The Crypto Beat - May 21

Here are all the latest stories related to cryptocurrencies Friday May 21, 2021.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin falls back below $40,000 as it wraps up wild week of trading - Chinese authorities intensified calls to crackdown on mining and trading the cryptocurrency, and this has resulted in yet another price drop.

Then there was this: The U.S. Treasury Department said a day earlier that it would require any cryptocurrency transfer worth $10,000 or more to be reported to the IRS.

“Cryptocurrency already poses a significant detection problem by facilitating illegal activity broadly including tax evasion,” the Treasury said.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency slid as much as 30% on Wednesday.

MicroStrategy CEO on his outlook on crypto, Elon Musk's role in bitcoin's volatility

Dogecoin

BTC tribe slams Musk’s Dogecoin tweet

Elon Musk's recent tweet about his plan to increase Dogecoin block size and lower the fees received criticism from a group of BTC developers and supporters. Musk tweeted: "100X higher transaction volume with 100X lower fees means total fees earned stay same. Low fees & high volume are needed to become the currency of Earth."

Bitcoin Association Founding President Jimmy Nguyen thanked him for explaining why blockchain scaling matters. He said, "Transaction capacity: Low fees & high volume are needed to become the currency of Earth in a tweet.

That is why BTC, ETH, and others do not work. It's exactly why BSV does work." The tweet was posted days after Tesla stopped accepting BTC as a payment option, citing concerns about increasing fossil fuel use for Bitcoin mining.

Ethereum

How Ethereum plans to get around a major drag on crypto prices

Bitcoin mining globally uses about as much electricity as the nation of Argentina, producing a similar volume of greenhouse gas emissions to the London metro area.

In a blog post May 18, Carl Beekhuizen, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, a nonprofit that helps organize the currency’s community of miners, programmers, and investors, asserted that the currency’s long-planned shift to a new computational method will shave 99.5% off its energy consumption (which is already much lower than bitcoin, because of the smaller size of its market). In a colorful analogy, Beekhuizen writes that if the energy demand of bitcoin were represented as the height of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, then Ethereum’s new energy demand could be compared to a single screw.  Source: QZ.com

- Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com