Bitcoin has recently rallied back toward its prior highs from last month and is now over $50,000 in price again. Two recent reports have doubtless aided this recent surge. They both tout bitcoin’s growing institutional acceptance as a store of value and possible future medium of exchange for all manner of commerce. One report, from Citi’s GPS research unit, sensationally claims that bitcoin could displace the dollar as the world’s premier international trade and invoicing currency. The other, by noted bitcoin advocate Vijay Boyapati, claims that bitcoin is well on track to displacing national fiat currencies generally.
While the two reports overlap in varying degrees, they both hold out great promise for the bitcoin ‘Lightning Networks’ currently under development. These are considered essential if bitcoin is to succeed in finding a growing range of commercial use cases. This is because they are designed to solve what many commentators, including myself, have identified as a critical weakness of the leading cryptocurrency – namely that its network consumes a huge and exponentially growing amount of computing and therefore electrical power.
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