Bitcoin continues to see positivity in the markets as the first month of 2020 goes into the history books. Some of the latest news and data show signs of Bitcoin's continued dominance and growth.

Price

The Bitcoin price breaks $9,000 once again as the overall sentiment seems bullish for the number 1 coin by market cap as it began climbing over the weekend from January 25, 2020, to today on the 27th.

Seeing nearly a 5% gain over the past 7 days, Bitcoin's price has been holding above $8,000 since hitting roughly $6,600 a few days right before Christmas in 2019. 

As we continue to inch closer to the psychological $10,000 Bitcoin price, some interesting events have been happening so far for the new year.

Double Spend

According to BitMEX Research, they discovered the Bitcoin network had a stale block on January 26, 2020. 

An amount of 0.00034801 BTC or ($3) appeared to have been double spent, however, it was determined that it was not a malicious double-spend and the network eventually sorts this type of transaction out through the number of confirmations.

Lightning Network

BitMEX also shared some data on the Lightning Network (LN) via their blog and revealed that over 70% of LN channels are public.

Source: BitMEX

Using the 1ml.com database and cross-referencing their data from private Non-Cooperative Channel closures, they were able to determine the public channel's dominance.

The amount of LN channels has been showing growth in the past 3 months.

Source: TxStats

Charlie Lee of Litecoin commented on the Lightning Network during an interview and believes we'll see a lot more LN usage on Bitcoin's network as it is more congested and needed to use the second layer solution.

LocalBitcoins Crackdown

Reports of LocalBitcoins have begun shutting down accounts of long-time users without notice has been making its rounds across the internet as regions of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia are being affected. 

Some users can no longer access their funds and the countries affected seem to be the problematic ones that are with civil wars and corruption.

As new Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know-Your-Customer (KYC) regulations go into effect, more crypto exchanges and services are having to change their structure and exclude services to many regions. While this may seem like a negative, this is a positive as Bitcoin and crypto become more legitimate and required for continued mass adoption across the globe.

Elon Musk Comments on Bitcoin

On an episode of the Third Row Tesla Podcast, Tesla Ceo Elon Musk opened up a bit on Bitcoin. The discussion begins at the 1:32.27 mark.

His overall answer: "neither here nor there on Bitcoin."

He does give concerns on how there are illegal transactions that happen but respectively sees crypto a replacement for cash but not as a primary database.

Hashrate Sees All-Time High

Bitcoin's network recently seen its all-time high with its hashrate and many in the crypto community correlate this with the price on the market.

Source: BitInfoCharts

The hashrate comes to no surprise to many as this is normal behavior because miners will see their rewards get cut in half from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC per block later this May 2020. By that alone will make it more difficult to obtain a larger amount of Bitcoins and left only through exchanges and others that are willing to sell them to you as the 21 million supply cap continues to creep closer.

Halving

The Bitcoin block reward halving gets closer as it's only a few months away. Many speculate the halving being a large factor in seeing a price rally and we are already starting to see the term "Bitcoin Halving" gain traction on Google Trends over the past couple of months.

Source: Google Trends

The halving will be the continued topic until it happens and while we already know what exactly is going to happen to the network, the crypto market may react differently. Though the markets consist of humans that can get emotional, we can expect to see some fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) or fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) reactions as the block halving approach.

Note: This is not trading or investment advice. Please do your own research (DYOR).