Kharif, Bloomberg) “We are definitely considering it and making sure that we have that option,” Cameron Winklevoss, co-founder and president of the New York-based digital-asset firm, said in an interview. “We are watching the market and we are also having internal discussions on whether it makes sense for us at this point in time. We are certainly open to it.”
Corporate
8 public companies with the biggest Bitcoin portfolios
(By Daniel Phillips, Decrypt)
Publicly traded companies
- MicroStrategy – 70,470 BTC
- It’s CEO Michael Saylor says he personally hols 17,732 BTC
- Galaxy Digital Holdings – 16,402 BTC
Funds
- Grayscale Bitcoin Trust – 572,644 BTC
- CoinShares – 69,730 BTC
- Ruffer Investment Company – 45,000 BTC
- 3iQ The Bitcoin Fund – 16,454 BTC
- CI Galaxy Bitcoin Fund – 15,570 BTC
- Galaxy Digital Large Cap Fund – 7,036 BTC
What else is happening
- Early innings of institutional adoption (Kevin Kang, Blockworks)
- (U.S.) Anchorage becomes the first federally-chartered Bitcoin bank (Nikhilesh De and Ian Allison, Coindesk)
- Fox Business host says all the Bitcoin in the world has been lost (Scott Chipolina, Decrypt)
- Ledger owners report chilling threats after 20K more records leaked (Turner Wright, Cointelegraph)
This article is published on BitPinas: Friday Focus: When Saturn Crosses Mercury
