Day: July 26, 2018

Venezuela is replacing its national currency, the bolivar, with a new one that will reportedly be tied to its controversial “petro” token.

Bitcoin’s price has rallied 45 percent in the last four weeks, setting the stage for a long-term bull market, according to technical charts.

With a market full of millions of users, it is only in due time that a user will fall suspect to glitches, hacks or plain old negligence. According to a popular crypto trader, his own mother has fallen victim to the wrongdoings of HitBTC, one of the oldest exchanges in the world.

Crypto Trader: F*** You HitBTC

Popular cryptocurrency analyst and trader Sicarious, recently took to Twitter to express his apparent distaste for the HitBTC exchange, which locked his sixty-five year-old mother out of her cryptocurrency holdings for over three months.

As noted on Sicarious’ appearance on the Crypto Street Podcast, he got involved in the early stages of the cryptocurrency industry, entering a position in Bitcoin during December 2013. Speaking more on his mother’s involvement in the industry, he pointed out that she expressed interest in Bitcoin when it was just worth $250, first entering the market when Bitcoin eclipsed the $350 price level.

According to the trader, even though she submitted all the required documents for “EVERY KYC hoop they’ve thrown at her,” her account remains locked by HitBTC staff. In a genuine bout of disappointment, he wrote:

“Her account is still locked, & after submitting a driver’s ID, passport, bank statements, utility bills, txids & screenshots, she had a skype convo with them this morning. This is their response. Her acc. has been frozen for 3 months… Apparently, HitBTC thinks that a 65-year-old woman asking her son for help when a sketchy-ass exchange steals her money means she’s a front for money launders.”

He then accused the exchange of using consumer funds irresponsibly to the point of insolvency, even going on to ask if they “get a kick out of screwing over innocent grandmas.”

Despite seeming to be all talk, no action, Sicarious went on to make the accused exchange aware of the fact that his mom is currently filing complaints with the U.S. CFTC, and will be seeking legal counsel moving forward.

In his rightful outrage, the crypto personality also asked users to retweet and respond to the Twitter rant in a bid to spread the word about this case. Jake Chervinsky, an American lawyer active in the cryptosphere, responded to Sicarious, noting that crypto could eventually be used to “disintermediate” selfish and malicious third parties.

Be careful out there . . . some day we'll use crypto to disintermediate self-interested & malicious third parties, but in these early days, we have to watch for bad actors & look out for each other.

Remember: your keys, your coins — not your keys, not your coins. DEX, please. https://t.co/Xbov5EA0RD

— Jake Chervinsky (@jchervinsky) July 25, 2018

It is currently unclear how much is locked up in the frozen account, but it is likely that it isn’t any small sum, as the crypto trader seemed outraged at the lack of customer support his mom had received.

John McAfee Doesn’t Seem To Like HitBTC Either

Sicarious is not alone in his aversion to the HitBTC exchange, but so is John McAfee, a long-time cryptocurrency proponent and eccentric personality, who went on a Twitter storm in late June/early July calling out the malintent of the exchange.  In his original jab at the exchange, McAfee wrote:

This wasn’t the end of his HitBTC hit job, as he went on to issue over 10 messages badmouthing the exchange, and what it stands for. He went even as far to say that he will be the exchange’s “worst enemy” until they prove that they are aligned with the interests of the cryptocurrency community overall, and are “truly interested in helping the poor.”

As pointed out in the tweet from Chervinsky, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) are the future of the cryptocurrency market, as they run on permissionless, uncensorable and non-biased smart contracts that cannot be controlled by any single entity. While DEXs are becoming ever-popular in this industry, there is still one hurdle that this variety of exchange has not been able to cross, this being the lack of support for fiat to crypto transfers.

While it is currently unclear how DEX developers will address this issue, it is only in due time that this form of exchange will reach prominence in the industry.

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Atypical trading patterns from Bitcoin miners indicate they are expecting the price rally to soon come to an end.

While it is not uncommon for miners to sell off a portion of newly-gained coins to cover operating costs, the extent of their sales suggests they are looking to sell before their work becomes less profitable. Reports indicate that in the month of June and the majority of July, the average miner was, in fact, working at a financial loss.

What is particularly unusual about the sales from miners is that the last 24 hours have seen them sell more Bitcoin than they created. They reportedly mined an aggregate of approximately USD 14.4 million in coins, selling a total of USD 17.3 million. Recent trends from the miners show that they have tended sell around the USD 10 million mark of their holdings, averaging less than their daily earnings.

An end to the rally, or just covering costs?

Alternatively, if miners are not expecting an end to Bitcoin’s rally, perhaps the last few unprofitable months have required immediate sales to cover the growing overhead.

Kyle Samani, a managing partner at Multicoin Capital Management weighed in on the subject, speculating that it was likely many miners are currently no longer waiting for a price appreciation to sell, although he did not share any particular reason as to why this might be.

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Iran may soon issue its own cryptocurrency in a move aimed to bypass economic sanctions enacted by U.S. President Donald Trump.

Crypto land is still in the green, Stellar, ChainLink, Stratis and Komodo making good gains.

The correction has not happened yet and markets are still creeping higher. Only Bitcoin and a couple of altcoins seem to be the beneficiaries however. Total market capitalization has broken $300 billion and is holding just above it at the moment.

Bitcoin has remained stable on the day with no gains or losses, holding at $8,240 at the time of writing. It still may pull back to below $8k as traders take profits but is steady this morning. Ethereum has made a marginal gain of 1.8% to trade at $485 but has been flat over the week posting no gains since the same time last Thursday.

Altcoins are generally in the green at the moment with one or two enjoying double digit growth this morning. One of those coins is Stellar Lumens which is up 11% on the day according to Coinmarketcap. XLM is currently trading at $0.332, which is up from $0.297 this time yesterday. On the week Stellar has made 9% from $0.307 this time last week. The monthly picture looks even better with a gain of 73% from just under $0.20 this time last month. Against Bitcoin XLM is up 11.4% on the day to 4070 satoshis but down 3% on the week from 4200 sats on Thursday last week.

Momentum has been driven by the TransferTo partnership which will enable Stellar to be used in cross-border transactions in over 70 countries.

Singapore-based Series B-funded company has chosen Stellar to promote financial inclusion in 70+ countries, with offices including in Miami and London.https://t.co/yMp2P5gNEH

100+ millon… https://t.co/mITkNHSzmR

— Stellar Lumens (@StellarLumens) July 25, 2018

The announcement goes on to state; “Under this collaboration, financial institutions and partners of both Stellar.org and TransferTo will benefit from the combined network coverage, and be able to leverage new technologies to send and receive money more efficiently to more than 70 countries.”

Binance currently takes the bulk of Lumens trade with around 45% of the total. Daily volume has doubled over the past 24 hours from $100 million to $200 million as Stellar makes its move. It has already surpassed Litecoin in the market cap charts with $6.2 billion and sixth palace.

Other altcoins making moves today include ChainLink and Stratis which are both up around 15% and Komodo climbing 9% on the day. Total crypto market capitalization has inched up 1.6% to $303 billion but trade volume has plunged 25% from $20 to $15 billion on the day.

More on Stellar can be found here: https://www.stellar.org/

FOMO Moments is a section that takes a daily look at the top 25 altcoins during the current trading session and analyses the best performing ones, looking for trends and possible fundamentals.

The post Cryptocurrency Market Update: Stellar Flies High on New Partnership appeared first on NewsBTC.

Bitcoin Press Release: Kryll.io, the Automated strategies trading platform announced that its KRL token will be listed on popular cryptocurrency exchange QRYPTOS on the 18th of July 2018.

July 18th, 2018, Sophia Antipolis, France – Following a successful crowdsale in which the company raised over 3600 ETH. This news comes as the French startup is wiring up its product for a release in August 2018.

The Kryll.io token event recorded contributions of over 3600 ETH and over 24000 registrations.  Kryll will be listed on QRYPTOS on July 18th, 2018.

About QRYPTOS

QRYPTOS is QUOINE’s fully digital cryptocurrency exchange and trading platform launched in June, 2017.

QUOINE is a leading global fintech company that provides trading, exchange, and next generation financial services powered by blockchain technology. With offices in Singapore, Japan, and Vietnam, QUOINE combines a strong network of local partners with over 250 years of combined team experience in fintech to deliver best in class financial services for its customers. QUOINE is the first global cryptocurrency exchange to be officially licensed by the Japan Financial Services Agency. More information is available at www.quoine.com

About KRYLL.IO

After a successful token sale early 2018, Kryll.io is completely focused on expanding the development team, launching Alpha version of its platform in August 2018, preparing for mobile apps in november and finally releasing a Beta version to the public by the end of the year.

Since 2009, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies enjoyed a phenomenal growth in terms of public interest and valuation. Holding investors, professional traders and hobbyists all beneted in their own ways from the amazing opportunities granted by this brave new world. Nevertheless the trading game requires time, technical knowledge, analytical skills, discipline and proficiency using professional tools in order to achieve true success. Crypto traders without all of this missed opportunities or lost a chunk of their assets in the last few years.

Now that the Kryll.io platform enters the game, this is changing.

Kryll.io is the first intuitive platform to define powerful crypto trading strategies through a simple drag’n’drop editor. With our Wysiwyt (What You See Is What You Trade) flow-based technology Crypto traders are now able to build from basic to advanced automated trading systems in an intuitive way, no dev skills needed anymore!

Kryll.io provides logical operators, markets indicators, value triggers, enhanced technical analysis, media opinion mining and deep-learning predictions; all this will help your to create automated winning strategies. Benchmark your strategies through real-time sandboxes and massive Kryll.io back-testing capabilities, share with the community, enjoy user-generated content.

Visit the Kryll Official website – https://kryll.io
Find on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/kryll.io
Join Telegram Channel – https://t.me/kryll_io
Follow on Twitter – https://twitter.com/kryll_io
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4aIXGM775I

Media Contact

Contact Name: Paul Collorafi, CMO, Kryll.io
Contact Email: [email protected]
Location: Valbonne, France

Kryll.io is the source of this content. Virtual currency is not legal tender, is not backed by the government, and accounts and value balances are not subject to consumer

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With literally hundreds of coins to choose from, structuring a digital asset portfolio is a daunting task – but coming up with the answers to 3 simple questions should help anyone create an investment thesis that is right for them

A few days ago news.Bitcoin.com reported on the debate between Bitcoin Cash (BCH) developers and community members concerning an idea called ‘pre-consensus.’ Some developers believe pre-consensus could help with bock time speeds, zero-confirmation transactions, and consensus in general. Since then there’s been a lot of discussion about this topic, and some members of the BCH community with mining power, like Viabtc’s Haipo Yang, seemed to favor the idea of faster block times. While other miners, like Coingeek’s Calvin Ayre, have issues with the recent ideas that involve what they call “risky protocol changes.”

Also Read: Bitcoin Cash Developers Debate an Idea Called Pre-Consensus

Bitcoin Cash and the Pre-Consensus Idea

Not long ago Bitcoin ABC client’s lead developer, Amaury Séchet, proposed the idea of pre-consensus to the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) community. The idea Séchet and other developers believe could make block times faster, help produce a more sound zero-confirmation system, and help with other consensus protocol changes. Right away Nchain’s chief scientist Craig Wright explained that he thinks pre-consensus is a horrible idea and “no hash goes to this crap.” Wright was not the only person who disagreed with the idea, and there have been many others who have written posts and comments about the concept in a negative light. However, this week Viabtc’s founder Haipo Yang had some positive statements to say about faster block times. On Twitter the Viabtc founder states:

I believe Bitcoin Cash should decrease the block time from 10 minutes to 1 minute. As a pool operator, I don’t see any technical problem and this will improve user experience very much.

Although again Nchain’s Wright immediately spoke out against it on Haipo Yang’s Twitter feed and said, “It will kill Bitcoin — It is a Poisson system. That makes the median time too low and the system stops scaling. It adds NOTHING — It makes the entire system fail and stop scaling — It is then not Bitcoin.” Wright continues:

No gain. No benefit. No value and a cap on growth, a change just for change sake without thinking and considering the long term.  And, it is NO longer Bitcoin. Not BCH. It alters the reward, it alters the schedule. You make this change, you kill your pool. And for what — 1 min helps NOTHING when it comes to retail. Makes 0-conf no better. Increases the orphan rate 20-30x and kills it as cash.

Coingeek Refuses to Cooperate With “Risky Protocol Changes”

Another figure within the BCH community with mining power, Calvin Ayre has explained his pool will refuse to go along with a “risky protocol change.” Ayre’s Coingeek mining pool (17.8% of the network/ last 7 days) has become a behemoth among the top BCH miners and has close to as much, and sometimes more than, the hashrate as Viabtc today (17.4%). Coingeek has announced it is “taking a stand and urging the community not to proceed with risky protocol changes,” and the firm believes the move is short-term thinking. Coingeek’s stance is very much aligned with Nchain’s Wright, and Calvin Ayre has also made statements against the discussed protocol change.

“Coingeek believes in Bitcoin BCH and further believes it should fully restore the original Bitcoin protocol — It was unnecessary changes to BTC’s base protocol that forced the fork to Bitcoin Cash BCH, the only true Bitcoin,” Ayre states on July 23. “Now that we have Bitcoin Cash BCH, we should be focused on fully restoring it to be the original Bitcoin protocol, rather than making additions or more changes that take BCH away from the original protocol.”

Everything that needs to be done can be layered on top and retain the decade of proven security. I can assure the BCH community that our miners will never support anything that changes the battle-tested underlying original Bitcoin protocol — not with so many ways to do everything needed on top of this proven secure protocol. Many friends of mine in the Bitcoin BCH mining community are telling me they also support our position.

Other BCH Proponents Bolster Séchet’s Pre-Consensus Idea

Although, there are a lot of people who support Séchet’s idea of bringing pre-consensus to the upgrade table, and have bolstered the concept. News.Bitcoin.com previously mentioned that Bitcoin Unlimited’s chief scientist, Peter Rizun, likes pre-consensus but there are a bunch of others. Cornell professor ‏Emin Gün Sirer explains to his Twitter followers, “Reasonable voices are rightfully pointing out that Deadalnix’s (Amaury Séchet) pre-consensus idea is entirely optional, completely non-threatening to existing interests, and a sensible thing to do — One would have to be a divisive idiot to oppose it.”

Stash Wallet engineer Justus Ranvier says, “I don’t care how bad of an idea what Deadalnix is proposing may or not be. The relevant fact is that Craig Wright immediately jumped to, ‘I will use my patents to attack anyone who tries to implement this.’ That is unconditionally the wrong response.”

The BCH community has been discussing the whole debate fervently lately and its likely these discussions will continue. However many BCH proponents, whether they agree or disagree, believe that at least there is no censorship of ideas, and everyone is free to speak their mind about the pre-consensus subject and the many other topics discussed daily.

What do you think about the pre-consensus topic? What side do you agree with and why? Let us know your thoughts on this subject in the comment section below.

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The Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange (BitMEX) has set a world record for the most trading volume in a single day on a cryptocurrency related exchange. On 24 July 2018, 1 million Bitcoin contracts worth over USD 8 billion were traded on BitMEX. This is more volume than all the other Bitcoin exchanges in the world combined.

A new BitMEX (and industry) record: 1,000,000 XBT (> $8BN) traded in the last 24 hours!

— BitMEX (@BitMEXdotcom) July 25, 2018

BitMEX doesn’t offer trading of actual Bitcoins. Instead, as a derivatives market, it offers XBT contracts that represent Bitcoins. CoinMarketCap doesn’t include BitMEX’s volume in Bitcoin daily volume numbers, nor does it rank BitMEX among other Bitcoin exchanges that trade actual Bitcoins. Binance, which has the first ranking on CoinMarketCap, has a relatively low trading volume of USD 1.5 billion in the past day. FCoin has a daily trading volume of USD 1.6 billion, but it generally isn’t included in the rankings since it uses transaction fee mining which causes volume numbers to be inflated via wash trading.

Bitcoin’s overall daily volume on 24 July 2018, excluding BitMEX, was USD 7 billion. This represents a significant volume surge to levels not seen since April and May 2018 when daily Bitcoin trading volume exceeded USD 10 billion at times. The current volume spike is coinciding with a strong Bitcoin rally that has brought Bitcoin’s price from USD 6,200 to USD 8,500.

Although the current volume numbers for Bitcoin are impressive, especially on BitMEX, daily Bitcoin trading volume is still far lower than the all-time highs near USD 23 billion in December 2017 and January 2018 when Bitcoin’s price rallied to USD 20,000. Total cryptocurrency daily trading volume hit USD 70 billion around the same time.

Since BitMEX is a derivatives market, it allows for short selling, and actually offers leveraging up to 100x. When this volume record was set on 24 July, there was a strong upward price movement, so most traders were probably leveraging long.

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Key Points

• Bitcoin price topped near the $8,500 level and started a downside correction against the US Dollar.
• Yesterday’s highlighted key connecting bullish trend line was breached with support at $8,190 on the hourly chart of the BTC/USD pair (data feed from Kraken).
• The pair is currently correcting lower, but it remains well supported near the $8,100 and $8,000 levels.

Bitcoin price is facing a minor selling pressure below $8,500 against the US Dollar. BTC/USD must stay above $8,000 to avoid an extended correction.

Bitcoin Price Analysis

Yesterday, we saw a nice upward move towards $8,500 in bitcoin price against the US Dollar. The BTC/USD pair traded as high as $8,496 before starting a downward correction. The price declined and moved below the $8,300 support area. There was also a break below the 23.6% Fib retracement level of the last wave from the $7,600 low to $8,496 high.

During the decline, yesterday’s highlighted key connecting bullish trend line was breached with support at $8,190 on the hourly chart of the BTC/USD pair. The pair also broke the $8,200 support and traded close to $8,050. However, the price remains well bid above the $8,000 support. Moreover, the 50% Fib retracement level of the last wave from the $7,600 low to $8,496 high was also intact. The price recovered, but upsides were capped by the $8,300 resistance and a bearish trend line on the same chart. At the moment, the price is consolidating below the $8,300 level. A break above the trend line resistance is needed for a fresh upward move.

Looking at the chart, the price seems to be struggling above $8,300. Therefore, there is a risk of more declines towards $8,000 before the price completes the current correction wave. Above $8,300, the price will most likely revisit $8,500.

Looking at the technical indicators:

Hourly MACD – The MACD for BTC/USD is mostly flat in the bearish zone.

Hourly RSI (Relative Strength Index) – The RSI is currently moving close to the 50 level with no bullish sign.

Major Support Level – $8,050

Major Resistance Level – $8,300

The post Bitcoin Price Watch: BTC/USD Short-term Correction Underway appeared first on NewsBTC.