Day: November 12, 2017

Bitcoin Price Key Highlights

• Bitcoin sold off sharply since breaking below the double top pattern highlighted in a previous article.
• Zooming out to the longer-term time frame shows that bitcoin price is still in correction mode and is testing the first Fib level.
• This lines up with a short-term area of interest but a deeper correction could find its way to the rising trend line on the daily chart.

Bitcoin price is in the middle of a much-needed correction from its strong rally since mid-September but technical indicators suggest that the uptrend could resume soon.

Technical Indicators Signals

The 100 SMA is still above the longer-term 200 SMA on the daily time frame so the path of least resistance is to the upside, which means that the uptrend would resume at some point.

In addition, the gap between the moving averages is widening to reflect strengthening bullish momentum. The 100 SMA coincides with the rising trend line connecting the lows of bitcoin price action since mid-July, adding to its strength as a floor.

It also lines up with the 61.8% Fibonacci retracement level around the $5000 handle. To top it off, it is around the former resistance level that might now hold as support, so plenty of buy orders are likely waiting there.

Stochastic is on the move down but dipping into oversold territory, which reflects exhaustion among sellers. RSI has more room to fall, though, so bearish pressure could stay in play until this oscillator hits oversold levels and turns back up.

If bullish pressure returns at any of the Fibs, bitcoin price could resume its climb to the swing high and beyond. On the other hand, a move below the trend line and 61.8% Fib could mark the start of a long-term reversal.

Market Factors

Bitcoin price popped higher on news that the hard fork this month is suspended, but this scenario is bound to come up again sooner or later, which means that the uncertainty has simply been postponed and not avoided.

Meanwhile, the dollar is also under pressure on more challenges to achieving tax reform, but it looks like it is able to hold a candle against the massive profit-taking in bitcoin longs.

The post Bitcoin Price Technical Analysis for 11/13/2017 – Deeper Correction Underway? appeared first on NEWSBTC.

Darknet markets, prized for their range of wares not commonly found on the clearnet, are back online. For the past three weeks, the most popular DNMs, including Dream and Aero, have been offline due to sustained DDoS attacks. Now, following a lengthy hiatus, the majority of markets are back online. There’s just one problem: with bitcoin transactions sometimes taking hours or even days to confirm, several markets are still largely unusable.

Also read: Openbazaar Sees a Variety of New Vendors After Privacy Enhancements

You Can Browse But You Can’t Buy

On the Dream marketplace, which only accepts bitcoin, customers have been left to window shop, gazing enviously at the goods on offer but unable to buy until their bitcoin transactions clear. The number of unconfirmed transactions in the mempool passed 150,000 on Saturday and is now touching 160,000.

Users on r/darknetmarkets complained of transactions sent to Dream, the largest DNM, that were unconfirmed after five hours. The Dream forum is filled with similar tales of woe, including dozens of complaints filed in the last 24 hours. Customers of the darknet, who are often in a hurry to get their goods, think nothing of paying high confirmation fees – even when those fees are approaching $10, as has been the case with bitcoin recently. Even with higher fees selected, however, transactions have still been slow.

Having survived since 2013, Dream is a veteran among darknet markets, whose tenure is often limited to mere months. Despite its size and reputation, the site has been slow to evolve however, and still only accepts payment in bitcoin. As a consequence, it’s vulnerable to the same woes that afflict all bitcoin users during times of blockchain congestion.

Privacy Coins Prosper

It wasn’t transaction issues that spurred many DNMs into accepting alternative digital currencies, but rather privacy. Law enforcement are becoming increasingly adept at assigning bitcoin addresses to real world identities, as a number of deep web vendors have discovered in the past year. Nevertheless, when the bitcoin network is under strain, altcoins provide additional benefits, facilitating quick and low-cost transactions.

Dream has yet to accept alternatives to bitcoin, but Point Marketplace (formerly Tochka) and Aero do, the former taking ethereum and the latter accepting monero. Then there is Libertas, which is a monero-only marketplace. Monero has risen in value over the past week, though how much of that can be attributed to darknet adoption is debatable.

DDoS and Deep Web Shenanigans

Deepdotweb, which monitors the uptime of DNMs, has displayed red bars across the board for weeks, signaling that the marketplaces have been under sustained DDoS attacks.

Thanks to the ease with which onion sites can be knocked offline in such a manner, attacks on darknet markets is commonplace, often motivated by rival sites or by ransomers seeking to extort bitcoin. Deep web markets have endured an unusually torrid time of late however.

Following the high profile collapse of Alphabay and Trade Route, due to law enforcement and an exit scam respectively, fear, uncertainty, and doubt has wracked the DNM forums and subreddits. As market after market has been toppled, vendors and customers have fled elsewhere. For some buyers, this has meant visiting dedicated vendor shops, which have been largely immune from the spate of DDoSing. Others have used the opportunity to seek out P2P alternatives that have no central point of failure.

How Bazaar

The biggest winner to emerge from the DNMs’ extended downtime and bitcoin’s backlog is Openbazaar. As news.Bitcoin.com recently reported:

The cryptocurrency-based decentralized marketplace, Openbazaar, launched its 2.0 platform with a slew of new features. Now a couple of months later, the marketplace seems to be seeing some significant growth as vendors from Darknet markets are starting to flock to the protocol’s benefits.

The development team have also announced that they’ll be adding bitcoin cash and zcash support, surmounting the biggest criticisms leveled at bitcoin from a darknet perspective: high fees, low confirmation times, and low anonymity.

Do you think P2P marketplaces are the solution to the DNMs’ problems? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Coincodex, Point Marketplace, and Deepdotweb.

Bitcoin.com’s own store features a wide range of interesting Bitcoin-related products. Looking for a hardware wallet? We got ‘em. Want a good-looking t-shirt? It’s there. Want to gift a nice Bitcoin tea cup? Go shopping.

The post Darknet Markets Are Back – But With the Blockchain Bloated Who’s Buying? appeared first on Bitcoin News.

Ethereum (ETH) now has a US$29.4 billion market capitalization, second only to Bitcoin (BTC) with US$96.7 billion. Yesterday, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) briefly held the number two spot in the setting of record trading volume from South Korea on weekend hours. Global volume in ETH trading has been ~US$1.5 billion over the past 24 hours, behind that of Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Compared to the other top coins by market cap, ETH has seen very little price action.ETH difficulty and hash rate have also remained stable since the difficulty and block reward reduction after the hard fork on October 17th. ETH continues to have substantially more transactions per day, ~200,000, than Bitcoin (not shown). With 13 second block times, ETH also currently has no unconfirmed transactions or fee problems.

Is the ‘rise’ of BCH all about pump and dump or are we looking at a seismic shift in Bitcoin?

It’s a crazy world when a stock’s price actually goes up after the company announces a loss, but that’s exactly what happened to Overstock. The market is ecstatic over its broad Blockchain investments

Not this again.

A lot has been said and done when it comes to the SegWit2x hard fork. Although most people assume this fork will not happen, that is not entirely factual. The Bitcoin2x website claims there are still plans to go ahead with the fork, although no real specifics are known at this point in time. We do know there is at least some interest in seeing this project move ahead sooner rather than later.

To SegWit2x or not to SegWit2x?

That is the question. More specifically, the main proponents of this hard fork announced they would no longer go ahead with the fork due to a slew of issues. It is evident that the lack of adequate replay protection would always be a major hindrance for this particular Bitcoin hard fork. No one wants to send money to the wrong blockchain simply because the developers couldn’t be bothered to add replay protection from day one. We have seen similar concerns over Bitcoin Gold, although it seems those developers have effectively solved the problem.

How the “new” SegWit2x team plans to address this major problem remains to be determined. All their website mentions is that there will be “different replay protection addition”‘, which is one of the vaguest statements we have seen in the Bitcoin world to date. It is evident that replay protection is something that cannot be coded in a few hours without plenty of expertise and understanding.

No one knows for sure who is behind the new initiative to go ahead with SegWit2x either. It seems highly unlikely that many of the former supporters remain involved, as the fork itself will not have any major impact in its current form whatsoever. Most people already deem Bitcoin Cash the only viable Bitcoin alternative, even though it can only be used in very limited fashion. Other altcoins which do not carry the Bitcoin name will see their day sooner rather than later if this trend keeps up.

Moreover, it is possible the alleged “launch” of SegWit2x is nothing but a joke at this point. A simple message on a website alone doesn’t carry all that much weight these days. Nor do we know who registered the Bitcoin2x.org domain name back in August of 2012, as it seems the plan to create Bitcoin2x has been around for a lot longer than most people realize. It will be interesting to see how all this plays out, even though the odds are still in favor of Bitcoin despite what some people may be telling the world right now.

To be more specific, those individuals are claiming that Bitcoin Cash is destined to rival and overtake Bitcoin as the main blockchain. The recent price pump certainly seems to confirm as much, even though it was all made possible by one exchange representing nearly 50% of trading volume. Whether or not that trend can be maintained for much longer remains to be seen. There is no organic or natural growth associated with Bitcoin Cash right now, and it is mainly supported by the people who failed to fork Bitcoin years earlier with Bitcoin Classic and Bitcoin XT.

In the end, launching SegWit2x despite all its issues would not necessarily be a bad thing. It might improve overall SegWit adoption on the main Bitcoin blockchain, which is an absolute must in order to make Bitcoin itself great again. For now, some companies are more than eager to integrate BCH instead of working with the solution that the Bitcoin Core developers presented to them months ago. It is an interesting turn of events, and one that will continue to cause friction for some time to come.

The Bitcoin Gold futures market finds itself in an interesting position right now. After many people had given up hope that this airdrop would happen this year, we now know that it in fact took place on November 12th. As a result, many are hoping the value of BTG soars so high it may make people forget about SegWit2x altogether. With a 64% gain registered in the past 24 hours, there is a good amount of money to be made from BTG futures right now.

Bitcoin Gold Futures Are Soaring

It is not entirely surprising to see the price of Bitcoin Gold futures go up right now. Until a few days ago, no one knew for sure when and if this network would actually launch. Considering it was announced a while ago and no real progress has been made for weeks, a lot of people have given up on the concept of Bitcoin Gold. That will come to change in the very near future, though.

With the Bitcoin Gold network launching on November 12th, we will effectively have three different versions of Bitcoin competing with one another. That in itself is pretty remarkable, although a fourth one may be added before the year is over as well. There are many different opinions as to how Bitcoin should operate on the surface and under the hood. All of these visions have advantages and drawbacks. Only one of them can come out on top, though no one knows for sure which chain that will be in a few months from now.

One thing is certain: people have shown an increased interest in Bitcoin Gold futures again. This particular market has seen its own share of volatility over the past few weeks. With an initial starting price of over US$500, there was genuine interest in seeing BTG succeed. Unfortunately, the Bitcoin Gold futures market collapsed pretty quickly when it became evident this was not a real hard fork, but merely a completely different altcoin which will airdrop BTG to existing Bitcoin holders.

Over the course of the past two weeks, the value of Bitcoin Gold futures has dropped sharply. At the bottom, it reached US$111, which is far below the initial starting price. Even so, a free US$111 per Bitcoin held at the time of the blockchain snapshot for BTG distribution is still easy money. It turns out that the Bitcoin Gold coin may be worth a lot more in the next few days, assuming the team gets its mainnet running properly.

While the Bitcoin Gold futures market is not a real indication of the BTG value, it does provide some interesting information. Once people learned that this currency would launch on November 12th, we saw the futures price rise to over US$300 in short order. Although there isn’t much in the way of volume in this market right now, it goes to show the Bitcoin Gold airdrop may disrupt some of the momentum both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash are experiencing right now. How this all will play out remains to be seen, though.

For now, it seems some of the Bitcoin Gold futures markets are projecting a potential price of over US$400 per BTG. Although this seems unwarranted for a currency that has nothing to do with Bitcoin itself, there will be some good money to be made in the coming days. The final few months of 2017 will be pretty interesting for the cryptocurrency ecosystem overall, as a lot can change between now and December 31st. Things will look very different when we head into 2018; that much is almost guaranteed.