Markets:

BTC/USD is changing hands above $9,600. The price went as high as $9,944 on Thursday, but the psychological $10,000 remained untouched. The first digital coin recovered from the intraday low of $9,236, however, the short-term trend remains bearish amid low volatility. The next critical support is created by $9,000.

ETH/USD struggles to stay above $200.00. The second-largest coin touched the intraday low of $197.10 before recovering to $201.30 by press time. The price has decreased by 1% since the beginning of the day and stayed unchanged on a day-to-day basis. Now ETH is moving within a short-term bearish trend. The volatility is low.

XRP/USD is hovering marginally above $0.2000 after a short-lived move to the intraday low of $0.1970. While a sustainable move outside the range is a positive development, we still need to see a follow-through for the momentum to gain traction. XRP/USD is trading within a bearish trend amid shrinking volatility.

Among the 100 most important cryptocurrencies, OmiseGO (OMG) $1.03 (+35.5%), Zilliqa (ZIL) $0.0104 (+17.9%)

The day's losers are Crypterium (CRPT) $0.4699 (-12.7%), ABBC Coin (ABBC) $0.1438 (-10.2%) Bytecoin (BCN) $0.00025 (-9.2%), IOTA (IOT) $0.2082 (+9.5%)

Chart of the day:BTC/USD, daily chart

Market

Bitcoin per $476,000 is not science fiction, at least in the long run, according to the CEO and founder at Real Vision and a well-known trader, Raoul Pal. He joined the club of cryptocurrency experts, who believe that Bitcoin has strong growth potential and eventually will cost $300,000-$500,000. Thus, Morgan Creek Digitals Mark Yusko and a prominent investor Max Keiser aired similar forecasts.

Industry

Visa has filed a patent application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for creating digital currency on a blockchain. The application was filed in November 2018, but published only on May 14, 2020. According to the document, Visa International Service Association and inventors Simon J. Hurry and Alexander Pierre wanted to receive a patent for a blockchain-based digital currency controlled by a central entity computer.

The new coin may be based on Ethereum network for the proposed coin that is supposed to be backed by the US Dollar. The process of maintaining the value of the stablecoin is described as follows:

...every time a dollar worth of digital fiat currency is generated, the central entity ensures that a corresponding physical dollar bill is removed from circulation, in order to regulate the value of the digital fiat currency.

According to the data provided by the research company Elliptic, the share of Bitcoin transactions related to illegal activity has been less than 1% of the total amount of operations with the digital currency. The experts noticed that Bitcoin has become less popular in criminal circles. Speaking in the interview with The Block, Tom Robinson, co-founder and chief scientist of Elliptic, said:

There is a clear downward trend. I think this is due to the introduction of anti-money laundering (AML) regulations, the work of law enforcement, and the AML efforts of crypto exchanges and other businesses - as well as speculation emerging as the dominant use of crypto.

Regulation

According to Pantera Capital Founder Dr. Steven Waterhouse, the US government wont allow private companies to challenge the status of the US Dollar. He believes that the government sees private cryptocurrencies with hundreds of millions of users as a threat to the dollar. Speaking in the interview, recorded prior to Pavel Durovs announcement, he said

The idea that some random startups are going to build their own stablecoins, perhaps with hundreds of millions of installs of a messenger client, whether it's Facebook or Telegram or someone else, potentially challenge the sort of central bank digital currency or existing central bank currencies? [...] That's got to be triggering for regulators. So I think that's why we've seen such a strong reaction to both Facebook Libra and also Telegram.

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Cryptocurrency Market News: Bitcoin in tactical retreat to $9,600 before another jump to $10,000 - FXStreet

It hasnt been long since bitcoin broke the ground in 2009, turning the monetary landscape upside down. With its decentralized nature and exceptional privacy, cryptocurrency quickly became popular among young people trying to make quick money.

As interesting as it is for tech and financial experts alike, theres no way around the harsh truth thats often swiped under the rug while discussing crypto: it damages the environment and the communities where its mined.

There has been extensive research done on the disruptive effects of cryptocurrency on the financial market, however, fewer people have highlighted the environmental damage that it causes along the way.

What is crypto mining?

In order to maximize their profits, crypto miners always try to seek out places with low-cost electricity and weak environmental policies, ultimately creating hazards for the environments and impact local populations without benefitting the communities.

The way the crypto miners produce currency is through an energy-intensive process requiring vast computing resources. According to recent estimates, over the course of a year, cryptocurrency consumes around 64 TWh (terawatt hours) of energy. Ranking it on top of the country of Switzerland by energy consumption, which 58 TWh per year.

As financial technologies become more and more accessible, ultimately making our lives much easier, there are certain aspects of fintech that create lasting damage to human health and the environment around us. Some activities that were once only a prerogative of the privileged few, like foreign exchange trading, are now accessible for everyone with a smartphone. This mobile trading FX brokers list shows just how much more accessible it is for virtually anyone to get involved in the foreign exchange market. With the increased accessibility to both FX, crypto, and other interesting new financial technologies, there should also be an increased awareness of the potential damaging side-effects that they might entail.

Due to its decentralized control, most cryptocurrencies have emerged from the grassroots communities, rather being corporate or government managed. To put it simplistically, cryptocurrencies are generated by using computers to solve puzzles that are stored in a blockchain, which are accessible on a decentralized database.

The difficulty of the puzzles increases proportionally to the number of miners competing to unlock bitcoins. In order to continuously solve the algorithms, mining servers require a tremendous source of energy. Ultimately, if the energy expense of mining exceeds the income from the currency produced, there is no more motivation to continue mining, which also significantly undermines the infrastructure that validates its monetary value.

In practice, this means that the possibility of profiting from mining cryptocurrency rises with the more powerful computer, faster internet connection, and the cheaper infrastructural services, such as electricity.

The damaging environmental impact of crypto mining

Despite its digital nature, the impact that cryptocurrency has on the physical environment and the welfare of communities where its mined cant be ignored.

With each cryptocurrency, the rising electricity requirements to produce a single coin can lead to an almost inevitable cliff of negative net social benefit, states a recent study about the monetary price of health and air quality impacts of cryptocurrencies.

Researchers claim that although mining activities produce financial value, electricity use creates crypto damage a term coined to illustrate the effects of digital exchange on human health and the environment.

There are ongoing debates on the exact extent of the impact that mining has on the environment. Even though it is agreed upon that crypto mining damages the environment, the impacts are markedly higher in places where the mining is dependent on dirty energy sources, such as the coal-fueled crypto mines in Mongolia. Coal energy sources offer prices that are 30% cheaper than the average energy consumption rates for industrial firms. With that being said, any cryptocurrency mined in China will produce four times as much CO2 pollution as the volume produced by renewable energy sources in Canada.

Sustainable way forward

With the growing popularity of cryptocurrency, as demonstrated by it entering more mainstream markets and being embraced by traditional financial institutions, we can surely foresee that crypto isnt going to go anywhere anytime soon. With the damage that it currently does to the environment, its also evident that its not sustainable, for now.

There are several promising figures that show a sustainable way of going forward with the crypto mining industry.

Recent figures show that crypto-mining facilities are looking into subsidizing the development of renewable energy resources in order to seek the cheapest resource to optimize the consumption value. The relationship between renewable energy and crypto-mining is well demonstrated in the bitcoin mining operations in China. The provinces hosting the most crypto-mining facilities correlate with the ones producing energy with renewable resources.

80% of Chinas bitcoin mining operations were based in Sichuan in 2017 a province that generated approximately 90% of its energy production from renewable resources, thereby accounting for 43% of global Bitcoin mining operations at the time.

The profitability of cryptocurrency mining is heavily dependent on its market value coupled with the price of electricity. If the value of a cryptocurrency decreases and goes below its cost of production, mining becomes unprofitable due to the large costs of the energy it needs. The most well-off crypto-miners work at the lowest cost by accessing the cheapest electricity capable of achieving intense use. As a result, miners are finding inexpensive energy markets while taking advantage of policy conditions that do not control how energy can be consumed.

Going forward, the crypto industry can become more sustainable if it commits to using renewable, clean energy in order to sustain itself. As the statistics show, in the long run, renewable energy is the future of electricity consumption. Utilizing the low-cost nature, crypto miners have an incentive to continue mining while minimizing their damage to the environment. However due to the decentralized nature of crypto that makes it so attractive to many will come as a detriment to the initiative, as at the end of the day theres no one to make the decision to go green but the individual miners.

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No way around it: the irreparable damage cryptocurrency does to the environment - Green Prophet

Longtime hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jonestold CNBC on Monday that Wall Street could be witnessing the historic "birthing of a store of value" through popular cryptocurrency bitcoin.

"It's a great speculation," Jones said on "Squawk Box."

He said he has "just over 1% of my assets in bitcoin. Maybe it's almost 2. That seems like the right number right now."

"Every day that goes by that bitcoin survives, the trust in it will go up," he added.

Jones, founder and chief executive at Tudor Investment and largely considered one of the best macroeconomic traders ever, told investors in a recent letter that he's betting on bitcoin as part of a far-larger strategy of maximizing profits.

For investors who have followed Jones' success in predicting the path of economic events, including his prescient bets against the U.S. stock market in 1987, his foray into cryptocurrency may seem unusual. But Jones defended his new investment, especially versus other stores of value like U.S. dollars.

Modern government-backed currencies, he argued, will almost always diminish in value over time. Many investors shy away from cash over the long term as legislatures continue to spend more than they generate in revenues and lean on central banks to pump cash into the economy, decreasing the purchasing power of each individual dollar.

"If you take cash, on the other hand, and you think about it from a purchasing power standpoint, if you own cash in the world today, you know your central bank has an avowed goal of depreciating its value 2% per year," Jones said. "So you have, in essence, a wasting asset in your hands."

Bitcoin, on the other hand, isn't subject to the whims of government spending, but is itself risky because it's only 11 years old, Jones said.He also confirmed that he has a portion of his portfolio invested in gold, a popular inflation hedge, and said he thought the metal could go "substantially higher" if inflation spikes.

"When I think of bitcoin, look at it as one tiny part of a portfolio. It may end up being the best performer of all of them, I kind of think it might be," he said. "But I'm very conservative. I'm going to keep a tiny percent of my assets in it and that's it. It has not stood the test of time, for instance, the way gold has."

Jones also said Monday that the economy would be in a "Second Depression" if the coronavirus pandemic doesn't get contained in a year.

The investor told CNBC in late March that the stock market could shoot higher by June if Covid-19 cases began to peak. The S&P 500 is up more than 15% since those comments on March 26 and the Nasdaq Composite has since turned positive for 2020.

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Paul Tudor Jones calls bitcoin a 'great speculation,' says he has almost 2% of his assets in it - CNBC

The cryptocurrency market has been painted with one big bearish flag led by the major cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin price plunged from highs close to $10,000 on Saturday to intraday lows at $8,105. Ethereum could not hold above $200 due to its correlation with Bitcoin price. Ether touched lows at $180 but is now trading 11.21% lower at $186. The third-largest cryptocurrency has not been spared as it has spiraled to $0.1780 (intraday low) from Saturday levels above $0.22.

The selloff in the market is taking place less than two days the 2020 block reward halving. The drop was not expected many traders must have been caught off guard. For instance, data by analytics platform Skew shows that liquidations hit highs $226 million.

Other cryptocurrencies have also recorded double-digit losses include Bitcoin Cash (11.5%), NEO (10.66%), Litecoin (10.81%), IOTA (12.16%), EOS (10.91%) and Ethereum Classis (12.83%).

Intriguingly, Bitcoin price bounced off the 61.8% Fibonacci level to exchange hands at $8,611. This shows the willingness of the investors to buy in anticipation of a reversal above $9,000. Also holding the price in place is the 200-day SMA (0$8,053). However, the sharp slope of the RSI suggests that selling pressure is still high in spite of the bounce from the intraday lows. Therefore, other support areas to keep in mind include $8,000, .the 50-day SMA and $7,000.

Read more:
Cryptocurrency Market Update: Bloodbath as Bitcoin nosedives to $8,000, Ethereum $180 and Ripple $0.1780 - FXStreet