Bitcoin is finally beginning to test $10,000 again, a level we haven’t seen since the end of January. Since this past crash was quite substantial and lasted longer than previous recent crashes, people are actually excited again when Bitcoin reaches each $1k milestone, leading to more reporting by media and more FOMO.
Transaction fees for Bitcoin are declining as on-chain volume is decreasing – these fees are anticipated to further decline as Coinbase adopts Segwit addresses. Hopefully in the future they also decide to implement batching as well.
Ethereum has slid slightly against Bitcoin, falling below 0.1 BTC a few days ago. There is heavy debate going on right now regarding EIP 867, or Standardized Ethereum Recovery Proposals. These discussions touch on the subject of how much authority Ethereum developers should have and touch on subjects such as legality, Ethereum’s philosophy and general governance concerns.
The concerns over governance in Ethereum has been an opportunity for other platform cryptoassets like EOS, which boast different governance structures. At this stage, I’m still invested in Ethereum but no longer picking up anymore because I feel it has gotten rather frothy in relation to Bitcoin.
Litecoin has been the real story in the past 48 hours due to a number of catalysts. Charlie Lee has been hyping upcoming events, including a quote-on-quote “huge unexpected surprise.” Coinbase Commerce is a new product offering by Coinbase which will help adoption for cryptoassets listed on the platform, currently Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and Litecoin.
This has led to some excitement for Litecoin, but the primary catalyst appears to be the announcement from Litepay (missed opportunity, Litpay would have been so much cooler!) will be operational for accepting Litecoin as payment similar to what Bitpay does starting on February 26th.
There’s also an upcoming hard fork of Litecoin called Litecoin Cash which will occur at block height 1,371,111 or roughly somewhere around February 18th to 19th. There’s some speculation that people are buying in for this fork, but realistically it seems like another joke fork that likely won’t even be worth claiming the coins for so I heavily doubt that. There’s also a 1% premine, always a wonderful sign.
Moving forward, I might be considering a more income-based approach as this is a more conservative way to take-profits in a rather risky market. Might make a video on that in future (along with my million other ideas currently sitting in limbo). What are your thoughts on the market?
Regarding Tether - I'm wondering why everyone seems to judge Tether based on whether each Tether in circulation is backed by an actual dollar. The US dollar value of any cryptocurrency is based on its circulating supply and the demand for the token, no?
With this in mind, does Tether not adjust its total supply based on the demand for Tether in order to keep the price of Tether at 1 USD - in effect tracking the US dollar?
How does being backed by physical US dollars affect this in any way? Even if people started massively selling off Tether, couldn't Tether developers "burn" excess supply to make it more scarce and keep the value at $1 regardless?
Being that you have discussed this issue in the past, I was curious to know your response to this. I welcome any other readers thoughts as well. Thanks.
A normal bank would maintain fractional reserves, and is insured and backed by the U.S. government. But Tether has a problem, the backbone of Tether's business is to exchange one USD for one USD₮. Now Tether must prove it has that money, in case people people would like to withdraw. It is possible to "burn" Tether to maintain the price, unfortunately that is not the case. Since Bitfinex lost it's ability to bank, no one has been able to withdraw Tether, therefor maintaining the price within 10 American Pennies.
Of course Tether might have the money, and is stuck with incompetent auditors, OR Tether has essentially created fake money propping the price of Bitcoin up.
Thanks for the response, but again - what relevance does a bank have to do with the Tether token? If Tether the company is making this their business model, then I certainly see your point. Clearly the Bitfinex exchange has problems.
I'm more referring to the concept of a stable coin in general. If you have a stable coin, whether or not you have fractional reserves in a centralized entity is irrelevant to the dynamics of supply and demand for the token itself. Whether or not people can cash out their crypto is the responsibility of the exchange you are using, or other type of selling/exchange method used by the holder.
So, if Bitfinex screwed something up, and can't give people their money - is that not an exchange issue? Theoretically a "flex-supply" stable coin should be able to have its value stabilized without regard to fiat backing in any way, no? And accordingly - regardless of the condition of the company Tether, the Tether token should have value relative to its usage and its ability to stabilize the price at 1 USD.
The whole premise of Tether is that it's backed 1:1 by fiat USD so if they're not then they're lying to Tether users, quote from their website
"Every tether is always backed 1-to-1, by traditional currency held in our reserves. So 1 USD₮ is always equivalent to 1 USD."
I see. That is important then. I wonder if another stable currency could upend this requirement though in the manner that I described above.
check out my post. https://steemit.com/crypto/@cryptoautonomy/crypto-currency-has-a-secret-weapon
Best possible income with crypto is holding steem power and self upvoting, or delegate to bidbots.
Nice video I think that particularly with the entry of wall street into the crypto market there will be many more peaks and troughs in terms of price to come. Focusing on crypto income and investing in good tech teams is a smart move in my opinion.
Ethereum has still to address its scalability issues. I don't think ETH-BTC flipping is happening anytime soon, unless they address those issues.
While BTC also has issues, a platform coin the ETH should never ever display such performance problems. That is not the hallmark of a good product.
One thing a recent crash has taught to people is to not invest blindly into anything. I am seeing people are now doing more research, collaborating than they did in December and early Jan. Overall its good for the Crypto market. Such crashed only bring out quality products. I am sure there will be more such crashes in future and thats when quality projects will stand apart from crap ones.
That was the most bullish video I saw from you in a long time. You talking about other cryptos than BTC or ETH was really nice to hear.
I did also looked at income focused cryptos, because it is hard for me to sell anything, unless I get it on top free.
You didnt mentioned NEO. I like it. Not because it is centralized, but because they try to build a big ecosystem around it with Ontology and its centralized nature, could make it a good option to be supported by China, if they decide to open up a little to it.
With Cardano I do have a really bad feeling. They are so far away from anything they can show. They not only need to catch up to Ethereum, but they need to develop it quicker than the Ethereum team. I would like EOS more, if they wouldnt have that disclamer, that the EOS token isnt usefully to anything and that you dont have a right to redeem if for the EOS Mainnet tokens (though I know they do it, to be sure to be not seen as a security).
Agree with you completely. NEO suffers from high gas fees to add new coins, but new ICO's are rolling out on the platform anyway:
EOS has a proven team and if the earlier Larimer projects (Bitshares, Steem) are a guide, it will be incredibly fast yet stable. It'll also finally move out of the environmentally-unfriendly mining to staking.
I expect EOS to pump once their token sale ends since that removes selling pressure.
Coins mentioned in post:
What about the Ripple(?)
Thanks for the video.
Do you think this 'next wave' could potentially beat the market cap of the previous? I.e. could bitcoin get to 20k anytime in 2018 realistically?
I think it depends on what you count as the 'next wave' Even if we have a bull run going up to 15k in the next month, I doubt the market cap is going to reach new all time highs without at least one more pull back in between.
Do you consider the recent announcement by LitePay to be a catalyst in the bump this week? If they are able to deliver on their promises, LTC will be able to be spent anywhere that Visa is accepted, with a mere 1% fee. I am somewhat skeptical on whether they will be able to deliver, but it is an encouraging thought for many.
Based on what I saw, LTC seemed to start this next wave off by getting into the upswing several hours before the other major Alts.
I mention it in the video and description - it's a bump for Litecoin certainly.
I literally skipped that whole paragraph! That's what I get for not watching the video and trying to read while on a conference call. >_>
My apologies.
Hi! Thanks for your support, @growingpower just upvoted your comment ;) Hope you have a great day
Love your work here. It's refreshing to get a sober-minded, well-thought out viewpoint from someone a bit more skeptical than most other people in this space. I'm optimistic, but I think it's important to consider the views of people coming from different perspectives. Thank you!
Also: I would love to hear your take on STEEM and the direction the ecosystem is going. I know you have a positive outlook but would love to see a more critical take. DTube seems to me like a complete YouTube ripoff - a video platform is a good idea but they seemed to have ripped off the entire design from YT. The most consistently active member on DMania seems to be a bot. I know these projects are in their early stages but it certainly detracts from their image to me.
I too would love to hear thoughts on these. To me, financial rewards can create an inequality. Especially in the long term.
Inequality, especially where it can be exploited, can easily lead to another form of centralisation. A seemingly decentralised platform becomes another form of power for those that can buy their way in.
I know you mentioned you bought in BTC at ~8K as you had said you would before the dip but I don't think you mentioned what your strategy was going to be if it fell even further. I am wondering if you bought in at even lower price. I did buy some at 8K but below that I kind of froze and didn't have the guts to get more.
Income-based approach would be Proof of Stake (PoS) which allows you use the coins to stake in validating transactions. The reward is for the fee for solving the algorithm. There are many coins out there that does it but it seems to hinge a lot on how much you own... Been trying hard to get to a critical mass to stake and get rewarded quicker... Couple of coins to consider are: NEO, NEBL, NAV, DASH, and PIVX.. They vary on the payout but on average is 1-10%. I know ADA, ETH, VEN will go to PoS or PoS-like environment.. Benefit for coin is people would hold them more than sell them and holders get payouts...
I admit I don't like the hype even from the development community in the crypto space. Am I surprised they would want to generally pump their own coins / projects? Absolutely not, but the hype even coming from the dev community makes me shudder when I think the amount of price manipulation that could come from that across the altcoin space.
Your upcoming video on an income approach to this next wave and techniques to maximize chances of coming out in the black sounds interesting. I'm happy to wait patiently as I know it will be of high quality coming from you. Thanks for the article.
How much do you think this market can go up to? If it went up to the 2001 level, it would be at 23 trillion taking into account inflation.
@cryptoinvestor it seems that Dow 30/ major stock indices are somehow correlated with bitcoin price. So the drop to 6000 occurred around Dow 30 recent downfall. It recovered since then as Bitcoin, but the major correction in stock market is expected within a month, so I can say that another price drop in bitcoin could be expected in a month.
What are you jibbering about? So you know when the next dip in stock market is coming?
Bitcoin Secret: How I prepare for the next bull run. Stocking up my Liquor supply 😆 🥃
I am thinking 🤔 💭 that it can go higher but people might get greedy or scared and start selling be for it has a chance to go ware it could go. This goes for all crypto coins.
Bitcoin is back on it's meds...👍
I think NEO is the more direct competitor to ETH atm. What do you think about it?
Great video as usual man !
In January I got into the Caviar ICO, it's a crypto/real estate fund that pays out dividends in ETH. They are performing a post-ICO audit and should be releasing tokens in a few weeks. I heard they will be traded on Nebula it's a new exchange. Perhaps you should look into that.
Sounds quite reasonable. Do you have any expectations on how high the next wave will go? And how low we might fall from there?
Thanks for this analysis.
You explicitly mentioned that you don't know how far BTC will rise again.
Later you said yourself that eventually the money-flow into the market will decrease.
I wonder if this isn't already happening. Volumes are rather low currently and a lot of people burned their hands in the last weeks.
How large can another bull-run get? Not much has changed compared to November/December. Major companies investments, development of the currencies and general adoption certainly lags behind the already overpriced market.
Because of this tend to believe that a "crypto-winter" could still be imminent.
What are your thoughts on this?
Well Lightning network is about to happen and also low price is an invitation to institutional money which will certainly not come during the highs. As soon as regulation settles and ETFs launched, we may see huge volumes come in if the price will still be low.
Light Network is still months behind, and is very buggy. It may be on the mainnet, but on the testnet a little more than 1 BTC has been sent. The team is making progress, but it is not ready now.
1 trillion here we come
I wonder what will the final ATH of Bitcoin be. You have yourself expressed in the past that even during the lows it was still overvalued (I think - don't want to put words in your mouth.) But some people seem to think that BTC will grow in price to tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars cough McAfee cough.
Were that to happen, the actual burst of the bubble would be absolutely devastating to some people. Probably more than the DOT com bubble, right? What's your take on this? Do you think it will not get such a high evaluation? I think you also expressed that crypto will bring about a new generation of investors. I think that if this market has a doomsday type crash then the new investors would be few and far between.
Andreas Antonopoulos, the well known BTC promoter, said that we already have too much of hashing power, which still increases day by day. I have a bad feeling that eventually BTC corrects to a level that makes mining profitable only to those, who have 0.06 USD/kWh or cheaper electricity or those who mine with co-generation of heat. And that level would be below 2000 USD/BTC.
Why 0.06 USD/kWh? What's special about that price?
Because there are plenty of energy sources at this price level to still ensure proper decentralization level. Lower prices would cause larger and larger centralization, until bitcoin user base would eventually switch to more decentralized solution.
Thank you! One of the best crypto youtubers!
Would be interesting If you made a comparisson over the fundamentals of Cardano vs EOS.
From what i read, they seem to have a direct competition between them, on what technology they want to deliver.
But what about investiment based on fundamentals between these two, If i had to choose only one.
I would like to hear your opinion on this.
Maybe throw in Steemit and its SMTs.
Great video, it feels so enlightening to hear your thoughts on the crypto market.
I made a buy order for nano at. 0012500 btc when it was around. 00142 and this bitgrail event triggered it. Now holding bags at.00088 btc. I think I will hold just because selling right now might be a huge mistake
Hey CryptoInvestor, what do you think about buying salt atm?
I picked some at 0.000440 BTC.
However I'm scared of the "flushing" from alts to BTC that might happen as people realize that btc is the only coin that keeps going up.
What are your thoughts on salt and do you think we'll see a "flush" from alts to btc as in mid December?
CI made an investment in SALT in 2017 as a 'what the hell, I can afford to lose it' investment. Search his YouTube archives and you will find it.
BOOM! All bears got REKT. Love it. BTC to 14k in two weeks!
Long time fan here my friend, great content as always!
How do you feel about alt positioning long term? I've been seeing that alts don't seem to hold their value when BTC drops and I feel like if there's another major correction underway, it might not be worth it as a long term hold.
Instead of "Being too lazy" to bring up your Steemit you should just have a pre-canned ending to your videos that you plug at the end. :)
Let me know if you need a video editor hahahahah
This rise feels like a legitimate, time-tested post-consolidation expansion. It'd be nice to see some steady progress forward, a shaking out of the scams and shitcoins and some good development news over these next few weeks, months. It is time for crypto to move beyond the hype cycle and into the serious emerging market state.
@cryptovestor, are you considering this next wave to be the last one before bubble pops after which price will not recover to previous highs?
Thanks again for great insights!
Excellent commentary, as always. Wholeheartedly agree re passive income, no doubt you will look at OBITS. On the face of it, there appears to be a path for growth.
KuCoin shares [Hong Kong] have an offer on the table, but dividend will be drastically cut soon.
Appearance of new exchanges (agressive?) like:- https://ico.wcex.co/?ref=s0oO0uHJ&lang=en may adversely effect both of the above.
But of course, it is early days for this digital currency market [say $4 billion] compared to forex at $5 trillion.
Insightful video as always especially the psychological assessment of the situation. I think you're spot on there and it think it should be stated that these crashes are training newcomers to crypto to hold through the dips.
The new money that came in at ATH for bitcoin has been flushed out the market a bit and I think it makes for a healthier market going forward.
One thing that makes me nervous is the premium on GBTC is at 83%. To me this indicates a bit of mania happening again. The premium has hovered around 50% for the past couple of months... since the Mania that began in November. I am just watching for now.
Nice video again. What if Bitcoin is a bubble that never pops? And what if it does pop? What will both outcomes do in your eyes?
Like, when Bitcoin is not a bubble and it will not pop. Will it go to $100,000? $1,000,000? $5,000,000 even? Like some people predict. The numbers getting crazier every day obviously. So that's the first question. Second. Is there some kind of limit you think? Will the crazy volatility ever be somewhat gone? And then we have Bitcoin for everybody and live life with Bitcoin, and other crypto. Happy days.
Or, if it does pop, what will be next? Will Bitcoin die in some way and be worthless? And will another crypto take over like Litecoin? Or maybe even some other one we don't even know anything about? Or if the Bitcoin bubble pops, will the whole cryptoverse just be gone. Poof! Gone.
I like to hear your opinion on both scenarios. The things I say can be completey different from what you have in mind. Just let it all out. The pop vs the not pop. Crypto in 5 to 10 years. The long run. What is going to happen? I know this is a hard thing to say. If you want, make a video about it. Would be nice to hear!
Cheers!
I'm just curious why you never talk about NEO?
👍
Hey cryptovestor. I agree with your sentiment about the Litecoin fork and I too see it as pretty much just a joke. The real excitement is coming from actual Litecoin doing good things in the real business world.
It’s real world integration through business partnerships and payment options that will be key to seeing coins go to the next level in 2018. Litecoin is poised to be one such leader and I’m excited by it!
I just came across your blog flicking through tags and I like your work. I’ve given you a follow and will hopefully see you around. 😎