Bitcoin is Having (Halving) Its Best January in Years

I used to read Medium when Bitcoin and crypto was a thing, not anymore. As even my generation of GenZ stopped trading crypto and turned back to Robinhood, it’s got me wondering.

What happend to all the crypto fans? Meanwhile in the actual markets Bitcoin has had its best beginning to a year since 2013!

Bitcoin experienced a surge of 29% in January, its best performance for that particular month since 2013, in seven years. The upcoming Bitcoin halving event seems also to be involved. Scarcity means Bitcoin could go up in value in the years ahead.

We’re 98 days away from the Bitcoin halving event and there’s a little engima called the Coronavirus that could wreck havoc on the stock-market. The Chinese stock market was down 8% yesterday, it’s biggest fall in four years.

The virus has only killed 360 people but already more than the SARS outbreak of 2003. So here we find Bitcoin again perhaps being viewed as a “safe-haven asset” as global equity markets remain shaky following the outbreak of the coronavirus. I’m no financial analyst but I’d say it’s half coronavirus and half the halving event of this year.

The U.S. are kings of panic and if an outbreak occurs in the United States, I expect Bitcoin to do really well. Already we have the U.S. taking measures that even the World Health Organization might call excessive.

Meanwhile its algorithmic clickbait media is going crazy over potential “pandemic” warnings. In China the number of people who have the virus is doubling every four days.

With the Coronavirus coming to town, the market capitalization or value of all bitcoin in circulation rose by $39.7 billion. It’s certainly an epidemic in China, but the virus has yet to find an outbreak in any other countries.

However American and Canadians are becoming more weary of Asians wearing masks and masks are now sold out in major cities all over the world. The coronavirus appears as contagious as the flu, or at least potentially way more dangerous, because it’s “novel” and well, we fear uncertainty.

We have to admit the possibility that simply the ongoing upward trajectory of the price of bitcoin correlates to the spread of the coronavirus. Bitcoin is itself a kind of virus, that a digital gold could be worth something!

For most of us Bitcoin is an arcane digital asset. Somehow miners are rewarded 12.5 bitcoin per block mined. The rewards are halved every few years and that rule is written into bitcoin’s underlying code (very prophetic!).

As of May 2020, the reward per miner will be cut in half again, to 6.25 new bitcoin.

So here’s the ironic part, the Bitcoin halving event could show the global peak of the virus in May, 2020. I don’t think this virus is slowing down in February, and that means more spreading.

Let’s face it, with the CDC and the American media pumping up coronavirus fears and virus-phobia like Netflix’s original doc Pandemic, officials are probably preparing for the possibility that this could be the next pandemic that the world will have to face.

The bitcoin halvening as well as the recent surge fueled by pandemic fears is the perfect storm for Bitcoin’s rise and the U.S. pushing China down in 2020 in business, technology and global political influence.

Suffice to say, I’ll be writing more about all of this in 2020.

I’m a writer for the Last Futurist, a site about the future of artificial intelligence.