Bitcoin's growing hashrate is making it harder for hackers to gain enough mining power to launch what's known as a 51% attack. According to Schwab, an attacker would need billions of dollars in specialized mining equipment, access to enormous amounts of electricity and years to build the required infrastructure in order to facilitate a successful hack. By that time, the Bitcoin network would likely have grown even larger, making the attack even more difficult.
The rising costs and competition among miners help strengthen Bitcoin's security and could support its long-term value, argued Schwab, alongside factors such as demand, liquidity and network activity.
"As the Bitcoin network continues to grow, its security potentially becomes self-reinforcing,” the firm’s director of digital asset research and strategy, Jim Ferraioli wrote.
The S&P 500 gained 1.5% on Monday. According to Bespoke, it’s that benchmark’s best opening day to a month since it rose 2.6% on the first trading day of October 2022.
The Nasdaq rose 2.1% Monday, and the DJIA added 1.3%.
Bitcoin flirted with the $64,000 level for most of the afternoon, and is currently higher by 0.8% over the past 24 hours at $63,850.
Coinbase has added WTI and Brent crude oil perpetual futures to its derivatives offering for traders outside of the U.S.
The contracts are USDC-settled and trade round-the-clock with no expiration date, allowing traders to hold positions without having to roll them over like traditional futures.
Until now, users were able to trade gold and silver perps.
“Over the past months we have seen a steady rise in automated, AI-assisted probing of our infrastructure, and we have dealt with several exploits,” said Boltz in an X post earlier this afternoon.
“The pattern is clear: attackers now iterate faster than a team our size can find and patch. In the past few days alone we saw a drastic acceleration, and we do not believe this asymmetry will reverse.”
“What we are seeing is a major paradigm shift for Bitcoin services operating on an open source stack, and it needs careful analysis.”
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