Keira Wright
A single Bitcoin miner from the Solo CK mining pool has defied the odds after successfully adding a new block on the Bitcoin blockchain, taking home 6.25 BTC ($266,000) for their efforts.
The lucky miner, who may have been mining on just one or two machines, solved a block with their modest hashrate capacity of 126 TH/s. According to a Jan 11 tweet from Solo admin, Dr. Con Kolivas it’s equivalent to about 0.000072% of the total Bitcoin (BTC) network hashrate — which is 175,000,000 TH/s (175 EH/s).
Bitcoin mining expert and member of the Bitcoin Mining Council (BMC) Hass McCook told Cointelegraph that he has never heard of anything like it, adding that “to say this is very rare is an understatement.”
“Usually, having 0.000072% of the hashrate means that, on average, Solo CK will win 0.000072% of the blocks, or, about 1 in 1,400,000,” he explained.
“Everything in Bitcoin is probabilistic, even transaction settlement. The more confirmations you have on your tx, the less likely it will be reversed.”
Arijit Sarkar
Popular mobile payment service Cash App has integrated the Bitcoin (BTC) Lightning Network as a part of an update, allowing faster and cheaper BTC transfers using the Layer 2 (L2) payment protocol.
Cash App is developed and owned by Block (formerly Square), a fintech firm co-founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. The announcement of the BTC L2 integration was shared as a notification on the official Cash App application, which made its way through to Crypto Twitter:
The Bitcoin Lightning Network protocol addresses the noted limitations of the BTC blockchain to improve speeds while reducing the costs associated with transactions.
Just last month, Dorsey featured in a video with Lightning Development Kit (LDK), a service developed by Spiral, a Square subsidiary focused on building for the Bitcoin ecosystem. LDK allows developers to integrate Lightning protocols into Bitcoin wallets and related services.
Prior to leaving Twitter, Dorsey also openly voiced his interest in integrating L2 protocols for the newly launched tipping services on Twitter and BlueSky:
The latest data from Business of Apps shows that Cash App catered to over 36 million users across the United States and the United Kingdom.
Joseph Hall
Bitcoin bull and founder of Edelman Financial Engines Ric Edelman has made some promising predictions about the future of the seminal cryptocurrency.
In an interview on CNBC program ETF Edge on Jan. 10, Edelman said:
“We’re already at a quarter of that number with 24% of Americans owning Bitcoin. It won’t be that much of a stretch for it to get to one-third. Bitcoin is becoming more and more mainstream. People are hearing about it everywhere–it isn’t going away.”
While 2022 got off to a rocky start, In his view, governments corporations, foundations, pension funds are investing in BTC: “there is major institutional involvement.”
As the author of soon-to-be-released “The Truth about Crypto,” Edelman is a long-standing crypto proponent. In 2019, he described Bitcoin as the first “genuinely new asset class” in 150 years, and back in December 2018, he recommended that investors load up on the orange coin.
In a follow-up interview with CNBC yesterday, he lamented that while he has predicted a Bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) for the past seven years, he’s convinced that by 2023, there will be spot ETF approval.
Similar to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissioner Hester Peirce’s thoughts on the matter, Edelman articulates that the SEC is running out of excuses to say no:
“A lot of the concerns the SEC has have been resolved by the industry through their own maturity, innovation and development. I am confident that we will see the SEC say yes because there is no legitimate reason for them not to.”
Matthew Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management agreed with him in the second interview.
This Daily Dose was brought to you by Cointelegraph.
