Bitcoin rallied to a new all-time high, and President-elect Donald Trump has picked some Bitcoin supporters for his team. Here are the cryptocurrency highlights of week 51:
- A new scalability solution for Bitcoin, called Teechan, has been developed. It is a new, practical, high throughput, low latency off-chain transaction protocol that can be deployed securely on the Bitcoin network, as it exists today. Teechan is similar in design to the Lightning Network, save for one crucial differentiating factor: it leverages trusted execution environments (TEEs), that is, secure hardware components found in recent commodity processors such as the latest batch of Intel CPUs with Software Guard Extensions (SGX).
- The price of Bitcoin itself was big news this week. The total value of all Bitcoins in circulation hit a record high above $14bn on Thursday, as the web-based digital currency jumped to its highest levels in three years after more than doubling in price this year. The price of one Bitcoin has peaked above $900 per BTC, compared $430 at the start of the year.
- Mick Mulvaney, a conservative Republican congressman from South Carolina and a long-time bitcoin supporter has been picked to run the Office of Management and Budget. He is the first member of Congress to accept Bitcoin donations and questioned Janet Yellen, Chair of the Federal Reserve, in October 2015: “what Bitcoin’s rising popularity says about public perception of the Federal Reserve’s conduct of monetary policy,” according to Coin Center, a non-profit bitcoin research and advocacy center.
- Also Elon Musk, head of Tesla and SpaceX, joined President-elect Donald Trump’s team of Advisories. Mr. Musk has made jaw-dropping comments on Bitcoin in the past. In an interview available on YouTube, Mr. Musk, describes his feelings on Bitcoin. “I think Bitcoin is probably a good thing. I think it’s primarily going to be a means of doing illegal transactions…But that’s not necessarily entirely bad. You know, some things maybe shouldn’t be illegal”.
- Compared to the previous week the price of Bitcoin has increased by more than 14 percent, with the exchange rate currently at $903 per BTC. The price of Ethereum lost almost eight percent, taking Ether down to a rate of $7.30 per ETH. Ethereum Classic on the other hand gained almost nine percent, with the price increasing to $1.10 per ETC. Zcash had a good week for a change, gaining 36 percent. One ZEC is now trading at roughly $49 per coin.
