Bitcoin falls below $50,000

Bitcoin Gold (BTG) won't be confused with actual Bitcoin any time soon but, as forks go, BTG stands tall this morning. Overnight, it jumped 14%, as of 7:30 a.m. (EST).

Ethereum, meanwhile, hit an all-time high yesterday, some 20 hours ago. ETH got above $2,600. You go, ETH. Oh. It has since tumbled 10% to $2,300.

Bitcoin fell 12% in 24 hours, sank below $50,000, and is 23% lower from its all-time high of about $64,800 hit last week.

At 8:45 a.m. (EST), BTC was about $49,600, per CoinGecko.

Falling below the $50K mark prompted bear/bull taunts/retorts on Twitter, with Messari’s Mira Christanto noting that as from-the-peak pullbacks go, one of 23% is hardly as severe as the kind experienced during the 2017 bull-run that produced average corrective losses of 35% (Cointelegraph).

Bitcoin has shed about one-fourth of its value since last week’s fever-dream-like fervor that happened to coincide with the debut of publicly traded shares issued by a major crypto exchange.

Worried this downward spiral could continue, enthusiasts, analysts and institutional investors alike are clinging to PlanB's stock-to-flow model like a snowbound Eskimo family huddled around a seal-oil lamp.

The anonymous Twitter user/quant analyst's "S2F" pricing model asserts via linear prognostication that as Bitcoin’s scarcity continues to increase, so will the price, expected to hit $100,000 at some point possibly even later this year.

Flaws have been pointed out by the model’s critics, who contend it is off base, plagued by an overemphasized and not concrete assertion: that the market capitalization of a monetary good, such as gold and silver, is derived directly from the rate of new supply; and linear regression techniques appear to have been applied naïvely.

Still, PlanB remains bullish and says that he is "relieved" by BTC's correction. "For a moment I thought that people were front running the model,” PlanB tweeted. “Now we are back to normal ... like clockwork."

Turkish authorities are investigating the shuttered Turkish crypto exchange Thodex over allegations of fraud involving an estimated $2 billion, Cointelegraph said. Thodex owner Faruk Fatih Ozer on Wednesday left Turkey, which is set to ban crypto, on a commercial flight bound for Albania, according to the Associated Press. In a statement, reported by Bloomberg, Ozer denied all allegations, said the whole thing was a hack/smear campaign, and promised to repay investors and to return to Turkey.

Not Fungible, Definitely Silly: A big bang period for non-fungible token (NFTs) has hurled endless particles of digital ephemera everywhere, some of it possibly to be discovered millions of years from now sparking conversations about the nature of our species, others never, ever, seen again. Gizmodo recently did a craziest-NFTs list that included on it a piece of NFT art depicting Lindsay Lohan and a VW Beetle – in a nod to "Herbie: Full Loaded" – as well as a series of Taco Bell memes tied to the rights to $500 worth of tacos. A Reddit thread on craziest NFTs led to an OpenSea-offered collectible from BECAUSE I CAN which bills itself as the “exclusive store for everyone who does not care what other people say.” The BIC collectible put a meta-light on all of the fun with simply the phrase "I Paid 1 Ether For This."