Bitcoin is packed with qualities – In November, billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego revealed to us that he had no less than 10% of his liquidity portfolio in Bitcoin . Today, he explains to us that he intends to HODLer his BTC for a good time, because it is for him one of the best investments there is.

A universal means of payment, but not only

Ricardo Salinas Pliego is the second richest man in Mexico. He is the founder of Grupo Salinas , which covers many sectors, ranging from telecoms to media to financial services.

In an interview with the crypto-media Cointelegraph, he reviews his investment in Crypto Code and explains the reasons for his choice.

We first learn that his interest in the king of cryptos does not date from yesterday . The billionaire explains that he bought his first bitcoin in 2013 , for the modest sum of $ 200 at the time. He was thus one of the very first investors in what is today the famous Grayscale investment fund , created that year.

What had drawn the businessman into Bitcoin at that time was that the digital asset could be „traded freely around the world .“

After accumulating several units of what he calls his „best investment,“ Ricardo Pliego resold his bitcoins during the previous bull market of 2017, when the price of BTC hit $ 17,000.

A “precious” store of value

The billionaire has since bought back more bitcoins and at lower prices, and intends to keep them again for a good little while:

“I want to sit on [my BTC] for another 5 or 10 years. “

And Ricardo Pliego has a good new reason for it, because in addition to facilitating and accelerating payments all over the world, the billionaire understood that Bitcoin was a „really valuable store of value“ in the face of state currency inflation :

“What is happening in Venezuela, in Argentina, where the fiat currency is collapsing, has become a scandal. The way you see those wheelbarrows of Venezuelan banknotes thrown in the dumpsters. It really opens your eyes to the issue of fiat money. “

Last little more undeniable of Bitcoin quoted by the rich businessman: the king of cryptos cannot „be confiscated as easily“ as fiats currencies.

The Chinese company Nervos has implemented a trust bridge designed to simplify cross chain transactions between its CKB network and that of Ethereum.

The Chinese blockchain project Nervos has announced the launch of a cross chain bridge between it and the Ethereum.

The launch of the Nervos Force Bridge was revealed on December 17; the bridge boasts native support for ERC-20 tokens and frictionless transfers between Nervos‘ CKB and Ethereum’s chain.

The team claims that their bridge was inspired by the „Force Staff“ tool from the popular game Dota 2, which allows users to force the movement of objects through their virtual world.

Nervos claims that its trust architecture simplifies the steps needed to execute transfers between strings, describing other bridges as requiring the deployment of „a new asset in the target string, recording the address in Bitcoin Fortune and specifying the relationship between the asset transfer“ to achieve inter-string functionality.

In contrast, developers do not need to do any integration to access Force Bridge, as the Nervos bridge only requires users to deploy the ERC-20 to initiate asset transfers, with CKB’s native support for ERC-20 smart contracts that require no further steps for contract execution. Nervos co-founder Kevin Wang said:

„Interoperability has been and continues to be a primary focus of the Nervos team as we develop our infrastructure to support the next generation of DeFi applications.“

Ethereum users can access Force Bridge directly from their wallet. The team hopes that Ethereum developers will look to the Nervos network to expand their ecosystem and their DApp user base.

The growing success of Ethereum amidst the boom in the DeFi sector in Q3 and the December launch of the Eth2 beacon chain has inspired many prominent blockchain projects to unveil the bridges between their own networks and Ethereum.

On November 24, Ava Labs unveiled its Avalanche-Ethereum bridge, which was developed by ChainSafe as part of its Avalanche-X grant program. In August, PureStake received a grant from the Web3 Foundation to develop the cross-chain functionality between Ethereum and Moonbeam substrate-based smart contracts.

Many projects are trying to establish a cross chain architecture beyond Ethereum as well; Coro One secures a grant to build a bridge between Jealousy and Cosmos in November.

Deribit attributed the addition of such a high strike to „market demand“. On Thursday, December 17, bitcoin updated an all-time high, climbing above $23,700 (Bitstamp).

So far, users have purchased 52 call contracts and no puts.

Deribit data indicates there are optimists willing to pay $940 (at the time of writing) for bitcoin to more than quadruple in the next three quarters. Should the price of the first cryptocurrency exceed the psychological barrier, these „calls“ will go „into the money“. They are now „deep out of the money“.

The buyer of an option receives the right to buy or sell a bitcoin asset (on Deribit, each contract is equivalent to one bitcoin) at an exercise price (strike price) on a specific date (expiration date). The seller undertakes to buy or sell the asset at the request of the option holder. The latter pays the seller at the time of purchase of the contract a certain amount of money – the so-called premium.

To understand how options work, our material will help you.

Recall that Deribit has obliged all users to be verified by the end of the year. The platform took this step following a similar decision by BitMEX, which launched a new KYC program in August.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Blockchain aims to make tax evasion more difficult in Thailand.

The Thai tax authority plans to use blockchain technology to streamline tax payments in the next year.

The tax authority wants to use blockchain to improve their way of collecting taxes, rather than increasing taxes. The Thai economy is now gradually recovering

According to a Bitcoin Trader review and report by the Bangkok Post, General Manager Lavaron Sangsnit stressed that new policies should not affect the country’s economic recovery and that tax hikes could bring the still fragile economy to a standstill.

The government’s goal is to raise $ 17.5 billion in fiscal 2020, 3.3 percent less than in 2019, when $ 18 billion was raised.

In 2021, the tax and customs authorities will also integrate blockchain technology. Sangsnit said blockchain will help these departments calculate tax debts, import duties and prices.

The three departments want to combine blockchain-based surveys in a single database. This is intended to make tax evasion more difficult

Since last year , the tax authority has been implementing blockchain technology to evaluate tax refunds for oil exporters. Oil exporters are required to pay excise taxes. Overpaid taxes can then be reclaimed when they have delivered the oil. The use of DLT technology is intended to make this process faster and more transparent for oil exporters.

Oil export revenues are a crucial part of the Thai government’s budget and amount to about $ 6.6 billion per year. That is around two thirds of all annual income.

Sangsnit said this new system should be fully operational for oil exporters by the first quarter of 2021.