Ep17: Weekly Cryptocurrency News 11/14/18

Consensus Network: Cryptocurrency News & Education

Consensus Network Weekly Crypto News: 11/14/18

Cryptocurrency Market Capitalization: $188 billion

Bitcoin Price (Coinbase): $5588

Bitcoin Bloodbath!

Bitcoin prices fell by almost 10 percent today all the way down to $5555.34 on Coinbase. Listeners of this podcast heard Tyler Jenks with Lucid Investments last week hint at some of the chart analysis that indicated a potential drop in the market. Well, I guess he was right. Now Tyler also suggested bitcoin prices could go A LOT lower (around $1000). If that happens, I will do ANYTHING Tyler tells me to do!

Is Satoshi’s Vision Causing the Bloodbath?

Now, what could be causing this selloff? The only real instability in the market at large is the pending hard fork of bitcoin cash tomorrow. Bitcoin cash was of course a hard fork of bitcoin itself led by, among others, Roger Ver AKA bitcoin Jesus and Craig Wright AKA Fake Satoshi. Wright has claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto himself, author of the bitcoin white paper but has never provided any evidence to that effect.

Now, Ver and Wright are facing off on a hard fork of bitcoin cash—Ver supporting software called ABC and Wright supporting software called “Satoshi’s vision”.

An email from Wright to Ver was circulating on crypto twitter and showed the following excerpts from Fake Satoshi: “Bitcoin (Cash) will die before ABC shits on it. I will see BCH trade at 0 for a few years…Side with ABC, you hate bitcoin (cash), you are my enemy. You have no fucking idea what that means.”

Talk about Drama. I thought American politics was bad. This is crazy!

At any rate, this is the primary instability in the market and many trading platforms have frozen bitcoin cash trades until the issue is resolved.

I would have thought that money would have fled into bitcoin from bitcoin cash to avoid instability the same way it did when money fled from tether, the stable coin that could never prove it’s peg to the US dollar. But that’s why I admit I am a terrible trader.

Something is going on here that I don’t understand. But fundamentally, my belief in bitcoin has got me seeing this as a buying opportunity. Warren Buffet said, “Be Fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” There’s a selloff going on and I am buying. I already bought at around $5600 today and will buy again we get close to $5200. I am NOT a trader but my long term view on bitcoin is still very bullish.

I should point out that even though Tyler Jenks predicted this sell-off, he also believes bitcoin will eventually be worth $500K. If you are willing to hold for a few years, it may be an asymmetric bet to buy now.

SEC Chief Puts Decentralized Exchanges on Notice

Last week the securities and exchange commission newly appointed cyber chief Robert Cohen put distributed exchanges on notice. Specifically, he announced that they filed a case against ether delta creator Zachary Coburn.

Decentralized exchanges are basically exchanges without centralized operations. Instead, trades are executed on smart contracts on the blockchain.

Cohen pointed out that using blockchain to create a decentralized trading platform does not remove the responsibility of the creator.

Cohen made it clear that a platform is operating in the United States must be compliant. It is not clear how the SEC plans to deal with anonymously created decentralized exchanges which are essentially impossible to shut down.

Anyway, the big news today is the bitcoin sell-off. I’m keeping a close eye on it. Follow consensus network on Twitter to get real-time updates.