Bitcoin, most altcoins, are hurting

U.S. stock futures shot up early Thursday following an inauguration day marked by pomp, pageantry – and a slew of strong corporate earnings reports – not to mention a fresh batch of pinnacles for the most widely followed indexes. The S&P 500 finished Wednesday up 1.4%, to 3,851.85, a new high. The NASDAQ Composite and the Dow Jones Industrial Average also both notched brand new highs.

Sparse amounts of green were observable across the crypto map, although Internet-of-things (IoT) supply chain platform VeChain (VET) did manage to hit a new all-time high of $0.0342 on Wednesday. The 21st-largest digital asset by market cap, VET rose 5.5% over the 24 hours ending Thursday at a.m. (EST). One last look at VET showed it losing ground on an hourly basis; looking back over the week, it's up 37%.

Whether Bitcoin can ever again match the kind of baffling parabolic propulsion seen in early January, when BTC topped $41,000, could partially depend on the ampleness of the liquidity in the CME-traded cash futures market favored by institutional money managers.

For the moment, which is suddenly starting to seem like half of forever, the fat boy of crypto remains mired in the low-to-mid $30K range, a tormented on-repeat-loop capable of making an airport terminal monorail seem like Le Mans.

As of Thursday morning, BTC was trading at about $32,600, down about 6% over the past 24 hours. BTC's price is 13% lower than it was last week at this time. But it is still up roughly 42% over the past month.

BeInCrypto's technical analysis looks for recurrent patterns – impulse waves that seem to tee up a big-picture trajectory as well as concurrent, corrective waves that can oppose that path, as well as mini-waves within those larger waves – and, well, long-term patterns appear to be dire. They suggest that BTC has completed a bullish impulse and is now correcting inside a complex triangular trap that may as well be a tiny device button that says "mute."

New regulatory filings suggest BlackRock is prepared to choose its own Bitcoin adventure.

On Wednesday, both the BlackRock Global Allocation Fund and the BlackRock Funds V turned over prospectus documents to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and in them the world's largest money manager includes BTC on lists of derivative products authorized for use, potentially, at least within these two funds; and more specifically, only cash-settled BTC futures traded on commodity exchanges registered with the CFTC, a list comprising all of one exchange, the CME.

BlackRock is laying down the regulatory tracks to conduct allocations if it so chooses, said The Block.

Craig Wright, chief scientist, nChain, and a well-known advocate of Bitcoin SV, tried to force Bitcoin.org to take down its copy of the Bitcoin white paper, part of a broader effort to advance his claim that he created the world's oldest crypto and that, in a weird irony considering the inherent nature of the network, he alone owns the copyright to its intellectual property.

Bitcoin.org said that the paper was rightfully published (in 2008) under the permissive and free MIT license by Satoshi Nakamoto. The organization also pointed out how the true Satoshi, whoever he/she/they are, is known to possess a Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption key which if utilized would allow Wright to verify his claim.