When Bitcoin was trading above $60,000, the smartest analysts and financial-minded folk told investors that BTC price would never fall below its previous all time high. These same individuals also said $50,000 was a buy the dip opportunity, and then they said $35,000 was a generational buy opportunity. Later on, they also suggested that BTC would never fall under $20,000. Of course, “now” is a great time to buy the dip, and one would think that buying BTC at or under $10,000 would also be the purchase of a lifetime. But by now, all the so-called “experts'' have fallen quiet …

Bitcoin (BTC) changed the world as a decentralized and non-governmental form of currency that can facilitate peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions that transcend national borders. But, despite this functionality, Bitcoin’s role as a payment mechanism has been called into question due to its low transaction throughput. The Bitcoin blockchain can handle up to seven transactions per second, which means that network demand has seen the average transaction fee on the network reach an all-time high above $62 during specific periods. In order to address low throughput and high transaction fees, developers made the Lightning Network — a layer-2 scaling solution that allows …

The Bitcoin (BTC) mining industry endured immense financial stress throughout the year 2022 as a prolonged bear market directly impacted their earnings when translated to the U.S. dollar. However, miners resilient to the year’s lowest mining revenue day, June 13, witnessed a 68.63% increase in mining revenue within a month. Over the year, revenue from Bitcoin mining dropped due to a multitude of factors centered around investor sentiment — driven by tensions arising from market crashes, ecosystem collapses and loss-making investments. Cutting through the noise, the Bitcoin ecosystem recovered across numerous determinants, including miners’ revenue in dollars, network difficulty and …

It’s weird to think that anyone could look forward to downturns in the crypto market, but that is precisely the position held by many developers and project creators who enjoy the low-pressure environment that exists during a bear market. As the saying goes, bear markets are for building, and now is one of the best times to survey the landscape to see which sectors of the market are most active in designing the platforms that will soar to new heights in the next bull cycle. Here’s a look at five sectors of the blockchain ecosystem that may present some of …

A Bitcoin (BTC) experiment on the Isle of Man involving the Lightning Network, 25 schoolchildren and the promise of a milkshake has yielded interesting results. At Willaston School on the Isle of Man (a British Crown Dependency nestled between the United Kingdom and Ireland), 25 6-year-old students, one teacher and one teaching assistant participated in the light-hearted Bitcoin study. MSW, a data analyst at CoinCorner, told Cointelegraph that he visited the school to discuss job opportunities and to inspire the kids, discussing his own career path, which spans nuclear reactor study, data analytics and now, Bitcoin. Inevitably, the talk delved …

Lightning Labs, a developer of the Bitcoin (BTC) Lightning Network (LN), released a beta version of the Lightning Network Daemon (lnd) — a complete implementation of the LN node — with added support to the latest protocol upgrades including Taproot and Musig2, among other improvements. lnd is a software component that handles various aspects within the LN including managing a database, generating payment invoices and revoking payments, to name a few. The latest software release, named lnd 0.15 beta (v0.15-beta), aims to empower developers to create solutions for more use cases by leveraging the Bitcoin network’s latest capabilities. Announcing lnd …

What are the various Lightning Network problems? Routing fees, channels being fraudulently closed, the exposure of nodes to online theft and malicious attacks are a few problems with the Lightning Network. Routing fees are among the vital Lightning Network problems that are required to transfer payments between channels. However, nodes do not get any reward in return for facilitating payments. Also, fraudulent channel closure, which means one party closes the channel without notifying the other party, leading to offline transaction risk is another issue with the LN. To transmit and receive payments on Bitcoin's Lightning Network, nodes must always be …

In light of the recent fragility in the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector, Bitcoin (BTC) maximalist and MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor feels that Bitcoin and the Lightning network can come to the rescue of the DeFi market. With two enormous protocols, Terra and Celsius, facing acute difficulties within a month of each other, the DeFi sector is going through a tough time. And in a recent tweet, Saylor suggested that Bitcoin and Lightning could help stabilize the industry. According to Saylor, Bitcoin provides a “sound ethical, economic, and technical foundation for DeFi.” He went on to say that the Lightning protocol …

Bitcoin (BTC) hash rate, a network security measure based on computing power for mining, achieved a new all-time high (ATH) of 231.428 exahash per second (EH/s) amid an ongoing bear market that witnesses BTC price plunging below the critical $25,000 mark. Hash rate is directly proportional to the computing power of mining equipment for confirming transactions, which deters bad actors from manipulating on-chain transactions. Complimenting the new hash rate ATH, the Bitcoin network difficulty stands at a strong position of 30.283 trillion. Some of the most popular Bitcoin mining pools based on market share include Poolin, AntPool, F2Pool, ViaBTC and …

There’s cause for celebration from the world’s largest cryptocurrency. The Lightning Network hit the 4,000 Bitcoin (BTC) public capacity milestone, meaning $120 million in value is ready for peer-to-peer payments. The Lightning Network first broke the 1,000 BTC barrier in August 2020 and the 2,000 BTC barrier in July 2021. The capacity has doubled in the space of 18 months. CoinCorner CEO Daniel Scott told Cointelegraph that “we had slow and steady growth with Lightning capacity to begin, but since Jan[uary] 2021, the uptick has been strong.” Danny Brewster, CEO of United Kingdom-based Bitcoin exchange Fast Bitcoins told Cointelegraph that …

Unwithered by the ongoing bear market, Bitcoin’s (BTC) underlying architecture continues to outperform itself — further securing, decentralizing and speeding up the impenetrable peer-to-peer (P2P) network. The same holds true for the Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN). The Bitcoin Lightning Network capacity attained an all-time high of 3915.776 BTC, as evidenced by data from Bitcoin Visuals, displaying a commitment to the cause of improving BTC transaction speeds and reducing fees over the layer-2 protocol. The Bitcoin LN was first implemented into the Bitcoin mainnet in 2018 to address Bitcoin’s infamous scalability issues and has ever since been able to maintain an …

Happy Bitcoin Pizza Day! Before you dial for a Margherita to commemorate the world’s first real-world Bitcoin transaction, here’s a slice of trivia: What do a family holiday to Japan, a 50 Cent album, a steak dinner and a framed cat photo have in common? They were all paid for with Bitcoin (BTC) by members of the Cointelegraph Bitcoin community! And just like the Bitcoin pizzas that cost 10,000 BTC, which are now worth more than $300 million, the community’s Bitcoin purchases have also skyrocketed. Benjamin de Waal, the vice president of engineering at Bitcoin exchange Swan Bitcoin, told Cointelegraph, …