Majors perk up again

All investments and trading are risky and may result in the loss of capital. Cryptoassets are largely unregulated and are therefore not subject to protection.

Major coins returned to rallying. Bulls are savoring the breeze. Bitcoin popped 4.3%, making a $24K handle seem more than plausible by the time today is over. BTC was $23,670 as of 9:25 a.m. (EST).

Ethereum surged 8%. It's above $1,600.

Per CryptoGlobe, BTC’s price action led crypto analyst Koroush Khaneghah (“Kourosh AK” on Twitter) to tell his followers: "Bears are sweating."

The tech-laden Nasdaq composite index is set to finish this week in the green even as social media stocks tank.

Twitter missed earnings. Snapchat slowed. Expectations – for a worsening ad revenue slump – weighed on shares of Meta in afterhours trading during the wee hours of Friday.

Earlier on Thursday, the Nasdaq notched its third straight positive session following positive quarterly results from Tesla.

Whew, the coast is clear! So says JPMorgan. Bank analysts, in a research report published earlier today, assert plainly that the crypto crisis has come to an end and that retail demand for crypto is solid, even poised to grow.

In fact, if token prices are rising (and right now they are), credit goes not to big institutions or whale wallets but, rather, to regular guys and gals, as measured by rising BTC holdings among mood-lit smaller wallets.

Meanwhile, Ethereum network traffic has surged, JPMorgan added.

The report looked into the severe phase of deleveraging that decimated crypto firms such as Terra, Celsius and Three Arrows Capital, examining whether it has reached a crescendo; and it seems that the event indeed is over, the big bank analysts said, pointing to the recovery in staked ether (stETH).

The JPMorgan report is "a bright ray of hope in otherwise grim conditions," Bitcoinist said.

Truly comprehending what Bitcoin is, how it works, begins with figuring out so-called “mining.” And that requires understanding how miners, as they compete for the right to fill the Bitcoin blockchain with new blocks, do insanely hard math. Suffice to say they don't use a calculator.

And they aren't so much trying to solve a math problem as they are trying to create/guess a “hash,” which is a fixed-length string of alpha-numeric code. It can take millions of attempts before a miner guesses the hash and secures the right to add, for a reward (some coins), a block to the chain, like a lottery winner cashing in a ticket.

"Hashrate" refers to the total combined computational power that is being used to mine and process transactions. In days of yore, when hashes were measured per-second in millions, they were called megahashes. Now that hashes come by the quintillion (which is another set of zeros up from quadrillion) we measure them in exahashes per second.

According to BitInfoCharts, per CryptoPotato, BTC hashrate reached an all-time high on June 8 at more than 250 exahashes per second (E-hash/s).

That rate has declined by almost 25% since.

On a related note, the Bitcoin mining difficulty just went through its largest negative readjustment in more than one year, declining by some 5%.

Occurring roughly every two weeks (after 2,016 blocks), the mining difficulty either makes it harder or easier for miners to do their thing. Essentially, it follows the hashrate and readjusts.

That hashrate decreased is not unexpected given the publicized challenges faced by miners.

Marathon Digital, for example, said 75% of its mining fleet was sidelined due to a storm in Montana while miners in Texas powered down in severe heat.

Due to the rising temperatures and soaring electricity use, Iran is reportedly now set to ban mining for the next several months.