Despite missing the mark with their $100,000 Bitcoin price predictions in 2021, Former Chief Strategy Officer at Block One Brock Pierce and co-founder of research firm Fundstrat Global Advisors Tom Lee are both tipping Bitcoin could hit $200,000 in 2022.
Essentially they are doubling down on their ambitious projections for 2022, even though Bitcoin’s high water mark of $69,000 was set on Nov. 10 and BTC is currently trading at $46,270.
Tom Lee predicted $200,000 for BTC in the Dec. 23 Market Rebellion Roundtable discussion. He said in the discussion:
“So maybe Bitcoin is, you know, in that $200,000 range. I mean, I think that’s achievable and I know it sounds fantastical, but it’s very useful.”
Lee previously maintained his 2021BTC price prediction of $100,000 as late as October in light of ProShares launching the first Bitcoin ETF in the USA.
At that time, he also predicted that Bitcoin exchange traded funds (ETF) would attract at least $50 billion over the next 12 months. American Bitcoin ETFs currently hold about $1.5 billion in assets between Valkyrie, Van Eck, and ProShares’ offerings.
Pierce meanwhile told Fox Business on Dec. 29 that it was “conceivable that it could break $200,000 for a moment and come falling back again.”
In a Jan. 22 article at the start of the year Pierce had cited $100,000 at the top of the range for 2021:
“There really are not many levels where I (anticipate) Bitcoin seeing resistance. We could get anywhere from $70,000 to $100,000 by the end of the year, but it will not be without volatility.”
In fairness to Pierce, the lower end of the range was indeed hit on November 10.
Popular anonymous Bitcoin price analyst Plan B has made his name with his price predictions and stock to flow model. On June 20, PlanB correctly predicted that BTC would hit $63,000 in October, but missed his $98,000 and $135,000 marks for November and December respectively as his “worst case scenario.”
PlanB has defended his predictions by claiming the accuracy of his statistical models to within one standard deviation. Although his price predictions were off, he said in a Dec. 25 tweet,
“$50K-$200K 1 standard deviation band feels wide. Some people think this makes S2F model invalid and not useful, but is it??”
Related:Bitcoin dips below $47K but one trader is eyeing ‘solid risk/reward’ for longing BTC now
Founder and CEO of Ballet Crypto Bobby Lee predicted that BTC would hit $300,000 this year back on Mar. 22 on CNBC’s Squawk Box. This was one of the most ambitious predictions to miss the mark this year.
Each public figure’s wrong predictions go to highlight the need to Do Your Own Research (DYOR) in cryptocurrency investing and to take price predictions as a bit of fun, rather than a serious guide to the future.
EOS and Block.One are back on the news. Is this one positive or negative, though? The EOS Network Foundation, a community-led organization, voted to decouple from Block.One. The ENF alleges that Block.One is no longer working for the benefit of the network. The company that created EOS will not get the 67M EOS that they had coming distributed over the next seven years. Even though the infamous Brock Pierce resigned from the company years ago, this will also affect his finances.
Related Reading | Peter Thiel and Bitmain Invest in Block.one to Support EOS Ecosystem
In The Present, What Does Brock Pierce Have To Do With Block.One?
This might’ve been the last straw. Just last month,Block.oneannouncedthat they were selling 45M EOS at a discount to one of Brock Pierce’s ventures.
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“Today we are pleased to announce that we have agreed to transfer 45 million EOS tokens to Helios.
Led by Brock Pierce, Helios takes aim at serving the EOS community through several high ambitions, including creating an EOS Venture Capital fund, facilitating the creation of institutional-grade EOS financial products, supporting the creation of infrastructure, tooling and documentation for developers, and organizing community events around education, networking, and use case development.”
A pseudonymous Twitter user that broke the news, analyzed it as follows:
8.
The #EOS community worked as one big DAO
A excellent example of democracy through voting and DpoS
The community is now well organized and in possession of hundreds of millions
Watch out for #EOS with the foundation and @EosNFoundation taking the lead
— PrrplFrog (@PrrplFrog) December 8, 2021
He says that “Block.One went in to a deal to sell their vested EOS tokens for a discount to their previous associate Brock Pierce!” And that, to stop this behavior, “The EOS community worked as one big DAO. An excellent example of democracy through voting and DpoS.” Even though the ENF is not a DAO, this might be a good example of how Decentralized Autonomous Organizations should work. However, should a decentralized protocol be so easy to control? Should the EOS Network Foundation be able to roll back a smart contract just like that?
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In any case, according toThe Block, the company is not yet in control of the 45M EOS they promised Brock Pierce. “Eight million of the tokens were already vested and controlled by Block.one while 37 million are still vesting (meaning they haven’t been released by the network yet).” Is this transaction what the EOS Network Foundation wants to block?
EOS price chart on Coinbase | Source: EOS/USD on TradingView.com
What Did The EOS Network Foundation Want?
The ENF was negotiating with Block.One. According to The Block, their goal was to “get hold of the EOS network’s intellectual property.” However, one of Block.One’s side projects, an exchange called Bullish, owned the IP. And Block.One “wouldn’t publicly commit to getting the intellectual property back.” What did the company do instead? Theyannounced this:
“In addition to the recently announced Helios transaction, today we are pleased to announce our intentions to offer the following grants of vesting tokens that are intended to be given over time, and subject to our token availability:
EOS Network Foundation – 30m EOS
Pomelo – 1m EOS
EdenOS – 1m EOS”
Related Reading | Cardano CEO Shares “Too Big Too Fast” Insight on EOS CTO Departure
How did the EOS Network Foundation react? They wanted the IP, not tokens. So, they createdthis proposal, which was approved. The ENF director, Yves La Rose, took to Twitter to declare victory.
“Through a super majority consensus, the EOS network has taken its future in its own hands. This begins a new era for EOS and highlights the power of the blockchain to enable a community to stand up against corporate interests that don’t align with theirs.”
Through a super majority consensus, the EOS network has taken its future in its own hands. This begins a new era for #EOS and highlights the power of the blockchain to enable a community to stand up against corporate interests that don’t align with theirs. https://t.co/8l62MBG67C
— Yves La Rose (@EosNFoundation) December 8, 2021
The community spoke. They will roll back and block the 67M EOS that Block.One had coming. How does that put them regarding the EOS network’s intellectual property? Do they have any chance of getting that IP now?
Featured Image by Valentin Salja on Unsplash | Charts by TradingView
The EOS community has voted to stop token vesting to Block.one, its $4 billion backer from the ICO boom of 2017 to 2018.
EOS developers and block producers, the EOS Foundation, Block.one, and Brock Pierce have been unable to reach a mutual agreement on a supply of locked EOS tokens.
EOS has struggled to live up to its promises since launching in 2018, and its token is still significantly short of its peak.
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EOS block producers have voted to stop vesting tokens to Block.one. The battle between the EOS Foundation and the project’s founding team, Block.one, continues.
EOS Community Votes to Stop Vesting
The EOS community has voted to stop vesting tokens to Block.one.
The project’s top 25 block producersreached the decisionfollowing weeks of negotiations between the community and EOS’ lead backer, Block.one. The block producers have opted to stop issuing 67 million EOS tokens that were scheduled to be unlocked over the next six to seven years.
The vote is the latest turn in an ongoing saga involving the community-backed EOS Foundation and Block.one. In November, the EOS Foundation proposed blocking Block.one from accessing 45 million EOS tokens worth around $196 million. The community claimed that Block.one had failed to deliver on its promises for EOS after raising $4 billion during crypto’s infamous 2017 to 2018 ICO boom.
Block.one announced that it had sold 45 million EOS to Pierce last month. Of the 45 million tokens, eight million were already liquid, leaving 37 million. The organization was due to receive a further 30 million tokens that it committed to the EOS Network Foundation on Sunday.
Yesterday, Block.one co-founder Brock Piercewrote in a tweet that he was working with the EOS Foundation CEO Yves La Rose on a “mutually beneficial proposal” that would allow the foundation and the EOS community “to take a leadership role in the future of EOSIO’s development and intellectual property.”
Block.one CEO Brendan Blumer also commented on the issue, emphasizing that “a lot of stakeholders” would need to be considered for any proposals. He later deleted the post without giving further explanation. Several major EOS block producers had a meeting to discuss the matter, and a clip of it can be seenhere.
A series of failed meetings and disagreements over who would deliver a letter of intent ensued, culminating in the final vote between the block producers.
EOS originally emerged as a so-called “Ethereum killer” after raising $4 billion via Block.one, but its path has been far from smooth over the last few years.The project has continuously faced criticism for failing to live up to its promises, and the EOS token has struggled to hit its 2018 highs. It currently trades at $3.75, which is still 83.6% short of its peak.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece held ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.
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Every industry, group, clique and conclave has its own share of weirdos — cryptocurrency and blockchain are no exception.
Considering that cryptocurrency is the so-called “native” currency of the internet — the repository of the sum of human knowledge and the eccentricities there contained — the crypto sector is home to perhaps even weirder moments and personalities than more established and traditional industries.
Outside of crypto’s inherently odd character, 2020 itself has shaped up to be a bizarre, if not downright terrible year. Existing socioeconomic problems in countries around the globe were exacerbated by the appearance of the novel coronavirus and governments’ subsequent reactions to it.
Bolivia and Kyrgyzstan underwent political upheaval, while the United States presidential election sowed more doubt about the country’s future than certainty in the peaceful transition of power.
Kanye West’s fashion brand received $5 million in coronavirus relief for small businesses. Hackers gatecrashed Zoom meetings. Tiger King became a brief obsession. A bunch of tone-deaf celebrities sang “Imagine” and it was absolutely horrible. The list of the weird and the bad goes on.
Crypto’s 2020 was no exception, with its own fair share of eccentric billionaires, foul-ups, power grabs and political posturing. So, as we say “sayonara” to 2020, let’s take a look at a few of the weirdest moments in crypto this year.
The crypto presidents
This year has been a big one for cryptocurrency adoption. Major financial firms have gone in on Bitcoin (BTC), with sizeable allocations and investments by banks and mutual funds.
As crypto becomes an increasingly mainstream financial instrument, it has attracted the admiration and ire of those in the halls of power. Proponents reached toward regulatory approval while suspicious politicians across the global sought to clamp down on crypto.
It should come as no surprise, then, that some in the crypto community tried to influence the regulatory discourse on cryptocurrencies. A select few, however, sought to do so as President of the United States of America.
American computer scientist and well-known eccentric John McAfee announced his own presidential run as the “crypto candidate” in 2018. However, things got even more interesting as he took to running his campaign from abroad as he supposedly fled capture by U.S. authorities pursuing him on tax charges. Operations were reportedly helped along by an eye-patched campaign manager.
I have finally chosen a campaign manager for my 2020 Libertarian Presidential run: @Loggiaonfire – the Intelligence Co-ordinator for my 2016 POTUS run, was instrumental in placing me on the 2016 National Stage. Rob is a loyal friend, a seeker of truth, and a constant warrior. pic.twitter.com/LmV9l3uMQu
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) October 3, 2018
McAfee frequently stated that he was only running for president to raise awareness about cryptocurrency, and never expected to win.
In May 2020, McAfee threw in the towel on his presidential bid, instead running for vice presidency, as the Libertarian Party in which he sought his nomination allows a vice president candidate to run separately.
Brock Pierce, a former child actor and crypto venture capitalist jumped into the presidential race relatively late, in the summer of 2020.
A co-founder of Block.one, the organization that created EOS, Pierce was featured on British comedian John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, where Oliver drew attention to the former’s eccentric spiritual take on EOS and his unicorn-themed wedding at the legendary U.S. art festival, Burning Man.
Pierce’s strategy and overall campaign image was far more tempered than that of McAfee. In addition to running on a platform prioritizing the development of digital currencies, he also had clear policies on a variety of other relevant issues, including criminal justice reform, universal earned income and healthcare.
As we well know, neither man won. Pierce has largely gone radio silent after the campaign’s conclusion, and McAfee is reportedly residing in a Spanish jail, so there will be no unicorn-themed parties in the Rose Garden, and no one will be smoking bath salts in the Roosevelt Room.
The drama at Bitmain
The details of corporate leadership are often unknown to the layman, as the major decisions and conversations all take place behind closed doors. One imagines Machiavellian takeovers and sycophants vying to get a rung up on the ladder, like in Billions or The Wolf of Wall Street.
The case of Bitmain, one of the largest producers of Bitcoin mining hardware, would appear to follow this stereotype.
In a story that is so dramatic it could have been written for TV, the once-friends and co-founders of the Bitcoin mining giant were locked in a bitter power struggle over the company, affecting its basic operations.
In October of last year, Bitmain co-founder Micree Zhan was ousted from the company in an attempt to “save the ship” by the firm’s other co-founder, Jihan Wu.
The conflict reportedly started due to Zhan’s supposedly disproportionate control over the company. He allegedly owned twice as many stocks in the firm as Wu, but the shares were downgraded as the drama began to unfold.
In May 2020, Bitmain issued statements confirming rumors that Zhan had been ousted from the company. Zhan subsequently sued Bitmain, and Wu ordered all employees to either sever contact with him or face punishment.
Armed guards reportedly appeared at the firm’s Beijing offices at Zhan’s behest in order to establish himself as a legal representative of the company. While Wu condemned the takeover, Zhan appears to have achieved some success, as he forbade employees to complete shipments of mining rigs.
Bitmain maintained that Zhan had no right to represent the company legally, but in June, he offered to buy out the company for $4 billion in shares. He appears to have been successful in changing the firm’s payments details to entities he controls, but hardware shipments still suffered and 10,000 mining rigs controlled by the firm went “missing” in Mongolia.
The Bitmain leadership struggle has yet to conclude, so we may look forward to more weird twists and turns in 2021.
The great Twitter hack of 2020…
July 15, 2020 is a day that will live on in infamy for social media giant Twitter, as the accounts of famous politicians, businesspeople and media figures were hacked and used for a Bitcoin giveaway scam.
The pages of Elon Musk, Kanye West, President-Elect Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates were all compromised and sent out posts with one of the oldest crypto scams in the book.
In the crypto giveaway scam, a supposedly magnanimous individual claims to be sharing their wealth via Bitcoin. One only needs to send a small amount to their listed address so that they can ascertain what your address is, and send you a sum worth far more than your initial transfer.
Most people with a passing familiarity with crypto are aware of this kind of scam, but some that are new to the space, or don’t know about crypto at all, apparently don’t think it all weird that Barack Obama wants to give them Bitcoin, and thus fall victim to the scheme.
In addition to the aforementioned famous faces, hackers also compromised the accounts of prominent players in the crypto space, including major exchanges Binance, Coinbase and Gemini, as well as protocols like Tron.
While Twitter responded immediately by locking the affected blue-check accounts, the damage had already been done. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey expressed his own lamentations on the platform.
Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.
We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.
💙 to our teammates working hard to make this right.
— jack (@jack) July 16, 2020
Rumors and speculation that the hack was an inside job were quelled when Twitter released a report on the incident, revealing that employees with broad administrative privileges had been victims of a spear-phishing attack.
While doppelganger accounts of famous individuals are often created to execute scams, the Twitter hack this year set a new precedent for the lengths scammers are willing to go to on social media platforms.
The $1 million bounty that never was
Never one to shy away from a good publicity stunt, Tron founder and BitTorrent CEO Justin Sun offered a $1 million dollar bounty to whoever could track down the parties responsible for the Twitter hack.
However, when reporters attempted to work with Tron in tracking down the scammers, the company miraculously failed to follow through on its high-profile promise.
After an individual approached a Cointelegraph reporter with highly credible information regarding the potential hackers, Cointelegraph attempted to put the individual in touch with Tron in order to pass on this info.
Tron, however, seemed utterly disinterested in talking to the source, instead insisting that the source get Cointelegraph’s stamp of approval before making its own examination. In its correspondence with both Cointelegraph and the source, it seemed like the company was trying to get out of paying the bounty. One group chat went as follows:
“Source: Whenever [you] are free, we could hop in a Zoom or Discord call and explain everything to you guys.
Tron representative: No we can chat right here go ahead.
Source: It’s a lot, much easier over a voice call.
Tron representative: Not happening.”
Instead, Tron set up an email account for tips, while major papers reported deep dives into the hack four days after Cointelegraph and the source had initially approached Tron. Tron later claimed that an FBI investigation into the incident was sufficient cause to terminate the bounty.
Tron’s behavior did seem rather odd, given its proposed goals, in addition to being rather convenient, as it didn’t need to pay out the generous sum.
The Dickening
Price predictions abound in the crypto space. Experts and analysts have predicted a Bitcoin bull run leading the coin to $100,000 during this cycle, and perhaps as high as $1 million by 2035. One Citibank analyst recently predicted a Bitcoin price of over $300,000 in 2021.
However, there is one particular price prediction that earns a spot on the weird-list this year. John McAfee, whom we already know as affirmed eccentric within the crypto space, made a bet three years ago that could be rather painful if he actually delivers.
In 2017, McAfee bet that Bitcoin would hit $500,000 by 2020, and if not, he would eat his own genitalia on television. As the 2017 bull run gained steam, however, he upped his bet.
When I predicted Bitcoin at $500,000 by the end of 2020, it used a model that predicted $5,000 at the end of 2017. BTC has accelerated much faster than my model assumptions. I now predict Bircoin at $1 million by the end of 2020. I will still eat my dick if wrong. pic.twitter.com/WVx3E71nyD
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) November 29, 2017
The event, which has become known as The Dickening and earned its own countdown clock, is now less than two weeks away.
So, all Bitcoin price needs to do for McAfee to avoid a rude luncheon is to increase by almost 5,000% in the next several days. Perhaps it’s a good thing his bet isn’t locked into a smart contract.
The year to come
As 2020 comes to a close, one thing is clear: The cryptocurrency space is growing and adoption will continue to increase throughout 2021 and the years to come. As the industry thrives, the weirdos contained therein will likely continue to shock and entertain both insiders and observers.
