An anonymous reader quotes a report from Jalopnik: On Monday after the close of business, Tesla announced its Q1 2021 financial results in its quarterly earnings call. The company turned a surprisingly large profit this quarter, but it didn't do it by selling cars. Q1 net profit reached a new record for Tesla, at $438 million. Revenue for the electric car company was up massively to $10.39 billion. Unfortunately, all of that profit is accounted for in the company selling $518 million in regulatory credits, and $101 million was found in buying and then later selling Bitcoin. That second point is particularly interesting, as Tesla purchased $1.5 billion worth of BTC, announced that the company would begin accepting BTC as payment for its cars, which drove up the value of BTC, then sold enough BTC to make a hundred million in profit.

Without the $619 million in credits and BTC sales, Tesla would have actually managed to lose $181 million in Q1. In that time, the company shifted 184,800 3/Y units, and while it didn't build a single X or S in Q1, it sold 2020 units from previously-built inventory. That means the company lost around $970 per car sold in Q1. The company has indicated it expects to see a 50 percent growth in 2021 year-over-year, which implies at least 750,000 vehicles shipped out to customers this year. Musk was later reported to have said he believes the Model Y will be the best selling vehicle in the world next year "more likely than not." Which would mean something like 1.5 million Model Ys sold in 2022. I'm inclined to doubt such a claim.

CNBC writes: A copyright lawsuit brought by Craig Wright — the man who has claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the creator of bitcoin — could finally put to bed the years-long mystery over who actually invented the multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency. That's because the success of the lawsuit would likely depend on Wright proving that he did, in fact, author the white paper that originally laid out the technology behind bitcoin. And the case could force the U.K. court to weigh in on whether or not Wright is the actual inventor of bitcoin, according to Reuters.

And in fact, Wright says he has evidence that can prove he is the author of the white paper.

London's High Court ruled on Thursday that Wright, the Australian computer scientist who first said in 2016 that he created bitcoin eight years earlier, could serve his copyright lawsuit against the anonymous operator and publisher of the website bitcoin.org, according to Reuters. Wright's lawsuit accuses bitcoin.org of copyright infringement for displaying a copy of the infamous bitcoin white paper, which he claims he wrote in 2008 outlining what bitcoin is and how it works. He's asking the court to force bitcoin.org to remove the white paper from the website.

Bitcoin.org has refused to remove the white paper from the website, and posted a statement in January saying Wright's "claims are without merit."

Bitcoin "fell dramatically in late April," writes The Street, "sinking from its mid-month high of around $64,000" to Sunday's current price of $47,600 — a drop of over 25% in less than two weeks.

So this week the Street spoke to Bobby Ong, the chief operating officer at the cryptocurrency data aggregator CoinGecko, asking "Was that just par for the course — normal volatility — of something else?" Ong: The recent bloodbath on April 18 saw a record of approximately $9.77 billion worth of futures contracts liquidated in just 24 hours. There was already a massive amount of leverage in the market in anticipation of the Coinbase initial public offering. The excitement of having the first crypto company IPO also led bitcoin's price to hit a new all-time high of $64,804.

However, the direct listing of Coinbase also had a lukewarm reception from stock investors. More recently, there was a lot of fear and uncertainty spreading on social media due to various factors, including (rumors of) the U.S. Treasury taking legal action against certain financial institutions for money laundering, which turned out to be false information. Other than that, CNBC was recirculating news about the crypto ban in India, Turkey banning crypto payments, President Biden proposing a higher capital gains tax, and China bitcoin miners losing power.

The selloff happened during the weekend when there were thinner order books. With high leverage and thin order books, even a small decrease in price will trigger a sharp drawdown and cause a downward spiral in price.

Naturally, the market also needs to correct itself, because there were many over-leveraged traders. It is also important to note that bitcoin options expire towards the end of every month, which usually causes increased volatility in the last week of each month.

TheStreet: Do you see the decline as a chance for people to get into it at a cheaper price?

Ong: It depends on that person and their goals. The profiles of buyers today are very different before, when it was mostly libertarians. Today. it's U.S. institutions, and soon it will be governments.

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter, tweeted Wednesday that bitcoin "incentivises renewable energy." And Elon Musk responded "True."

The BBC adds that the tweets came "despite experts warning otherwise." The cyrptocurrency's carbon footprint is as large as some of the world's biggest cities, studies suggest. But Mr Dorsey claims that could change if bitcoin miners worked hand-in-hand with renewable energy firms.

One expert said it was a "cynical attempt to greenwash" bitcoin. China, where more than two-thirds of power is from coal, accounts for more than 75% of bitcoin mining around the world...

The tweet comes soon after the release of a White Paper from Mr Dorsey's digital payment services firm Square, and global asset management business ARK Invest. Entitled "Bitcoin as key to an abundant, clean energy future", the paper argues that "bitcoin miners are unique energy buyers", because they offer flexibility, pay in a cryptocurrency, and can be based anywhere with an internet connection. "By combining miners with renewables and storage projects, we believe it could improve the returns for project investors and developers, moving more solar and wind projects into profitable territory," it said.

Author and bitcoin critic David Gerard described the paper as a "cynical exercise in bitcoin greenwashing".

"The reality is: bitcoin runs on coal," he told the BBC.... "Bitcoin mining is so ghastly and egregious that the number one job of bitcoin promoters is to make excuses for it — any excuse at all."

Bitcoin and other digital currencies plunged on Friday as a proposed capital gains tax hike from U.S. President Joe Biden led to a wave of selling. From a report: At around 9:30 a.m. ET, bitcoin was down 7.6% in the last 24 hours at $49,000, according to Coin Metrics data. It's the first time bitcoin has traded below $50,000 since early March. Ether fell to $2,255, down 10.7%. XRP, the fifth-biggest cryptocurrency, plunged 16%. This wiped out more than $200 billion of value from the entire cryptocurrency market, according to data from CoinMarketCap. "The market has run up quite a bit overall, and it's probably cooling off before the next leg up," Vijay Ayyar, head of business development at cryptocurrency exchange Luno, told CNBC by email. President Biden is expected to raise long-term capital gains tax for the wealthiest Americans to 43.4%, including a surtax. That would be higher than the top federal tax rate on wage income. The new tax rate would apply to returns on assets held in taxable accounts and sold after more than a year. This triggered a sell-off in stock markets overnight, with all three major U.S. indexes ending Thursday's session in the red. Analysts said fears over Biden's capital gains tax proposal may be extending to crypto investors, who have had a great year with the price of bitcoin having climbed more than sixfold in the last 12 months.

The Bank of England and the Treasury have announced they are setting up a taskforce to explore the possibility of a central bank digital currency. From a report: The aim is to look at the risks and opportunities involved in creating a new kind of digital money. Issued by the Bank for use by households and businesses, it would exist alongside cash and bank deposits, rather than replacing them. No decision has been taken on whether to have such a currency in the UK. However, the government and the Bank want to "engage widely with stakeholders" on the benefits and practicalities of doing so. The taskforce will be jointly led by the Bank's deputy governor for financial stability, Sir Jon Cunliffe, and the Treasury's director general of financial services, Katharine Braddick. The Bank has previously said it is interested in a central bank digital currency (CBDC) because "this is a period of significant change in money and payments." The use of cash in financial transactions has been steadily declining in recent years, while debit card payments have been on the rise. Use of credit cards and direct debits have also been increasing.

PayPal on Tuesday will begin allowing select customers of its Venmo app to buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrencies as consumers increasingly look for ways to pile into the digital assets. Bloomberg reports: The firm will make it available to all the app's users, who number more than 70 million, within the next few weeks. For now, Venmo is allowing customers to trade in just four types of cryptocurrency: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash. Users will also have the ability to share their cryptocurrency purchases on the Venmo feed.

"We do think some customers will certainly want to share this fun experience," Darrell Esch, senior vice president and general manager of the Venmo app at PayPal, said in an interview. "They can share with their friends and community that they've taken the step into this space."

Online electronics retailer Newegg said it is now accepting dogecoin as a method of payment. From a report: Customers will be able to complete transactions using the dogecoin held in their BitPay wallet, according to an announcement Tuesday. Newegg first began accepting payments in bitcoin in July 2014. The company is now among the first retailers to accept dogecoin as payment. Further reading: Dogecoin Rips in Meme-Fueled Frenzy on Pot-Smoking Holiday.

April 20th or 4/20 is the unofficial marijuana holiday where thousands of cannabis smokers celebrate the smoking of marijuana with marijuana. But this year, it could also be the day the meme-based cryptocurrency Dogecoin shatters new record highs. According to Fortune, "advocates are hoping to see Dogecoin hit $1 on April 20 -- one week after it was valued at just 9 cents. From the report: Dogecoin has already hit some financial landmarks that didn't seem possible at the start of the year. Its market value has topped $50 billion, making it bigger than Ford or Marriott. And if it comes close to hitting its target Tuesday, it could outpace some blue-chip companies. For once (for now), Elon Musk has nothing to do with the furor surrounding Dogecoin. This time, the credit goes, in part, to... Slim Jim. Really.

The packaged meat product latched on to Dogecoin-mania on its Twitter account last Wednesday (saying "RT to send Doge to the moon!!" -- the rallying cry among the r/WallStreetBets crowd for GameStop stock). The cry worked. Doge fans -- and even other brands -- jumped on the bandwagon quickly.

"The mania that drove crypto assets to records as Coinbase went public last week turned on itself on the weekend," report Bloomberg — as the price of bitcoin took a big dive: The world's biggest cryptocurrency plunged as much as 15% on Sunday, just days after reaching a record of $64,869. It subsequently pared some of the losses and was trading at about $56,440 at around 8:25 a.m. in Tokyo Monday. Ether, the second-biggest token, dropped as much as 18% to below $2,000 before also paring losses. The volatility buffeted Binance Coin, XRP and Cardano too.

Dogecoin — the token started as a joke — bucked the trend and is up 7% over 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.

The weekend carnage came after a heady period for the industry that saw the value of all coins surge past $2.25 trillion amid a frenzy of demand for all things crypto in the runup to Coinbase's direct listing on Wednesday. The largest U.S. crypto exchange ended the week valued at $68 billion, more than the owner of the New York Stock Exchange... Dogecoin, which has limited use and no fundamentals, rallied last week to be worth about $50 billion at one point before stumbling Saturday. Demand was so brisk for the token that investors trying to trade it on Robinhood crashed the site a few times Friday, the online exchange said in a blog post.

There was also speculation Sunday in several online reports that the crypto plunge was related to concerns the U.S. Treasury may crack down on money laundering carried out through digital assets... Besides the "unsubstantiated" report of a U.S. Treasury crackdown, Antoni Trenchev, co-founder of crypto lender Nexo, said factors for the declines may have included "excess leverage, Coinbase insiders dumping equity after the direct listing and a mass outage in China's Xinjiang province hitting Bitcoin miners."

The New York Focus site writes: A decade ago, the bankrupt owner of the Greenidge power plant in Dresden, New York, sold the uncompetitive coal-fired relic for scrap and surrendered its operating permits. For the next seven years, the plant sat idle on the western shore of Seneca Lake, a monument to the apparent dead end reached by the state's fossil fuel infrastructure. But today, Greenidge is back up and running as a Bitcoin mining operation. The facility hums with energy-hungry computers that confirm and record Bitcoin transactions, drawing power from the plant's 106-megawatt generator now fueled by natural gas.

The mining activity is exceptionally profitable, thanks to an 800 percent rise in Bitcoin's price since last April. Seeking to ride the boom, the plant's new owners plan to quadruple the power used to process Bitcoin transactions by late next year. Environmental advocates view Greenidge's ambitions, if left unchecked, as an air emissions nightmare. And they fear that dozens of other retired or retiring fossil-fueled power plants across New York could follow Greenidge's example, gaining new life by repurposing as Bitcoin miners or other types of energy-intense data centers.
The New York Times recently touted an alternative to bitcoin mining: the "proof of stake" method, which "instead awards miners new blocks based on how much cryptocurrency they already own." The world's second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, Ethereum, has said it is moving toward proof of stake (that switch is likely to take up to another year). Though some critics say Bitcoin will eventually need to follow, particularly if an environmental backlash grows, there are no current plans to do so and such a move is unpopular within the Bitcoin community.

"That reduces your emissions to almost nothing," said Joseph Pallant, Blockchain for Climate's founder and executive director. Cryptocurrency platforms like Tezos or Near Protocol already use proof of stake and have vastly lowered their energy use.

Dogecoin has seen its price rise by a factor of five over the last week. Yesterday, it was trading at $0.13. Today, it's one of the world's 10 most valuable cryptocurrencies, with a market capitalization of $45 billion. Ars Technica's Timothy B. Lee writes: Dogecoin's price tripled over the next 36 hours. My editor suggested that I write about whether Dogecoin's rise is a sign of an overheated crypto market, but for a coin like Dogecoin, I'm not sure that's even a meaningful concept. Dogecoin isn't a company that has revenues or profits. And unlike bitcoin and ether, no one seriously thinks it's going to be the foundation of a new financial system. People are trading Dogecoin because it's fun to trade and because they think they might make money from it. The rising price is a sign that a lot of people have decided it would be fun to speculate in Dogecoin.

Of course, the fact that lots of people have money to spend on joke investments might itself be a result of larger macroeconomic forces. The combination of stimulus spending, low interest rates, and pandemic-related saving means that a lot of people have more money than usual sitting in their bank accounts. And restrictions on travel and nightlife mean that many of those same people have a lot of time on their hands.

Dogecoin, the virtual currency that originally started as an internet meme more than seven years ago, has surged more than 85% in the last 24 hours and is trading at $0.13. Its market cap is now over $17 billion. CNN reports: The currency has soared more than 2,000% from the start of the year, and has a big fan in Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose tweets about it have on occasion driven up Dogecoin's value. Dogecoin has also enjoyed something of a cult status on Reddit, where a popular group -- not unlike the WallStreetBets group behind GameStop's rally -- decided earlier this year to propel its value "to the moon." Dogecoin soared over 600% in the wake of that push. The latest surge in crypto prices comes as Coinbase became the first major cryptocurrency company to list its shares on a U.S. stock exchange.

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase opened trading on Wednesday at $381 per share, giving it a fully diluted market value of around $102 billion. From a report: This is a slight premium to the most recent private trades for Coinbase stock, and more than 50% higher than the reference price set last night by the Nasdaq. Coinbase's public listing has been among the most anticipated in recent years, with expectations it will garner a massive market cap. Further reading: Coinbase's blockbuster debut is a 'watershed' for crypto -- but there are risks ahead.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Coinbase, the American cryptocurrency trading giant, has set a reference price for its direct listing at $250 per share. According to the company's most recent SEC filing, it has a fully diluted share count of 261.3 million, giving the company a valuation of $65.3 billion. Using a simple share count of 196,760,122 provided in its most recent S-1/A filing, Coinbase would be worth a slimmer $49.2 billion. Regardless of which share count is used to calculate the company's valuation, its new worth is miles above its final private price set in 2018 when the company was worth $8 billion. Around four years ago in 2017 Coinbase was worth just $1.6 billion, according to Crunchbase data. For investors in that round, let alone its earlier fundraises, the valuation implied by a $250 per-share price represents a multiple of around 40x from the price that they paid. "The Coinbase direct listing was turbocharged recently when the company provided a first-look at its Q1 2021 performance," adds TechCrunch. "As TechCrunch reported at the time, the company's recent growth was impressive, with revenue scaling from $585.1 million in Q4 2020, to $1.8 billion in the first three months of this year. The new numbers set an already-hot company's public debut on fire."

HSBC has banned customers of its online share-trading platform from buying or moving into their accounts MicroStrategy stock, calling it a "virtual currency product." Reuters reports: The bank will not facilitate the buying or exchange of products related to or referencing the performance of virtual currencies, the message to an HSBC InvestDirect client said. MicroStrategy declined to comment. The U.S. business software firm is led by bitcoin proponent Michael Saylor and owns bitcoin worth billions of dollars.

While HSBC will allow the holding, sale and outgoing transfer of MicroStrategy shares, it will forbid new purchases or incoming transfers, said the message dated March 29. "HSBC has no appetite for direct exposure to virtual currencies and limited appetite to facilitate products or securities that derive their value from VCs (virtual currencies)," HSBC said in a statement. The bank said its policy towards cryptocurrencies had been in place since 2018 and is kept under review.

Jess Powell, CEO of Kraken, the world's fourth-largest digital currency exchange, warns that governments around the world may start to clamp down on the use of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. CNBC reports: "I think there could be some crackdown," Jesse Powell, CEO of Kraken, told CNBC in an interview. Cryptocurrencies have surged in value lately, with bitcoin hitting a record high price of more than $61,000 last month. The world's most valuable digital coin was last trading at around $60,105. [...] Kraken's chief thinks regulatory uncertainty around crypto isn't going away anytime soon. A recent anti-money laundering rule proposed by the U.S. government would require people who hold their crypto in a private digital wallet to undergo identity checks if they make transactions of $3,000 or more.

"Something like that could really hurt crypto and kind of kill the original use case, which was to just make financial services accessible to everyone," Powell said. Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have often been associated with illicit activities due to the fact that people transacting with it are pseudonymous -- you can see where funds are being sent but not who sent or received them. "I hope that the U.S. and international regulators don't take too much of a narrow view on this," Powell said. "Some other countries, China especially, are taking crypto very seriously and taking a very long-term view."

Kraken's CEO said he feels the U.S. is more "shortsighted" than other nations and "susceptible" to the pressures of incumbent legacy businesses -- in other words, the banks -- that "stand to lose from crypto becoming a big deal." "I also think it might be too late," Powell added. "Maybe the genie's out of the bottle and just trying to ban it at this point would make it more attractive. It would certainly send a message that the government sees this as a superior alternative to their own currency."

Angel investor Balaji S. Srinivasan (also the former CTO of Coinbase) is now focused on 1729.com, which wants to give you money to do his bidding — or something like that. He's calling it "the first newsletter that pays you.

"It has a regular feed of paid tasks and tutorials with $1000+ in crypto prizes per day, and doubles as a vehicle for distributing a new book I've been writing called The Network State."

His latest post? "How to Start a New Country" (which envisions starting with a "cloud first" digital community): We recruit online for a group of people interested in founding a new virtual social network, a new city, and eventually a new country. We build the embryonic state as an open source project, we organize our internal economy around remote work, we cultivate in-person levels of civility, we simulate architecture in VR, and we create art and literature that reflects our values.

Over time we eventually crowdfund territory in the real world, but not necessarily contiguous territory. Because an under-appreciated fact is that the internet allows us to network enclaves. Put another way, a cloud community need not acquire all its territory in one place at one time. It can connect a thousand apartments, a hundred houses, and a dozen cul-de-sacs in different cities into a new kind of fractal polity with its capital in the cloud. Over time, community members migrate between these enclaves and crowdfund territory nearby, with every individual dwelling and group house presenting an independent opportunity for expansion...

[Cloud countries] are set up to be a scaled live action role-playing game (LARP), a feat of imagination practiced by large numbers of people at the same time. And the experience of cryptocurrencies over the last decade shows us just how powerful such a shared LARP can be...

The cloud country concept "just" requires stacking together many existing technologies, rather than inventing new ones like Mars-capable rockets or permanent-habitation seasteads. Yet at the same time it avoids the obvious pathways of election, revolution, and war — all of which are ugly and none of which provide much venue for individual initiative...

Could a sufficiently robust cloud country with, say, 1-10M committed digital citizens, provable cryptocurrency reserves, and physical holdings all over the earth similarly achieve societal recognition from the United Nations?
For the "do his bidding" part, the post promises that up to ten $100 prizes will be awarded to people who share constructive reviews on their sites/social media pages (including proposals for extensions).

Previously the site had offered $100 for the ten best hirelings "running a newsletter for technological progressives at your own domain, as a way to begin incentivizing the decentralization of media." (It cited a tweet that argues succinctly that "The NYT is telling anti-longevity stories for us. We must take control of our own story.") In general the site describes itself as "a newsletter for technological progressives. That means people who are into cryptocurrencies, startup cities, mathematics, transhumanism, space travel, reversing aging, and initially-crazy-seeming-but-technologically-feasible ideas." So the newsletter-creating task had envisioned them all "constantly pushing for technology in general and reversing aging in particular, writing like their lives depended on it. In other words, blog or die!"

Other rewards went to the first 10 people to complete three Elixir problems, the 100 people who posted the best inspiring proof-of-exercising photos, and 40 people who helped identify people and places "where the ascending world is surpassing the declining world."

For one of his latest "tasks," Srinivasan wants you to read a long essay on quantum computing (and answer questions), with an optional series of "review emails". $10 in bitcoin will be awarded only to the first and last 50 readers/question-answerers, while another $100 in bitcoin will be awarded to the first and last 5 review-email readers who "persist for a month."

Peter Thiel is "pro-crypto" and "pro-Bitcoin maximalist," but he also thinks the cryptocurrency may be undermining America. From a report: Thiel, the venture capitalist and conservative political donor, urged the U.S. government to consider tighter regulations on cryptocurrencies in an appearance on Tuesday. The statements seemed to represent a change of heart for Thiel, who is a major investor in virtual currency ventures as well as in cryptocurriences themselves. "I do wonder whether at this point, Bitcoin should also be thought [of] in part as a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S.," Thiel said during an appearance at a virtual event held for members of the Richard Nixon Foundation. "It threatens fiat money, but it especially threatens the U.S. dollar." He added: "[If] China's long Bitcoin, perhaps from a geopolitical perspective, the U.S. should be asking some tougher questions about exactly how that works."

According to researchers in Beijing, China, the total carbon footprint of bitcoin mining in the country will peak in 2024, releasing around 130 million metric tons of carbon. This figure exceeds the annual carbon emissions of countries including Italy and the Czech Republic. New Scientist reports: By 2024, bitcoin mining in China will require 297 terawatt-hours of energy and account for approximately 5.4 per cent of the carbon emissions from generating electricity in the country. The researchers predicted the emissions peak in China in 2024 based on calculations of when the overall cost of mining -- the investment in computing equipment and the electricity costs -- outweighs the financial rewards of selling mined bitcoin. They used both financial projections and carbon emissions analysis to model the emissions footprint in China, taking into account factors such as location. Bitcoin miners in Beijing or other parts of northern China are very likely to be using electricity from coal-powered plants. Mining in southern provinces -- especially Guizhou, Yunnan and Sichuan -- is in large part powered by hydroelectricity, says Guan. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.