Bitcoin gets back to raging

Trying to transcend the capricious whims of an electric car mogul while overcoming intense pressure from marketplace bears, Bitcoin spiked by about 10% as Sunday gave way to Monday.

As of 7:30 a.m. (EST), BTC, the largest cryptocurrency in terms of its total market capitalization (roughly $735 billion), was trading, in spot markets, per CoinGecko, in the vicinity of $39,300.

Bullishness rained down after Elon Musk tweeted about Tesla perhaps accepting BTC as payment, someday, provided mining activities become cleaner, and, in addition, following the confirmation of the protocol's Taproot update.

In a nicely symmetrical moment just before 6:30 a.m. (EST), Bitcoin displayed 9.6% gains over 24-hour and seven-day periods, while being utterly flat, 0.0%, over the prior 60 minutes. But as far as the weekly recordings turned in by the other mega-majors, as of Monday, there wasn’t any wonderfulness to behold.

For the week, the non-stablecoins comprising what we like to call the Big Ten, had all, with the exception of BTC, declined.

The steepest seven-day drop was endured by Dogecoin (DOGE) which fell 13.3%. Polkadot (DOT) fell 9%.

Taking a wider angle, looking across the largest 20 coins, and honing in on the ugliest weekly performer: Internet Computer (ICP) over seven days lost 40%.

While an Elon Musk tweet has been credited as causing Bitcoin's Sunday surge, there was another catalyst: the network's first update in four years.

Dubbed Taproot and approved by a majority of miners on Saturday, the update will bring more privacy and efficiency to Bitcoin while opening the door for smart contracts.

Taproot ships in November (CryptoBriefing).

We'll gladly pay you Tuesday for exposure to your Bitcoin today. And despite your issuance’s sub-investment grade rating.

That's what a cadre of institutional investors told MicroStrategy last week in subscribing to a $500 million high-yield bond offering from the Michael Saylor-led software company/BTC repository.

Some of last Tuesday's demand came from investors, including hedge funds and pension funds, ravenous for yield and who crave BTC exposure, however, structurally, can’t outright own crypto, Bloomberg reported.

Wall Street macro strategist Brian Reynolds, interviewed last week for an upcoming episode of a Blockworks podcast, portrayed MicroStrategy’s sale as harkening back to the late 1980s and early 1990s when financier Michael Milken fostered a huge market for non-investment-grade IOUs, dubbed "junk" bonds and which helped contribute to a wave of bank failures. The "sub-priming of bitcoin," Reynolds said, marks a crossing-the-Rubicon moment for Big Fixed Income with respect to crypto.

File under scary but harmless: a social media phenomenon last week put forth the proposition that to figure out how the rest of your 2021 will turn out, look to the title of the top box-office movie on one’s tenth birthday.

We tried this unorthodox forecasting method – for Bitcoin.

The pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto released the whitepaper, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," on Oct. 31, 2008, a date often pegged as BTC’s birthday.

When BTC turned ten as of the last week of October, 2018, the top movies were “Venom,” about a monstrous creature, and a horror flick reboot, “Halloween.”