Crypto industry players who are bullish on bitcoin point to various reason why they think the digital currency will go up, including rising inflation and increasing institutional investor participation. But an uncertain regulatory environment continues to prove a headwind for bitcoin.

STR | NurPhoto via Getty Images

Bitcoin could hit $100,000 within a year, the CEO of crypto lending firm Nexo has predicted.

Antoni Trenchev told CNBC he thinks the world's biggest cryptocurrency can surge above $100,000 "within 12 months."

He said he's "worried" about bitcoin's short-term prospects, suggesting it may fall in tandem with traditional financial markets as the Federal Reserve starts unwinding its massive monetary stimulus program.

But that may, in turn, "give further impetus to crypto," he added, as a "crash" in stocks would likely mean the U.S. central bank eventually goes "back to easing in no time."

If Trenchev's forecast is correct, that would mean bitcoin's price would have to more than double this year.

For what it's worth, in January 2020 Trenchev predicted bitcoin's price wouldtop $50,000by the end of that year. "Everybody was laughing me out," he says.

Trenchev's 2020 prediction didn't come true. Bitcoin only managed to hit a high of just over $29,000 that year. But the cryptocurrency did eventually surpass that $50,000 in February 2021.

Crypto believers say the market has matured, and that there's ample liquidity now that major Wall Street institutions like Jump Trading and Jane Street are flocking to digital assets.

Meanwhile, crypto "whales" like Do Kwon, the co-founder of blockchain firm Terra Labs, are buying up millions of dollars' worth of bitcoin in the belief that it could become a future "reserve" currency.

But there are some headwinds for the market. The global regulatory environment remains fragmented and the crypto market still remains volatile. In particular, bitcoin remains heavily correlated to the stock market, in particular the Nasdaq index. While stocks remain volatile, so too could bitcoin.

Bitcoin is still around 40% off its record high of $68,990.90.

Other crypto executives don't expect as much price appreciation this year.

"In this particular moment in time we are living under, I would say, global uncertainty in the markets, not just the crypto markets, also in the stock markets," Paolo Ardoino, chief technology officer of Bitfinex, told CNBC in an interview on Wednesday.

"So we are seeing definitely lower volumes on the crypto side ... bitcoin volumes have dropped over the last few weeks. So that is quite important as a metric because it tells many whales, many active market participants, participants that were very active before are waiting a little bit on the sidelines."

Whales are large investors that are able to move the market.

Ardoino said bitcoin could fall sharply below $40,000 but he expects by digital currency will be "well above" $50,000 by the end of the year.

"I'm a bullish person on bitcoin I see so much happening in this industry and so many countries interested in bitcoin adoption that I'm really positive," he said.

See the original post here:
Bitcoin could hit $100,000 within a year, crypto firm's CEO predicts - CNBC

Even in this digital age where most data is secured in faraway servers and virtual accounts, many people still see value in storing precious assets in a locker or safe. Several individuals also shunned the idea of digital currency because they couldn't procure it physically like they would with traditional fiat. The creation of physical bitcoins was done with these pointers in mind.

On the surface, physical bitcoins are similar to their fiat counterparts. They are usually made from metals like brass, silver or even gold. They also have a logo printed on one side and their value on the other. However, the similarities between the two ends here.

While centralized fiat coins have a specific value, the value of a physical bitcoin comes from a private key printed on its back. This key holds the coin's actual value in a digital wallet it could be 1 BTC or 100 BTC, depending on the maker of the coin.

Also Read:

You can think of physical bitcoins as a bank card or a gift certificate. The paper or the card does not have any value. Rather, the magnetic strip on the front of the card or the certification on the voucher is what gives you access to the real currency. Similarly, when it comes to physical bitcoins, it is not the coin that matters so much, but the private key mentioned on the back thats important.

How are physical bitcoins created?

Most people who create physical bitcoins use a 3-D printer. The design itself varies as they are created by enthusiasts, not a centralized organization. Some coins are metal-plated, and some use pure silver or gold.

The back of the coin is where its value lies; it contains the private key for the actual bitcoins. Holders can use this key to redeem the BTC online. Also, each coin has its individual private key. Therefore, even if someone steals or tampers with it, they will only be able to access the BTC in that specific coin. On the other hand, if this were a digital wallet, the entity would have access to all the cryptocurrency stored within it.

To further mitigate tampering, the private key is stored in a holographic sticker on the back of the coin. When the sticker is peeled, it leaves an identifiable mark. If there is a mark on your coin, you will know it was tampered with.

The first physical bitcoin

Physical representations of Bitcoin have existed for a long time now. Over the years, several different renditions have also cropped-up, each with different compositional material, values, and purposes. However, it all started with the Casascious coin, created by Mike Caldwell in 2011.

Caldwell minted a range of physical coins. He began with 0.5 and 1 BTC brass coins and even expanded to a 1,000 BTC gold-plated bar. By 2013, Caldwell had minted roughly 27,000 coins. However, he had to suspend his operation due to restrictions from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a branch of the Treasury Department.

They informed him that minting physical bitcoins would qualify him as a money transmitter. Thus, he would have to register at a federal level if he wanted to continue selling the coins.

What are the coins worth?

The answer to this question seems relatively simple a physical bitcoin is worth the amount of BTC held in its private key. However, it is not as simple as that. Due to the rarity of the coins, the price is often more than the BTC stored in the digital wallet.

Another factor for a physical Bitcoin's worth is the material used to create the coin. As discussed above, these coins are made from various materials. They could be metal-plated, made from gold or silver, or even plastic. The coin's price will increase if the material it was made from is expensive. For example, a coin made from gold will be more costly than a coin that uses metal plating.

Collectability also plays a significant factor. These coins are rare and unique due to the materials used, the logo printed and their limited supply. A coin that was minted a long time ago will be a rare collectable, especially if only a few others like it exist. As such, its value will be independent of the value of bitcoins stored in the private key. People would want to buy it because of its rarity, similar to movie posters or fiat coins that are no longer in circulation.

See more here:
What is a physical bitcoin, and what is its worth? - CNBCTV18

Lightning Network now gives Data Mynt merchants, partners and their customers a faster option for Bitcoin transactions at minimal cost.

Every day, Bitcoin is less about a store of value and, arguably, the currency-of-choice for day-to-day. Lightning is the key to unlocking the user experience for BTC payments the world is waiting for."

Alex Christian, Data Mynt CEO

SAN FRANCISCO, April 18, 2022 /PRNewswire/ --Data Mynt, the world's fastest growing cryptocurrency payment gateway, has launched support for its fourth major blockchain network in as many months, the BitcoinLightningNetwork. Data Mynt now facilitates seamless payments to and from all Lightning Network enabled wallets in addition to Polygon Network, Ethereum Mainnet, and Bitcoin network wallets and assets. Data Mynt merchants and partners, which are on schedule to number in the tens of thousands by the end of Q2 2022, now receive and send payments from all Lightning Network enabled wallets such as Cash App and Strike.

Favored by nation states such as El Salvador and household brandnames includingTwitter, PayPal and Whole Foods, Bitcoin is the world's most widely used digital asset.

Data Mynt is on pace to be the global leader in crypto payments by supporting all major blockchains, all enabled wallets and their owners' crypto-of-choice.

The Data Mynt gateway enables merchants, funds, and enterprises to expand their payment options for their crypto customers, investments, and partners. At the same time, it reduces payment processing costs and eliminates frictions such as chargebacks and crypto price volatility.

"Every day, Bitcoin is less about a store of value and, arguably, the currency-of-choice for day-to-day utility," noted Data Mynt CEO Alex Christian. "The Lightning Network is the key to unlocking the user experience and scalability for BTC payments that the entire world was waiting for." "Data Mynt's leadership in adopting Lightning will help bring Bitcoin to the next billion people around the world," said Elizabeth Stark, CEO and Co-Founder at Lightning Labs.

About Data Mynt

Data Mynt is a global crypto payment processing gateway. Its wallet, asset and blockchain-agnostic suite of solutions offer partners and merchants an omnichannel approach to receiving and sending on-chain crypto payments free from volatility, risks, and costs of traditional payment methods. The Data Mynt payment solution is also designed to streamline implementation via API, branded web page, iFrame and merchant app, while consistently delivering a seamless customer experience for hundreds of thousands of merchants. DataMynt.com

About Lightning Labs

Lightning Labs is building the next generation of decentralized, resilient financial infrastructure. We believe systems based on cryptography, blockchains, and smart contracts will enhance financial cooperation around the world in unprecedented ways at scales both large and small. We have developed Lightning Network Daemon (lnd) the most advanced and most developer-friendly implementation of the Lightning Network protocol. Along with Neutrino, an open platform that enables users with mobile devices to conduct blockchain and Lightning Network transactions quickly and easily.

Media Contacts:

Data Mynt

Alex Christian

334289@email4pr.com

Twitter

415-349-0533

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/data-mynt-crypto-payment-gateway-now-live-on-bitcoin-lightning-network-301526810.html

SOURCE Data Mynt

Read more:
Data Mynt Crypto Payment Gateway Now Live On Bitcoin Lightning Network - 69News WFMZ-TV

Alena Vorobiova hadn't thought much about bitcoin before Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Fast forward to border closures and shelling on her hometown, cash shortages at ATMs across the country, and the central bank suspending electronic cash transfers and she decided to give bitcoin a try.

Whereas money providers often charge transfer fees of 10% or more when you send $100 from the U.S. to Ukraine, bitcoin's Lightning Network, which is a payments platform built on bitcoin's base layer, slashes the cost of transactions to virtually zero.

Vorobiova and CNBC decided to put Lightning payments to the test with the expertise and translation skills of bitcoin developer Gleb Naumenko, who is currently hiding out in the western part of Ukraine as the war rages on.

The bottom line? It really does work as well as bitcoin boosters say it does.

The process of downloading a crypto wallet onto Vorobiova's phone, transferring bitcoin over the Lightning Network from the U.S. to Poland, and withdrawing the equivalent in Polish currency from a bitcoin ATM from the southwest city of Wrocaw took less than three minutes.

Alena Vorobiova withdraws Polish zloty from a bitcoin ATM in Poland.

Last August on a road trip from Houston to Dallas, Peter McCormack founder and host of the popular What Bitcoin Did' podcast taught CNBC how to use the Lightning Network to make instant payments to anyone in the world.

The tutorial took less than 60 seconds and involved four basic steps: We downloaded the Blue Wallet app and generated a one-time invoice in the form of a QR code. McCormack scanned that QR code using a similar app on his own phone, and then transferred 100,000 satoshis, or sats (the smallest denomination of bitcoin, about 0.00000001 BTC) from his account to ours. The total transfer was equivalent to about $50.

Eight months later, from a hotel room in Miami on the sidelines of the Bitcoin 2022 conference, CNBC decided to pay that knowledge and some of those sats forward.

On a three-way video call with Naumenko in Western Ukraine, Vorobiova in Southwest Poland, and CNBC in Miami, we followed a very similar sequence of events.

With the guidance of Naumenko, Vorobiova downloaded the Muun wallet app, a different type of self-custodial wallet for bitcoin and Lightning, made a four-digit pin, and generated an invoice as a QR code. CNBC then captured that QR code using the scan mode in the Blue Wallet and transferred over 50,000 of sats from McCormack. The fees amounted to fractions of a penny. (For purposes of the experiment, Naumenko transferred another 50,000 because the bitcoin ATM had a minimum withdrawal amount.)

Bitcoin developer Jeff Czyz tells CNBC that Lightning wallets are compatible because they all have to implement the Basis of Lightning Technology, or BOLT, specification, which defines a layer-2 protocol for sending payments across the Lightning Network.

"A Lightning wallet app is akin to a bank, in that sending money between banks requires them to speak the same language," said Czyz, a developer with Jack Dorsey's team known as Spiral (formerly Square Crypto). That common language is the BOLT specification.

"The Lightning Network consists of nodes connected by payment channels, which are used to forward payments across the network without the need to trust intermediaries," continued Czyz.

Alena Vorobiova withdraws Polish zloty from a bitcoin ATM in Poland.

Just like the tutorial in the car, the process of transferring sats from Miami to Wrocaw also took about a minute.

From there, Vorobiova who followed her sister and niece to the Polish city of Wrocaw to help them get settled went to one of the fifteen bitcoin ATMs in Wrocaw and requested a withdrawal.

She accomplished this by using a QR code that the ATM spit out. She scanned the QR code into her phone using the Muun app, transferred her bitcoin into the ATM's account, and the ATM in turn issued the money. She ended up with 170 zloty, the Polish currency, worth about 100,000 sats or $40. The ATM company took a fee of 10 zloty, or about 5.5% of the total transaction.

"That's the same flow as making a payment for a good or service using Lightning," explained Czyz.

For Vorobiova, this was more of a fun experiment. She is able to go back and forth from Ukraine to Poland, and she tells CNBC that she is following the guidance of Ukrainian regulators to just use credit cards for the time being.

But the process illustrates how refugees with no cash and no way of accessing their belongings can use crypto wallets for banking.

Some Ukrainians use it to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions, while others have found that Lightning is a cheap and fast way to receive donations and remittances from anywhere in the world. In Poland, for example, there are more than 175 bitcoin ATMs, allowing refugees who fled with bitcoin to cash it back out for fiat currency.

"Me sitting in California, I can still send you any amount of money instantly to your phone anytime," said Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer for the Human Rights Foundation, which has been supporting activists in Ukraine since 2009.

"We don't have to worry about the fact that you're a refugee. It doesn't matter that you don't have a Polish passport or a bank account. None of these things matter," continued Gladstein.

See the article here:
We sent bitcoin from Miami to a Ukrainian in Poland who withdrew it as cash, all in less than three minutes - CNBC

All Bitcoin transactions are public, anyone can look at them. Whirlpool bitcoin mixing breaks deterministic links to past transactions and provides forward-looking anonymity. This article demonstrates the easiest way to Whirlpool your bitcoin so that you can take steps to preserve the censorship-resistant and permissionless attributes of Bitcoin, demonstrating how to install and set up a new Samourai Wallet on Android.

Samourai Wallet is a mobile-first, privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet. Additionally, connecting Samourai Wallet to the Desktop Whirlpool graphical user interface (GUI) will be covered. Some of the privacy-enhancing tools built into Samourai Wallet include:

The Whirlpool implementation can be used directly from the mobile Samourai Wallet application without any additional configuration. However, if you are not using your own node then you are trusting someone else's. Using Samourai Wallet in connection with your own Dojo on the RoninDojo Tanto provides you with the most privacy-conscience solution, as you are not trusting someone else's node, you are using your own node.

Every Bitcoin wallet, be it mobile or desktop, needs to gather information about wallet balances and transaction history from a Bitcoin node; it is best practice to use your own node but it is not a requirement as many wallet developers provide publicly-accessible nodes. This section will demonstrate how to use Samourai Wallet without your own node, as this is the simplest and fastest way to start.

Before you get started, it will help to have a recovery sheet or notebook to write your seed phrase and passphrase information.

You can download the Samourai Wallet application from an F-Droid repo, its website or the Google Play Store.

Simply install the application and follow the on-screen system prompts. Once you launch the application, select MAINNET.

Next, you will be greeted with a helpful on-boarding presentation.

Next, you will be asked to choose a directory to store your encrypted wallet backup file. Then allow system access.

Next, you can toggle on the option to enable Tor. Leave the option to connect to your own Dojo toggled off to use the default settings which will communicate with the Samourai Wallet Dojo node instead of your own private Dojo node. Then press the Create a new wallet button in Samourai Wallet. Or, if you have a wallet to import, then select the option to Restore an existing wallet instead.

Next you will be asked to create a passphrase. Using a strong, high-entropy passphrase will help protect your bitcoin in the event that your 12-word seed phrase is ever compromised.

Check the box that says you understand that no one can help you recover a lost or forgotten passphrase. Keep in mind as well that any passphrase you enter will generate a completely different wallet, so make sure you are writing this down correctly and double checking your work. If you ever need to restore your wallet and you enter a passphrase that is off by even a single character, then it will generate a completely different wallet. After entering your passphrase, the app will ask you if you would like to download the recovery sheet.

The next screen will present your 12-word seed phrase. Do not share these words with anyone for any reason. These 12 words are a human-readable representation of your Bitcoin private key. Anyone who gains access to these words and passphrase can take your bitcoin. Do not take a screenshot of these words. Do not take a picture of these words. Do not save them in a text file or other digital format. Make sure that you write these down in order and then secure this seed phrase like it was cash, gold or jewelry. Many people choose to stamp their wallet recovery information (seed phrase and passphrase) into metal that can withstand extreme environments such as fire and flooding. You can find further information on this topic here.

Then you will be asked to confirm the passphrase you entered and then create a PIN. The PIN will be required to access the Samourai Wallet application. Use a strong PIN that is not easy to guess or the same as your primary phone access PIN.

Finally, you will be presented with your unique PayNym, you can claim it so that others can easily connect with you. Then you will be at the home screen, you can click on the blue + sign to see options for Whirlpool, send, receive and PayNym. The receive option for example is where you can generate new Bitcoin addresses.

Now you have a mobile Bitcoin wallet with built-in privacy tools that communicates over Tor. Congratulations, this is a great step along the path to sovereignty. Go out and earn some bitcoin in exchange for goods or services, buy some from an ATM or earn some mining rewards.

Once you have received bitcoin that you would like to mix, simply follow these steps from your mobile Samourai Wallet:

Now your resulting UTXOs from the TX0 will be registered as available inputs to new mixes. Once mixed, your UTXOs will be in your post-mix wallet. From there, anytime you open the Whirlpool client in your mobile Samourai Wallet application, those UTXOs will be registered as available inputs to mixes looking for free riders. The mixing stops once you close the mobile Whirlpool client.

Going a step further, there is a way to achieve 24/7 mixing, even when you close the application on your mobile. You can install the Whirlpool GUI on your desktop, connect it to your mobile wallet and the desktop GUI will keep your UTXOs mixing.

First, you will need to download the Whirlpool client appropriate for your operating system. The different options along with accompanying developer signatures can be found here and detailed installation instructions can be found here. Be aware that you will likely need to install OpenJDK as well which is covered in the installation instructions.

After installing the Whirlpool client application, launch it and then select the Standalone: Standalone GUI option. Then click on Continue.

Give the GUI some time, Tor connections can take a little while. You may need to try this a couple of times before the connection is made. But once the connection is made, you will be presented with a screen asking you to input the Whirlpool pairing payload from your Samourai Wallet. In Samourai Wallet, click on the three-dot menu in the upper right-hand corner and select Settings then Transactions then Pair to Whirlpool GUI at the bottom. This will display a QR code that contains your Whirlpool payload. Simply click on the QR code option in the desktop GUI and this should launch your webcam, then hold up the QR code on your mobile so the camera can scan it.

Once received, then click on Initialize GUI.

Next, enter the passphrase for your Samourai Wallet and click on Sign in.

Once signed in, you should be able to see your balances, mixing activity and then you can set targets for how many mixes you wish to achieve. You can even generate deposit addresses from the Whirlpool GUI.

Now when you initiate mixes from your mobile Samourai Wallet app, you can close the app afterwards and your UTXOs will continue to be registered as available inputs to mixes as free riders so long as your desktop client stays running. This configuration is using the default Samourai Wallet node as a backend. For network privacy, the communication happens over Tor. This can also be configured to use your own node instead.

This is a guest post by Econoalchemist. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

Here is the original post:
The Easiest Way To Whirlpool Your Bitcoin And Preserve Privacy - Bitcoin Magazine