2022/30

08 August 2022 - 14 August 2022 week Bitcoin & Economic News

Aug 14, 2022

This newsletter contains charts and other interesting pictures too. Some Email clients auto-block pictures, so don’t forget to enable them!

Bitcoin News

TL;DR
Day To Day Hypermarket is the first in UAE to accept Bitcoin payments
Iran makes first import order using possibly Bitcoin
Vespene Energy raises $4.3 million to help cities mine Bitcoin
CleanSpark acquires 86 MW mining facility for more than $16 million
Tropic Square begins production on prototype for Bitcoin wallet’s open source chip
BlackRock launches spot bitcoin private trust for U.S. clients (UPDATED!)
Genesis Digital Assets secures 708 MW capacity for Bitcoin mining
Vinteum launches Bitcoin developer funding in Brazil

Day To Day Hypermarket is the first in UAE to accept Bitcoin payments
Popular discount store in the UAE Day To Day Hypermarket, well-known for its multiple branches as well as huge offers, has come up with this new option of payment, which is considered the next step into the future of payment solutions.
The payment process will require your mobile phone. For in store payments, it involves a POS machine located in the stores that will facilitate the transaction. For online shopping payments, simply click on the option for Bitcoin payments, a link provided by the website (daytoday.ae) will facilitate the payment there on. In both cases, payments can be processed instantly and in a hassle free manner.
Day To Day Hypermarket has set a benchmark for other retailers in the UAE - not only will it cater to the expats but also to the citizens of the UAE.
Iran makes first import order using possibly Bitcoin
The official news says “cryptocurrency”, but we all know that on the international market it’s highly possible that it was only Bitcoin.
According to Reuters, Iran has registered its first official order for importing $10 million worth of goods in cryptocurrency this week, the semi-official Tasnim agency reported on Tuesday quoting an official from the Ministry of Industry, Mine and Trade.
“This week, the first official import order registration worth 10 million dollars was successfully completed using cryptocurrency. By the end of September, the use of cryptocurrencies and smart contracts will be widely used in foreign trade with target countries,” Alireza Peymanpak said. (Reporting by Dubai Newsroom; Editing by Alison Williams)
Vespene Energy raises $4.3 million to help cities mine Bitcoin
Vespene Energy, a methane mitigation company providing bitcoin mining infrastructure, closed a $4.3 million funding round led by Polychain Capital to launch net carbon-negative bitcoin mining.
Vespene utilizes micro-turbines installed at municipal landfills to convert excess or wasted methane gas into electricity which is then fed to bitcoin mining data centers. As Vespene provides this infrastructure, the municipalities have a completely hands-off experience which enables a completely new revenue stream with zero cost to the municipality.
“Our goal is to mitigate a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and help fuel the transition to a renewable energy future by using bitcoin mining to turn landfill methane streams into revenue streams for our customers,” said Vespene Energy co-founder and CEO Adam Wright.
“And because our sites require no connection to the grid or pipeline buildout, we can turn otherwise harmful and wasted landfill methane into a clean power source for carbon-negative Bitcoin mining in about six months,” said Wright.
CleanSpark acquires 86 MW mining facility for more than $16 million
CleanSpark, a North American Bitcoin mining company that focuses on the sustainability of mining, has acquired an active mining facility from Waha Technologies. Located in Washington, Georgia, this facility will be the third for the company in this state, adding to their College Park and Norcross facilities. All of these sites use low-carbon energy sources, like nuclear, as their primary source of energy.
Currently the acquisition adds more than 36 MW to the mining capacity of CleanSpark, however, it is scalable up to 86 MW.
The price for the facility is $16.2 million while also purchasing more ASIC miners for its mining fleet. The company has added 3,400 Antminer S19 series miners for $8.9 million. Moreover, in June it bought 1,061 Whatsminer M30S machines and in July it acquired an additional 1,800 Antminer S19 XPs, with delivery this month. Overall, these three purchases add up to 685 petahashes per second (PH/s) once fully deployed.
“This partnership will diversify our local industry, create rural technology jobs, expand our electric customer base, and invest in our community.” by Bill deGolian, Mayor of Washington
Tropic Square begins production on prototype for Bitcoin wallet’s open source chip
According to Bitcoin Magazine, Tropic Square, a startup backed by Satoshi Labs dedicated to the open-source development of processing chips, is beginning production of its first transparent integrated chip called the TROPIC01.
The chip is designed to provide a truly secure and transparent element for chip sets. Tropic’s intention with this open-source chip design is to fundamentally improve the conditions of hardware protection for the entire electronics industry.
“We already see demand from potential customers, mainly in Europe, to test the prototypes,” said Tropic Square CEO Evzen Englberth. “Although our first customer will be Trezor Company (from SatoshiLabs holding), several other companies from various industries have also expressed interest in the chips.”
"Our goal is for the Tropic Square chip to become a security standard, not only in the hardware crypto wallet market,” said Jan Pleskac, CTO of Tropic Square.
“That is also why we are going against market standards and the current stream of closed products,” Pleskac added. “We target resilience against side-channel attacks and resilience against attacks causing erroneous behavior – the so-called ‘fault injection.’ Transparent chips allow us to open up implementation details to the community, which helps strengthen security through finding and highlighting potential vulnerabilities.”
This is one of the best things that will happen this year. The open-source chip is needed because it can be tested rigorously against any kind of attack and if it passes it will be one of the safest solutions to store someone's wealth.
BlackRock launches spot bitcoin private trust for U.S. clients (UPDATED!)
Just last week was when I wrote about BlackRock’s jump into the Bitcoin Market and this week they are already starting to serve their private clients too.
BlackRock, the world's biggest asset manager, has launched a spot bitcoin private trust for institutional clients in the United States.
"Despite the steep downturn in the digital asset market, we are still seeing substantial interest from some institutional clients in how to efficiently and cost-effectively access these assets," the company said.
If this is not bullish news, I don’t know what it is. The super wealthiest ones will buy the dip. Don’t sell them your precious coins!
(UPDATE 1.: Larry Fink doubles back on Bitcoin)
Genesis Digital Assets secures 708 MW capacity for Bitcoin mining
Genesis Digital Assets is one of the top industrial Bitcoin miners in the U.S. and has recently acquired an extra 708 MW of working capacity with room to grow according to their press release.
The Bitcoin mining company is expecting to add 495 construction jobs in addition to 130 full-time positions for local communities in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Texas.
“We’re very pleased with the pace of our U.S. expansion. Our team has worked incredibly hard to scale our capacity and while the market remains volatile, we remain more committed than ever to executing on our mission to provide the infrastructure that powers the Bitcoin network.” by COO of Genesis Andrey Kim.
Genesis was founded in 2013 and runs more than 20 large-scale Bitcoin mining operations. The company also reported having more than 300,000 miners that have mined more than $1 billion in Bitcoin.
Vinteum launches Bitcoin developer funding in Brazil
Vinteum, a non-profit Bitcoin research and development center, will start training and funding developers for the Bitcoin ecosystem in Brazil. In a press release put out on August 10th, 2022, the non-profit also announced intentions to expand its program to include Latin America and eventually, the whole world.
According to the non-profit, no single entity should fund Bitcoin development. The more organizations there are, the better it is for the decentralization and open-source nature of Bitcoin.
Vinteum believes that to achieve the goal of building a global currency, Bitcoin development needs diversity. It needs input from developers around the globe. And over time, organizations with different focus areas will pop up. In this regard, Vinteum will “focus on building and growing the Bitcoin development ecosystem in Brazil and the wider Latin America region.”
“The development ecosystem will be more robust and resistant if we have different entities funding developers from all over the world. We have a lot to work on and we need input from a diverse set of engineers, so we can build a truly global and inclusive monetary system and payment network(...)Educating and onboarding more developers into Bitcoin and Lightning is critical if we want it to scale to billions of people,” by Vinteum executive director Lucas Ferreira.
Couldn't agree more! More and more Bitcoin developer funding is needed because Bitcoin has no CEO to allocate money to its development, it must be a community driven incentive!

Global Economic News

TL;DR
US Household debts on ATH and peak inflation reached too?
Russian Ruble stays strong
German electricity prices on ATH (again)
The EU hypocrites trying to save their economy

US Household debts on ATH and peak inflation reached too?
The total household debt in the United States surpassed $16.15 trillion in Q2 2022. Not wondering about it when the Rental costs in the US surpasses an average of $2,000 a month for the first time in history.
Bloomberg also reported that about 13% of the nation’s total population of around 34 million consumers in the United States spent more than they earned in the past six months. A breakdown of the data indicated that 15.4% of residents don’t have any savings. Another 22.2% have less than $1000 in savings. Furthermore, over 30% of residents have between $1,001 and $15,000 in savings, while only 29.3% have over $15,000 in savings.
Meanwhile, the US has seen the worst annual decline in nonfarm productivity in 74 years.
Yet the Keynesian economist thinks from one single lower CPI number that “peak inflation” is reached. They possibly never heard about short term corrections in a trend. Nothing goes just straight up or down without corrections:
“Another sign for peak inflation: US headline consumer price for Jul rose 8.5% YoY and was flat MoM. Economists were expecting increases of 8.7% and 0.2%, respectively. Core CPI was unch vs Jun at +5.9% but below St’s +6.1% forecast. Jul CPI is bullish especially for tech stocks.” by Holger Zschaepitz, market maniac at Welt.
The FED already lost the game for helping their citizens: It's Game-Over For The Fed - Expect A Monetary "Rug Pull" Soon...
I can’t express better how important it is to educate yourself about financial self-sovereignty. No one, not the FED and not even the government will come to help in your own wealth preservation. It’s important to learn as much as you can. The best start is with Saifedean Ammous’s The Bitcoin Standard book (this is not a paid advertisement!).
P.s. If you want to talk about it, join the new Bitcoinomics Newsletter Telegram group.
Russian Ruble stays strong
“Since hitting an all-time low of 177.26 RUB/USD on March 7, the Russian ruble has surged 189% against the USD. Governor Elvira Nabiullina and the ruble are weathering the sanctions storm. During the same period, the Ukrainian hryvnia has lost 17% of its value against the USD.” by Steve Hanke, Economist at Johns Hopkins University
German electricity prices on ATH (again)
The 1 year ahead electricity price jumps >€462/MWh, has now gained ~300% ytd.
Even Bloomberg sees now the wider picture how this will end: In the Energy Markets, Putin Is Winning the War.
The EU hypocrites trying to save their economy
“EU increased exports to Russia for second month in a row, 18% higher in June than May, amounting to €4.5 bn, including industrial equipment, medicines, plastic and cosmetics. Largest exporters were Germany and Italy. Largest export increase in % terms m/m was Poland and Baltics” by The Sirius Report

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These are just speculations, no investment advice!

“A considerable amount of plebs have been buying the dip.” by @JohalMiles

“BITCOIN THE 5TH GREAT BULL RUN STARTS.” by @AurelienOhayon

“Bitcoin testing important Daily RSI trendline.” by @MatthewHyland_

“RSI has broken out (D). -First target $28.000-$30.000 Dollar. I've been telling you for days that we're going higher. And you are still bearish?” by @el_crypto_prof

“This macro structure is repeating itself” by @StockmoneyL

Bitcoin Shorts

Funny Bitcoin short stories

“21,000,000 BTC / 7,900,000,000 People on Earth = 0.0026 BTC per person. 376 people fighting for each coin. Around 20% of BTCs are lost forever so it’s likely even worse.” by @Alessan72994896
“Bitcoin Miners have been accumulating since June!” by @BTC_Archive
"Bitcoin miners heating a greenhouse of flowers" by @GeneratedWorld
Already a new Lightning Network record: 4,500 BTC is the new ATH capacity.
“This new school funded by Bitcoin and built in Nigeria is educating over 300 students and creating jobs. The future is bright.” by Bitcoin Magazine
Iran’s Deputy Minister of Trade: Bitcoin will be widespread in foreign trade by September.
“Two years ago, MicroStrategy embarked on a Bitcoin strategy, adopting BTC as its primary treasury reserve asset, acquiring 21,454 bitcoins at an aggregate purchase price of $250 million or ~$11,653 per bitcoin.” by Michael Saylor
The Bitcoin network settled over $62 TRILLION worth of BTC in the last 12 months.
Proof of Work is the most secure system humanity has ever engineered. (video)