As the cryptocurrency markets rebound following last week's price crash, dogecoin makes it into space and one commentator equates bitcoin to plots of land.
The cryptocurrency market never fails to entertain. At the end of last week we saw a market wide crash as bitcoin prices plummeted. 72 hours later and bitcoin's price has recovered bringing with it most of the other big altcoins.
Looking at the price graphs for all the top cryptocurrencies, we see they all took a dip for 24 hours on Friday but most have recovered to the at or near the same levels they were at on Thursday.
One of the coins which wasn't caught up in the bitcoin maelstrom was zetacoin, the mysterious cryptocurrency which is promising big things in relation to some project in Africa. The altcoin saw its value rise 22% in the last 24 hours.
Bitcoin bounce back
As the date for Chinese banks to end any financial relationship with bitcoin exchanges (15 April) gets ever closer, its seems that the expected bitcoin crash may not be as ba as expected.
Last Friday the price of a bitcoin got as low as $355 as a number of exchanges in China reported the suspension of bank transfers from customers seems to have driven the slump in price, with BTCTrade and BTC100 both issuing notices to customers confirming shutdown notices issued by the Chinese government.
It is more uncertain than ever if the impending Chinese regulations are going to have a positive or negative impact on bitcoin's price - if indeed they have any impact at all.
Dogecoin in Space
The dogecoin logo pictures in the International Space Station
One of the stated goals of dogecoin is to get "to the moon" and while this is more of a philosophical rallying cry, one Nasa astronaut has helped doegcoin as close to the moon as possible.
Rick Mastracchio is currently aboard the International Space Station and at the behest of his son David, the astronaut took some pictures and video of the dogecoin logo on board the space station.
As David explained in his original post on Reddit:
"I have been a dogecoin supporter for a a few months now. I only wish I could have hopped on at the beginning. My dad is currently on the ISS and so I sent him the high quality picture of the dogecoin to have him take a picture with it and the Earth in the background."
While the post received a lot of attention on Reddit, it also attracted a lot of negative comments from people who believed the images were fake. To try and convince people David asked his father to take some more images, which he duly did, here.
There's even a short video of the dogecoin logo floating in space:
Welcome to Bitcoin Island
Over the weekend a very interesting and insightful post was published by Richard Gendal Brown, who blogs about finance and bitcoin.
In it he compares bitcoin to land, giving three reasons for making such a comparison:
- In the end-state the quantity of bitcoin will be fixed, just like land
- Bitcoin is not perfectly fungible and neither is land
- Bitcoin is not 'consumed' through use – just transformed and transferred. This is similar to land and dissimilar to many commodities, which are consumed (or at least degraded) through use
Brown imagines thinking about bitcoin in terms of 'unspent transaction output'. These are bitcoins that have been sent somewhere but not yet themselves been spent - and when thought of in terms of land, are equated to plots of land.
Brown concludes:
Of course, the land analogy is imperfect but I do think there is something to it. If nothing else, the mental image of "Bitcoin Island" with UTXOs being the plots of land feels like a really useful one... it has certainly helped my understanding...
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