Bitcoin News Summary – April 27, 2020

News regarding the Chinese digital currency has been emerging more frequently in the past few weeks. The latest local report on the matter claims that testing has already begun in mainland China. Trial runs include catering and retail industries, including massive U.S. chains Subway, Starbucks, and McDonald’s.

HDR Global Trading, which operates the BitMEX exchange, announced a $2.5 million donation to COVID-19 relief efforts. The funds will be split between four organizations working to stem the disease including Gates Philanthropy Partners launched by Bill and Melinda Gates.

Australia’s Power Ledger company just launched a blockchain-based service that enables independent power producers to sell their excess solar-generated energy to others. The system will run in a new housing development in Perth to start, with more residential developments to be added over the next few years.

In a clever bit of marketing, footage from a lecture on Monero propelled to the second position in the US box office rankings. While US cinemas are all shut down at the moment, viewings are still possible via digital stream. Monero enthusiast, film director and producer, Justin Ehrenhofer, partnered with several theatres to have the footage screened. The film grossed $3,430 on its opening weekend.

Bitcoin accumulation is on the rise in the past few weeks as reported by Glassnode Insights. BTC hodlers are stashing more coins daily now than they did at any time in the last year.

Before we conclude, this week’s “Bitcoin quick question” is what is mining difficulty?

In order to keep Bitcoin’s money supply in check, the system is built in a way that a new block of transactions is added every 10 minutes on average. However, if more miners join the network, the increasing computational power may create a situation where a block is found much faster.

To account for this, a mining difficulty adjusting factor was put in place. If more miners join the network, the system adjusts by making it harder to mine a block. If miners drop from the network the difficulty will decrease. 

It’s important to note that difficulty adjusts in retrospect every 2016 blocks, or roughly every 2 weeks. At the end of a difficulty cycle, the system checks the average block mining time and adjusts the difficulty accordingly.

If you want to learn more about mining and difficulty, check out the link in the description.

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That’s what’s happened this week in Bitcoin. See you next week.