Bitcoin (BTC) is on a “lower left to upper right trend” and its volatility should not scare investors, the former head of the New York Stock Exchange says.

In an interview with CNBC on June 23, Thomas Farley revealed long-term convictions about Bitcoin and dismissed concerns over BTC price losses.

Bitcoin: Going up, but not "up only"
Coming a day after CNBC pundit Jim Cramer admitted that he sold his Bitcoin stash, suggesting that BTC/USD was going as low as $10,000, Farley provided some much-needed mainstream bullishness.

“With respect to the recent price moves, I’m kind of sanguine about them — Bitcoin’s a very volatile asset class, in part because it’s a new asset class,” he told the network.

“I have no doubt it’ll go up, it’ll go down over the long term — I still think it’s a lower left to upper right trend and I think we’re going to see that play out over five years.”
With mining upheaval coming from China still on everyone’s lips, popular mainstream criticism of Bitcoin’s energy usage was also swiftly cast aside as a temporary issue.

“I think this kerfuffle is an interesting conversation, but by and large I think it’ll be resolved because I think the blockchain at its core adds to its efficiency and in fact will add to energy efficiency over time,” he continued.


Less convinced on gold. vs. Bitcoin
When it comes to Bitcoin as “digital gold,” however, Farley was more conservative in his predictions.

Now firmly beneath a trillion-dollar market cap, Bitcoin must transform in order to take on store-of-value safe-havens.

Related: Joining the ranks: Bitcoin’s correlation with gold and stocks is growing

“I think the upper bound for now is gold, which is about a $10 trillion market cap,” he added.

“In order for Bitcoin to one day exceed gold, it’ll have to be more of an accepted form of currency — I’m not sure, frankly, if it ever gets there.”
Proponents argue that Bitcoin, by its very nature, faces just a matter of time before eclipsing gold thanks to the latter’s ultimately infinite supply and inability to beat Bitcoin in all aspects of “money.”

The precious metal saw a major sell-off last week after comments on policy from the United States Federal Reserve.

To beat gold, Bitcoin would need to trade at more than $533,000 with the current supply.source

The cryptocurrency market rebounded sharply from Tuesday’s losses, with Bitcoin going back above $34,000 to as high as $34,380 from the new 2021 low of $28,845 on Coinbase. The price of Ether also recovered to nearly $2,045 after touching $1,700 during the sell-off. The market-wide sell-off resulted in the liquidation of $1 billion for two days in a row, nowhere near more than $8.6 billion on May 18 and over $10 billion on April 17, according to Bybt. These latest numbers, however, are expected to be much higher given Binance only pushes out one liquidation each second and now accounts for less than 30% of the total liquidation share while before making the changes, it was responsible for about 50% of the crypto market liquidations. Liquidations are actually the reason why the prices rebounded so nicely. “Liquidations lead to higher odds of mean reversion. The more liquidations you see, the stronger the reversion,” noted trader and economist Alex Kruger. According to him, that is why buying the dips is easy in a bull market and tough in bear markets. “Corollary: generally the ideal time to buy is during intraday panics when liquidations taking place, and not after you get the reversal. In other words, long when feeling extremely bearish, sell when extremely bullish. Go against your instincts,” he shared on Twitter. Sam Trabucco, a quantitative crypto trader at Alameda, also explained this on a Twitter thread as he shared that $100s of millions in net buying liquidations and vice-versa creates momentum. Given that so much of this buying and selling comes from liquidations, which are not organic, there is even more propensity for reversion. As for what happened was “people are over-reacting to news, liquidations are exacerbating that over-reaction, and then people are trading the other way when they realize that.” “BTC's price has been very momentum-driven on a days-long timescale,” and the narratives prevailing in the market lately have been China FUD driving prices down, Bitcoin being bad for the environment, and institutions are underwater and need to sell. But Trabucco argued that none of that is concrete as China FUD is not really new, the US is far from regulating the crypto away, and Michael Saylor “isn't fucked.” During this week-long crash, Binance’s average funding rates on Bitcoin perpetual contracts, which matters a lot for the market, has been paying longs while open interest was shrinking, suggesting longs were already closing. FTX, Bybit, OKEx, and others were having a similar pattern that “people were closing for whatever reason, and aggressively selling to do so.” And with net liquidations highest in recent days, this spike helped fuel reversion because “no one wanted to sell down to $30k (as) buying there is a predictably great trade,” said Trabucco. “It seems like MAYBE today marks yet another paradigm switch? We'll have to wait and see,” he concluded. source

Decentralized finance lending and stablecoin protocol MakerDAO has adjusted stability fees across a wide range of crypto assets used as collateral on the platform.

The move comes as the demand for DAI and other stablecoins has cooled amid the recent crypto market retracement, with Maker hoping to drive up demand for DAI minting through the reduction in fees.

⚠️Maker Protocol Changes ⚠️ (1/5)
ETH-A Stability Fee: 5.5% → 3.5%
ETH-B Stability Fee: 10% → 9%
ETH-C Stability Fee: 3% → 1%
WBTC-A Stability Fee: 4.5% → 3.5%
LINK-A Stability Fee: 5% → 4%
YFI-A Stability Fee: 5.5% → 4%

— Maker DAI Bot (@MakerDaiBot) June 21, 2021
When users deposit crypto assets to mint the protocol’s stablecoin, DAI, the debt incurs a stability fee which is effectively a continuously accruing interest that is due upon repayment of the borrowed tokens.

Maker’s fluctuating stability fees are designed to maintain DAI’s dollar peg, as when collateralized debt position (CDP) holders mint more DAI than the market demands, the stable token’s price could fall below $1.

Increasing the stability fee pushes up the cost of borrowing DAI, reducing demand for minting the token. Conversely, reducing the fees, as MakerDAO has just done, drops the cost of borrowing DAI to stimulate demand.

DAI’s circulating supply spiked to an all-time high of $5.1 billion on June 16 but has fallen 6% since then to current levels of around $4.8 billion. Demand for the stablecoin has slowed amid an accelerating downtrend in crypto asset prices and falling activity in the DeFi sector.

MakerDAO token holders are currently in the process of voting on whether to implement flash loan functionality. If passed, the proposal will allow a maximum of 500 million Dai to be minted by individuals for flash loans, removing existing constraints that limit the value of loans based on the volume of liquidity available in lending pools.

⚡️ Flash minting is here. ⚡️

DeFi position management / arbitrage is about to get a big UX improvement. Maker is providing 500M in ERC3156-compliant flash mints once the weekly spell passes.https://t.co/JJvHoSGENH

— Sam MacPherson (@sgmacpherson) June 18, 2021
At the time of writing, 3,184 MKR governance tokens had been mobilized to support the proposal.

MKR is currently down 20% over the past 24 hours — falling from $2,600 to an intraday low of $2,060 before a minor recovery to $2,200 at the time of writing.source

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is the biggest and the most influential Dogecoin supporter in the community, has made a contribution to a discussion about attempts to reduce DOGE transaction fees.

One of Dogecoin developers, Ross Nicoll, has tweeted that he intends to convince naysayers about the devs being able to reduce the current DOGE transaction fees.

Elon Musk commented on that, saying that a reduction of fees would be an important improvement.

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Earlier, no link shorteningday reported that the Tesla CEO was working with Dogecoin developers to improve the coin’s transaction efficiency.

Ross Nicoll is one of those devs.

Back in mid-May, Musk shared his vision of how Doge parameters could be improved to make it a better payment unit than Bitcoin. Among them was reducing the DOGE transaction fees by 100 percent. Ideally, according to Musk, Dogecoin should be quick enough and its transaction fees cheap so as buying a cup of coffee with DOGE would not cost more than the coffee itself.

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MicroStrategy CEO, Michael Saylor, objected to Musk back then, stating that the world needs a decentralized and secure store-of-value (referring to Bitcoin) much more than a centralized, less secure and inflationary medium of exchange (referring to DOGE).

The world needs a decentralized, secure, deflationary store of value like #Bitcoin much more than it needs the more centralized, less secure, inflationary medium of exchange that you describe above.source

Interest is falling across several metrics, but can you keep a good Doge down?

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Has the Doge had its day? Dogecoin interest cools NEWS
Dogecoin (DOGE) hogged the spotlight on a tightly crowded stage throughout most of 2021, as Bitcoin (BTC) and the wider cryptocurrency market climbed to new all-time highs.

Fueled by the social media flirtation of an eccentric billionaire, and the coordinated efforts of strategic Reddit traders, Dogecoin’s value increased 15,000% since the turn of the year when it peaked in early May.

As Dogecoin’s price boomed so too did its exposure to a mass of internet users who had previously never heard of an eight-year old cryptocurrency that even industry insiders considered to be long dead. Created purely as a joke, Dogecoin was barely a mention in the ongoing story of the cryptocurrency space, which the mainstream media has long considered synonymous with the word “Bitcoin” itself.

For that reason, it may have come as a surprise in early May when the volume of Dogecoin searches recorded on Google Trends rose to match that of Bitcoin. Searches for both terms were equal in the first week of May, as Dogecoin rose to an all-time high of $0.73. For context, in January, Bitcoin searches outnumbered Dogecoin by over 8,000%.

The Doge’s presence was predictably boosted on Twitter too, where the self-proclaimed Dogefather Elon Musk’s tweets regularly caused Dogecoin mentions to outnumber those of Bitcoin.

Data from Bitinfocharts shows the highest spike in Dogecoin Twitter mentions came in late January, when Reddit traders elected Dogecoin to be the cryptocurrency equivalent of GameStop.

Doge’s price climbed over 300% on the day in question, and a massive 944,000 tweets containing the word Dogecoin were recorded, compared to just 196,000 that mentioned Bitcoin. Musk lent what many regarded as implied support for the Dogecoin pump at the time, when he posted a meme with the word ‘Dogue’ as a modification of the name of the fashion magazine, Vogue.

And so went Dogecoin’s ascension. Amid the furore, new millionaires were created out of thin air, and others lost life savings because they followed what they thought to be the lead of Tesla’s tweet-happy CEO.

Related: When will Elon Musk’s influence on Bitcoin end?

But what goes up must come down, and as Dogecoin’s valuation fell by over 60%, so too did its cheaply won presence on the media stage. After peaking in early May, Dogecoin searches on Google fell by 90%, as the uninitiated horde of casual internet users moved on to something else.

Likewise, after outnumbering Bitcoin mentions on Twitter throughout much of the year, Dogecoin was eventually brought back to heel, and hasn’t outshone Bitcoin on the social media platform in over a month.

Taking a peek at blockchain statistics, we also see that some of Dogecoin’s usage stats have dropped even beyond the extent of the recent price crash. We’d typically expect to see Dogecoin transactions at a lower ebb than during this year’s bull run, but as per data from Bitinfocharts, daily Dogecoin transactions recently hit a near three-year low of under 20,000 — a number not witnessed since October 2018.

A sign that despite all the media hype, people are actually losing faith in Dogecoin as a usable cryptocurrency? Perhaps. As Dogecoin became the plaything of crypto whales in 2021, it was regularly subject to massive fluctuations in transactions, fees and the value of currency transacted across its blockchain.

Related: Only whales move DOGE: Data suggests major Dogecoin wealth gap

Since May 5, when over $82 billion was sent across the blockchain in one day, Dogecoin’s daily transaction value has been on the decline, and stood at $4.4 billion as of June 14. Amid the movement of the aforementioned billions, Dogecoin transaction fees rose 25,000%, from $0.01 to $2.52. The subsequent decrease in the blockchain’s usage has since seen fees drop as low as $0.60 once more.

While attention and usage appear to be falling across several metrics, it would be folly to bet against Dogecoin mustering a resurgence in the months and years to come. Even if Elon Musk were to lose interest in Dogecoin and his tweets died down, what other global celebrity might come along and expose the coin to a mass audience all over again?

Just this week a nonfungible token of the original Dogecoin Shiba Inu picture sold for $4 million in Ether, suggesting hype hasn’t completely cooled on Dogecoin just yet. In May a survey revealed that more Americans had heard of Dogecoin than they had Ethereum — a seven-year-old project which houses the most developers in the cryptocurrency space.source

While speaking at the Virtual Fintech Forum in Hong Kong on May 27, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin commented on obstacles related to the Ethereum 2.0 rollout. Buterin said that there had been several internal team conflicts in the past five years and as a result, he confirmed that Ethereum 2.0 launch is unlikely to occur before late 2022.

In a May 22 report from Goldman Sachs, analysts said that Ether has a "high chance of overtaking Bitcoin as a dominant store of value." Furthermore, the report noted the growth of the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector and the nonfungible token (NFT) ecosystems being built on Ethereum. Coincidentally, on the very next day, Ether's price bottomed at $1,750.

On June 14, CoinShares released its weekly fund flows report and Ether investment products had the largest outflows, totaling $12.7 million.

However, the upcoming $1.5 billion options expiry on June 25 could be a turning point for Ether, according to Cointelegraph. This figure is 30% larger than the March 26 expiry, which took place as Ether's price plunged 17% in five days and bottomed near $1,550.

Despite flirting with $2,600 after a 12% rally over the past week, top Ether traders seem unable to change their neutral-to-bearish positioning according to derivatives data.

The 3-month futures premium is neutral-to-bearish
Normally, Tte 3-month futures will usually trade at a premium to regular spot exchanges. In addition to the exchange liquidity risk, the seller is postponing settlement and usually charges more.

The 6% to 17% annualized return on stablecoin lending indicates bullishness whenever the 3-month premium trades above that range. On the other hand, when futures are trading below the stablecoin lending rate, it is a signal of short-term bearish sentiment.


Huobi ETH Sept. futures premium vs. spot market. Source: TradingView
As shown above, the 8% premium — 26% annualized — vanished on May 13, indicating extreme optimism. Since then, it has been ranging near 2.8%, which is equivalent to 10% annualized. Thus, top traders are neutral-to-bearish according to this indicator as it nears the lower level of the expected range.

The options skew shows moderate signs of fear
The 25% delta skew compares similar call (buy) and put (sell) options and will turn positive when the protective put options premium is trading higher. Whenever this metric surpasses 10%, it is considered a "fear" indicator.

The opposite holds when market makers are bullish and this causes the 25% delta skew indicator to enter the negative range


Deribit Ethereum options 25% delta skew. Source: laevitas.ch
From May 20 to June 8, the indicator stood near 10%, indicating a higher protective put premium, which is usually a ‘fear’ indicator. However, over the last week, it has slightly improved to 7%, within the "neutral" range, but still close to bearish sentiment.

There is no evidence of bullish growth in top traders' confidence as Ether tests the $2,600 resistance. So until those indicators flip to neutral-to-bullish, traders should act with extreme care before concluding that a bull run is in place.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision.source

Many things can be bought with Bitcoin nowadays.  For example, any product can be bought through Bitcoin from Overstock.com.  Many more such businesses are now using Bitcoin as a currency.  The idea is that just as credit cards are being used instead of money now, in the future money and credit cards will be replaced by bitcoin or some other coin.source