Oil prices and natural gas prices were up after the American Petroleum Institute (API) reported a 4.785-million-barrel crude draw and natural gas prices rebounded to try to fill a gap left from a weather forecast price plunge. Yet could one of the reasons that oil and gas are up due to bitcoin prices that recently have gone parabolic? Yes, I know it sounds crazy and it probably is, but the fact is Bitcoin is a very energy-intensive currency.

Bitcoin once again has taken the world by storm. With the increase in price, there is also increased energy demand and this is one reason why there may be a better alternative to Bitcoin. On top of that, regulatory scrutiny for the crypto known as Ripple is taking up space as it was delisted from two exchanges. Yet a story by MarketWatch that the energy to produce Bitcoin is enough to power a country of more than 200 million people as we have spoken of before is making people start to wonder if there is a better way to create a better cryptocurrency. 

Bitcoin will most likely be displaced by another coin that is not as wasteful on energy and bad for the environment. For full disclosure, my money is on CloudCoin and Raida technology. Instead of Blockchain and mining, “CloudCoin uses the patented Raida technology that uses the cloud for transactions making it far superior from an energy standpoint, not to mention speed and security at the same time. I am not recommending this but just making you aware of why I have invested in this and why I think that Bitcoin has some big problems that Raida technology solves.

The energy that Bitcoin consumes is considerable and Marketwatch laid out just how considerable. They wrote, ”The University of Cambridge’s Centre for Alternative Finance attempts to keep track of bitcoin energy consumption. While the exact consumption can never be known, a guess can be produced by tracking the total number of hashes produced by miners and looking at the efficiency of bitcoin mining equipment. The hash rate is the measuring unit of the processing power of the bitcoin network. The recent increase in price — bitcoin BTCUSD, +3.14% has jumped 276% this year, trading around $27,000 on Tuesday — has made it more profitable to use less-efficient equipment. 

At 92.8 terawatt-hours annualized, bitcoin’s power consumption is slightly ahead of Pakistan’s consumption in 2016, and not wildly away from the Netherlands’ consumption that year. Put a different way, the electricity consumed by minting bitcoin could power all the tea kettles in Britain for 21 years. ( does the Queen know this?) MarketWatch says that two-thirds of bitcoin production is done out of China. More than half of China’s energy output comes from coal, so the bitcoin production is likely to be particularly dirty. (Does Joe Biden know this?) The U.S. is in second place in terms of bitcoin production, with an estimated 7% of all bitcoin production, which puts it slightly ahead of Russia and Kazakhstan according to Marketwatch.

So Bitcoin is a dirty little coin so to speak, environmentally anyway. Raida technology that powers Cloudcoin is, according to the Cloudcoin website, the most energy-efficient cryptocurrency on the market. They also believe that it is the answer to replace the blockchain. As they say when it comes to data Supremacy - blockchain has it, the global DNS (Domain Name System) has it and so does RAIDA (Redundant Array of Independent Detection Agents). CloudCoin is the first and only currency built on DNS and not cryptography. 

Like the DNS, the entire world's population can use the RAIDA thousands of times per day. It is 100% scalable. The DNS system has not been brought down since its creation in 1985. Similarly, neither has the RAIDA ever gone down since its creation in 2016. It uses an incredibly small amount of electricity so it will never become too expensive to operate. So little is the electricity used that CloudCoin has no fees. And CloudCoin is the world's only patented currency.

Ripple caused a shakeup in the crypto space due to a fight over regulations and whether a cryptocurrency is a currency or security or maybe both. The Coin Telegraph reported that “Cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex announced on Dec. 29 that it will be removing all XRP markets starting from Jan. 15, 2021. Trading pairs affected are BTC/XRP, ETH/XRP, USDT/XRP, and USD/XRP.  The announcement comes just days after fellow exchange Coinbase said that it would suspend trading in XRP from Jan. 19.

XRP’s fortunes have taken a significant downturn since the United States Securities and Exchange Commission unveiled a lawsuit against XRP issuer Ripple last week.  The lawsuit alleges that Ripple, along with CEO Brad Garlinghouse and co-founder Chris Larsen, have raised more than $1.3 billion through what it claims is an unregistered, ongoing securities sale of XRP. Ripple hit back yesterday, claiming that the SEC’s “attack” on Ripple is an attempt to bring down the entire U.S. crypto industry.

While denying that XRP is indeed security as the SEC claims, it also noted that the majority of XRP customers reside outside of the U.S. and that it would continue to operate and support its products in the rest of the world. However, this seems to have done little to reassure investors, as XRP price dropped another 10% in the past 24 hours to $0.20. XRP had been riding high before the announcement of the SEC lawsuit, hitting a yearly high of $0.67 in late November. With 70% of that value now wiped out, analysts are wondering whether this lawsuit could be a final death-knell for XRP.

Coindesk reported that “For Coinbase, the reason for dropping XRP as a traded asset was simple: As the company seeks to go public, being a platform for something that’s potential security would mean adding more paperwork simply so it could be legally allowed to let retail customers buy and sell a single cryptocurrency.  The SEC claimed last week that XRP is a security and that Ripple has been selling it without registering or seeking an exemption for seven years, raising $1.3 billion in the process. The legal battle itself is just beginning, and litigation might take years if Ripple fights the charge in court, as it has indicated it would. Coinbase is now the biggest exchange to act on XRP and could serve as a bellwether for other platforms. On Friday, Bitstamp announced it would halt XRP trading and deposits for all U.S. customers on Jan. 8.

For the crude oil market, we should see the Energy Information Administration confirm the API draw. It may also show more demand for U.S. products. We should see exports rise as the dollar weakness is making U.S. energy exports look attractive globally. The API reported gasoline inventories fell by 718,00 barrels and distillates by 1.877 million barrels.

In the quest to save the planet, the group “Earth First” views humans as just collateral baggage whose lives mean nothing. The group put lives at risk by vandalizing two natural gas pipelines in Colorado taking away heat from 2000 people. I guess they have little regard for folks that might freeze to death. This environmental religion that values environmental extremism of human life shows that their cause has nothing to do with science but on some crazy weird belief system. Sad.