It's not just for nerds anymore. Institutional money is now becoming a big player in the bitcoin space. Here's one reason why:
Trace Mayer: Bitcoin's Move Into Satellites Makes It Nearly Unstoppable as Next Global Currency
"Blockstream is leasing space on the global satellite network...and right now you can get access to bitcoin from satellite in two-thirds of the planet and it'll be the full planet by the end of the year. This means you can take a $100 satellite dish, point it up there and you can basically download the blockchain. So that means you don't have to go through a centralized ISP anymore, it means that you don't have to go through any third party anymore that would know you are actually downloading this because it is broadcast-only, kind of like radio, and so the privacy implications are huge, the censorship resistance implications are huge.
This is part of the fifth network effect with developers building out infrastructure. We are no longer going to have to rely on the actual internet infrastructure that is out there in terms of internet backbones or fiberoptic cables or stuff like that. So this is really cool in all those regards...that means some guy selling goats in Africa can point a $100 satellite dish up at the satellite, he can manage the blockchain...and then everybody in his village that has cellphones, they can have their bitcoin wallet...transact with each other via the lightning network. Nothing is actually hitting the blockchain; nobody has to have an internet connection because they are just connected via the satellite. They are able to have a safe store of value, they are brought directly into financial inclusion, they don't need a bank account, they completely skip that just like they skipped landlines with telephone...
Say you're a multimillionaire and you want to use bitcoin but you don't want anyone to know you are using it. Well, guess what? You can have your satellite dish and you can interact with the bitcoin network...[with] no third party, no internet ISP, none of this and in a censorship resistant way. It doesn't matter if you're in Canada, Antarctica, Africa, North America—you can interact with the bitcoin network now. I mean this is mind blowing stuff...
When you're dealing with a censorship resistant network like bitcoin and yet it's being broadcasted across the entire planet via satellites. How do you clamp down on that?... In order to launch any type of attack against bitcoin, you are really having to go up against something that is designed to be a force multiplier, meaning you have to expend a hundred resources and it only has to expend one to defend itself, so it's force multiplying in that effect but, two, there's not really any real attack you can launch on it because each person that runs a full node, meaning that they do their own network consensus and they are handling their own private keys, those people can interact directly with this network with the satellite. So that means you would have to clamp down on each particular individual and I don't really see that happening any time soon. So, bitcoin is just going to continue to grow and grow..."
Given the above, Mayer told Financial Sense Newshour that "institutional money is flowing into bitcoin in a really big way." After hitting his previous price targets over the past few years, Mayer thinks the next major milestone will be when bitcoin hits $10,000 and starts to compete with gold and the US dollar.
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