A Forbes article suggests that China’s efforts to criminalize all forms of cryptocurrencies has not had a significant impact on cryptocurrency values, likely because Twitter enabled cryptocurrencies to be sent and received using the Lightning Network late last year. Twitter has been integrated to the Strike Bitcoin Lightning wallet service to enable these “Bitcoin tips.”
The Lightning Network is important in this enablement as it acts as an adjunct to Bitcoin to speed up transactions through aggregation before they are put onto the Bitcoin blockchain. This makes every transaction much faster and lowers the cost to make a transaction:
“In June, the authoritarian government banned local banks from enabling cryptocurrency transactions and outlawed the energy-intensive practice of bitcoin mining, in which specialist computers are put to work solving complex problems in a race to earn newly minted bitcoins.
That clampdown triggered a 20% crash in bitcoin’s price, yet the latest, more draconian measure has moved the needle by less than 5%.
Bitcoin was almost completely unchanged on Saturday, having found strong support at its 200-day exponential moving average.
And while mainstream media outlets like the BBC, Sky News, The Times and The Guardian rushed to report on the negative developments in China, news coverage of the positive adoption by Twitter TWTR +7.1% was almost entirely restricted to financial outlets like Bloomberg and CNBC.
Twitter began integrating the Strike bitcoin Lightning wallet with its platform last week, enabling users to send and receive bitcoin as easily as tweeting out a thought.”
Overview by Tim Sloane, VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group
