At press time,
bitcoin (BTC) is priced at US$9,316 – a 1.3% bump over the last 24 hours of trading.
Ethereum (ETH) is currently trading at US$748,
Litecoin is down overnight to US$157, and
Ripple at US$0.81.
CLICK BELOW FOR LIVE CRYPTOCURRENCY PRICE INDEXES:
Gary Cohn, former
Goldman Sachs president as well as former Chief Economic Advisor to US President Donald Trump, believes that there will a global cryptocurrency in the future. But it will be a coin ‘more easily understood’ than bitcoin.
Cohn told CNBC that he thinks there will be a ‘global cryptocurrency at some point where the world understands it and it’s not based on mining costs or cost of electricity or things like that’.
Bitcoin mining relies on miners’ computers to solve complex mathematical algorithms (or hashes) in order to get a block reward through a
proof-of-work protocol. In October 2017, it was estimated that bitcoin mining required 56 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per day at an expense of US$6.7 million.
Cohn explained he’s ‘not a big believer in bitcoin’, but a ‘believer in blockchain technology’. He added that the coin of the future will ‘probably have some blockchain technology behind it’.
“It will be much more easily understood how it’s created, how it moves and how people can use it,” Cohn said.
When asked about recent reports that Goldman Sachs will be offering various bitcoin contracts with the intent if opening a trading desk, Cohn said, “they [Goldman Sachs] should do what they think is in the best interests of their shareholders”. Cohn says that he currently owns no shares in Goldman Sachs.
Cohn told Bloomberg yesterday that he was considering ‘running a regulated bank, but in a digitised world’, following his March departure from the Trump administration.
“I do have an idea for a company. It would be an interesting concept playing on the knowledge I know from the banking world,” Cohn said.