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Bitcoin (BTC) Bounces Off $6,000 Over The Weekend, But Will It Continue To Rise?

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Bitcoin Chart With Values

Bitcoin (BTC) bounced strongly and cleanly off the exact $6,000 level as can be seen on the BTC/USD daily chart above. The price crashed hard on Friday but since then, it has now formed two consecutive green candles over the weekend. While this may be something every bull wants to see, weekend activity generally does not matter much as most traders are away on weekends and the low volume makes it easy for a few big players to manipulate the market.

It is true that a lot of Bitcoin (BTC) buying has been going on in OTC markets over the last few months. It is also true that institutional players are preparing to get involved in the game. Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), parent company of the New York Stock Exchange has recently announced a cryptocurrency platform, Bakkt. Circle owned by Goldman Sachs recently acquired popular crypto exchange, Poloniex. Long story short, in the past eight months, big players in the financial sectors have been positioning themselves to enter the space.

These are all exciting developments that would result in more ETPs for Bitcoin (BTC) in the future to trade and overall, the market will gain a lot more credibility, traction and adoption long term. However, short term smart money is busy accumulating but it wouldn’t mind if the price were to fall further. They are not buying on exchanges anyway, and they are looking to accumulate all they can before the next rally. So, if Bitcoin (BTC) breaks below $6,000 and continues to fall, it will be in their interest to let it fall. If the price were to fall close to $5,000 that would still be pretty normal for the big players although retail investors would be running for the gates, panic selling as if Bitcoin (BTC) is headed to zero.

Bitcoin Chart With Values

Most Bitcoin (BTC) traders get so caught up in shorter timeframes that they completely forget about the big picture. The above monthly chart for BTC/USD shows how Bitcoin (BTC) has traded since the beginning of 2012. This trend has never been breached. The only reason Bitcoin (BTC) could break below this trend line now would be if Bitcoin (BTC) turns out to be a scam. Otherwise, there is absolutely no chance. The reason for that is that Bitcoin (BTC) was created to be an effective store of value. Its price was meant to appreciate with time and that too in a systematic manner.

Bitcoin (BTC) was designed to generate a set number of units. Only 21 million Bitcoin (BTC) will ever be in existence. Currently 17.2 million have been mined and are in circulation. The way Bitcoin (BTC) mining works is that miners are rewarded for every valid block discovered. After every 210,000 blocks are mined, halving kicks in. The way halving works is that it reduces the mining reward to half. So far, there have been two halvenings.

When Bitcoin (BTC) mining started, the reward was set at 50 BTC, which during first halvening was cut down to 25 BTC in 2012 and was then cut down to 12.5 BTC in 2016. The next halvening is expected in 2020, which will cut down the reward to 6.25 BTC. Bitcoin (BTC)’s supply is controlled by the miners. The price of any asset is determined by supply and demand. As miner rewards reduce, they will stop selling at prices they cannot make a profit at, thus reducing the supply compared to demand, which will keep driving Bitcoin (BTC)’s price higher.

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Bitcoin’s Mining Costs Will See It Bottom out at $6,000, Traders Argue

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Two well-known traders, Brian Stutland and Jim Iuorio, have recently revealed they believe bitcoin has a major support at the $6,000 thanks to its mining costs, which means it may be the bottom of the cryptocurrency’s downtrend.

Speaking to CNBC, the traders noted that while it may be too expensive for the “average person” to start mining the flagship cryptocurrency, some of the miners will find it difficult to mine profitably if the cryptocurrency falls below the $6,000 mark.

Their comments came shortly after bitcoin lost over $1,000 in a 24-hour period, after reports suggested Goldman Sachs had dropped its plans to open a bitcoin trading desk in the near future and a whale moved over $100 million to cryptocurrency exchanges.

Brian Stutland stated:

It’s going to be difficult [to profit] once we get down to this $6,000 level I think that’ll act as some support there. But look, do we really need Goldman Sachs? The point of cryptocurrency was to get people out of the banking system, and bank and transactions offline from that.

Goldman Sachs’ chief financial officer (CFO), as CryptoGlobe covered, later on revealed the reports were false as the company is still working on “setting up a trading desk to make markets in digital currencies such as bitcoin.” It’s moving into the crypto space in “response to client interest in digital currencies.”

Per Stutland’s words, while the drop created “some selloff” the bottom will be reached a $6,000. Jim Iuorio then noted bitcoin price charts point to a potential bounce if the cryptocurrency manages to go through $6,480.

If bitcoin goes through that level, Iuorio said, the cryptocurrency will “come out of that little consolidation it’s been on” and go up to $6,800. If it fails to do so and trades under $6,300, he added, it’ll fall back to $6,000.

At press time, BTC is trading at $6,470 after rising 1.38% in the last 24-hour period, according to CryptoCompare data. The cryptocurrency seemingly started recovering after reports suggested crypto exchange Coinbase was tapping the expertise of $6 trillion asset manager BlackRock to launch a crypto ETF.

As CryptoGlobe covered adoption has been growing, as billionaire Tilman Fertitta, owner of the NBA basketball team Houston Rockets, recently started accepting bitcoin and bitcoin cash in hos Post Oaks Motor Cars dealership.

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What are Forks and Airdrop in Cryptocurrency?

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The cryptocurrency industry boasts of many technical terms of which most of them need no tedious search to understand them as they are self-explanatory. One of the frequently used terms in the industry is airdrop.

The word combination alone provides a gist of what it really means, however, it may not have a literal meaning as it may be assumed to be. This post identifies and explains two important most-used terms in the industry.

Airdrop

Airdrop does not literally means “drops” fall from the air or the air really drops. It signifies a free distribution of tokens or cryptocurrencies for a specific purpose. In most occasions, cryptocurrency companies decide to reward their early adopters by distributing a proportion of free tokens to them.

In addition, some companies ask interested parties to perform minor tasks, including liking their telegram page, following them on twitter and few other instructions to stand a chance of getting a portion of the distribution.

As this may be a marketing strategy to get more people on board to build a community, this may also be a strategy to evenly distribute tokens in order to avoid market manipulation by large token holders.

Airdrop is very common among the newly introduced coins that need a kind of popularity to rise to the moon.

Forks

Fork in cryptocurrency has a general meaning of dividing or introducing an updated version of an existing cryptocurrency. When inventors realize that an existing cryptocurrency falls short of a particular function, a similar but upgraded version is introduced.

A good example is Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash. Bitcoin gave birth to Bitcoin cash in 2017 after inventors announced on a fork that was intended to make the digital world even better.

Forks are categorized into two; Hard folk and Soft Folk. Hard fork has been explained to be a permanent diversion from an existing Blockchain with the nodes of the new Blockchain not interacting with the transactions of the old one.

Soft Node is quite different. Transactions of the non upgraded nodes are recognized by the new upgraded ones; however, when the non upgraded node mines blocks continuously, the new nodes will reject them.

In this case, enough hash power is needed to make it succeed. It is believed that the existence of a fork makes the future of cryptocurrency very bright. Possibility of a fork can address so many problems in the cryptocurrency industry.

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What Next For Ethereum (ETH)?

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Ethereum (ETH) has had a rough week in the crypto markets. On the 5th of September, right before the whole market lost close to $40 Billion in a day, ETH was valued at $280 and seemed to have considerable support at that level. Then the news hit that Goldman Sachs have decided not to proceed with plans for a Bitcoin (BTC) and Crypto trading desk. The entire market tanked. ETH fell in the markets to current levels of $219 as the news about Goldman Sachs have since been declared as fake news.

Fears of Further Decline and ICO’s Dumping ETH in the Markets

The Ethereum HODLers in the crypto community are concerned that ETH will continue falling to levels well below $200.The last time ETH went below this levels was back in mid September when it was valued briefly at $195.

With the constant rumors that ICOs are selling the ETH they raised last year and early this year to avoid further losses, the concern still lingers of the possibility of the digital asset continuing to depreciate in value. Although this claims have not been confirmed, the theory is plausible given the tonnes of crypto that was poured into ICOs from late last year to date.

Will it Go To Zero?

The extreme side of events is that ETH will plummet to zero as everyone ditches the digital asset for more stabler coins such as Stellar (XLM). There is also the theory that ETH can be replaced as the preferred ‘gas’ payment on the Ethereum network thus making the digital asset obsolete. However, the Ethereum community would not agree to such a radical overhaul of the network’s operations.

A Call for a New Ethereum Network

This then leads to a new discussion that the Ethereum network needs to evolve with the times or risk being obsolete as more efficient networks are created. These include the likes of Tron (TRX), Zilliqa (ZIL) and Neo (NEO). Of particular concern are the security vulnerabilities in Ethereum smart contracts as well as the network having congestion issues that need to be solved by increasing its throughput.

Waiting It Out

The good thing is that ETH still has fans and HODLers who are willing to wait out the current storm in the form of a bear market. There are also high hopes that the scalability issues on the network will be solved very soon further injecting the much needed life into the digital asset.

In conclusion, the digital asset of ETH is facing some trying times in the crypto markets as it has dropped 85% since its peak value of $1,400. With the bear market still in full force at the moment of writing this, there is some fear that its value could drop further. However, the long term future of ETH is still bright if its network can evolve with the times.

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