Musk will just have to stick to Dogecoin, Twitter, and the bazillion other things that occupy his time. Elon Musk likes to keep himself busy—he cofounded PayPal, runs the multibillion dollar car company Tesla, and wants to "protect the future of consciousness by making life multi-planetary” through aerospace company SpaceX.

But galvanizing Bitcoin miners toward a cleaner, more energy-efficient future won’t be on his to-do list—not formally, anyway.
The Bitcoin Mining Council, a group of energy-conscious North American Bitcoin mining companies first revealed by Musk in a tweet in late May, debuted today and clarified that Musk will have “no role” at the Council.source

Luxury items like art and jewelry often see spikes in demand when their price goes up. Does Bitcoin behave in the same way?
The price of Bitcoin can rise and fall by thousands of dollars in as little as an hour. For smaller projects that can happen in a matter of seconds. But despite cryptocurrency’s notorious volatility, the desirability of digital money moves more slowly. While there is a rich and diverse corner of crypto specializing in predicting price, there is a considerably smaller group of people looking at Bitcoin from a behavioral economics perspective. In particular, sentiment around Bitcoin when the price goes up.source

One of the public companies with the largest Bitcoin portfolios cashed out its last investment in April well before the cryptomarket slump.London-based asset management firm Ruffer exited the Bitcoin market in April with a little over $1.1 billion profit for its clients.

The firm invested $600 million in November, a month after Bitcoin’s price started to rise from about $10,500. It sold some of its holdings for a $750 million profit in December and early January, but it kept going.

“We actively managed the position and by the time we sold the last tranche in April the total profit was slightly more than $1.1 billion,” Hamish Baillie, an investment director at Ruffer, told The Times of London today.source

BEIJING'S "close ties" with Ethereum competitor Vechain has seen the Chinese-based cryptocurrency's price soar by nearly 2,000 percent in one year.The ruling Communist Party of China is notoriously suspicious of technologies and organisations that lie beyond its control, hence their recent clamp-down on bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies. However, one cryptocurrency project that is seeing support from Beijing is Vechain (VET), a domestically developed decentralised finance operation that is similar to the Ethereum blockchain network. China's President Xi Jinping is desperate to keep a firm hand on the inroads that the cryptocurrency revolution is making into the world's second-largest economy.source

Despite raking in $7 million from various notable investors, Impossible Finance still has to convince users that building on Binance Smart Chain is safe. New decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Impossible Finance completed a seed round, raising over $7 million, co-led by True Ventures, CMS Holdings, Alameda Research, and Hashed. Launched on April 9, Impossible Finance is built on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) but has plans to go multi-chain by expanding onto Ethereum and Polygon. Calvin Chu, developer at Impossible Finance and formerly of Binance Research, told Decrypt that the protocol’s livepaper had received 400 edits from “the top builders and investors in this space,” and it’s that collaborative spirit that the project’s hoping to instill as it incubates future DeFi projects off its launchpad.source

A customer survey on attitudes to blockchain, NFTs, and cryptocurrency wallets hints at the smartphone manufacturer's crypto ambitions. If OnePlus were to develop its own "cryptophone," it wouldn't be the first smartphone manufacturer to do so.

Samsung smartphones have featured support for its Samsung Blockchain cryptocurrency wallet since 2019; subsequent models of its flagship Galaxy smartphone line have included a built-in crypto wallet that stores private keys in the phone's Knox secure enclave. Last month, Samsung updated the Blockchain Wallet app to include support for crypto hardware wallets.source

A fight over New York's emergent Bitcoin mining industry raises questions about retired power plants and the environmental impact of Bitcoin. Greenidge Generation is at the center of the fight. The company began as a coal-fired power plant in 1937, but recently pivoted to Bitcoin mining under cleaner natural gas, and argues it is complying with all of New York state’s environmental regulations. That’s not good enough for green activists who claim Greenidge’s facility not only harms the planet, but could pose a fatal blow to New York’s climate change ambitions. The conflict has drawn media attention not just in New York but around the world. While Greenidge currently mines just four Bitcoin per day, it has become a symbol for those who say Bitcoin is a needless waste of power in a world struggling to reduce energy use.source