 |
|
|
|||||
The price of Bitcoin has declined dramatically in recent weeks, and cryptocurrency investors are more fearful than ever. In the past 24 hours, the crypto king dipped to the $60,000 rangea low it has not seen since October 2024. While Bitcoin has now recovered slightly to around $66,000, many analysts and investors still think the token may not have bottomed out yet. Heres what you need to know about Bitcoin’s continued fall, and how low things might go. Why is Bitcoin falling? Like most cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin (BTC) has been steadily falling almost since the year began. As Fast Company previously reported, there were two main drivers for this fall. The first is increased geopolitical uncertainty. Since the year began, America attacked Venezuela, threatened to take Greenland by force from one of its most important European allies, and is now in a standoff with Iran. Military conflict almost always affects markets, but until it happens, no one can predict by how much or in what direction. That uncertainty generally leads investors to pull their money from relatively risky assets, like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and park it in safe havens, like gold or the U.S. dollar (USD). The second recent driver was President Trumps announcement, in late January, the he has selected Kevin Warsh as the next Federal Reserve chair. The news caused the U.S. dollar to spike, making it more valuable. And since cryptocurrencies are priced in dollars, the same amount of dollars could buy more crypto, thereby impacting the value of the digital tokens. In recent days, other factors have pushed Bitcoin down to levels not seen in well over a year. Those factors include a bearish run in tech stocks. When tech stocks decline, crypto tends to follow suit. Additionally, there have been significant forced liquidations of Bitcoin in recent days. These selloffs happen automatically when Bitcoin hits a certain price level. These automated selloffs can prompt other investors to sell their shares, too, before the price drops any further. In short, Bitcoin isnt dropping for any one reason. There are numerous factors working against it right now. Bitcoin isnt the only cryptocurrency that is falling Without a doubt, Bitcoin is having a bad day. Over the past 24 hours, the token fell as low as $60,074.80. That represented a more than 50% decline from its all-time high of $126,198.07 in October. At its current price of around $66,378, Bitcoin has now lost more than 42% of its value in the past six months alone. But Bitcoin isnt the only crypto that has suffered a major crash. As Fast Company reported yesterday, XRP has been getting hammered as of late. In the past six months, the popular token has lost more than 54% of its value. Other popular tokens, including Ethereum, BNB, and Solana, have also seen incredible drops during the same period. Crypto greed and fear index hits all-time low In the wake of this recent crypto crash, it should be no surprise that the majority of cryptocurrency investors are experiencing significant dread at this time. Indeed, CoinMarketCaps Crypto Fear and Greed Index has now reached an all-time low. The index measures investor sentiment in the crypto market. An index value of 80-100 indicates that investors are experiencing extreme greed, which often manifests as surging crypto prices. Meanwhile, 60-80 represents greed, 40-60 neutral, and 20-40 fear. Today, the index has fallen to 5 on the scale, which puts it in the 0-20 range, which means investors are experiencing extreme fear. A rating of 5 is an all-time low for the index, and is 50% lower than its previous all-time low of 10 during a crypto selloff in November 2025. Where is the bottom for Bitcoin? While no one can predict what Bitcoin or any asset will do in the future, what everyone wants to know now is whether Bitcoin has hit its floor or if things are going to get worse. Crypto-watchers with more positive inclinations might point out that while Bitcoin fell to the $60,000 range in the past 24 hours, it did not fall through that barrier. And the coin has now recovered about 10% of its 24-hour low. Bitcoin is currently trading at $66,378 at the time of this writing. However, there are plenty of analysts who think Bitcoin may not have hit the bottom yet. On February 1, Galaxy Asset Management sent a memo to investors warning that the token could trade in the $56,000 to $58,000 in the near term. Meanwhile, 10x Researchs CEO, Markus Thielen, today told CNBC International that Bitcoin could drop to as low as $50,000. If thats the case, todays fall is far from the bottom for Bitcoin.
Category:
E-Commerce
This Sunday will see the Seattle Seahawks face off against the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX. The game will also mark the conclusion of the tenth football season featuring Next Gen Stats, the analytics system that delivers detailed data about every game to coaches and broadcasters through a partnership with Amazon Web Services. Next Gen Stats began in 2015, when the National Football League deployed RFID chips in player shoulder pads and even in the football itself, enabling the league to capture location data multiple times per second through sensors installed throughout stadiums. It has since become a mainstay of football broadcasts and training sessions, delivering granular insights to a sport that previously could track only a fraction of the complex movements of 22 players and the ball across the field. Next Gen Stats is part of the vernacular now, says Julie Souza, AWSs global head of sports. Bringing data to the gridiron Behind the scenes, dozens of machine learning modelsthe same kinds of systems AWS offers to process business datatranslate the raw numbers generated by the sensors into understandable stats in real time. With the recent addition of 4K cameras to NFL venues, the system can now capture not just player position on the field but the precise position of shoulders, elbows, knees, and hands, generating 29 data points per player 60 times per second. That data is processed by in-stadium AWS servers in roughly 700 milliseconds, then sent to the cloud to feed machine learning models that run in under 100 milliseconds. The result is analytics delivered to broadcasters within about a second, shorter than the NFLs typical broadcast delay. Announcers are equipped with dashboards that surface key stats, along with AI systems that allow them to ask natural-language questions based on new and historical data, Souza says, such as, When was the last time this particular play happened, or that you know, this metric was achieved? The data is also increasingly used to inform player coaching and off-the-field training, as well as rule changes designed to make the game safer. AWS helped the NFL run thousands of simulated football seasons that informed the Dynamic Kickoff rule, introduced in the 2025 season. The change helped boost returned kickoffs while reducing the plays historically elevated concussion rate. Whats amazing about that is everything that we had modeled for them is what has panned out from the results, Souza says. Analytic dashboards also help teams identify players at risk of injury, allowing coaching and training staffs to intervene before injuries occur. Those changes in play and training led to roughly 700 fewer missed games by players last season, she says. More detailed stats can also help newer fans, including international audiences and younger viewers, understand the game more quickly. Richer player data has enabled new types of broadcasts as well, including animated versions of real games that appeal to families with children, and Amazon Prime Videos Prime Vision with Next Gen Stats stream of Thursday Night Football. Features tested in the Prime Vision stream, such as highlighting players likely to blitz the quarterback, have since made their way into the main broadcast. You can do all of these different versions of broadcast to serve different and specific audiences, but it’s all coming from that same set of data, says Souza. A different kind of bowl game Next Gen Stats data is also used in the NFLs annual Big Data Bowl, an analytics competition that invites contestants to develop new use cases for the leagues vast trove of data, and in some cases leads to jobs with the NFL or individual teams. Souza, who has served as a judge in the competition, says new judging criteria are being added to evaluate how proposed analytics could be conveyed to fans during a broadcast. The shift reflects a broader recognition that even as sports become more driven by data, storytelling remains central. Everything we’re talking about right now is the sciencethe science, and the engineering, and the analytics, and the rigor, and the math, she says. It only matters if the art is there, and the art is the storytelling.
Category:
E-Commerce
Hello, and welcome back to Fast Companys Plugged In. Programming, as it turns out, is just typing. Talking at Ciscos AI Summit in San Francisco on February 3, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made that pithy observation to sum up the phenomenon of people using AI coding tools to simply describe in plain language software they want to exist, with an algorithm doing the heavy lifting. The comment came during a wild, wide-ranging riff on how AI is changing the world, and Huang kept joking that his chatter might have been influenced by several glasses of wine. (Hey, he was the after-dinner speaker.) But even if alcohol-fueled poetic license was involved, the sentiment captured the present moment. The earliest evidence that AI could transform how people program computers came even before ChatGPTs arrival, dating to when GitHub released the first version of its Copilot in 2021. At that point, AI was autocompleting snippets of code for humans rather than generating software from scratch. The progress has been radical since then, reflected in the boom for coding agents such as Cursor, Windsurf, Replit, and the industrys current darling, Anthropics Claude Code. Along the way, the act of willing software into reality through AI got a name: vibe coding. At the Cisco event, Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreessen, and other Silicon Valley luminaries talked about the whole industry having arrived at a crucial juncture in the pivot to AI software generation. Anthropics chief product officer, Mike Krieger, whose boss, Dario Amodei, predicted last March that AI would be writing essentially all of the code within a year, suggested thats in the neighborhood of coming trueat least at Anthropic: Right now, for most products . . . it’s effectively 100%. Along with potentially upending the entire tech industry, AIs ability to write programs could have a powerful democratizing effect on how the world uses technology. For the past few decades, most people who use computers have been wholly dependent on software written by trained professionals. What happens when that trained professional might be an algorithm, available to the masses to create whatever pops into their minds? Ive been exploring that question since last March, when I used Replit to bring my dream note-taking app to life. The experience was amazing enough that I put up with Replits many rough edges, including its iffy debugging skills, repeated introduction of security flaws, and sycophantic tendency to tell me my ideas were pure genius. Since then, I have had better luck with new and improved versions of the service. Ive also dabbled with several other coding platforms with increasingly impressive results. But Claude Code, which Ive been using recently to reimagine a game I wrote back in high school, is the most uncanny of them all. As a lark, I fed it my 1980s BASIC code, expecting it would have no clue what to do with something written in such an obsolete language. Instead, it roughed out a modern, web-native version in minutes. Since then, weClaude Code and Ihave been collaborating to improve the game and dress up its graphics. I say we because it truly feels like were working as a team. Claude builds out my ideas without me having to spell them out in excruciating detail, and sometimes comes up with ones of its own. Its ability to understand what I want the game to do, and why, can feel like it borders on the clairvoyant. When Ive finished fooling around with the new versionsoonIll share it here so you can judge the results for yourself. (Full disclosure: I had one bizarre issue with Claude Code. For a few days, it labored under the mistaken understanding that some of my requests were examples of prompt injectiona nefarious third party issuing commands meant to interfere with the projectand kept assuring me that it was ignoring them. Despite that, it continued to code up a storm. I asked Anthropic what was going on, but the company hasnt yet provided an explanation.) Quirks and all, Im thoroughly enjoying making AI-generated software. But I do confess that its brought out my inner Edsger Dijkstra. A celebrated computer scientist and A.M. Turing Award winner, Dijkstra bristled at the notion that anyone should be able to create software. He maintained that proper programming required an especially deep understanding of mathematics. Mere mortals shouldnt even try. In a 1975 essay, Dijkstra ripped into BASIC, the language I used to write the original version of my game. Created at Dartmouth in 1964 and initially intended for non-techie liberal arts majors, BASIC emphasized approachability over elegance. Instead of demanding too much from these neophytes, it was simple to learn and tolerated sloppy code. He hated it. As someone who once programmed a fair amount but allowed my skills to atrophy, I am nagged by the fear that vibe coding is a form of cheating. It feels too easy. Im also bothered by the fact that I dont fully understand the code Claude wrote, and in fact have barely glanced at it. In short, I havent been entirely comfortable with the prospect of software becoming something that anyone can make. Dijkstra, who died in 2002, isnt around to chime in on Claude Code or other forms of vibe coding. I cant imagine hed be thrilled with them, though. In many cases, their algorithms seem to settle for the most expedient approach to a job, resulting in software that may be less than optimal even if it gets the job done. I cheerfully admit to being unqualified to judge Claudes coding proficiency, but my high school programming buddy Charles, who went on to become a professional developer, took a peek and deemed some of its techniques cringe-worthy. Legitimate reasons exist to be skittish about the quality of vibe-coded software, particularly on the security front. Last week, an app called Moltbooka social network for AI agents< .="" href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/ai-agents-now-have-their-own-reddit-style-social-network-and-its-getting-weird-fast/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">made quite a splash. According to security firm Wiz, it also left its database of user information vulnerable to leaks, due to a misconfigured server. Vibe coding may have been to blame. My reluctance to be responsible for assuring other peoples privacy is the biggest reason why I havent shared any of the productivity apps Ive vibe coded for myself. Presumably, software companies with human engineers in the loopsuch as Nvidia and Anthropichave charged them with vetting the robustness of AIs handiwork. Its tough to imagine the day coming when that isnt essential. Still, I am slowly getting around to the belief that vibe coding is not an alternative to coding, but a legitimate form of it. Even the most gifted programmer typically needs help translating their work into something a computer can understand. Most of them rely on high-level programming languages that break tasks into the reduced set of low-level instructions a processor performs natively. Until now, those high-level languages have had names such as Python, JavaScript, Swift, and C++. Thanks to remarkable tools such as Claude Code, they can now have names like English. Im looking forward to seeing what happens once the floodgates break wide open. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on fastcompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company The real reasons Elon Musk merged xAI and SpaceXIt’s all about this sci-fi fantasy. Read More Anthropic takes aim at chatbot adswith its own Super Bowl adThe company’s tongue-in-cheek spots highlight concerns about advertising inside AI assistants and provoke a sharp response from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Read More How the Epstein files reignited the rich and powerfuls oldest grudgesFrom Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman to Ben Shapiro and Steve Bannon, the latest Epstein disclosures are giving powerful rivals fresh material to settle old scores. Read More Celebrating Cultures That Power InnovationBest Workplaces for Innovators celebrates cultures that empower employees to improve, build, and invent. Apply today to be recognized where ideas thrive and innovation drives impact. Apply Today TikTok is fueling a SoulCycle comebackThe boutique spin giant is riding a wave of 2016 nostalgia back into the spotlight, and Gen Zers are on board. Read More This super simple tripod is designed for the modern ageManfrotto worked with Layer to design an easy-to-use tripod built for the new era of content creation. Read More AI is about to invade the real world2026 is the year the technology gets physical. Read More
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||