Tag: Ethereum

What’s happening with the price of bitcoin?

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Bitcoin, cryptoLeave a comment

Yesterday bitcoin was just over $7,000 and as I sat down to write today, it was over $8,000. Indeed, the altcoins like ETH, LTC and XRP had also risen significantly overnight. It’s remarkable to think that it is not that many weeks since bitcoin’s price was under $4,000 and now it has doubled.

It’s because of Facebook

The question everyone always wants the answer to is, “What is making bitcoin’s price surge like this?” Billy Bambrough attributes it in part to Facebook ramping up its plans for a token to rival bitcoin. He reported in one of his articles that Spencer Bogart, a partner at venture capital firm Blockchain Capital, said that Facebook’s plans had “lit a fire in the pants of every major [financial technology] and financial institution in the U.S.” Bogart also believes that Facebook’s move into the crypto arena “will be a catalyst for mainstream bitcoin and cryptocurrency adoption around the world, spurring other financial and technology companies to get into bitcoin and crypto.”

Relative strength index is up

Bambrough also says in another article: “Bitcoin’s relative strength index (RSI), used to identify the momentum behind asset prices, this week registered its highest value since the beginning of 2018 — shortly after bitcoin hit its all-time highs.”

What we have seen since bitcoin hit its massive high of $20,000 in December 2017, has been a lot of discontent with the crypto market and a stalling of adoption by major retailers. Still, the leading cryptocurrency always has its stalwart supporters, such as Mike Novogratz and other bitcoin bulls. Their price predictions, while not yet achieved, look a little more likely to happen than they did only a couple of months ago.

Bitcoin follows a pattern

Indeed, analysts from investment bank Canaccord Genuity said they expect bitcoin to rally hard over the next 24 months, potentially returning to its late 2017 highs. They believe that next year’s halving of bitcoin, which reduces the return to miners by 50%, could be one of the reasons that bitcoin’s price keeps pushing higher.

Canaccord’s analysts also noted that what we are seeing right now is “the striking similarity in bitcoin’s price action between 2011–2015 and 2015–2019.” What they are pointing to here is that bitcoin appears to have a four-year cycle, which is related to its halving that also happens in that same time period. They also predict that there may be “a slow climb back toward its all-time high of ~$20,000, theoretically reaching that level in March 2021.”

And there is one other thing happening at the moment that could be benefiting bitcoin’s price, and that is the US-China trade war over tariffs. While the digital assets market is soaring, the stock markets are falling, especially after China announced tariffs on American goods in a tit-for-tat reaction to Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products.

As ever, it is a combination of things that is contributing to the surge in bitcoin’s price, but it is hard to say which one of them is having the greatest effect.

Should we focus more on bitcoin’s use case than its price?

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Bitcoin, Blockchain, crypto, EthereumLeave a comment

The crypto rollercoaster has morphed into ride with only slight dips and rises this month. It seems s if every few days traders need to take a rest and the bitcoin price sags a bit, The majority of the leading altcoins appear to follow what happens with bitcoin, although not uniformly.

As we head into next week, it’s hard to predict what we might see, although the weekends tend to bring some dips, suggesting that on Friday traders think about exiting the market for a couple of days. Jim Preissler writing at Forbessuggests: “Heading into the new week, expect possible dips to still be well supported at $4,700 in BTC and $154 in ETH. $5,800 and $187 could be tough resistance.’

As Preissler points out, XRP does not seem to have benefited from the latest crypto rally as much as BTC. ETH and LTC and there appears to be resistance at the $0.38 mark. ETH has been consistently outperforming XRP since February and it doesn’t look like there is going to be much change there.

Omkar Godbole at Coindesk suggests that what is needed to move the market along is a breach of BTC’s new resistance level of $5.200. As I write on 17th April, we have a slight glimpse of that as BTC touched $5,200.14. The market-leading cryptocurrency picked up a strong bid at lows below $4,200 on April 2 and jumped to 4.5-month highs above $5,300 on April 8, confirming a bullish reversal. However, over the last couple of days that rally paused, which Godbole attributed to BTC being overbought amongst other factors. But momentum seems to moving in an upward direction again. And, as Godbole has pointed out, “the longer duration outlook will remain bullish as long as prices are trading above $4,236.”

For the moment, bitcoin is trading above that level, but are we too focused on price?

As more real life use cases for bitcoin appear, such as the news that UK’s largest travel agency Corporate Traveller is now accepting bitcoin for payments, and the town of Innisfil in Ontario accepts BTC to pay property taxes, it is to be hoped that the public sees more advantages to using bitcoin for a range of payment purposes. That should encourage more belief in the cryptocurrency, and boost the number of people owning e-wallets and joining exchanges to purchase crypto. Slowly, slowly, cryptocurrency is edging forward toward mass adoption. We are a long way from that yet, but there’s no need to panic. It takes time to adjust to the new, even when the use case and the benefits are clear to a few. Just think back to the beginning of the Internet and the length of time it took the average consumer to feel comfortable with it. When people understand the benefits of using bitcoin and focus less on the price it is trading at, I believe that is when we’ll see a sea change in the crypto market.

Is Google making the blockchain searchable?

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Bitcoin, Blockchain, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I came across an interesting article on Forbes the other day by Michael del Castillo. He tells a story about data scientist Allen Day, a former Google employee, who while looking at some of the tools he developed there, saw something puzzling. What he saw was “a mysterious concerted usage of artificial intelligence on the blockchain for Ethereum.”

Day was able to look into its blockchain and see a “whole bunch” of “autonomous agents” moving funds around “in an automated fashion.” Although Day has no idea who created the AI, he suspects “they could be the agents of cryptocurrency exchanges trading among themselves in order to artificially inflate ether’s price.”

Day also remarked that he didn’t believe this was the work of a single exchange, but is rather a group effort. Part of Day’s job is anticipating demand for a product before it even exists, and in the light of what he has seen, he believes that making the blockchain more accessible is the next big thing.

Let’s not forget that Google made the Internet more usable, bringing it billions in revenue, and if Day is correct in his predictions it could have another major pay day by making the blockchain searchable. Del Castillo says if it does, “the world will know whether blockchain’s real usage is living up to its hype.”

Day has already been working on this with a team of open-source developers, who have been loading data for bitcoin and ethereum blockchains into Google’s big data analytics platform called BigQuery. And, with the help of lead developer Evgeny Medvedev, he created a suite of sophisticated software to search the data.

Day is hoping that his project, known as Blockchain ETL (extract, transform, load) will bring Google’s revenues from cloud computing services up to the level of Amazon and Microsoft. Google is some way behind both of them, but it will struggle to match Amazon’s revenues of $27 billion from cloud services, because Amazon has been in the blockchain game since 2018 with a suite of tools for building and managing distributed ledgers. And Microsoft got into the space in 2015, when it released tools for ethereum’s blockchain. These two companies are focused on making it easier to build blockchain apps, whereas Day wants to reveal how blockchains are actually being used, and by whom.

Day has been demonstrating how his Blockchain ETL could function by examining the hard fork that created bitcoin cash (BCH) from bitcoin. “I’m very interested to quantify what’s happening so that we can see where the legitimate use cases are for blockchain,” Day says. “Then we can move to the next use case and develop out what these technologies are really appropriate for.”

Day is now expanding beyond bitcoin and ethereum. Litecoin, zcash, dash, bitcoin cash, ethereum classic and dogecoin are being added to BigQuery.

It seems Google is waking up to blockchain and is now powering ahead by filing numerous patents related to the blockchain. The company is also encouraging its developers to build apps on the ethereum blockchain, and GV, Google’s investment division has made some investments in crypto-related startups.

The Two Doors of Crypto Perception

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Bitcoin, BlockchainLeave a comment

You may have seen a photo of a dress circulating on social media last year. People were asked what colour the dress was. Some saw white and gold, some lilac and gold, and others saw blue and black. The post demonstrated that perception is not universal, and the same can be said about cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, which can be viewed through two lenses.

Data and code first

There are those who perceive the technology to be the most important aspect of this new space and the one that will outlast all other aspects. Some people see the blockchain as a gigantic network of global computers working on the decentralised principle. Most often these ‘believers’ are software designers and developers who are focused on code and data. They see lots of potential in the blockchain for implementing new forms of software with new capabilities. It offers them data storage that is resistant to censorship and is immutable. It can also be audited and the code can’t be changed once it’s in use. This is one group, but there is another.

New money

Another group perceives the technology as merely a tool that is necessary to create a new form of money. This group is more likely to be made up of people from backgrounds in economics and finance. They look at it from a perspective of the history of money and bring the idea that all forms of money have specific properties: resistant to forgery, secure, durable, measurable and divisible. So this group sees cryptocurrency as a new version of ‘sound money’. Some of them are sceptical about fiat currencies and aren’t fans of centrally controlled monetary policies. They see cryptocurrencies as a revolutionary new form of global money and the antidote to what they see as the questionable modern experiment of fiat currency.

The bigger picture

What does this leave us with? One group see crytpocurrency as the single useful purpose of the blockchain, while the other sees cryptocurrency as just one component in what the blockchain can do.

The ‘new money’ group actively buy cryptocurrencies and want to encourage mass adoption so the value of the coins increases. The blockchain-focused group is more enthusiastic about projects that experiment, add features, and explore the blockchain tradeoff-space.

But, what we can take away from this is that both views complement each other and one keeps the other in check. There is room for both perspectives and those working in the crypto space would do well to take a step back and take in a wider perspective that includes the views of both these groups to see exactly where the crypto space is heading.