Today in crypto: BlackRock’s clients aren’t factoring Bitcoin’s global payments potential into their investment thesis, Peter Schiff says OGs selling to ‘weak’ hands will make future downturns more sever. Meanwhile, a solo Bitcoin miner earned 3.146 BTC worth $266,000 with a computing power of only 1.2 TH/s.
BlackRock’s Bitcoin clients aren’t ‘underwriting’ the case for global payments
BlackRock’s head of digital assets, Robbie Mitchnick, said that most of the world’s largest asset managers’ clients aren’t considering Bitcoin’s use for daily payments when deciding whether to invest in the asset.
“I think for us, and most of our clients today, they’re not really underwriting to that global payment network case,” Mitchnick said during a podcast interview published to YouTube on Friday.
“That’s sort of maybe out-of-the-money-option-value upside,” Mitchnick said.
He said this doesn’t mean Bitcoin won’t eventually achieve widespread use in payments, but he called that scenario “a little bit more speculative,” stressing that investors are far more focused on the “digital gold” or store-of-value thesis.
“There’s a lot that needs to happen in terms of Bitcoin scaling, Lightning, and otherwise to make that possible,” he said. In August 2024, Galaxy Research suggested that most Bitcoin layer-2 scaling networks, particularly “rollups” may not be sustainable in the long term despite their popularity as a promising method to keep Bitcoin payments cheap, fast and decentralized.
Bitcoin rotation to ‘weak’ hands will make future drawdowns more severe: Peter Schiff
The transfer of Bitcoin (BTC) from strong hands to “weak” hands by continued selling from long-term holders, also called “OGs,” will make future Bitcoin market downturns more severe, according to gold advocate Peter Schiff.
Schiff is one of Bitcoin’s most vocal critics and continues to argue that it is overvalued and destined to fail. In a Saturday X post, he said:
“Some argue that after all these years, BTC is finally having its IPO moment now that there’s enough liquidity for the OGs to cash out. I agree, but this much BTC moving from strong to weak hands not only increases the float, but also means future selloffs will be bigger.”
The comments came amid a broad downturn in the crypto market and investor fears that the next bear market may have already started.
‘Extremely lucky’ solo Bitcoin miner beats massive odds to win $266K
A solo Bitcoin miner hit the jackpot on Friday, earning 3.146 BTC, worth roughly $266,000, after solving block 924,569 with only a tiny fraction of the computational power typically needed to win a block reward.
The miner, who is believed to be operating a hobby-grade machine, struck gold with a hash rate of roughly 1.2 terahashes per second (TH/s), which is a speck of dust in an industry dominated by industrial-scale operations producing exahashes (one quintillion hashes per second).
CKpool creator Con Kolivas announced the win on X, congratulating the “extremely lucky” miner and noting just how improbable the event was. He estimated that the odds translate to about 1.2 million to one per day at the miner’s reported hash rate.
The miner received 3.125 Bitcoin (BTC) from the block subsidy plus 0.021 BTC in transaction fees, bringing the total to just over 3.146 BTC, according to onchain data.
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