After Musk kiss-off, Bitcoin shudders

With tens of thousands of crypto enthusiasts filing into the Miami airport for this weekend's Bitcoin 2021 conference, one buzzworthy asset seized center stage: ladies and gentlemen, we give you Filecoin (FIL).

The 23rd-largest crypto, tied to a project connected with decentralized file storage, hopped on a northbound flight over the past 24 hours. FIL was about $90, as of Friday morning at 6:45 a.m. (EST), having gained 18% compared to Thursday morning at that time.

At one point, FIL got near $96 on Thursday afternoon. It's been more than two months since FIL hit an all-time high of $237.

Touted as the world's largest Bitcoin event, the conference has a packed lineup of speakers who surely will make lots of colorful comments about BTC. In an eagerly anticipated session, slated for 10:40 a.m. this morning, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor will take the stage at the Mana Wynwood Convention Center, which is expected to draw a minimum crowd of 30,000 in-person maximalists over the next 48 hours; countless others will be watching via live stream.

With a broken-heart emoji and a not-too-subtle Linkin Park song reference, Elon Musk on Thursday night tweeted out a Bitcoin kiss-off more bitter than sweet. BTC immediately lost momentum. Tender, flirty dancing with $40,000 devolved into a mid-$30K-range mosh pit. As of Friday morning at 9 a.m. (EST), BTC, over the previous 24 hours, shed 6%.

Ethereum lost 7.6% during that same period. Cardano (ADA), Dogecoin (DOGE), XRP (XRP) and Polkadot (DOT) all were enduring losses of 10-12% in that span.

The ranks of long-term-minded Bitcoin investors keeps swelling, despite price dips, or possibly because of them, which would seem to be a harbinger of more sunny days ahead, regardless of Elon Musk's rainy tweets.

Timing its announcement to drop on the eve of the Miami Beach Bitcoin bonanza, Celsius said Thursday that it holds 107,900 BTCs representing roughly one-fourth of the crypto platform's total community assets.

After a tumultuous month for BTC, London-based Celsius took stock of its 750,000 user accounts worldwide to ascertain whether HODLing had eroded. Despite BTC dropping by 30% in May, Celsius reports that, on every single day during the month, the platform had at least twice as many users transferring in BTC than there were users who were transferring it out.

Meanwhile, "whales" (those wallets containing between 100 to 10,000 BTCs) appear to be loading up (Cointelegraph).

According to data from Santiment, whale addresses have been nonplussed by the correction, adding 50,000 BTC worth nearly $2 billion into their collective wallets (CryptoPotato).

Antivirus software giant NortonLifeLock’s Norton 360 has an alert about a soon-to-be-available update: an Ethereum mining feature.

Select participants starting this week will get to test run Norton Crypto. It uses a device's GPU to mine for Ethereum which users can then transfer into a cloud-stored "Norton Wallet."

Leaving aside the environmental backlash surrounding crypto mining (as well as the fact that right now Ethereum is moving, via Eth2-era Proof-of-Stake protocols, toward validation-enabled block creation), simply the "idea of having mining software included in a program that comes with people’s computers seems like a slippery slope," said The Verge, questioning the implications of any product's ability to tax GPU and suck electricity when customers' computers are not in use.