Crypto News: Bears and Mainstream Fud Claw and Maul Cryptocurrency Markets in Jan 2018!

Well folks, Jan 2018 marks a month of bears and fud in Bitcoin's steady rise to greatness. Sadly other solid cryptocurrencies are still attached to the fate of BTC so the bear market has managed to maul not just grandpa bitcoin but its many offspring as well. Bitcoin has been in a month-long price slide and on Thursday took another dip and fell below $9,000. Amazing to see Bitcoin fall from greatness and experience a 55 percent from December's peak of $19,500. Its funny because if you look at annual charts of Bitcoin it follows an almost an identical pattern to previous years. The fact that it ran so hard last year has made the dip all the more painful in my opinion but lets be honest, Bitcoin is Bitcoin and its not going anywhere!

The latest price decline comes amid growing concerns that the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem has become rife with scams and other questionable behavior. None of these developments have been focused on bitcoin specifically, but the cryptocurrency ecosystem is highly interconnected. All the other major cryptocurrencies have suffered losses over the last 24 hours, and many virtual currencies have seen their value decline by double digits.

It seems obvious to me that whales, governments and the mainstream media are working together to push prices down. One interesting thing to note is that the recent round of futures has seen the majority of hedge funds place bets that BTC will go up before contracts end. This all points to massive manipulation but humans are naturally afraid and seeing a dip like this is shocking to say the least! A lot of people will dump and walk away taking their losses with them. I remember a famous quote from Warren Buffet saying something like when others are selling you should be buying (obviously more aggressively at close to your estimation of the bottom).

The first bit of bad news this week was Facebook's announcement that it was restricting cryptocurrency ads on its various platforms.

"We want people to continue to discover and learn about new products and services through Facebook ads without fear of scams or deception," Facebook wrote. Facebook described the policy as "intentionally broad" and listed "use your retirement funds to buy bitcoin" as an example of a cryptocurrency ad that wouldn't pass muster under the policy.

Facebook certainly kicked a dog when it was down but I would expect nothing less from a guy like Zuckerberg eh? I gave up facebook a long time ago and only check it once in a while at best but rarely post anything. Steem is the way forward...

Also this week, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced it was shutting down a little-known cryptocurrency project called AriseBank. The project was endorsed by boxer Evander Holyfield and claimed to have raised $600 million, but the SEC contends that the project was fraudulent.

This is clear manipulation from the U.S. government, an entity which you could easily argue has been against cryptocurrencies from their inception. Why would they be against them? Well other than the fact that they are a direct threat to its petro-dollar hegemony I can't really come up with any other reason...

Meanwhile, rumors are swirling about Tether, a cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to the United States dollar. Tethers are supposed to be redeemable for dollars at any time, but in recent months Tether has struggled to gain access to the conventional banking system and has failed to produce a financial audit demonstrating its solvency.

Happy to debunk this news. After doing a bit of digging I was able to learn that there are about 2 billion 'Tethers' in circulation at the moment. Considering the market is over 400 billion USD at the moment its just a small percentage of the overall market valuation so people who are good at math aren't sweating this little fud log but lets be honest, the masses just aren't as good as math as we'd like to think. More fear, more panic, more selloff.

A significant number of bitcoin traders use Tether dollars as a substitute for actual dollars, so if Tether is revealed to be insolvent, it could have a big impact on the broader cryptocurrency economy.

Fortunately there are other solutions like SBD which have been created just for this very event. Let us hope that USDT falls and can be replaced with a better solution like SBD!

Well, what this all amounts to is that I'm buying more. The pain, the despair, these are buying signals. I've been to this crypto rodeo before, I've studied the patterns and because I don't believe this is the end of the bubble well if it doesn't pop, it has to grow larger! Sell when you hit new ATH's buy when you feel despair and hopeless sentiments. That's my guide to buying and selling cryptos right there. Hope it works for you!

Thanks for reading @Techblogger!

Source:

More bad news pushes bitcoin’s value below $9,000 - ARS Technica

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ARS Technica