An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde took aim at Bitcoin's role in facilitating criminal activity, saying the cryptocurrency has been enabling "funny business." "For those who had assumed that it might turn into a currency -- terribly sorry, but this is an asset and it's a highly speculative asset which has conducted some funny business and some interesting and totally reprehensible money-laundering activity," Lagarde said in an online event organized by Reuters.

The remarks, made in a conversation largely focused on the euro-area's economic outlook, show top policymakers are taking notice as a speculative fever sweeps cryptocurrency markets. Bitcoin prices have more than doubled since November and topped a record $41,000 earlier this month. Concerns over money laundering and the ability of financial firms to know the identities of their clients have been at the forefront of the cryptocurrency debate. While critics say that instruments like Bitcoin make the illicit transfer of funds easier, crypto advocates say the network of digital ledgers known as the blockchain allows money to be traced more easily than cash and can actually help law enforcement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: German prosecutors said Tuesday that they have taken down what they believe was the biggest illegal marketplace on the darknet and arrested its suspected operator. The site, known as DarkMarket, was shut down on Monday, prosecutors in the southwestern city of Koblenz said. All sorts of drugs, forged money, stolen or forged credit cards, anonymous mobile phone SIM cards and malware were among the things offered for sale there, they added. German investigators were assisted in their months-long probe by U.S. authorities and by Australian, British, Danish, Swiss, Ukrainian and Moldovan police.

The marketplace had nearly 500,000 users and more than 2,400 vendors, prosecutors said. They added that it processed more than 320,000 transactions, and Bitcoin and Monero cryptocurrency to the value of more than 140 million euros ($170 million) were exchanged. The suspected operator, a 34-year-old Australian man, was arrested near the German-Danish border. Prosecutors said a judge has ordered him held in custody pending possible formal charges, and he hasn't given any information to investigators. More than 20 servers in Moldova and Ukraine were seized, German prosecutors said. They hope to find information on those servers about other participants in the marketplace. The move against DarkMarket originated from an investigation of a data processing center installed in a former NATO bunker in southwestern Germany that hosted sites dealing in drugs and other illegal activities.

Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth, as of this week, about $220 million. From a report: The password will let him unlock a small hard drive, known as an IronKey, which contains the private keys to a digital wallet that holds 7,002 Bitcoin. While the price of Bitcoin dropped sharply on Monday, it is still up more than 50 percent from just a month ago when it passed its previous all-time high around $20,000. The problem is that Mr. Thomas years ago lost the paper where he wrote down the password for his IronKey, which gives users 10 guesses before it seizes up and encrypts its contents forever. He has since tried eight of his most commonly used password formulations -- to no avail. "I would just lay in bed and think about it," Mr. Thomas said. "Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn't work, and I would be desperate again."

Bitcoin, which has been on an extraordinary and volatile eight-month run, has made a lot of its holders very rich in a short period of time, even as the coronavirus pandemic has ravaged the world economy. But the cryptocurrency's unusual nature has also meant that there are many people who are locked out of their Bitcoin fortunes as a result of lost or forgotten keys. They have been forced to watch, helpless, as the price has risen and fallen dramatically, unable to cash in on their digital wealth. Of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin, around 20 percent -- currently worth around $140 billion -- appear to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets, according to the cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis. Wallet Recovery Services, a business that helps find lost digital keys, said it has gotten 70 requests a day from people who want help recovering their riches, three times the number of a month ago. Bitcoin owners who are locked out of their wallets speak of endless days and nights of frustration as they have tried to access their fortunes. Many have owned the coins since Bitcoin's early days a decade ago, when no one had confidence that the tokens would be worth anything.

Bitcoin and other digital coins tanked on Monday, wiping some $200 billion off the cryptocurrency market. CNBC reports: The market capitalization or value of the cryptocurrency market was $880 billion at 9:20 a.m. ET, down from $1.08 trillion a day earlier, according to Coinmarketcap. Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency, fell over 12% from a day earlier to $32,576, according to Coin Metrics data. It earlier sank to an intraday low of $30,863. Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency, was down 23% to $1,005. It briefly tumbled below $1,000, hitting an intraday low of $945. The sell-off in cryptocurrencies comes after a huge rally and perhaps signals some profit-taking from investors. Bitcoin is still up over 300% in the last 12 months and last week hit an all-time high just below $42,000.

Jehan Chu, founder of cryptocurrency-focused venture capital and trading firm Kenetic Capital, said the pullback in bitcoin could be a buying opportunity for new investors. "This short term correction is both natural and needed, and is a great entry point for long-term investors as we quickly reach $50k this quarter and $100k by year's end," Chu told CNBC. Last week, Social Capital's Chamath Palihapitiya said bitcoin could go above six digits. "It's probably going to $100,000, then $150,000, then $200,000," Palihapitiya told CNBC's Halftime Report. "In what period? I don't know. [Maybe] five or 10 years, but it's going there."

A hacker took control of people's internet-connected chastity cages and demanded a ransom to be paid in Bitcoin to unlock it. From a report: "Your cock is mine now," the hacker told one of the victims, according to a screenshot of the conversation obtained by a security researcher that goes by the name Smelly and is the founder of vx-underground, a website that collects malware samples. In October of last year, security researchers found that the manufacturer of an Internet of Things chastity cage -- a sex toy that users put around their penis to prevent erections that is used in the BDSM community and can be unlocked remotely -- had left an API exposed, giving malicious hackers a chance to take control of the devices. That's exactly what happened, according to a security researcher who obtained screenshots of conversations between the hacker and several victims, and according to victims interviewed by Motherboard. A victim who asked to be identified only as Robert said that he received a message from a hacker demanding a payment of 0.02 Bitcoin (around $750 today) to unlock the device. He realized his cage was definitely "locked," and he "could not gain access to it."

The world's cryptocurrency is now worth more than $1 trillion, with bitcoin accounting for a large majority of the value. The price of the oldest virtual currency has risen above $40,000, pushing the value of all bitcoins in circulation up to more than $700 billion. From a report: Ether, the cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network, is now worth more than $140 billion. Then there's a long list of less valuable cryptocurrencies, including Tether at $22 billion, Litecoin at $11 billion, and Bitcoin Cash at $8 billion. Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto is believed to own around 1 million bitcoins. Most of these were mined in the first two years of Bitcoin's existence when there was little competition. If he still has copies of the private keys that control these coins, that would give him a net worth of nearly $40 billion -- enough to make him among the 40 wealthiest people on the planet. Nakamoto has never publicly revealed his true identity and has not communicated publicly since 2014.

Bitcoin surged to $40,000 for the first time, doubling in value in less than a month and pushing the total market value of cryptocurrencies beyond $1 trillion. From a report: Cryptocurrencies hit the milestone after a fivefold climb in market value in the past year, data from tracker CoinGecko shows. Strategists have cited demand from speculative retail traders, trend-following quant funds, the rich and even institutional investors as among the reasons for the surge. Bitcoin rose as much as 11% on Thursday to $40,065 and has more than quadrupled in the past year, according to a composite of prices compiled by Bloomberg. It accounts for about two-thirds of cryptocurrency market value, followed by Ether at about 13%, according to CoinGecko data.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Security firm Intezer Labs said it discovered a covert year-long malware operation where cybercriminals created fake cryptocurrency apps in order to trick users into installing a new strain of malware on their systems, with the obvious end goal of stealing victims' funds. The campaign was discovered last month in December 2020, but researchers said they believe the group began spreading their malware as early as January 8, 2020. Intezer Labs said the hackers relied on three cryptocurrency-related apps for their scheme. The fake apps were named Jamm, eTrade/Kintum, and DaoPoker, and were hosted on dedicated websites at jamm[.]to, kintum[.]io, and daopker[.]com, respectively.

The first two apps claimed to provide a simple platform to trade cryptocurrency, while the third was a cryptocurrency poker app. All three apps came in versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and were built on top of Electron, an app-building framework. But Intezer researchers say the apps also came with a little surprise in the form of a new malware strain that was hidden inside, which the company's researchers named ElectroRAT. Intezer researchers believe the malware was being used to collect cryptocurrency wallet keys and then drain victims' accounts. To spread the trojanized applications, Intezer says the hackers posted ads for the three apps and their websites on niche cryptocurrency forums, or they used social media accounts. Because of a quirk in the malware's design, which retrieved the address of its command and control server from a Pastebin URL, Intezer believes this operation infected around 6,500 users -- the total number of times the Pastebin URLs were accessed.

Telegram has no plans to fix a vulnerability that makes it easy for hackers to find your precise location. The problem stems from a feature called People Nearby, which is disabled by default, but allows users who are geographically close to you to connect. Ars Technica reports: Independent researcher Ahmed Hassan, however, has shown how the feature can be abused to divulge exactly where you are. Using readily available software and a rooted Android device, he's able to spoof the location his device reports to Telegram servers. By using just three different locations and measuring the corresponding distance reported by People Nearby, he is able to pinpoint a user's precise location. Telegram lets users create local groups within a geographical area. Hassan said that scammers often spoof their location to crash such groups and then peddle fake bitcoin investments, hacking tools, stolen social security numbers, and other scams.

Telegram lets users create local groups within a geographical area. Hassan said that scammers often spoof their location to crash such groups and then peddle fake bitcoin investments, hacking tools, stolen social security numbers, and other scams. A proof-of-concept video the researcher sent to Telegram showed how he could discern the address of a People Nearby user when he used a free GPS spoofing app to make his phone report just three different locations. He then drew a circle around each of the three locations with a radius of the distance reported by Telegram. The user's precise location was where all three intersected.

In a blog post, Hassan included an email from Telegram in response to the report he had sent them. It noted that People Nearby isn't enabled by default and that "it's expected that determining the exact location is possible under certain conditions." People Nearby poses the biggest threat to people using Android devices, since they report a user's location with enough granularity to make Hassan's attack work. The recently released iOS 14, by contrast, allows users to divulge only a rough approximation of their location. People who use this feature aren't as exposed. Fixing the problem -- or at least making it much harder to exploit it -- wouldn't be hard from a technical perspective. Rounding locations to the nearest mile and adding some random bits generally suffices. When the Tinder app had a similar disclosure vulnerability, developers used this kind of technique to fix it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinDesk: Ukraine's government has chosen the Stellar blockchain network as a platform to build a central bank digital currency (CBDC). Announced Monday, the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine and the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) signed a Memorandum of Understanding to build out a "virtual assets ecosystem and national digital currency of Ukraine." The National Bank of Ukraine has been researching the possibility of CBDC implementation since 2017, and the Stellar partnership will now be the basis of its virtual currency development, according to Digital Transformation and IT Deputy Minister Oleksandr Bornyakov.

"The Ministry of Digital Transformation is working on creating the legal environment for the development of virtual assets in Ukraine," Bornyakov said in a statement. "We believe our cooperation with the Stellar Development Foundation will contribute to development of the virtual asset industry and its integration into the global financial ecosystem." Stellar Development Foundation CEO Denelle Dixon said the partnership with Ukraine's government and other stakeholders to digitize the hryvnia will officially launch this month. "We've been in conversations with governments and institutions all over the world about the key considerations for issuing CBDCs. It's important to remember many, if not all, of these organizations weren't designed to be technology companies and that they have many audiences that they are supporting," Dixon said via an email. "That makes a public-private partnership so essential to getting this right."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Ether, the native currency of the Ethereum network and the second most valuable cryptocurrency, has soared above $1,000 for the first time since 2018. The rise is part of a broad cryptocurrency boom inspired by the continued rise in bitcoin's price. Last month, bitcoin rose above $20,000, smashing its previous all-time record of around $19,500. Since then, it has continued to rise, breaking above $30,000 in recent days. As I write this, one bitcoin is worth around $31,000.

Cryptocurrencies tend to rise and fall together. So it's not surprising that other virtual currencies are also on the rise. Ether has seen dramatic gains over the last year. At the start of 2020, one ether was worth around $140. The price rose to around $600 in late November, the same month bitcoin started flirting with a new record. In the last few days, ether has been on a tear, rising from $600 on Christmas Day to more than $1,000 today. It isn't just ether. Litecoin, one of the oldest "altcoins," has seen its value triple over the last three months to $150. Bitcoin Cash, a variant of bitcoin that's optimized for high transaction volumes, has nearly doubled over the same period and is now worth $400. Polkadot and Tether have also seen continued growth in recent months.

The one exception is XRP, the currency of the Ripple network. "Just before Christmas, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged two Ripple executives with selling unregistered securities," reports Ars. "The announcement has caused some US cryptocurrency exchanges to stop offering trades in XRP. XRP has lost two-thirds of its value since a November peak." Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S., also suspended trading in XRP.

Last Sunday we reported Bitcoin's price had surged 50% in the previous month.

In the week since it's surged another 24.8%.

As Bitcoin celebrates its 12th anniversary, a Forbes columnist writes that Bitcoin "soared to $34,000 yesterday — but here's why Warren Buffett will never own Bitcoin." Buffett has called Bitcoin, among other names, "rat poison squared" and has said he won't ever buy the cryptocurrency. "I don't have any cryptocurrency and I never will," Buffett told CNBC in February, when Bitcoin was trading at about $10,000. Here are 3 reasons why Buffett will never own Bitcoin, no matter how high the price of Bitcoin soars:

Buffett believes that Bitcoin has no underlying value. As a value investor, Buffett invests in companies that are undervalued, produce stable and recurring cash flow and have the ability to increase in book value. To Buffett, Bitcoin doesn't produce earnings or dividends. Rather, the value of Bitcoin is simply what one person is willing to pay for it. In this regard, Bitcoin is no different than the tulip craze of 1637. Therefore, Buffett believes that Bitcoin has no inherent value...

While all investing involves some degree of speculation, Buffett's background is in insurance and risk mitigation. Buffett doesn't invest in "high fliers" — that's not his game. His game is "buy and hold" — forever. He invests in companies that grow over time, steadily and consistently.
And the third reason? Warren Buffett "only invests in things he understands."

"He prefers to invest in stable consumer goods companies like Coca-Cola and financial services companies like American Express."

The Nordic region once again has become a lucrative place to mine crypto-currencies, thanks to a plunge in electricity prices. From a report: The wettest weather in at least 20 years boosted production from hydro-electric plants, leaving Sweden and Norway with some of the lowest power prices in the world. The resulting glut in the most important raw material for making the virtual coins coincided with a year when the price of Bitcoin almost quadrupled. The currencies are made in giant computer farms that process complex algorithms in halls as big as airport hangars. That makes electricity one of the key inputs, with operations sometimes consuming as much power as that used by 70,000 households. The current market dynamics give big miners alternatives to places where Bitcoin are usually created such as China, Kazakhstan and Canada.

Their luck follows several years of poor margins from higher electricity costs and lower prices for most virtual currencies. Many of the the miners that were attracted to the region during the last rally in 2017 have left. "The ones that stayed through the difficult period, like us, are quite happy now," said Philip Salter, head of operations at Hong Kong-based Genesis Mining, which operates a data center in Boden, Sweden. "There were times we were not making any profit at all, but during the last year our profitability has more than tripled." Unusually wet weather along with mild temperatures boosted hydro reservoirs across Nordic region to the highest level in more than 20 years, leaving the area awash in generation capacity. The result is power prices close to zero for extended periods. Average prices this year are about a third of those in Germany, Europe's biggest power market.

The price of Bitcoin increased 50% — in the last four weeks.

Now priced at $26,579, "Bitcoin is crashing — upward," quips CNN Business: The digital currency has a market value north of $500 billion. Think Bitcoin is just a fad? It's worth more than Visa or Mastercard. Or Walmart...

Its rapid rise has been remarkable — or insane, depending on your appetite for risk. But there's some logic to the run-up: Investors are pouring money into bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies during the Covid-19 pandemic as the Federal Reserve sent interest rates near zero (and expects to keep them there for several more years), severely weakening the US dollar. That makes bitcoin, comparatively, an attractive currency. There's a set limit to the number of bitcoins on the planet, and investors believe that once the supply runs out, the digital coin's value can only increase.

Also aiding in bitcoin's soaring valuation: Big, name-brand investors are stockpiling it, and huge consumer companies are embracing it. That's adding a dose of validity and appeal to cryptocurrency for mainstream investors. For example, a top executive at BlackRock [the world's largest asset manager, with $7.81 trillion in assets under management] recently said the cryptocurrency can replace gold, and Square and PayPal have both embraced bitcoin.
The article also includes some advice from Anthony Scaramucci, founder and managing partner of the global investment firm Skybridge Capital (who was also, for 10 days, White House Communications Director): Scaramucci said people have begun to accept bitcoin — and since it appears in so few portfolios, it has plenty of room to grow. Still, bitcoin is a volatile asset and will be a risky holding if you invest in it. "This thing has a tendency to crash up," he said. "It is due for a correction, and these corrections can be violent." Scaramucci said bitcoin could suddenly tumble 20% to 50%. "You have to be very cautious," he added.

But he also highlighted bitcoin's staying power over the course of the past decade: If you took $1 and put 99 cents of it in cash and a penny in bitcoin, that investment strategy would have outperformed $1 invested in the S&P 500 over the last 10 years, he noted.

"Bitcoin's best days are ahead of it, but it's going to be volatile and I think people need to be prepared for it," Scaramucci told CNN Business.

An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from CoinDesk, written by Ryan Zurrer. Zurrer is founder of Dialectic AG, an alternative-assets focused multi-family office. Previously, he was a Director at the Web3 Foundation and led the investment team at Polychain Capital, pioneering the SAFT as a legitimate investment instrument. From the report: Crypto is set to bifurcate and we will begin to see two parallel economic superhighways being built and used. One economic superhighway will be for know your customer (KYC)-compliant "digital currencies" such as central bank digital currencies (CBDC) or corporate-backed digital currencies such as USDC or diem (formerly libra). In parallel, the other economic superhighway will be a detour-filled adventure of crypto-anarchist money Legos being stacked and iterated on by anonymous teams, self-organized via a myriad of DAO-like governance structures. It's all about to get quite strange. Diversification is the only coherent path forward both within crypto ecosystems and beyond during these uncertain times.
[...]
In 2021, we are going to see layer 2 apps for the first time and not only to entertain or as early experiments. We will see entire micro-economies emerge and transform thousands of people's lives. In 2021, we'll see more anonymous teams governed by DAOs popping up and experimenting with exotic derivatives and porting real-world assets on-chain with NFTs. Layer 2 will also usher in crypto's own "SoMo" (social + mobile native) moment, whereby applications will look to be native and seamless on many of the apps that billions of users already have on their home screen: WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook, the App Store and so on. This is where corporate-cryptos and CBDCs will have a clear advantage and will foster significant innovation. We'll see the backers of CBDCs and corporate-cryptos spend lavishly to seed ecosystems of layer 2 app development.

We'll continue to see consolidation between crypto projects. DeFi yield strategies will begin to stack on one another combining debt, exchange and derivative strategies under unified liquidity while novel layer 1 experiments, often branded abhorrently as "Eth Killers" will ironically need to combine teams, treasuries and economically rebase to survive against Ethereum's accelerating network effects, community and composability. We'll also see an acceleration in "treasury raids" as protocols with enormous sums of money leftover from the 2017 initial coin offering (ICO) era are pressured by their token holders to pay a dividend, tie the treasury to the token or unwind and distribute the funds back to project funders. For those who got into crypto because of ideals like freedom and self-sovereignty, Zurrer says "we're likely to see a significant portion of the space migrating to FATF-compliant regulations regarding KYC/anti-money laundering and primarily transacting in centralized digital currencies." He encourages everyone to "remain open-minded about the innovation that CBDCs and corporate currencies will bring" as they "will drive adoption beyond what we've achieved thus far."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The value of one of the world's most valuable cryptocurrencies is crashing and a recently filed SEC complaint is at the root of the free fall. According to CoinMarketCap, the XRP token's value has declined more than 42% in the past 24 hours and is down more than 63% from its 30-day high of $0.76. It now sits at just $0.27. XRP's price volatility has rivaled the most capricious of cryptocurrencies. Since reaching an all-time-high of $3.84 back in January of 2018, the coin has spent much of the past two years drifting closer and closer to pennies. In the past month, on the back of major rallies from other cryptocurrencies, XRP has seen its biggest rally in years, but those gains were all erased this week by the Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse's admission that the SEC was planning to file a sweeping lawsuit against the company during the current administration's final days.

The SEC's fundamental argument is that XRP has always been a security and that it should have been registered with the commission from the beginning more than seven years ago. The SEC claims that the defendants in the case -- namely the company Ripple, CEO Bran Garlinghouse and executive chairman Chris Larsen -- generated more than $1.38 billion from sales of the XRP token. The company's line has been that XRP is not a security but is, in fact, a tool for financial institutions, though the coin's volatility has discouraged banks from actually adopting the token. Meanwhile, XRP is present on a number of cryptocurrency exchanges, a fact which could expand the scope of this legal complaint and affect more players in the space.

U.S. securities regulators on Tuesday sued cryptocurrency giant Ripple, and both its CEO and executive chairman, for allegedly selling over $1.3 billion in unregistered securities. Axios reports: Ripple on Monday had publicly disclosed that the lawsuit was to be filed imminently, and said it does not believe its tokens needed to be registered. XRP, the cryptocurrency created by Ripple in 2012, has the crypto industry's third-largest market cap at around $22 billion, behind only Bitcoin and Ether. In a separate article, Axios' Dan Primack writes that this lawsuit "could put a chill on some crypto industry investment, as Ripple has no interest in settling fast and moving on." He adds: "It also could mildly complicate the upcoming IPO for Coinbase, where XRP-to-dollar activity made up 15% of trading volume over the past 30 days (per Nomics)."

"Bitcoin is almost as bs as fiat money," Elon Musk tweeted on Sunday, and then followed it up with another tweet. "One Word: Doge."

"The tweet sent shares of Dogecoin up nearly 20% and landed it on the list of trending Twitter topics," reports CNN. (Later that day Musk tweeted "i love all u crazy ppl out there.") The tech billionaire even went as far as updating his Twitter bio with the title "Former CEO of Dogecoin..."

This isn't the first time Musk has tweeted about Dogecoin, the bitcoin descendant. The SpaceX CEO mentioned the digital coin in July when he tweeted "It's inevitable" with an image depicting the dogecoin standard engulfing the global financial system. The tweet sent shares up 14% at the time.

Dogecoin was created in 2014 as a parody to a popular internet meme "doge", which involved a picture of a Shiba Inu dog.

Although the virtual coin started off as a joke, it currently has a market value of nearly $570 million.

One day after they were uploaded, RubyGems discovered and removed two malicious packages that had been designed to steal cryptocurrency from unsuspecting users by installing a clipboard hijacker, reports Bleeping Computer, citing research by open-source security firm Sonatype.

Fortunately, while the packages were downloaded a total of 142 times, "At this time, none of the cryptocurrency addresses have received any funds." These packages were masquerading as a bitcoin library and a library for displaying strings with different color effects. A clipboard hijacker monitored the Windows clipboard for cryptocurrency addresses, and if one is detected, replaces it with an address under the attacker's control. Unless a user double-checks the address after they paste it, the sent coins will go to the attacker's cryptocurrency address instead of the intended recipient...

The base64 encoded string is a VBS file that is executed to create another malicious VBS file and configure it to start automatically when a user logs into Windows. This VBS script is the clipboard hijacker and is stored at C:\ProgramData\Microsoft Essentials\Software Essentials.vbs to impersonate the old Microsoft Security Essentials security software. The clipboard hijacking script monitors the Windows clipboard every second and check if it contains a Bitcoin address, an Ethereum address, or a raw Monero address.

The last time the price of bitcoin hit $20,000 was December of 2017. But Matt Luongo, the CEO of a crypto venture builder, points out to NBC News that this time the market is seeing "significant, high-conviction plays from [a few] large funds and even CEOs of publicly traded companies." "Names like Guggenheim Partners, [hedge fund managers] Paul Tudor Jones and Stan Druckenmiller, and the recent support from Michael Saylor at Microstrategies and Jack Dorsey at Square and Twitter are telling," he said. S&P Dow Jones also announced this month that it will launch cryptocurrency indices in 2021, paving the way for cryptocurrencies to become more mainstream investments.

Beyond the swing of high-profile supporters, there isn't a way to tell who is buying bitcoin. However, the number of new bitcoin addresses, the unique identifiers where the assets are sent, recently hit a record of 25,000 per hour for the first time since January 2018, according to data intelligence firm Glassnode.
Luongo ultimately argues to NBC that "This growth represents real adoption, and it won't disappear when the next bubble bursts."

To get a counter-balancing second opinion, NBC also spoke to the creator of the YouTube channel "Crypto Bobby," who also notes that PayPal (as well as the stock-trading app Robinhood) have also added support for bitcoin.

Sometimes NBC refers to the two men as "crypto enthusiasts" — but other times they're just referred to as "experts."