Kevin Durant regains access to lost Coinbase account after 9 years

Basketball legend Kevin Durant has regained access to the Coinbase account he opened in 2016, after he and his agent Rich Kleiman lost the password 9 years ago. The recovery, confirmed this week, would suggest Durant purchased Bitcoin under $1000. - link

OUR TAKE: There’s nothing like a good forced HODL story, and even better when they’re a household name.

It’s quite common that famous sports stars get the Bitcoin bug. Football player Russell Okung had part of his salary paid in Bitcoin back in 2019 and Odell Beckham Jr was public about converting his salary to BTC.

But what’s different about Durant is that he bought it in 2016 …almost a decade ago.

For context, Okung’s Bitcoin story starts in 2019 and Beckham Jr’s in 2021. The deep pocketed sports star trend is really just a phenomenon of the 2020s.

Durant says he initially bought bitcoin after a dinner with his then-teammates one night where “I just heard the word ‘bitcoin’ 25 times and the very next day we started investing.”

It wasn’t really a headline-grabber and there were no sponsorships. Just old school dollar cost averaging (DCA).

Durant joins a long list of forced hodlers. Take programmer Stefan Thomas, for example, who famously sat on 7,002 BTC for years because he forgot the password to his hardware wallet. He only has two guesses left!

Ironically for Durant, he’s actually an investor in Coinbase. So even though he helped back the platform he still couldn’t remember the login credentials to access his own Coinbase account for nearly a decade.

As a proud Oklahoman, I’ll point out that Durant was playing for the OKC Thunder when he first bought Bitcoin. We’re just built differently in the Sooner State.

-CBS

Bitcoin’s difficulty reflects 1 ZH/s milestone

Bitcoin’s difficulty increased yesterday by nearly 5% to 142.34 trillion. The record high officially marks the Bitcoin network’s first difficulty adjustment to reflect 1 ZH/s of total hashrate (for reference, a difficulty target for Bitcoin of exactly 139.7 trillion reflects 1 ZH/s of hashrate). - link

OUR TAKE: At last the day has come.

We reported last week that Bitcoin’s hashrate hit 1 ZH/s on the 7-day moving average, but in my opinion, clearing the 139.7 T difficulty is the most definitive way to measure that Bitcoin’s hashrate has cleared the milestone.

Not only was the event a long time coming, but it was largely expected to occur shortly after the summer cools down in the U.S. (so right about now) since curtailment stops dragging on mining operations.

It’s a salient reminder at any rate that, while your favorite public bitcoin miner is eying a juicy hyperscaler deal, plenty of bitcoin miners are still deploying around the world.

And even if the U.S.’s dominance wanes with all of the big miners who are pivoting to AI, there’s a flood of next generation hashrate coming from Bitmain, MicroBT, Proto, Canaan, Bitdeer, and Auradine next year that will only send Bitcoin’s hashrate higher.

Power may be a constraint here in the U.S. given demand for AI/HPC data centers, but that won’t be the case everywhere, and most of this new hashrate will end up somewhere.

All of that said, given the demand for AI/HPC, low hashprice, and general bottlenecks for power, it’s likely that Bitcoin’s hashrate won’t experience its historic meteoric growth in the coming years, but rather a gradual slow climb punctuated by occasional pauses in the summer for demand response.

At any rate, September 18 is due, if not the full honors of a Bitcoin holiday, at least an honorable mention (a footnote in a calendar, or a fun fact in a newsletter perhaps…).

-CMH

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Bitfarms, Cipher Mining lead Bitcoin mining stock charge with double digit weekly gains

Bitfarms (BITF) topped all miners, rising 138% across the period following a market re-rating concerning its Panther Creek site - link 

Metaplanet launches U.S. arm, raises $1.4 billion in international offering

According to a September 17 filing, Metaplanet (TYO: 3350, OTCQX: MTPLF) has established Metaplanet Income Corp., a wholly-owned U.S. subsidiary dedicated to its Bitcoin Income Generation Business, shortly following the a ¥212.9 billion ($1.44 billion) upsized international equity offering. - link

Bitdeer launches 12.5 J/TH SEALMINER A3

Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR) unveiled its SEALMINER A3 ASIC bitcoin miner series on Tuesday, marking the third generation of the company’s in-house manufactured SEALMINER bitcoin mining rigs. The new lineup comprises four models: the A3 Air, A3 Pro Air, A3 Hydro and A3 Pro Hydro. — link

U.K. regulator to ease regulations for crypto firms

The United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority has revised some of the rules it applies to crypto asset providers. Instead, the regulator will tailor existing regulations to accommodate bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. “We start from the principle that if it is the same risk you go for the same regulatory outcome,” FCA Executive Director for Payments and Digital Finance David Geale said. - link