Jesse Coghlan
A survey from digital payment company Block Inc. has found that the higher respondents rated their own level of cryptocurrency knowledge, the more optimistic they are about the future of Bitcoin (BTC).
Block surveyed more than 9,500 people from the Americas (2,375), EMEA (4,360) and APAC (2,860) regions in January, ensuring to include 100 Bitcoin owners in each region for its 2022 Bitcoin Knowledge and Perceptions Report.
The report, released on Tuesday, shows a correlation between optimism and the likelihood of purchasing, and compared the result with the respondent’s self-identified level of knowledge.
Of those who identified as having fair to expert knowledge of crypto, 41% say they’re “very likely” to purchase Bitcoin in the next 12 months, compared with just 7.9% of those with “limited to no knowledge.”
Despite higher-income individuals having slightly more optimism for Bitcoin’s future than lower-income individuals, the lower-income countries of Nigeria, India, Vietnam and Argentina reported the highest rates of optimism and the highest claimed levels of cryptocurrency knowledge.
Education and promotion seem like the key to adoption as the biggest reason, as cited by 51% of respondents who said that not buying Bitcoin was because of a lack of knowledge. The second most cited reason was the potential risk of theft (32%) and the perception that BTC had too much price volatility (30%) came in third.
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Helen Partz
The concept of cryptocurrency inheritance continues to rapidly evolve as the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry spawns more ways to make a “crypto will.”
The Israeli crypto software provider Kirobo is moving to tackle a major void in the DeFi industry by providing crypto investors with an opportunity to pass private keys or transfer funds according to their last will.
The firm announced on Tuesday the launch of an inheritance feature on its decentralized crypto wallet Liquid Vault, allowing users to designate crypto wallets to inherit their funds.
The new solution enables the generation and execution of an automated last will and testament without the need for lawyers, government authorities or any other centralized entity. Instead, users just need to select up to eight beneficiaries and choose a date for distributing the assets to the designated wallets.
Liquid Vault’s new inheritance mechanism is based on Kirobo’s unique “future conditional transactions” technology, similar to the wallet’s backup feature. The tool allows users to create future transactions or get a secondary access point to crypto based on various conditions.
“Future conditional transactions is a unique infrastructure, based on smart contracts. It allows users to sign future transactions and to condition them on almost anything,” Kirobo CEO Asaf Naim told Cointelegraph. “It also allows third parties to develop complex services on the blockchain without the need to develop smart contracts,” the CEO added.
Launched in beta in late 2021, the Liquid Vault wallet supports Ether (ETH) and all ERC-20 tokens, including the Ethereum-based version of Bitcoin (BTC), Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), as well as ERC-721 nonfungible tokens (NFTs). At launch, Liquid Vault’s inheritance tool supports ETH and ERC-20 tokens, with Kirobo also planning to add support for theinheritance of NFTs with future updates.
The issue of crypto inheritance is one of the most concerning questions for crypto owners as private cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) don’t allow anyone but the owners to control their assets by design. As of 2020, as much as 4 million BTC, or about 20% of the total circulating BTC, was estimated to be lost forever due to lost access to BTC, with a large portion likely caused by death.
As previously reported by Cointelegraph, there are a wide number of ways to pass on crypto to the next generation, including using software inheritance services or simply sharing keys with trusted family members.
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Ezra Reguerra
Anti-crypto technology experts urged United States lawmakers to resist the influence of pro-crypto lobbying efforts.
Bruce Schneier, a lecturer at Harvard, reportedly said that blockchain advocates’ claims are “not true.” He added that the technology is not secure and not really decentralized. According to Schneier, systems where you can “lose your life savings” when you forget your password is “not a safe system.”
Along with other computer scientists and academics, Schneier signed a letter criticizing crypto and blockchain and sent it to U.S. lawmakers in Washington. Software developer Stephen Diehl supports the idea and also signed the letter. Diehl noted that the letter is an effort for counter-lobbying since crypto supporters only “say what they want” to the politicians.
Within the letter, the signatories claimed that cryptocurrencies are “risky, flawed and unproven digital financial instruments.” The academics attempted to dissuade regulators from supporting the efforts of pro-crypto lobbyists to create a “regulatory safe haven” for crypto.
The efforts to combat crypto lobbying came amid the growth of lobbyists representing crypto from 2018 to 2021, according to data from Public Citizen. Apart from lobbyists, the budget spent on crypto lobbying also grew from $2.2 million to $9 million during those years.
Just yesterday, the U.S. Federal Reserve published a study that examined the potential effects of central bank digital currencies (CBDC) on the implementation of U.S. monetary policies. The study highlighted scenarios that could happen in the event that a CBDC is implemented.
Meanwhile, analysts expressed varying opinions on the U.S. Federal Reserve’s quantitative tightening that’s scheduled to start Wednesday. Pav Hundal, an executive at Swyftx exchange, told Cointelegraph that this may have a negative impact on crypto markets. On the other hand, Nigel Green, CEO of deVere Group, thinks that it may have minimal impact.
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This Daily Dose was brought to you by Cointelegraph.
