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Sadiq Khan is heading for a landslide and could become the first mayoral candidate to win outright after counting just one round of votes, an Evening Standard poll reveals today. Mr Khan leads his main rival, Tory candidate Shaun Bailey, by 53 per cent to 28 per cent on first preferences, the Opinium survey of 1,100 Londoners reveals. If the Labour mayor’s support holds firm in the 45 days to polling day on May 6, this would make him the first-ever London mayoral candidate to secure victory without needing to rely on second-preference votes. A candidate is elected after securing 50 per cent of the ballot. The results, from fieldwork by the pollsters between last Wednesday and Saturday, are the latest to confirm Mr Khan is set for a second term as mayor. A Redfield and Wilton poll earlier this month put him on 51 per cent and Mr Bailey on 25 per cent. The Opinium poll indicates that if the contest did progress to a second round run-off, in which second preference votes were added to first preference votes, Mr Khan would win with 66 per cent against 34 per cent for Mr Bailey. Lib-Dem Luisa Porritt and Green candidate Sian Berry each received seven per cent support, ahead of UKIP’s Peter Gammons on two per cent and Women’s Equality Party candidate Mandu Reid on one per cent. Two per cent of respondents selected “another candidate”. Other contenders include the anti-lockdown, anti-woke campaigner and actor Laurence Fox . Adam Drummond, head of political polling at Opinium, said: “Sadiq Khan is probably going to be re-elected as mayor as his main rival, Conservative Shaun Bailey, is poorly known and doesn’t seem to have the qualities that previously successful Conservatives in London have needed to win in an increasingly Labour-leaning city. “In all of the issues we tested, Mr Khan’s approach is preferred to Mr Bailey’s but, despite the partisan lean of London as a whole, Boris Johnson’s approval rating is higher than the percentage intending to vote for his candidate. “While a Conservative winning in London (especially since Brexit) was always going to be an uphill climb, the more positive national political environment for the Conservatives may have given them a better chance than expected had they had a more appealing candidate. As it is, Shaun Bailey appears to have taken a bad hand and played it badly.” Today’s poll found 47 per cent of respondents approved of Mr Khan’s performance as mayor, with 31 per cent disapproving – with similar approval ratings in inner and outer London. It found that 24 per cent of respondents said they were “not sure” who they planned to vote for. Mr Khan’s 53-28 lead over Mr Bailey is based on responses from respondents who say they are certain to vote and who select a candidate. Mr Khan was even able to take Tory voters from Mr Bailey, with 18 per cent of those who voted Conservative in the 2019 general election saying they would back the current mayor. A total of 77 per cent of Tory general election voters said they would support Mr Bailey. The votes for London mayor are counted electronically, meaning both first and second preference ballots are processed at the same time. But an outright victory on first preferences would avoid the need to redistribute the second preference votes cast for eliminated candidates. If Mr Bailey achieves 28 per cent of first preference votes on May 6, it would be on a par with the 27 per cent achieved by Tory candidate Steve Norris in the first London mayoral race in 2000, when Ken Livingstone got 39 per cent, and the 29 per cent Mr Norris polled in 2004. Mr Johnson’s two victories, in 2008 and 2012, saw him secure 43 per cent and then 44 per cent of first preferences respectively, going on to defeat Mr Livingstone on both occasions. In the 2016 poll, Mr Khan won 44 per cent of first preferences to 35 per cent for Tory candidate Zac Goldsmith. Mr Khan went on to defeat Mr Goldsmith by a record 315,529 votes. However Mr Livingstone’s first preference performance in 2000 - when he was standing as an independent - remains the biggest gap between first and second-placed candidates after the first round. If Mr Khan does go on to secure victory based solely on first preferences, this would appear to be a consequence of the third and fourth-placed parties polling badly. Simon Hughes polled 15.2 per cent of first-preference votes for the Lib-Dems in 2004. The mayoral race formally began today with the opening of nominations. Candidates wishing to stand have a week to submit their papers. About six million Londoners will be able to vote for the Mayor and the 25 members of the London Assembly. People can vote if they are aged 18 or over on May 6, a British, qualifying Commonwealth or EU citizen and living in London. People not yet registered to vote can do so by April 19 at: gov.uk/register-to-vote

SAN FRANCISCO — Bitcoin has been in a bull market like few the world has ever seen. At the beginning of the year, the price of a Bitcoin was below $1,000. It hit $5,000 in October, then doubled by late November. And on Thursday, less than two weeks later, the price of a single Bitcoin rose above $20,000 on some exchanges, according to Coinmarketcap. The latest price spike has been credited to signs that Wall Street companies plan on bringing their financial heft into the market. At the current cost, the value of all Bitcoin in circulation is about $300 billion. To get a sense of how big that is, all the shares of Goldman Sachs are worth about $90 billion. The gains have been driven by several other factors — perhaps the most important being the irrational mentality that can take over in speculative bubbles. But most people buying Bitcoin are doing so in the belief that others will want it even more in the future. The gains, though, have many people, even Bitcoin believers, anticipating a big crash. Bitcoin used to be all about libertarians and black-market trade. Are those still driving the price? The fringe communities that drove Bitcoin in its early years are playing a much less important role in the current rally. Many investors have said the most important factor driving the current enthusiasm is the entry of hedge funds and other institutional investors. The path for large investors has been smoothed by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Chicago Board Options Exchange, which have been racing to roll out Bitcoin futures contracts. Most banks are already signed up with these exchanges and consequently can immediately begin trading the contracts. The options exchange has said it plans to start trading on Sunday. It is still unclear how the arrival of Bitcoin futures will influence the demand for the digital tokens. With a futures contract, banks can bet on the price of Bitcoin without holding the underlying Bitcoins. This is expected to bring many new players into the market who don’t want to deal with the complications of holding Bitcoins. But the futures contract will also allow investors to short Bitcoin, or bet on the price’s going down, which has been hard to do until now. Some analysts think this could put downward pressure on the price. Other market participants have worried that Bitcoin futures could spread the risks of Bitcoin into the rest of the financial system. People still use Bitcoin and other virtual currencies to make ransom payments and buy illegal goods online, including synthetic opioids. But that activity has been on the wane since the authorities shut down some of the largest online black markets this year. What role are smaller investors playing in the virtual currency markets? Individual investors have been just as active as large investors. Nowhere has the phenomenon of ordinary people buying virtual currencies been more visible than in South Korea, where several exchanges have storefronts to help new customers. This is all the more remarkable because just a year ago, Koreans showed almost no interest in these markets. Small Japanese investors have also been investing in Bitcoin. They have been encouraged by laws passed this year that essentially legalized Bitcoin and allowed Bitcoin exchanges to get regulatory licenses. In the United States, most small-time investors have gone to the San Francisco company Coinbase, which provides a Bitcoin brokerage service, similar to Charles Schwab, as well as an exchange for larger investors. Coinbase now has more account holders than Schwab, and it has struggled to keep up with the growth. China used to be the most active country for Bitcoin trading and mining, but the authorities there have cracked down this year. What are the dangers of getting into this market? Many of the largest exchanges, including in South Korea, are essentially unregulated. The lack of oversight means that no one is checking that the exchanges are properly securing their customers’ money or that large players are not able to manipulate the price. One of the largest exchanges in the world, Bitfinex, has been hacked numerous times and provides little transparency about where it is keeping its money. Even regulated exchanges, like Coinbase in the United States, have not been battle tested like larger financial institutions, and their operations have gone down at key moments. Once people buy Bitcoin or other virtual currencies, they are often targeted by hackers who have become experts at penetrating Bitcoin accounts. Bitcoin “wallets” are vulnerable to new kinds of attacks that are not a problem for ordinary financial accounts. Most important, in contrast to money in a bank account, when a Bitcoin is gone there is essentially no way to get it back and no insurance covering its loss. Are more people using Bitcoin to pay for things? When Bitcoin was released in 2009, it was described as a new kind of electronic cash. Recently, though, many programmers working on Bitcoin have said the system in its current form is not a particularly good way to pay for things. They argue that it is best designed to serve as a sort of scarce commodity, like digital gold, allowing people to keep their money outside the control of governments and companies. Many people who want to use virtual currencies for online payments are looking to Bitcoin competitors, like Bitcoin Cash and Monero. What role are the other virtual currencies playing in this frenzy? Earlier this year, bullish sentiment was focused on Ethereum, a virtual currency network that is more adaptable than Bitcoin. The price of Ether, the virtual currency on the Ethereum network, has continued to rise in recent months, but not as fast as Bitcoin. Many investors were also putting their money into custom virtual currencies released by entrepreneurs in so-called initial coin offerings. These new virtual currencies have generally been designed to serve as the internal payment mechanisms on new software the entrepreneurs are building. This fall, though, regulators have signaled that they are planning to crack down on coin offerings. Where did virtual currencies come from, and how do they work? The Bitcoin software was released in early 2009 by a mysterious creator who went by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. The search is still on for the true identity of Satoshi. The software released by Satoshi set out the basic rules for Bitcoin and the computer network on which it lives. Unlike other forms of money, which are controlled by governments and financial institutions, Bitcoin operates on a decentralized network of computers that no one institution controls. For more details, see our Bitcoin explainer. Follow Nathaniel Popper on Twitter: @nathanielpopper A version of this article appears in print on December 8, 2017, on Page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Bitcoin Has Exploded in Value, but What Comes Next?.

It is 9:00AM in our New York City office, and one of us (Jordan) stops by the fifth-floor kitchen to pick up a free piece of fruit — a healthy perk that Weight Watchers offers its employees. When he arrives, he faces a familiar sight: the bananas are already gone and only the oranges remain. When other hopefuls approach and find the bananas missing, they do not take a free orange. They just walk away. What is wrong with these people? Is there a subculture of orange haters lurking at Weight Watchers?