A recently published report by Citi group, one of the world’s largest financial institutions, highlights that Bitcoin could become the currency of choice for international trade.
Can Bitcoin be the currency of the future in international trade?
The US-based banking giant analyzed the transformation and future potential of the major cryptocurrency within the global financial system in a 108-page report titled “Bitcoin at Tipping Point.”
According to the authors of the report, as Bitcoin evolves, it is possible that its properties, combined with its global reach and neutrality, will make it the currency of choice for international trade in about seven years.
The Citi team also highlighted that Bitcoin is at a “tipping point” for mainstream adoption, noting that its growth in the coming years depends on various factors.
“The perspectives on what makes Bitcoin important continue to evolve and generate new opportunities while increasing its perception to become the main trend,” the report reads.
“A focus on global reach and neutrality could see Bitcoin become an international trading currency. This would take advantage of Bitcoin’s decentralized and borderless design, its lack of exposure to foreign exchange trading, its speed and advantage of costs in the movement of money, the security of your payments and their traceability”.
The Bank of New York Mellon announced that it will begin custody of various digital assets for its clients. L
BNY’s chief executive officer for digital business and asset services Roman Regelman explained that digital assets “are becoming part of the trend.”
More and more banks are beginning to accept cryptocurrencies, after years of absolute rejection, as in the case of Citibank, JPMorgan and Bank of America, which prohibited buying them with their credit cards.
Also payment services such as PayPal, Visa and recently MasterCard, jumped on the new wave.
What can cause the collapse of Bitcoin ?
The largest cryptocurrency trading platform in the United States, Coinbase, has warned that one of the main risks to its business and the crypto economy is the mysterious identity behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, who developed Bitcoin.
Coinbase assured in a public document that if the true identity of the creator of the virtual currency is revealed or if he transfers his bitcoins, the prices of the most valued cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum could plummet.
Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym used by a person or group of people who developed the Bitcoin protocol and its reference software. It owns around 1.1 million Bitcoins which represent around 5% of all that can be mined.
This amount exceeds $50 billion, an amount that makes the Bitcoin developer almost as rich as the Chinese businessman and founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma.
So far, Nakamoto’s true identity is a mystery, which is why he has been the subject of much speculation, something in common he has with his currency. However, many pieces of evidence were discovered that cast doubt on his supposed Japanese identity behind which the identity of one person or several is hidden.
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
While it is known that his name is Satoshi Nakamoto, there are still many doubts as to whether it is actually a person or a set of programmers who created the Bitcoin protocol, but fundamentally, its reference software.
It all started in 2008, that is, in the midst of the subprime mortgage crisis in the US when Nakamoto published an article describing a digital money system.
A year later, when the whole world was going through a deep economic crisis, the Bitcoin software was launched, based on the implementation of a network of the same name and the first units of the currency.
The official story goes that in 2010 Nakamoto transferred the corresponding domains to other prominent members of the community and left the project, but this is impossible to verify.
What did prove that the transaction log with Nakamoto’s known addresses contains approximately one million bitcoins.
But nothing is known about his true identity, which obviously remains unknown and is the subject of all kinds of speculation. At this point, the discrepancies range from assuming that the name is real, that it is a pseudonym or if it is a group of people.
Although in his original “paper” he presented himself as a 37-year-old man living in Japan, this was questioned due to his perfect use of English and the fact that the Bitcoin software is neither documented nor labeled. in Japanese.
For the security researcher, Nakamoto could be a genius or a group of people. For his part, Laszlo Hanyecz, who intervened at a later stage than the original project and who maintained contact by email with Nakamoto, considered that the code was too well developed to be a single person.
In search of some clue to find his identity, it was assumed that due to his writing and the terminology used, he was originally from a Commonwealth country.
Another programmer, a Swiss named Stefan Thomas, analyzed the times of each of his messages posted on the Bitcoin forum (more than 500) and determined that there was a steep decline between 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time, including weekends.
From that analysis, he deduced that if it were a single individual with conventional sleep habits, it would be assumed that they could reside in the eastern United States as well as parts of Central America, the Caribbean, and South America.
In the frantic search to know his identity, several names emerged, including the following:
Dorian Nakamoto: He is the best known and perhaps the least likely. He rose to fame in 2014, when Newsweek magazine published an article in which he was mentioned as the father of the child, for which he appealed to rather circumstantial evidence and took into account an interview in which, due to a misunderstanding, inisinuto have worked on the project.
Nick Szabo: He is a prominent American cryptographer who designed a theoretical mechanism for a decentralized digital currency called “bit gold”, according to which a participant could solve cryptographic puzzles to validate transactions. In other words, something similar to what is called “mining”. It also works in his favor that he used to use pseudonyms and was one of the first supporters of Bitcoin, which makes him even more suspicious.
Wei Dai: is a computational engineer who has made multiple contributions to the field of cryptography, but perhaps what points him out the most is that his name appears in the Bitcoin white paper , because he was the creator of “b-money”, its predecessor of the first cryptocurrency and that was used as a reference for its design.
Hal Finney: He was a cryptographer and cypherpunk activist, inventor of the first proof-of-work (PoW) system, which would later be implemented in Bitcoin. In addition, he was the first person to receive bitcoins and one of the first developers of the software. He passed away on August 28, 2014.
Craig Wright and Dave Kleiman: It is the option that has raised the most media noise since its appearance in 2015. At the end of that year, the investigations of two digital newspapers pointed to Wright as the creator of Bitcoin.
While he appears to possess the necessary skills, his eagerness to appear in public and declare himself Satoshi Nakamoto without hard evidence belies the cypherpunk ideology from which the cryptocurrency was born.
In that year, the information came from a hacker who allegedly managed to infiltrate Wright’s email accounts, where it could be seen that “Satoshi Nakamoto” was actually a joint pseudonym that also included Wright’s friend and forensic computer analyst, Dave. Kleiman, deceased two years.
But regardless of who the real Nakamoto is, if as those who seek him say, he never moved his million bitcoins, today he would be one of the richest men in the world since his fortune these days would oscillate between 36,000 and 40,000 million dollars.
