We can now buy a Tesla with bitcoins, but what’s next?
One could specify a single barometer that epitomizes growth for the bitcoin network in the same way we can choose out a single economic indicator that demonstrates the growth of a sovereign country. Hashrates, transactions, price, coin days destroyed, UTXOs, flows, etc. can all be used and have been honorably used to act as a barometer of growth. But one that is simple, straightforward, but hasn’t been able to attract the spotlight too often in the media is the vanilla number of addresses that are tracked on the network.
Put blandly, the number of addresses is the number of unique addresses that have ever been used in a transaction on the network. It’s plausible to assume that multiple people use multiple addresses which in some fashion is inflating the number, but the lone fact it’s used in a manner that is useful to the user is enough to warrant that particular address is unique.
Currently there is about over 800 million unique addresses being used on the bitcoin network by the day and if we were to assume that each address is used by a unique person, that amount of people would surpass the total population of the United States. The arguments of bitcoin using alot of energy is subjective and goes back to the question of who has the moral duty of saying who’s usage of energy is a waste or not a waste to society. But the data speaks volumes. The data doesn’t lie. The number don’t lie. There is over 800 million unique addresses that appear on the network by the daily. That’s more than double of what we saw in the last bull run.
As the last bull run brought in a frenzy of retail investors, this year’s bull run seems to focus on attracting the institutions and large corporates into the space through easy exposure. Grayscale has allowed large institutions to gain exposure to bitcoin without ever having to interact with a UTXO. Most diehard bitcoiners would view this as a rather lazy attempt in getting to know the innovative digital currency, but it does at least open the gateway for more flows. What has made Grayscale so unique is that they allow this type of non-direct exposure to bitcoin through their funds that essentially track the price of bitcoin. A derivative in some sense as long as they don’t provide more exposure than the actual bitcoins they own.
What we see in the chart above that shows the inflows/outflows of funds Grayscale has been experiencing since January, we could see the plethora of new inflows coming in during February as bitcoin was rocketing towards 50k and beyond. As prices have now been subdued and calm, net zero inflows/outflows have stagnated.
When prices do increase later this year, it would be expected to see large inflows of green bars showing on this chart as it is inevitable that more heavy institutional flows will be abundant.
It’s getting harder and harder to mine bitcoin. It’s getting more difficult and difficult to mine bitcoin. But with the right capital, resources, and aspirations, mining bitcoin can still be done properly. One could look at the charts showing hashrates and difficulty but it’s undeniably amazing how mining interest from institutions keep on flowing in. Current bitcoin difficulty level is 21T while the number of total hashrates on the network is about 163 EH/s. This is amazingly both higher than levels seen during the last bull run. But this time around, the number of retail miners are smaller as more institutions have taken up the role of participating in the bitcoin mining game.
What is more particular for this bull run is the availability of hashrate contracts enabling retail investors to partake in the mining festival all over again. Here at 1TMine, we’ve been offering hashrate contracts since early last year and it continues to be a popular option amongst our users.
WRAP UP
After allowing users to purchase crypto through their platform, PayPal is now allowing users to use those purchased crypto as payment to merchants. This is just another huge announcement by the payments giant as they try to compete with a myriad of other crypto payment competitors such as BitPay.
What may be a bigger announcement is Tesla allowing customers to purchase their cars with bitcoin itself. Currently right now, 1 bitcoin is more than enough to purchase a Tesla vehicle.
About Valarhash
Chengdu-based Valarhash integrates mining machine sales, miner hosting, mining pool, and mine construction services. Led by CEO Fiona Lv, Valarhash aims to provide users with transparent and beneficial mining plans using advanced technology, with lower barriers of entry. Business operations cover hardware research and development, digital asset transactions and 1TMine hash power contract sharing. With a leading position in the hash power market, Valarhash integrates frontier resources with global vision, providing crypto compute service (CCS) and linking physical and digital worlds with blockchain technology.
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