Iceland is known as one of the best place for bitcoin mining – with cheap geothermal energy being the main contributing factor, as well as the fact that Iceland’s cold climate means that mining farms don’t need air conditioning. Exactly 20 days later, something known as the Iceland mining heist occurred, with 600 mining servers being stolen, in addition to 600 GPUs, as well as 100 motherboards, processors, PSUs, and computer memory sets. Now it seems that the story may have reached its conclusion. A fugitive suspected of being behind the theft was arrested in Amsterdam yesterday. The suspect had been in a low security open prison in Iceland since February, but fled on April 17, boarding a plane for Sweden using another man’s passport. The Iceland mining heist has been regarded by Icelandic press as one of the largest criminal cases in the country’s history.
Coincidentally, the price of Bitcoin has for several days managed to stay above the line of mining profitability. According to recent reports, when BTC is worth less than $8.000, mining is no longer profitable in most cases. Fortunately, the crypto market is recovering quite nicely, and one BTC is currently worth $9,316, nearly $500 more than 24 hours ago. Bill Baruch, a market strategist for Blue Lines Futures, predicts that crypto prices will continue to grow in the long term, but he feels that, at least in the near future, BTC won’t rise above $11,800. In his view, going past the $11,800 resistance would be an extremely bullish indicator for Bitcoin.
And while some are concerned with Bitcoin’s potential success, others are looking into the various ways it could fail. Earlier today, experts from MIT published an article in the MIT Technology review, titled “Let’s Destroy Bitcoin”. In the article, they look into three ways in which the king of crypto could cease to exist as we know it. The first way Bitcoin could be destroyed is if the government decides to take it down or usurp it to replace it with “Fedcoin”, backed by the Federal Reserve. “Fedcoin” would make it easy for the government to track taxes, forthe government to track taxes, for example. The other possibility is death by Facebook. If Facebook wanted to do it, it could secretly take over Bitcoin by giving all of its users BTC addresses and rewarding them with BTC for interacting with ads and performing other tasks. Facebook could also issue its own cryptocurrency, just like Telegram, potentially sidelining every other crypto out there. The third option is creating too many cryptocurrencies. If cryptocurrencies become so ubiquitous that there is a special, dedicated crypto for every situation, then a crypto like Bitcoin could lose its purpose.This is all speculative, of course, as the authors themselves admit. Right now, with a price increase of more than 4,25% over 24 hours, Tim Draper’s enthusiastic predictions seem much more likely than various doomsday scenarios. On Saturday, Draper attended the Intelligence Squared US debate in New York City, where he said that Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and the underlying technology in general are bigger than the Iron Age, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and the Internet.
A recent survey conducted by Reuters seems to corroborate that claim. At the moment, 25% of financial institutions surveyed want to start buying and selling digital assets, and more than 56 finance firms will become a part of the cryptocurrency ecosystem within the next 6 months.
