Forbes - In the bleak midwinter 🥶

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	Good Tuesday morning. This is Billy Bambrough, getting you up to speed with the bitcoin and crypto latest.


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24-hour crypto market snapshot

$41,884

$3,125

$450.36

$136.66

January blues 🫐


	The cryptocurrency market is on track for its worst start to a year "since the earliest days of the digital alternative to money," according to a Bloomberg report. The bitcoin price remains locked at around $41,000 per bitcoin this morning with the combined market still bobbing around $2 trillion. Ethereum is up 1% as its rivals diverge; Binance's BNB is soaring, up almost 5%, while solana is down nearly 2%. Terra's luna, a recent addition to the major market, has surged by 5% after a bruising few days. Watch out today... for Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell appearance before the Senate Banking Committee after Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan said they're expecting at least four interest rate hikes this year. Powell's hearing is due to start at 10am ET. Now read this: Is SEC’s Gary Gensler the skunk at the fintech party or the adult in the room?

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Digital distress 😩



	World Economic Forum (WEF) founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab, speaking in 2020 AFP via Getty Images


	Risk on: The World Economic Forum's 2022 Global Risks report has dropped, warning over increasing environmental threats that include the soaring popularity of cryptocurrencies. "New innovations that require high amounts of energy during production and use, such as crypto-mining or crypto-trading, often coming from fossil fuel energy sources, can also offset efforts to reduce ecological footprints," the report read. Failure to act on climate change is currently the biggest global risk, it found, followed by extreme weather and biodiversity loss. Digital everything: The report also warns over the "cyber vulnerabilities" of the crypto-enabled web3—a potential successor to the Silicon Valley-centric web 2.0. "In the future, the interconnectedness and convergence of these digital tools will continue to increase as society embraces the next version of the internet built upon blockchain technology. One manifestation of this migration will be the metaverse: a network of 3D virtual spaces, enabled by cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) among other technologies, with unprecedented socio-economic interoperability and immersive virtual reality experiences," the authors wrote, pointing to data from Chainalysis that showed "ransomware exploded in 2020 and shows no signs of slowing down." Why it matters: The bitcoin network is often said to use more electricity annually than many medium-sized countries. As the bitcoin price rises and competition between so-called miners who secure the bitcoin blockchain in exchange for new coins increases, so too does their energy use. While some think bitcoin and cryptocurrencies will spur the development of new, green technology in order to meet this demand, China's ban on bitcoin and crypto mining last year has paved the way for others to follow suit. China fallout: Last week, the Eastern European country of Kosovo followed China in banning bitcoin miners, with Fortune reporting that "Scandinavian nations are claiming that they can’t meet clean energy goals if crypto is hogging such a huge and growing share of their wind, energy, and geothermal resources." Meanwhile... A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office has recommended that the IRS and FinCEN work together to tighten registration requirements for crypto kiosks, blaming them for a rise in the use of crypto payments to facilitate illegal human and drug trafficking. Coindesk has a write-up. The bottom line: Governments are going to come under a lot of pressure to crack down on crypto this year, with environmental costs likely the primary argument for bans and restrictions. Now read this: Crusading for God, family and … bitcoin?

The Signal and the noise 🔊


	🛑 Moxie Marlinspike, the founder and chief executive of the popular encrypted messaging app Signal who threw the cat amongst the pigeons last week with a brutal takedown of the current state of web3 development, has announced he's quitting the company, with rumors swirling he could be headed to MobileCoin. ✍️ "The move seems tied in some way to the rise of MobileCoin, a cryptocurrency startup that counts Marlinspike as its earliest technical advisor," writes Connie Loizos, Silicon Valley editor at Techcrunch. 📶 Signal, which counts Tesla CEO Elon Musk among its 40 million monthly users, began testing MobileCoin support last year, expanding the service in November even after regulators have torpedoed several attempts by messaging companies, including Facebook and Telegram, to embed crypto-based payments in recent years. Now read this: Is Moxie Marlinspike right about web3?

Cash App gets a jolt ⚡


	📲 Cash App, part of Jack Dorsey's Block (née Square) has begun rolling out Lightning Network support, according to user reports on social media. ⚔️ Dorsey, a bitcoin devotee, quit Twitter last year to focus on Block and has become one of the most vocal warriors in the bitcoin versus web3 wars that have engulfed the crypto space in recent weeks. ⌛ In 2019, Dorsey said it was a matter of when not if support for Lightning, a so-called layer two scaling solution for bitcoin that's designed to tackle its scaling issues and enable micro-payments without compromising on decentralization, would be added to Cash App. Now read this: Bitcoin’s noble goal is no more. Time for regulation

	Billy Bambrough
	Forbes Senior Contributor

I am a journalist with significant experience covering technology, finance, economics, and business. I write about how bitcoin, crypto and blockchain can change the world.

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Forbes - In the bleak midwinter 🥶

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