Month: November 2017

Bitcoin Price Key Highlights

• Bitcoin price is starting to trend lower as more traders book profits off the recent rallies.
• Price is trading inside a descending channel on the 1-hour time frame and is testing resistance.
• If it continues to hold, the selloff could resume back to the channel support around $8400.

Bitcoin price is slowly trending lower on profit-taking off the recent moves and a return in dollar demand.

Technical Indicators Signals

The 100 SMA is still above the longer-term 200 SMA on this time frame so the path of least resistance is to the upside. This means that there’s still a chance for bitcoin price to break past the resistance and resume the longer-term climb. However, the 100 SMA is also holding as dynamic resistance for the time being.

Stochastic is also moving south to show that sellers are in control of price action. RSI is treading sideways to signal potential consolidation from here.

Market Factors

The dollar has slowly been regaining ground to its counterparts as Senate moves forward with its vote on the tax bill. After passing the Senate Budget Committee and seeing a positive revision in the JCT estimates, the bill also drew support from Senator John McCain, which was seen as the main catalyst for the recent dollar rally.

Further progress in this regard could take bitcoin price lower to the dollar as traders reestablish their long USD positions. Apart from that, data from the US economy has been mostly upbeat and reflective of some progress in higher inflation.

However, there’s also the chance that geopolitical risk could pick up as Trump is looking to replace Secretary of State Tillerson to pursue less diplomatic tactics with North Korea.

This usually props up cryptocurrencies like bitcoin as traders continue to seek higher returns but in alternative markets outside of stocks and commodities, also drawing risk-off flows away from the dollar and the yen.

The post Bitcoin Price Technical Analysis for 12/01/2017 – Short-Term Downtrend appeared first on NEWSBTC.

Key Points

• Bitcoin cash price is under pressure and it recently traded below the $1240 support against the US Dollar.
• There are two bearish trend lines forming with resistance near $1350 and $1480 on the hourly chart of BCH/USD (data feed from Kraken).
• The price is currently struggling to recover above the $1350 level and upsides remain capped.

Bitcoin cash price declined further towards $1200 against the US Dollar. BCH/USD is likely to struggle further with resistances near $1360 and $1400.

Bitcoin Cash Price Hurdles

There was no recovery in bitcoin cash price as it declined further towards $1200 against the US Dollar. The price failed to hold yesterday’s low near $1280. It traded below the $1250 and $1240 support levels and traded close to the $1200 handle. A low was formed near $1203 before a minor correction wave was initiated. There was a move above the 23.6% Fib retracement level of the last drop from the $1605 high to $1203 low.

However, the upside move found resistance near $1360. There are two bearish trend lines forming with resistance near $1350 and $1480 on the hourly chart of BCH/USD. The first trend line coincides with the 38.2% Fib retracement level of the last drop from the $1605 high to $1203 low. Therefore, the $1350-1360 levels are important for the current correction. Above $1360, the price might attempt a test of the $1400 level.

The 38.2% Fib retracement level of the last drop from the $1605 high to $1203 low is near $1406 to act as a hurdle. On the downside, the $1200 support zone holds a lot of importance. BCH must stay above it to avoid declines toward $1050.

Looking at the technical indicators:

Hourly MACD – The MACD for BCH/USD is slightly in the bullish zone as per the correction.

Hourly RSI (Relative Strength Index) – The RSI for BCH/USD is still below the 50 level.

Major Support Level – $1200

Major Resistance Level – $1360

Charts courtesy – Trading View, Kraken

The post Bitcoin Cash Price Technical Analysis – BCH/USD Settles Below $1400 appeared first on NEWSBTC.

This year’s incredible bitcoin rally has raised a lot of interest in the cryptocurrency and created huge demand from people to learn everything they can about the phenomena. One academic institution which tries to answer this call is New York University (NYU).

Also Read: Paxful to Help Fund 100 Schools in Africa #BuiltWithBitcoin

Bitcoin 101 at NYU

The Stern School of Business at NYU was the first major US academic institution to offer a course in cryptocurrencies to its graduate students back in 2014. Now the school plans to offer a new option for undergraduates to learn about the field as well, NYU professor David Yermack told the Financial Times.

This new course is likely to be a highly sought one among NYU undergrads. Starting out with just a few dozen students, the graduate course accommodated 100 this year with many more applying to get in, and is expected to reach about 300 graduate students next year. “We are moving it to our largest auditorium, with capacity for 350 students,” the professor exclaimed.

Challenges

Universities that wish to offer classes about bitcoin, blockchain and other cryptocurrency related material face two problematic issues at the moment.

First, as anyone who follows the news can tell you, these subjects are changing at an incredible speed and if you were to write a textbook about the latest developments it will be out of date by the time it is printed. As Prof Yermack said: “Year over year we’ll change well over half the course material. It keeps you young to be reading half the night just to keep up with the latest innovations.”

Secondly and more importunately, the field is suffering from an acute talent shortage. With a teeming market full of new projects raising funds via ICOs, established companies exploring how to harness blockchain technology for their needs, and Wall Street heavyweights racing to start bitcoin trading, the competition for knowledgeable individuals is fierce. “Our biggest challenge is finding enough people to teach the courses,” explained Prof Yermack.

If you are looking to learn about bitcoin, but can’t make it to NYU, there is no reason to worry. All of the material needed can be found freely on the internet. And if you desire an Ivy League seal of approval, Princeton offers a ‘Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies’ course on Coursera.

Do you need a university to teach you about bitcoin? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Want to create your own secure cold storage paper wallet? Check our tools section.

The post NYU Plans to Launch an Undergraduate Course in Cryptocurrencies appeared first on Bitcoin News.

ICOs have the potential to draw global investors to Africa, expose governments to Blockchain.

As an investment asset Bitcoin has been a stellar performer in 2017, eclipsing the returns of equities, bonds, and commodities by a substantial margin. Year-to-date, bitcoin has generated a return on investment of over 950 percent. The S&P 500, on the other hand, is only up 17 percent since the start of the year, while the Barclays Global Aggregate Bond Index is up 7 percent and the Rogers International Commodity Index (RICI) is up 2.5 percent year-to-date.

Indian Exchanges have been experiencing rapid increases in their number of users recently. Despite government hostility, Bitcoin is gaining traction amongst retail investors.

Bitcoin (BTC) violently shed over 19% on the BLX earlier this week after crossing the five digit barrier, US$10,000. The current market cap stands at US$167.6 billion. Bitcoin is up 11,000,000% over the past five years. Six years ago BTC was worth a mere $2 per coin.

The bubble in cryptocurrency threatens the broader financial system, given new buyers’ different motivations from early adopters and use of leverage.

After concluding a successful token pre-sale round, FinTech company The NAGA Group is launching their main token sale, which begins today on December 1, 2017.

Disclosure: This is a Sponsored Article

NAGA is proud to have a pool of more than 6000 users in the official Telegram chat.

More Facts About the Main Token Sale and the Purpose of the Token Sale

Our Goals

First of all, the company’s goal is to raise 30M USD. Unsold tokens will be burned, so there will be no impact on our token economy from having a high cap.

Furthermore, we would like to address some of the questions that we’ve received from the community:

The NAGA Group is conducting an ICO after conducting an IPO. This is quite novel and so it’s not unexpected that this ICO would raise many eyebrows and also many questions.

Why ICO After IPO?

The NAGA Group has already executed a 12.5M Euro Venture Capital round with the multi-billion dollar Chinese FOSUN Group, and a successful Initial Public Offering (IPO) of its stock in which the price soared by 600%. The IPO was oversubscribed by 300%+ before any “crypto-announcement” took place. So having raised significant capital in an IPO, why launch an ICO?

In conducting an ICO we seek to

• Bridge the new economy (cryptocurrencies) to the old (public equities)
• Develop a crypto and virtual goods product line to bridge to our existing stock trading products
• Unify these worlds with one token
• Grow the cryptocurrency space by many millions of new wallets
• Legitimize ICOs by launching one from a publicly listed company
• Pioneer new governance models by bridging public equities to tokens
• Create novel crypto-compatible corporate structures
• Lead the industry by example

In the ICO world, the unfamiliar is often met with some suspicion, and rightly so. The importance of this ICO is the extent to which the public markets have already performed diligence far beyond what is typical for any ICO during the preparation for the NAGA Group IPO. Because of this, ICO participants know they are participating in a well-structured, well-governed and high-quality token ecosystem.

It’s fundamental for the company to stand at the crossroads between the old and the new economy, and as such we seek to venture into the world of cryptocurrency, but to retain the best qualities of an existing publicly traded company, including real, proven products, revenue, solid executives, and the kind of scrutiny and oversight that comes from being publicly listed.

Why Do We Need a Bridge?

Every 27 years (average lifespan) a fiat currency fails, and the reigning system has to be retooled. We’ve recently seen the devaluation of the Zimbabwean dollar, and many global currencies continue to fail. The most enduring fiat currency ever is the British Pound (GBP) which has lasted for about 300 years – however it has lost 99.5% of its original value since inception. The US Dollar is considered a leading currency, however, every US citizen is born with $157,000USD of debt and the country has been forced to bail out banks that are too big to fail through programs like the toxic assets relief program and quantitative easing.

Bridging the old and the new economies will further the ability of anyone to balance between these worlds and to choose freely for themselves how to distribute their assets among these realms.

The Power of a Hybrid:

The Toyota Prius in large part popularized and proved the idea that the age of electric cars and gasoline cars could be “bridged” within a single company and product line. Similarly, NAGA seeks to create a hybrid crypto-economy in the intervening transition period.

The Prius has a gas engine in addition to its electric battery. A typical ICO only has the power of the proceeds it has raised to power its economy. Powering an economy means incentivizing and acquiring users, developing ecosystem partners, managing the token economy through buying back tokens and other means. The NAGA Group already has a powerful “fiat reserve” in the form of significant cash reserves from Venture Capital and IPO financing rounds. In addition, the Group has a significant equity value. These two reserves (namely the fiat cash reserve and the equity reserve) can be seen as a “gas tank” that can power the “vehicle” of the NAGA crypto economy.

In addition to this “gas tank”, however, the NAGA Group also has an “electric battery” in the form of its 15,000+ backers who have already supplied more than 15 million USD in ICO proceeds during the presale and even more backers who will come in during the main sale. These proceeds will arrive in the form of a “bitcoin” token reserve (in the form of highly liquid crypto assets such as Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Ether). By combining a fiat cash reserve, equity reserve, a “bitcoin” token reserve, and the NAGA Coin reserve, the ability to back the token and create beneficial outcomes for token holders is multiplied.

Why We’re Different. Unlike Most ICOs, NAGA is:

1. Funded: we have already raised multiple rounds of investment, including our recent IPO which went up by 400% and a venture capital round from the multi-billion dollar FOSUN Group in China.
2. Credible: NAGA has the tremendous legitimacy and credibility that comes from undergoing the extreme diligence and regulatory scrutiny that comes from a public listing.
3. Shipping Product: main product development is complete and we already have a multi-million dollar revenue product. We already have sufficient capital to complete the tokenization of our product ecosystem.

Use of raised funds:

Proceeds of the ICO will solely be used for the development of the NGC and its ecosystem. They can not be consolidated for the sole benefit of the listed NAGA Group AG.

The use-case to fund trading accounts to trade financial markets by depositing crypto-currencies has been established with this ICO.

The NAGA wallet: Token holders can certainly use the NAGA wallet to hold NGC but NAGA does not intend to impose its own wallet on token holders. Token holders can therefore use whatever wallet they choose.

Our Economic Model

To understand how new capital stimulates our token economy, please refer to our Excel scenario sheet. The core assumptions for SwipeStox´ past KPIs (like CAC, Conversion, LTV etc.) are based on real audited data.

Network Effects

This model gives us confidence that we can create a significant network and data effects that provide Metcalfe’s law exponential growth potential. Every new user contributes to the demand for NGC tokens and this produces the groundswell for increasing the value of the token for all holders. In addition, the application is an inherently social buying app that has both data and social network effects.

This Excel scenario sheet allows our community to apply their own assumptions via a dashboard.

Scalability

As the scalability in our segment is huge the limit should represent the amount that could still be reasonably invested into marketing to grow the user-base and hence token-economy. We hence set the hard cap at an amount at which we can still reasonably scale up (see XLS scenario sheet — containing the KPIs from our audited and listed running business) — taking in consideration the diminishing returns from marketing channels etc..

You can learn more about the NAGA Ecosystem and Token Sale at nagaico.com and by following them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, BitcoinTalk, and Telegram.

Along with Bitcoin, Ethereum had a crazy day this week. Although Ethereum had a more predictable correction right to the previous resistance level of 395. We were expecting the pullback because Ethereum tends to have a pullback every time it reaches new highs.

ETH/USD Technical Analysis

ETH/USD reached a new high of $480 last week. After consolidating in that area for four days, it rode on the Bitcoin mania and reached a predictable level on Wednesday. 

We could see further drops for ETH in the coming days, towards the next support level at 339. However, so far, market participants appear to be indecisive on which direction to take Ethereum next.

Ethereum Founder Unveils Plans for “Ethereum 2.0”

Meanwhile, Ethereum’s founder, Vitalik Buterin, unveiled his plans for “Ethereum 2.0” this week, which would be the next-generation version of Ethereum.

The Ethereum network was originally born as an idea for next-generation cryptocurrency network to begin with. It could do a lot more interesting things than just financial transactions. But, in the past years, it has also revealed a few major issues within the network.

According to Buterin, there are currently three major problems that need to be solved to push the Ethereum network to the next level: privacy, Consensus and smart contract safety, and probably the biggest of them all: scalability.

To overcome these, Buterin explained that the next generation of Ethereum will use a new architecture called “sharding,” which will enable the network to process thousands of transactions per second — all on the same chain, which means safety will not be sacrificed.

Buterin also noted that sharding will create new types of addresses on the network, which will give Ethereum the opportunity to evolve by adopting new backward incompatible protocols without disrupting the main blockchain. Once Ethereum 2.0 is launched, it could potentially create yet another bullish market for it to bring it to new highs, but of course, this could take some time.

Bitcoin’s biggest competitor isn’t Ethereum

While we’re at it, let’s through this idea around.

The biggest competitor to bitcoin and its crypto-empire might appear to be Ethereum. Ethereum has the second-largest market cap of any digital currency, and it’s had an even better year-to-date performance than bitcoin. Further, its blockchain is being tested in small-scale and pilot projects by 200 different organizations in the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.

But the two cryptocurrency giants seemingly have different missions at the moment. Ethereum appears intent on pushing its blockchain to enterprises, while somewhat ignoring its Ether token as a means of payment. Meanwhile, bitcoin has focused extensively on building up its reputation as a payment facilitator, and only recently turned its attention to attracting businesses to its blockchain. While competitive to a degree, bitcoin and Ethereum aren’t direct threats to one another.

Instead, bitcoin’s biggest competitor just might be Litecoin. As of Nov. 27, Litecoin had the sixth-largest market cap of all cryptocurrencies, at $4.9 billion, trailing only bitcoin gold, Ripple, bitcoin cash, Ethereum, and bitcoin.

We will dig deeper into Litecoin next time!

xox

Kiana Danial

Invest Diva

The post Ethereum Remains Above Key Support After Breaking $500 appeared first on NEWSBTC.

Those who don’t want intrusive government regulation should integrate best practices and self-regulate. ICO fundraising has great potential, but scams and low quality projects must be weeded out.

If you’ve been involved with blockchain for a while, you may have picked up on a recurring theme in many recent news stories — something along the lines of ‘blockchain is the future,’ ‘it will only continue to grow in the coming years’, and ‘it will revolutionize corporate finance by de-centralizing lending and removing the need for middlemen.” Are they right? Currently, there are two dominant perspectives on that.