Bitcoin Daily: Bitcoin Falls To $55K After Record Weekend Highs; Bitcoin ATMs Multiply At Gas Stations Across US

Bitcoin has dipped in price as of Monday (March 15), slumping slightly from its high of $60,000 over the weekend, Reuters reported. In afternoon trading, bitcoin was down 5.3 percent at $55,865.

In addition, the coin faces trouble in India, where a proposed bill would criminalize possession, issuance, mining, trading and transferring crypto assets. The bill would be in line with India’s stated goal of doing away with private virtual currencies. The country is looking at doing a framework for its own official digital coin.

In other news, bitcoin users in various places in the U.S., including Montana smoke shops, gas stations in the Carolinas and New York delis, will now be able to find bitcoin ATMs where they can buy or sell digital currencies, Reuters reported separately. They’ll also be able to sometimes get hard cash from the machines.

There have been more machines installed over the past year as crypto trading has buoyed bitcoin’s price. As of January, there were 28,185 bitcoin ATMs in the U.S., Reuters reported, citing stats from independent research site howmanybitcoinatms.com.

Meanwhile, Ant Group, and billionaire founder Jack Ma, is the frontrunner of a China-led list of blockchain patents on Clarivate’s Derwent World Patents Index (DWPI), CoinDesk reported.

Ant Group is the holder of 2,298 blockchain patents, with 586 added in 2020. The report stated that’s a 33 percent decline from the 880 filed in 2019.

Also featuring prominently on the DWPI are Ping An Group, which filed 1,215 patents in 2020, and IBM, the only non-Chinese company in the top 10, which had 647 filings. The rankings are based on a number of factors including “technical breadth, geographical coverage and average annual citations” to find the average strength of a company’s patents, according to the report.

Lastly, with the high bitcoin prices as of late, retail traders have been able to go toe-to-toe with bigger banks, Bloomberg reported, citing data from J.P. Morgan Chase.

Retail investors have purchased over 187,000 bitcoins so far this quarter, compared to 205,000 from last quarter, the report stated. Meanwhile, institutions bought around 173,000 bitcoin in that time, after buying almost 307,000 last quarter.

Bloomberg reported that this suggests that bitcoin flows have become more balanced after institutions largely dominated them before.