In the last 48 hours, since its daily peak on January 26, the Bitcoin price has declined from $3,657 to $3,515, by nearly four percent against the U.S. dollar, while TRON surged by 10 percent on the day.

The decline in the Bitcoin price has led the valuation of the crypto market to drop by $2 billion from $221 billion to $219 billion.


Major crypto assets in the likes of Ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP), EOS (EOS), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) initiated losses in the range of three to five percent.

Report Suggests Crypto Industry is Performing Well, Why is Bitcoin Dropping?
According to a study conducted by PwC, a Swiss IT consulting form Inacta, and Crypto Valley Venture Capital (CVVC), the number of crypto startups in the region has increased from 629 to 750 in the fourth quarter of 2018.

The top 50 companies in the 750 are valued at more than $400 million on average and the combined valuation of all crypto ventures in Switzerland remains above $20 billion.

The report stated that the valuation of crypto startups declined from $44 billion to $20 billion in 2018, by 54 percent. Still, the performance of the cryptocurrency sector has been relatively strong in consideration of the 80 percent drop in the Bitcoin price, the best performing major cryptocurrency in the global market.

Yet, many analysts currently foresee the valuation of the cryptocurrency market declining in the upcoming months.

Some traders have emphasized that throughout 2019, cryptocurrencies are expected to demonstrate a low level of volatility and momentum, gradually bottoming out in a low price range.

In the short-term, traders have said that if the Bitcoin price does not rebound out of key resistance levels at $3,800 and $4,000, a slow downside movement to the low $3,000 region cannot be avoided.

“Pretty much closing all my BTC longs for a 1% loss. This is not the impulsive price action i had been anticipating and the daily candle despite not being closed yet, just doesn’t look good at all unless we rally back above $3,800 it seems as if the $3,200 lows will be tested again,” one trader said.

Previously, Cardano founder and Ethereum co-creator Charles Hoskinson noted that despite the strong performance of the cryptocurrency industry, investors should expect the price of major crypto assets to stagnate for a while.

“It might take 11 years for us [the crypto industry] to recover back to where we were in 2017, but we will be a dramatically different ecosystem at that point. We’ll have millions, perhaps even billions of users,” explained Hoskinson.

As of now, based on the performance of Bitcoin in the past three days, traders generally believe that the trend of the cryptocurrency sector is bear-biased.

A cryptocurrency technical analyst with an online alias “Hsaka” said that the Bitcoin price retraced most of its gains in the past week.

Hsaka said:

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TRON’s Continuous Upward Rally
Throughout the past month, TRON has outperformed both Bitcoin and the U.S. dollar.

Since December 15, the price of TRON has increased from $0.0129 to $0.0303, by more than 134 percent.



Although TRON remains down by 89 percent from its all-time high, the recent efforts from the TRON foundation and Justin Sun to allocate a large amount of capital in financing decentralized applications (DApps) and developers have had a positive impact on the short-term price trend of TRON.



source : https://www.ccn.com/tron-spikes-134-in-1-month-will-the-crypto-sectors-strong-performance-push-bitcoin-higher/

Cryptocurrency exchange Gate.io confirmed that it had lost about $220,000 worth of Ethereum Classic coins – about 40,000 ETC – during the ongoing manipulation of the project’s blockchain network.

The exchange confirmed Tuesday that the Ethereum Classic blockchain was under 51% attack – in which a single entity takes control of more than half the network’s hash power that allows it to rewrite its transaction history and double-spend coins – and identified three accounts about the attacker(s).

“It happened between 0:40 Jan.7, 2019 and Jan 4:20 Jan.7, 2019 UTC for about 4 hours,” Gate.io revealed in a blog post. “All the transactions were confirmed normally on the ETC blockchain and became invalid after the blockchain rollback.”

At the time of transfers, the ETC/USD rate was fluctuating between $4.90 and $5.25, according to the details available on CoinMarketCap.com.

“Gate.io’s censor successfully blocked attacker’s transactions at the beginning and submitted them to the manual exam,” explained Gate.io. “Unfortunately, during the 51% attack, all the transactions looked valid and confirmed well on the blockchain. The examiner passed the transactions. It caused about 40k ETC loss due to this attack. Gate.io will take all the loss for the users.”

$1 Million Theft Reported
Coinbase, the US crypto exchange which first brought the 51% attack before the press, today revealed that the attackers were still exploiting the Ethereum Classic network and had siphoned-off 219,500 ETC coins worth over a million dollars. Blockscout, an Ethereum Classic blockchain explorer, confirmed reorganization attacks between block numbers 7261495 and 7261496. Per their data, a transaction containing 26,000 ETC was first spent during the mining of block number 7261492; the same transaction was again noted on block number 7261497.

Almost all the exchanges have discontinued their ETC deposits and withdrawals but none of them – except Gate.io – have reported any losses. The situation leads to a scenario whereby attackers are holding all the stolen ETC with no options to liquidate them for fiat. Ideally, it should lead to a flat price action before the Ethereum Classic team comes up with a solution to entirely repeal the attack


Ethereum Price Action is Flat and Rangebound despite 51% Attack | Source: TradingView/BitFinex

Ethereum Classic Responds
Ethereum Classic developer Donald McIntyre admitted they were looking at a textbook 51% and double spend attack – an opinion which was refuted by Cody Burns, another fellow ETC developer, who believed that there was more room for investigation.

“To be clear we are making no attempt to hide or downplay recent events,” the group stated in an official response. “Facts are facts and as the situation develops we’ll soon get a full picture of what actually took place. Linzhi is testing ASICS. Coinbase reported double spends; both may be true.”

The team subsequently raised its prevention tactics by asking exchanges to increase their block confirmation times.

source:https://www.ccn.com/ethereum-classic-hacker-stole-54200-etc-from-crypto-exchange-gate-io/

As other asset markets, particularly the stock markets, enter a bear market some believe cryptocurrencies have a chance at being the best performing asset class next year.

Travis Kling, a self-proclaimed ex-equities portfolio manager who “fell down the crypto rabbit hole” and is now heading up the cryptocurrency asset management firm Ikigai, tweeted today:
https://twitter.com/Travis_Kling/status/1076660659759300611/photo/1

The U.S Federal Reserve began quantitative easing (QE) ten years ago, lowering interest rates and buying trillions of dollars’ worth of government bonds and mortgage-backed securities. The move potentially saved the U.S from major depression. Other global economies followed suit in buying bonds and increasing market liquidity in order to fuel economic growth.

Could Quantitative Tightening Inspire Investors to Choose Digital and Decentralized?
In late 2017, the Federal Reserve began to let its holdings mature without reinvesting. The U.S was the first to end quantitative easing moving instead to the opposite – quantitative tightening. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) and the European Central Bank (ECB) also slowed bond purchases in 2018.


Central Bank Assets Source: Bloomberg

Bloomberg Economics declared October 2018 as the month the world’s largest central banks collectively started to decline their bond holdings. Though the ECB and BOJ are still scaling back rather than releasing holdings.

With the U.S leading, interest rate rises are a further sign of “normalization” a process of allowing economies to operate under their own steam without central bank intervention. It’s this, combined with other factors, that’s causing fear of global recession and impacting global asset markets.

Cryptocurrencies emerged in 2009, just after QE began and, Kling is right, have not existed in a traditional asset bear market. Kling also agreed that this year’s developing bear market has impacted cryptocurrency performance and as a risky asset they could also see further impact:


After Kling’s tweet, the resulting conversation on Twitter held mixed opinions. Some believe cryptocurrencies could continue to fall and be the “worst” performing asset class out of a global economy of bad-performers. Others think that once again believers in this new digital asset class, out of the control of central government manipulation, will lead the charge and spur a reversal of the cryptocurrency market.


Cryptocurrency Market Capitalization Source: CoinMarketCap

This reversal may already be happening, over $30 billion has re-entered the cryptocurrency market in the past week as other asset markets plummet. Outperforming all other assets in 2019 would forever cement the role of cryptocurrencies in global economies. Time will indeed tell.

source : https://www.ccn.com/cryptocurrencies-could-outperform-all-other-assets-in-2019/

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty has dropped more than 7 percent over the past 24 hours as the fallout of the prolonged market rout continues. Despite a recent recovery that has taken bitcoin above $4,000, many miners are still finding it difficult to remain profitable or break even. CCN reported in November that any cryptocurrency miners in China are dumping their mining rigs or re-purposing them for non-blockchain uses like video rendering and cloud computing.

More recently, CCN also reported that several cryptocurrency mining operations across Europe and Asia are shutting down because of the bear market, including Bladetech, a startup behind what was to be the largest crypto mining facility in the UK.

Difficulty Adjustment and Implications
In the light of the bitcoin blockchain’s reduced hashrate caused by withdrawing miners, the network is designed to automatically adjust the difficulty level in order to avoid a situation where there is a huge transaction confirmation backlog and high confirmation fees. The 7 percent drop in difficulty is likely to be the start of a similar difficulty readjustment pattern as bitcoin below $6,000 increasingly becomes a prolonged reality.


Source: BitInfoCharts

As showed in the above chart, Bitcoin’s difficulty fell from about 5.8TH/second to about 5TH/second on December 19. In contrast Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV have remained stable at about 1TH/second

Source: BitInfoCharts

The implication of this is that while interest in mining bitcoin is declining, this has not impacted positively on interest in mining Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. In other words, miners leaving bitcoin are not merely switching to other cryptographically similar cryptocurrencies, but are exiting the cryptocurrency mining space altogether. This is not likely to create any disruption in the normal functioning of bitcoin in the short term because the dynamic difficulty adjustment system will ensure that there is enough hashpower to service the network.

The real danger however lies in the fact that the existing situation can in itself become an obstacle to mass cryptocurrency adoption in the long term if low prices persist. The wider cryptocurrency market has a well-documented history of tracking bitcoin’s moves closely, which means that a perceived reduction of interest in mining bitcoin will eventually lead to an exodus of miners from cryptocurrency altogether which could at least theoretically jeopardise the security of cryptocurrencies.


Source : https://www.ccn.com/bitcoin-difficulty-drops-over-7/

a lot of bad news that makes coin holders panic and sell all their coins why do people always do this? I think we need to understand the philosophy behind blockchain technology and all cryptocurrencies, and at the moment we stop doing these activities because with panic by itself it will reduce the reputation of crypto money itself and its own cryptocurrency.



how are you ready and agree to say no to the panic news that exists?

What do you think if these 4 coins can replace ETH
1. Monero (XMR)
2. TRON (TRX)
3. IOTA
4. NEO

and which coins have the potential to be invested next year?

source: https://kabarcoin.com/pengganti-bitcoin-dan-ethereum/

Ripple’s XRP token has a posted a 6 percent profit to establish a fresh weekly high towards $0.534. The bullish behavior also got the coin close to replacing Etherum as the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

SOURCE: TRADINGVIEW.COM

The XPR/USD value appreciated from 0.506-fiat to 0.535-fiat on Monday. The price action underwent a weak downside correction later. It found support at 0.516-fiat and is since hinting a further upside bias. The pair is now trading at 0.532-fiat, looking to reclaim the weekly high, followed by a breakout towards 0.556-fiat, the November 6 high. The level also poses as a potential upside target for the intraday long position albeit the long-term bearish bias.

To the downside, a push below 0.516-fiat could enable the market to locate the next likely support at 0.506-fiat. The level also marks a downside target for day traders, looking to enter short positions towards the levels and generate maximum intraday profits.

Ripple-based Interbanking Corridor
Japan’s MUFG Bank on November 9 announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Banco Bradesco S.A., a Brazil-based banking service. The MoU discussed a partnership between the two organization to create a cross-border payment corridor that would be powered by the Ripple technology.

However, the press release about the MUFG-Bradesco partnership never elaborated which of the Ripple solution they would utilize. The San Francisco company currently offers xCurrent and xRapid solutions in its line of products. Many a time, the adoption of the xCurrent solution has been wrongly attributed to the rise in XRP value. Though, the product does not make it mandatory for participants to purchase XRP to complete a cross-border transaction. The xRapid solution, on the other hand, exclusively uses XRP tokens.

The XRP price action remained relatively calmer on the day of the announcement. Around that time, the US Dollar was posting fresher highs, as discussed in this analysis, weakening all the quoted assets, including Bitcoin and Ripple.  The XRP upsides developed only after the comments of Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse about the coin’s long-term bullish sentiments surfaced.

Ripple Better than Bitcoin and SWIFT
Amidst the rumors that Ripple was looking to partner with SWIFT, Garlinghouse cleared that the interbank messaging network was, in fact, a rival. He went on by saying that Ripple would likely replace SWIFT as the world’s leading interbank financial network.

“The technologies that banks use today that Swift developed decades ago hasn’t evolved or kept up with the market,” he said. “Swift said not that long ago they didn’t see blockchain as a solution to correspondent banking. We’ve got well over 100 of their customers saying they disagree.”

The CEO also projected XRP as a better currency than Bitcoin. He said that their money is 1,000 times cheaper and faster than the world’s leading crypto-asset. The comments came after the rumors about White House looking to pit XRP against Bitcoin surfaced last month.

source: https://www.ccn.com/xrp-posts-6-gains-as-japan-and-brazil-adopt-ripple-tech-for-payments/