Weekend 🔗 Digest - Bitcoin rising 🐦🔥
[7 min read] In your inbox every Saturday, best enjoyed with coffee and lunch ☕🍽️. This week: Crypto market surges 📈, Bitcoin news and innovation, and I make a digital avatar using AI
Hello everyone!
Hope you all enjoy this week’s Weekend 🔗 Digest, which showcases the granddaddy of all crypto - ₿itcoin. Understanding Bitcoin is important in embracing transformative nature of blockchain and crypto.
If you are new (welcome!) be sure to check out the history & purpose of this newsletter as well as the archive.
Hope you all have a good weekend enjoy the sunny NZ weather! 🌞
Ryan
Here’s what you’re getting today:
Market update: Back to green as the crypto market surges 📈
Interesting news: This week the focus is on Bitcoin news and innovation
Video of the week: Blockchain explained in 5 levels of difficulty
This week’s AI creation: How I made a digital avatar using AI, and how she could be used.
Market update 📈
🗺️ Heatmap shows the crypto market’s surge over the last week (size of the blocks are market share, colour & % show the change over the last week)
Sentiment up to 61/100 (low levels of greed) following the surge in prices. I expect traders to be taking profits prices to head back down a bit, and sentiment to oscillate around 50ish for awhile
Interesting news from the week 🗞️
Bitcoin is the theme of this week, if there is a single digital asset you need to know about and (semi) understand, its this one.
This week I read a great article from Sam Callahan “10 Reasons to Be Bullish on Bitcoin in 2023”. I have summarised some of them (and relevant news) s for you all below. Next week I’ll share the remaining 5.
The crypto contagion cleansing seems to be over - companies that were over-leveraged or built on hype have been crushed. Like a forest fire clearing dead scrub, its healthy for the ecosystem as a whole.
Major oil & gas companies are entering bitcoin mining - Natural gas (a by-product of oil production") is often stranded because there are no pipelines and infrastructure in place to take it to market. Often it is vented directly into the air or flared (burned off). Bitcoin mining (ie what Texas is doing) can use this energy, better for profits and the environment.
Institutional bitcoin interest is still strong - Big players like Blackrock and BNY Melon have overwhelming demand from their clients for an institutional-grade Bitcoin custody solution. In a recent survey, 41% of their institutional investors hold digital assets, 75% of them are either investing or actively considering investing in digital assets, and 91% are interested in investing in digital assets within the next few years!
The growth of the Bitcoin Lightning network - A “layer” on top of Bitcoin that allows super fast and cheap transfers of value. The network itself keeps growing as well as the ecosystem itself, offering different products and services to help improve UX/UI and drive Lightning adoption forward.
The Financial Accounting Standards Board prepares new rule to improve Bitcoin accounting - There are currently no accounting or disclosure rules specifically for Bitcoin, so businesses need to classify them as intangible assets. They have the mark the value of the asset once a year, if the price of bitcoin goes down, they have to mark the value lower on their balance sheet, and if the price goes up, they can’t record the gain unless they sell the bitcoin. FASB expects to vote on whether to propose a digital asset rule early this year, which would be followed by a proposal sometime in the first half of 2023. This is big news for companies holding bitcoin on their balance sheets!
Video of the week 🎥
In my consulting work, helping companies understand Web3 and the emerging Metaverse, I often start by explaining blockchain technology.
I often use this video of political scientist and blockchain researcher Bettina Warburg explaining blockchain technology to 5 different people; a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert. Hope you find it helpful!
This week’s AI creation 🎨🤖🎵
Each week I showcase something amazing generated by an AI-based tool.
This week I have quickly made a simple AI Avatar. While the final product is nothing new, the magic is now the ease and scale at which these can made/automated for practically free. I think these will reshape the space around customer service and education in particular.
This was my process:
First I used Midjourney (free trial) to create a face. I used the prompt" “imagine a medium shot of a young woman, captured with a Nikon D850 and a Nikon AF-s NIKKOR 70-200mm f/2.8E FL ED VR lens, lit with high-key lighting to create a soft and ethereal feel, a shallow depth of field”:
Next I used ChatGPT (free) to generate some script with the prompt ”how can AI-powered avatars be useful?”
Then I used Eleven Labs AI powered text-to-voice AI software to create realistic speech. It sounded amazing:
Next I used Studio D-ID free trial to animate the face in time with the voice recording. Not perfect but passable, and you can imagine how much better they will be in 3, 6, 12 months. Enjoy the final product below:
Can I help your business or brand learn about Blockchain, Web3 or the emerging Metaverse? It’s one of the consulting services I offer. Contact me at https://johnsonandhunt.com/reach-out