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China has just completed its first trade of liquefied natural gas (LNG) settled in yuan, the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange said on Tuesday. The trade involved around 65,000 tons of LNG imported from the United Arab Emirates. The French supermajor, one of the world’s top LNG traders, confirmed to Reuters that the trade involved LNG imported from the UAE, but declined to comment further on the deal.

For a fourth year running, regular Bitcoin Core contributors received a survey to surface priorities and ensure that people feel that they can contribute effectively. This blog post is a summary of the results in a format similar to last year’s survey.

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Deutsche has been in trouble for years, much like Credit Suisse, with speculation about its survival swirling through the markets. If any major institution was going to lose the confidence of its investors during this crisis, it was always likely to be at the front of the queue. It remains to be seen what happens next. But the only real way out will be for the German government and the ECB to step in with a guarantee to backstop Deutsche’s losses and to guarantee that depositors will be paid in full. They could decide to nationalise it, or else arrange a quick merger with a rival, most probably Commerzbank, or possibly France’s BNP Paribas. Any fallout from a Deutsche bailout would hit the entire eurozone. A Deutsche collapse could bring the euro down with it. Unless the government and the central bank can shore it up over the weekend, very soon the entire currency will be in deep trouble.

The impact of a bear market on the crypto industry can be significant. The crypto industry is heavily influenced by market sentiment, which can quickly shift from bullish to bearish during market downturns. This can lead to a vicious cycle of selling, as investors rush to exit their positions and lock in gains or minimize losses. However, the bear market is not all gloom and doom, there are also many benefits to a bear market that are often overlooked. First and perhaps most alluring to most is that a bear market can be an opportunity for investors to buy into the market at lower prices. Bear Markets can bring much-needed clarity to the cryptocurrency space. History provides countless examples of bear markets we can look to for reassurance. We only need to look back half a decade to examine two recent bear markets in crypto and how they impacted the industry.

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Multisig solutions are not new to bitcoin. The concept was first pioneered and formalized into the standard Bitcoin protocol as early as 2012 but only started getting traction in 2014 after the shutdown of the Silk Road and the collapse of the bitcoin exchange Mt.Gox. The two adverse events urged developers to promote a better way to obtain maximum security against hacks and confiscation by authorities. If you get past the inconvenience of setting up a multisig wallet and the technical learning required, multisig can help you achieve greater peace of mind with your bitcoin by adding an extra layer of security to your holdings.

The bitcoin standard would mean that central banks would and should hold bitcoin on their balance sheets. Perhaps this would mean that central banks would not be needed anymore, but like any government agency or quasi-government agency, that doesn’t necessarily mean they will go away. Central banks will hold bitcoin because it will give their countries an advantage over other countries where the central banks don’t. The more free that a country is, the stronger it is against other countries. Bitcoin is freedom. Bitcoin is freedom from financial oppression. Under bitcoin, the economy would move from a debt economy to a savings economy. The economy would also move back to being more about production than consumption because consumption and debt don’t grow economies.

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While we should never discount a sitting governor fighting for economic freedom (or mentioning Bitcoin), there are questions to ask about what these bills could mean for Satoshi’s innovation, and the looming presence of a CBDC. ‍ It needn’t be stated here, but Central Bank Digital Currencies would be indelibly harmful to economic and personal freedom, and thankfully, the Bitcoin Policy Institute has a healthy archive of articles that both examine and reiterate this reality. ‍ But considering two rising GOP stars — and rumored presidential hopefuls — are using their state executive authority to presumably quash CBDCs, it’s worth examining what they’re specifically addressing. In a sense, it’s an upgrade to existing commercial law that would allow Bitcoin to be used as collateral for all future financial contracts. It’s “not your keys, not your coins” in commercial law. Not only would this bill protect your Bitcoin in any commercial transaction, but it would also better define and protect ownership of your Bitcoin in a bankruptcy scenario like FTX, Voyager, or BlockFi.

"Understanding the distinction between the commodity futures markets and the underlying commodity market is critical to understanding the current regulatory environment for digital assets, such as bitcoin. As it stands now, like all other commodities, the CFTC regulates the trading of bitcoin futures contracts. But the CFTC does not regulate bitcoin itself or the bitcoin spot markets, which are akin to the cattle auction houses and livestock stockyards in my cattle example. Unlike in my cattle example, there is currently no federal regulator of bitcoin or bitcoin spot markets." - Summer Mersinger

It is worth remembering that Bitcoin was born from the ashes of the last major banking crisis. “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” is the message that Satoshi inscribed in Bitcoin’s genesis block. Since that time, Bitcoin has become recognized as both a technical marvel and an economic expression, yet it has not been tested in a major banking crisis until now. Bitcoin has fared well so far, but the journey ahead of us is likely long. The root issue of flighty deposits and unrealized losses on assets caused by a rising rate environment has yet to be systematically addressed. It may not always be obvious why Bitcoin is needed, but it is times like this that remind us.

If banks were “money warehouses” that simply hold your deposits for you, the financial system would be far more stable than it is today. Throughout most of human history, banks were just “money warehouses” that stored money and charged customers a fee for the service. What we think of as banks today – both a lender and a depository together – is comparatively new. Why? Because both storing and lending the very same customer money is inherently an unstable proposition – its stability could be fleeting because it rests on the idea that not all customers will want their money back at the same time. Such a system inherently is prone to periodic crises, the amplitude and frequency of which tend to increase over time.

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Based on the current situation, markets are bracing for higher rates and banks continuing to tighten credit availability – a scenario generally favorable to risk-off assets. Ethereum is considered a more risk-on, higher beta than Bitcoin, suggesting it will underperform versus the leading cryptocurrency going into a risk-off environment. The percentage change in total ETH addresses has decreased over the past five years, dipping below BTC last month. The Merge narrative led to bullish price drivers in the switch to Proof-of-Stake and deflationary tokenomics. However, more than six months on, ETH continues to lose against Bitcoin. The ETH/BTC ratio is currently at 0.0635, less than half that during the 2017 peak. Since the banking crisis, a notable drop off in the ratio occurred, suggesting the market overwhelmingly favors Bitcoin in these uncertain times.

Just days after the fallout from Silicon Valley Bank and the establishment of the Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP), there’s been a significant rise in the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet after a full year of decline via quantitative tightening (QT). The PTSD from extensive quantitative easing (QE) is causing many people to sound the alarms, but the changes in the Fed’s balance sheet are a lot more nuanced than a new regime shift in monetary policy. The key takeaway is that this is much different than the QE spree of asset buying and the stimulative easy money with near-zero interest rates that we’ve experienced over the last decade. This is about select banks needing liquidity in times of economic distress and those banks getting short-term loans with the goal of covering deposits and paying the loans back in quick fashion. We’re likely far from the end of the chaos and volatility this year,as each month has brought new levels of uncertainty in the market. This was the first sign of the system needing Federal Reserve intervention and swift action. It likely won’t be the last in 2023.

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For ~15 months, we’ve been waiting for the Fed’s unsustainable rate hikes to break something in the financial system and disabuse the Fed of their delusional fantasy that they could actually implement quantitative tightening (QT) without causing calamity. Well, something finally broke. Ironically, it’s the same thing that broke in 2008, just for different reasons – banks’ balance sheets. In 2008, it was heavy exposure to risky mortgage-backed securities. In 2023, it is heavy exposure to long-dated US Treasury bills – supposedly the least risky asset on the planet. After ~15 months, quantitative tightening is dead. And now, we’ve just begun the 5th era of quantitative easing (QE5).

Bitcoin introduced a cryptographic peer-to-peer version of money that allows online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Many recent studies evaluated and criticised Bitcoin’s energy consumption through its Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism without evaluating its efficiency compared to classical electronic payment system. Based on physics, information science and economics, the paper computes and compares the energy consumption and define what is the energy efficiency of both the current monetary payment system and Bitcoin cryptopayment system. The paper demonstrates that Bitcoin consumes at least 28 times less energy and can run today with 60 times less energy than the classical system. At a single transaction level and with total volumes accounted for, Bitcoin produces equivalent energy efficiency rates or better. When Bitcoin Lightning is compared to Instant Payment scheme, Bitcoin gains exponentially in scalability and efficiency, proving to be millions of times more energy efficient per transaction than Instant Payments.