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With some cryptocurrencies down 40% or more from their recent highs, crypto investors may be nervous about what comes next. But despite the volatility, there are at least three good reasons forbitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC) investors to believe in the cryptocurrency's future.

To say bitcoin has been on a wild ride in the last year is an understatement. Just since May of last year, bitcoin rose from about $9,400 to over $64,000 by April 2021. Bitcoin's recent correction gained steam based on two key factors. Elon Musk seemed to back away from his support of bitcoin based on the idea that bitcoin mining uses a tremendous amount of power. This doesn't fit within Tesla's (NASDAQ: TSLA) eco-friendly stance. The second issue was China cracking down on the use of crypto as a form of payment.

Though bitcoin's price has been volatile, increased acceptance as an investable asset class seems to bode well for its future. Square (NYSE:SQ) was one of the first companies to help move bitcoin into the mainstream through its Cash App. In case there was any doubt about the popularity of bitcoin, Square's bitcoin business jumped 11-fold to more than $3.5 billion in the company's most recent quarter. The financial company has constantly referenced bitcoin engagement within the Cash App as one of its growth pillars.

Image source: Getty Images.

PayPal (NASDAQ:PYPL) isn't content to let Square corner bitcoin enthusiasts. The payments company wants customers to feel comfortable with crypto as a form of payment, ofering to "put the currency back into cryptocurrency." Many investors are still trying to learn about what crypto is and how it might fit their life. Though many companies allow investors to buy crypto, the are relatively few debit card or payment options, that allow people to spend crypto directly. PayPal is offering to automatically convert crypto to spendable currency to make payments wherever PayPal is accepted.

It's one thing for retail-focused companies to attract customers with bitcoin options. However, Goldman Sachs' head of digital assets, Mathew McDermott, said the investment firm's institutional clientshave moved beyond learning about crypto and are requesting access to it for their portfolios.

Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) wants into the bitcoin business as well. The bank will soon offer a professionally managed solution for clients involving cryptocurrency. John LaForge, the bank's head of real asset strategy said, "We think the cryptocurrency space has just kind of hit an evolution and maturation of its development that allows it now to be a viable investable asset."

There's a method to bitcoin mining's madness. A study from 2018 in Applied Economics Letters suggestsa theory behind the price of bitcoin: The value of a single bitcoin is correlated to the cost to mine that coin.

Given this backdrop, it makes sense to look at the costs that go into mining. One of the primary costs miners deal with is the graphics card(s), or ASIC miner(s), that generate most of the processing power. Graphics cards and ASIC miners are suffering from ongoing supply shortages. Theoretically, as the cost to acquire mining equipment increases, so should the price of bitcoin.

The largest supplier of bitcoin mining gear is Bitmain, which reportedly is soldout until at least August of this year. Where graphics cards are concerned, Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) believes the GPU shortageis likely to continue through 2021. Due to supply shortages, it's a regular occurrence for scalpers to buy and then resell mining equipment with a significant markup.

Investors should note that bitcoin mining is also limited to one block every 10 minutes, so miners can't speed up production to churn out more coins. With high demand, set production, and increased costs to acquire mining equipment, bitcoin's price should rise as long as these trends continue. The challenge with these trends is scarcity driving costs up also means driving out less capitalized competition. According to Fitch Solutions, a data analytics firm, the chip shortage affecting miners could last at least until 2023.

Investorsare beginning to speculate that bitcoin could follow Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) in moving from proof-of-work (mining), to proof-of-stake (holding). One of the central issues being debated publicly is the massive electricity cost of running a proof-of-work system like bitcoin. However, there are several reasons to believe bitcoin may not need to follow Ethereum down the proof-of-stake road.

First, Ethereum's moving to proof-of-stake because of the vast number of applications trying to run on the current network. A proof-of-stake network, which requires far less computing power to verify transactions, can help Ethereum's network expand and become more efficient.

Second, the bitcoin network has been developing a lightning network since 2015.Think of it as an access road that connects to the bitcoin highway, but also runs parallel. In bitcoin's traditional network, each new transaction is linked and reaffirmed with all of the other data on the network. Using the lightning network, two parties can essentially send and receive between each other multiple times without including the main network in every single transaction. This way, bitcoin transactions can fork off the main road and create many smaller transaction sideroads that don't have to clog up the main network. As new lightning-supported crypto wallets become more prevalent, the bitcoin network should be faster and theoretically cheaper to use.

Lastly, bitcoin's limited supply argues investors should favor holding the coin as a scarce asset. Unlike bitcoin, Ethereum doesn't have a hard cap on its supply overall, which means it can much more easily pay interest to stakeholders by giving them more ETH. Bitcoin's hard cap of 21 million total coins means that at some point, stakeholders would no longer be able to generate additional interest in bitcoins, because the cap would have been reached.

Bitcoin investors can also draw encouragement from the similarities between bitcoin and gold. Gold holds value not only from its relative scarcity, but also because it requires work and time to mine the metal. There are an estimated 190,000 tons of gold above ground. Each year, roughly 2,500 to 3,000 tons of new gold is mined. Given the costs and limitations of profitable mining, statistical research suggests that large-scale gold mining won't continue much past 2075.

Bitcoin's future supply sounds similar to its real metal counterpart. The crypto equivalent of gold has a circulating supply of about 18.7 million coins. By design, Bitcoin sets its maximum supply at about 21 million coins. Bitcoin mining generates a block every 10 minutes worth 6.25 bitcoins. Blocks are reduced by 50% automaticallyevery 210,000 blocks, or roughly every 4 years, which reduces bitcoin's inflation rate. With these calculations, investors know the final bitcoin should be mined around 2140.

Even Sylvia Carrasco, CEO of gold exchange Goldex, finds similarities between gold and bitcoin. In a questionnaire by Markets Insider in February 2021, Carrasco was asked if she would rather hold gold or bitcoin over the next ten years. She noted, "Bitcoin and gold both have significant advantages over fiat currencies because neither can be diluted or debased."

While bitcoin is certainly more volatile than gold or many stocks, its returns significantly outperformed these other assets over the last two years in particular.

Asset

6 Months

1 Year

2 Years

Gold

0.4%

11.5%

45.54%

S&P 500

11.7%

40.3%

53.47%

Bitcoin

31.8%

321.7%

342.79%

Data source: Yahoo Finance.

Investors can't afford to ignore an asset that has outperformed others by this margin. Bitcoin seems to get a new stamp of approval from different companies on a regular basis. The squeeze on supplies of efficient mining equipment increases the cost to produce the coin. As bitcoin moves toward mainstream adoption, gold and crypto seem ever more similar.

After the recent crypto correction, Bitcoin trades at a nearly 40% discount to its 52-week high. Investors looking for confidence in bitcoin's future can watch for future expansions of bitcoin into more mainstream financial transactions. In late May 2021, PayPal announced it would now allow users to transfer bitcoin outside of PayPal's internal crypto wallet for the first time. This will allow users to freely move their bitcoin to other sites for trading, or to make payments to their friends directly with crypto instead of having to convert their crypto to cash first.

When it comes to tracking the mining side of the equation, investors can keep up with Nvidia as a way to track how supplies are moving. As long as Nvidia's supply is constrained, there is a decent chance that mining costs are up, which would seem to support bitcoin's price. But investors should remember that bitcoin is closer to the crypto world's version of gold, not the dollar. While it's important that bitcoin be usable, the fact that institutions and individuals want to hold bitcoin in their portfolios is another factor to watch. Those worried about having missed the big move in bitcoin may be getting another chance with the recent correction.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Were motley! Questioning an investing thesis -- even one of our own -- helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

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Investors Who Worry About Bitcoin Should Remember These 3 Things - The Motley Fool

MELVILLE, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Henry Schein One, a subsidiary of Henry Schein, Inc. (Nasdaq: HSIC), announced today that it has acquired an 80% ownership position in Jarvis Analytics, a software company that develops comprehensive business analytics tools to help dental practitioners and their teams use data to diagnose problems, strengthen decision-making, and improve business performance.

Dallas-based Jarvis Analytics was founded by Steven Maroulis in 2017. Maroulis will continue to manage Jarvis Analytics and lead the Henry Schein One Dental Analytics business as Executive Director. The expected 2021 financial results from Jarvis Analytics are immaterial to Henry Schein One. The acquisition will be neutral to Henry Scheins 2021 earnings per share and accretive thereafter. Additional financial terms were not disclosed.

This partnership further demonstrates our commitment to offer the latest advances in technology through Henry Schein One, making it possible for dental practices to improve nearly every aspect of their business management, said Stanley M. Bergman, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Henry Schein. We look forward to a strong partnership with Jarvis that will enable dental teams to use data more effectively to build a better business.

Dental practices have tremendous amounts of data stored in practice management systems, such as Henry Scheins market-leading Dentrix, Dentrix Ascend, and Dentrix Enterprise, as well as systems for patient relationship management, finance, marketing, and more. Unfortunately, many dental practices do not yet consolidate and analyze this disparate data. Jarvis simplifies the collection of data from multiple sources and organizes it so the information can be presented in real-time reports, dashboards, and other methods. Jarvis analytics tools can also help identify the impact positive changes may have on projected revenue, including hygiene recall, patient retention, case acceptance, and collection.

Data mining is the new vehicle for accelerating dental business growth. Dental practices that know how to use dental analytics to analyze their data can see what has happened, what is happening, and make informed decisions about the changes they should make to improve performance, said Mike Baird, Chief Executive Officer of Henry Schein One. The addition of Jarvis Analytics means dental teams will benefit by having a trusted partner with the size and expertise of Henry Schein One to enhance and support their dental analytics solutions. With these insights, practices owners and dental management teams can make better decisions to improve efficiency, increase revenue, and maintain clinical excellence.

Jarvis Analytics will continue to be practice management system agnostic, working with more than 10 practice management systems, including Dentrix, Dentrix Ascend, and Dentrix Enterprise. The analytics tools offered by Jarvis Analytics will eventually become integrated into select Henry Schein One practice management systems, making it possible to deliver one digital workflow that simplifies management while improving business performance.

From day one, our vision has been to help dental practitioners turn practice management data into powerful insights, said Mr. Maroulis. Our customers recognize the value of data analytics and have chosen to embed it into every layer of their business to drive operational efficiencies and growth. Were excited for the future and look forward to the critical role Jarvis will undertake to help Henry Schein One become the leader in dental analytics solutions for dental businesses of any size.

About Henry Schein OneHenry Schein One, a subsidiary of Henry Schein, Inc. established in partnership with Internet Brands in 2018, is a software company providing integrated software and services to the dental industry. Headquartered in American Fork, Utah, the company offers market-leading solutions for dental practices, including Dentrix, Dentrix Ascend, Dentrix Enterprise, Easy Dental, TechCentral, Demandforce, Sesame Communications, Lighthouse360, Officite, and DentalPlans.com as well as solutions offered through international companies, including Software of Excellence, Logiciel Julie, InfoMed, axiUm, and LabNet, among others. For more information, visit http://www.henryscheinone.com.

About Henry Schein, Inc.Henry Schein, Inc. (Nasdaq: HSIC) is a solutions company for health care professionals powered by a network of people and technology. With more than 20,000 Team Schein Members worldwide, the Company's network of trusted advisors provides more than 1 million customers globally with more than 300 valued solutions that help improve operational success and clinical outcomes. Our Business, Clinical, Technology, and Supply Chain solutions help office-based dental and medical practitioners work more efficiently so they can provide quality care more effectively. These solutions also support dental laboratories, government and institutional health care clinics, as well as other alternate care sites.

Henry Schein operates through a centralized and automated distribution network, with a selection of more than 120,000 branded products and Henry Schein private-brand products in stock, as well as more than 180,000 additional products available as special-order items.

A FORTUNE 500 Company and a member of the S&P 500 index, Henry Schein is headquartered in Melville, N.Y., and has operations or affiliates in 31 countries and territories. The Company's sales reached $10.1 billion in 2020, and have grown at a compound annual rate of approximately 12 percent since Henry Schein became a public company in 1995.

For more information, visit Henry Schein at http://www.henryschein.com, Facebook.com/HenrySchein, and @HenrySchein on Twitter.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

In accordance with the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, we provide the following cautionary remarks regarding important factors that, among others, could cause future results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements, expectations and assumptions expressed or implied herein. All forward-looking statements made by us are subject to risks and uncertainties and are not guarantees of future performance. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results, performance and achievements or industry results to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These statements are generally identified by the use of such terms as may, could, expect, intend, believe, plan, estimate, forecast, project, anticipate, to be, to make or other comparable terms. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, those discussed in the documents we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), including our Annual Report on Form 10-K. Forward looking statements include the overall impact of the Novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) on the Company, its results of operations, liquidity, and financial condition (including any estimates of the impact on these items), the rate and consistency with which dental and other practices resume or maintain normal operations in the United States and internationally, expectations regarding personal protective equipment (PPE) and COVID-19 related product sales and inventory levels and whether additional resurgences of the virus will adversely impact the resumption of normal operations, the impact of restructuring programs as well as of any future acquisitions, and more generally current expectations regarding performance in current and future periods. Forward looking statements also include the (i) ability of the Company to make additional testing available, the nature of those tests and the number of tests intended to be made available and the timing for availability, the nature of the target market, as well as the efficacy or relative efficacy of the test results given that the test efficacy has not been, or will not have been, independently verified under normal FDA procedures and (ii) potential for the Company to distribute the COVID-19 vaccines and ancillary supplies.

Risk factors and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from current and historical results include, but are not limited to: risks associated with COVID-19, as well as other disease outbreaks, epidemics, pandemics, or similar wide spread public health concerns and other natural disasters or acts of terrorism; our dependence on third parties for the manufacture and supply of our products; our ability to develop or acquire and maintain and protect new products (particularly technology products) and technologies that achieve market acceptance with acceptable margins; transitional challenges associated with acquisitions, dispositions and joint ventures, including the failure to achieve anticipated synergies/benefits; financial and tax risks associated with acquisitions, dispositions and joint ventures; certain provisions in our governing documents that may discourage third-party acquisitions of us; effects of a highly competitive (including, without limitation, competition from third-party online commerce sites) and consolidating market; the potential repeal or judicial prohibition on implementation of the Affordable Care Act; changes in the health care industry; risks from expansion of customer purchasing power and multi-tiered costing structures; increases in shipping costs for our products or other service issues with our third-party shippers; general global macro-economic and political conditions, including international trade agreements and potential trade barriers; failure to comply with existing and future regulatory requirements; risks associated with the EU Medical Device Regulation; failure to comply with laws and regulations relating to health care fraud or other laws and regulations; failure to comply with laws and regulations relating to the confidentiality of sensitive personal information or standards in electronic health records or transmissions; changes in tax legislation; litigation risks; new or unanticipated litigation developments and the status of litigation matters; cyberattacks or other privacy or data security breaches; risks associated with our global operations; our dependence on our senior management, as well as employee hiring and retention; and disruptions in financial markets. The order in which these factors appear should not be construed to indicate their relative importance or priority.

We caution that these factors may not be exhaustive and that many of these factors are beyond our ability to control or predict. Accordingly, any forward-looking statements contained herein should not be relied upon as a prediction of actual results. We undertake no duty and have no obligation to update forward-looking statements.

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Henry Schein One Acquires Majority Interest in Jarvis Analytics - Business Wire

Here is the list of the top 10 AI professors who help their students excel in technology.

Artificial intelligenceand other disruptive technologies likemachine learning,natural language processing, data analytics, cloud computing, etc. are created by humans to make life easier. They are mostly human-based, which means they resemble or work like us. The trigger behind all the technological developments inartificial intelligence advances and influences speech recognition, visual perception, language identification, decision making, etc. Further, the efforts are turned to machines that we use in our daily life. To scholar disruptive technologies, aspirants need clear people who can provide guidance and help them achieve their goals. That is whatartificial intelligence professorsdo in colleges. Artificial intelligenceprofessors in Indiaand elsewhere elaborate their students on technology and motivate them to achieve big things in life. Analytics Insight has listed the top 10artificial intelligence professorswho offer the right opportunity to students and help them excel in their interested fields.

Balaraman Ravindran is the Mindtree Faculty Fellow and a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He also heads the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and AI at the IITM. Ravindran holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Currently, his research interests are centred on learning from and through interactions and span the area of data mining, social network analysis, and reinforcement learning. Ravindran has published over 100 papers in journals and conferences, including premier venues such as ICML, AAAI, IJCAI, etc.

LinkedIn-Balaraman Ravindran

Umesh Bellur is the Head of the Department of Computer Science at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB). He holds a B.E in Electronics Engineering from Bangalore University and secured his PhD in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University, New York. Bellur is interested in anything distributed around virtualization and cloud computing where he is looking at problems in derivative clouds and serverless computing, VM provisioning, placement, and migration. As an educational professional, he is skilled in distributed systems, Linux, Algorithms, C/C++/Python, and cloud computing.

LinkedIn-Umesh Bellur

Pulak Ghosh is IIMB Chair of Excellence and Professor of Decision Sciences at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIMB). Ghosh specializes in intersections of big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and its use in economics, finance, policy, and social value creation. Before joining IIMB, he served as Associate Director, Novartis Pharmaceuticals. He also held teaching jobs as Assistant Professor at Georgia State University ad Associate Professor at Emory University, USA. Ghosh also served in the Advisory group of big data at the United Nations (UN) Global Pulse, a big data initiative by the UN and the knowledge commission of UNESCO-MGEIP.

LinkedIn-Pulak Ghosh

Sanjiva Prasad is the professor and head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD). He received his B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur in 1985 and his MS and PhD in Computer Science from SUNY, Stony Brook, USA. Prasads research interests are in the broad area of formal methods, programming language and their semantics, concurrency theory, verification, proof theory, mobile computation, formal foundations of networks, including IoT and SDN, security. He is specially focused on information flow and formal methods for reconfiguration architecture.

LinkedIn-Sanjiva Prasad

Pushpak Bhattacharyya is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering Department IIT Bombay. His area of research is natural language processing and machine learning. He currently holds the Major Bhagat Singh Rekhi Chair Professorship of IIT Bombay. Before joining IITB, he worked as the director of IIT Patna and served as the President of the Association of Computational Linguistics. Due to his interest in NLP and machine learning, Bhattacharyya has published more than 350 research papers on the topics. He also authored a textbook called Machine Translation.

LinkedIn-Pushpak Bhattacharyya

Suyash P. Awate is the Associate Professor of the Computer Science and Engineering Department, IIT Bombay. His interests are in image analysis, medical image computing, machine learning, computer vision, statistical modelling, and inference. Awate has done research on statistical shape analysis, kernel methods, image classification, image quantification, image reconstruction, statistical analysis of the cemetery of the human brain cortex, image restoration and denoising, image segmentation, and image registration. He has authored and published many papers on image analysis technology.

Chiranjib Bhattacharyya is the Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Automation at Indian Institute of Science. His interests are centred on machine learning, convex optimization, and bioinformatics. He holds BE and ME degrees, both in Electrical Engineering, from Jadavpur University and the Indian Institute of Science. Bhattacharyya completed his PhD from the Department of Computer Science and Automation, IISc. Before joining IISc, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. Bhattacharyya has authored papers in leading journals and conferences in machine learning.

Susheela Devi is a Principal Research Scientist in the Department of Computer Science and Automation at IISc, Bengaluru. She has a keen interest in the field of pattern recognition, data mining, and soft computing. In her role, she educates students on data structures and algorithms, computational methods of optimization, artificial intelligence, intelligent agents, topic in pattern recognition, data mining for proficiency, algorithms and programming, and soft computing.

LinkedIn- V. Susheela Devi

Sudeept Mohan is the Head of the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. His interest centres on intelligent control and robotics. Mohan has spent all his learning years at BITS Pilani. He holds degrees in B.E in Electrical & Electronics, M.Sc in Physics, M.E in Electronics and Control, and PhD in Control of Robot Manipulators, all from BITS Pilani.

Rajeswari Sridhar is the Head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the National Institute of Technology, Trichy. Her area of interest includes data structures and algorithms, compilers, machine learning and deep learning, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, data science and analytics, and cloud computing. Sridhar secured her B.E degree in ECE from Government College of Technology, Coimbatore and M.S in Computer Science from City University, USA. She also holds a PhD in CSE from Anna University, Chennai.

LinkedIn-Rajeswari Sridhar

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Wizards of Tech: Top Artificial Intelligence Professors in India - Analytics Insight

In earnest, it's far too early to tell whether or not Twitter Blue is going to worth the added cost. Particularly with social media, it's hard to imagine a world in which paying for a free service is worth it, even for the paltry price of $2.99 per month.

However, with social media trending towards paid services, Twitter could be establishing itself on the ground floor of an innovative movement. After all, the platform just launched the Tip Jar feature, alluding to a financially-driven future for the app.

If all goes according to plan, Twitter could set itself up to shirk the infamously unpopular data-mining practices of the industry, particularly with companies like Google and Apple throwing up road blocks to the sketchy methodology for making money.

Paying for social media is going to be a tough barricade to break down after a decade and a half of cost-free scrolling. But hey, maybe it'll be the push some of us need to go outside and enjoy social interactions the old fashioned way again.

Revamp your online presence with the best social media management software

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Everything We Know About Twitter's New Premium Service - Tech.co