With China Tightening Regulations, Crypto-related Ads Reportedly Gone From Local Websites
Latest News by Molly Jane Zuckerman 2 HOURS AGO
Cryptocurrency Markets Move Back Into Green After Substantial Selloff
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After experiencing a 2-day slump during which the price of most cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, and Bitcoin Cash declined significantly, the cryptocurrency market has started to recover.
Cryptocurrencies in the top 20 rankings of the global cryptocurrency market have recorded large gains over the past few hours. Ripple in particular demonstrated a staggering 48 percent increase in value, while bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Cardano, and Litecoin have risen in the range of 15 percent to 35 percent.
Although major cryptocurrencies are still down significantly from their all-time highs, bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Ripple have all kept their “psychological thresholds.” Bitcoin has rebounded above the $10,000 mark, Ether recovered past $1,000, and Ripple did not decline below the $1 mark.
It is highly unlikely that fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) from the South Korean and Chinese cryptocurrency markets caused the recent correction, given its magnitude and the size of both markets. But, a reasonable explanation is the closure of bitcoin future contracts on January 17, and whales or institutional investors in the traditional finance market dumping cryptocurrencies like bitcoin to cash out their short contracts.
Over the past 12 months, Ripple has surged by 330-fold, Ether by 130-fold, and bitcoin by 19-fold, with minor corrections. It is also possible that the sudden increase of cryptocurrencies without a major drop in value led to a large correction to occur.
Previously, Ethereum creators Vitalik Buterin and Charles Hoskinson questioned the value of most cryptocurrencies in the market, given that tokens without products and users have obtained multi-billion dollar valuations within a short period of time.
With the recent correction in mind, public blockchains and cryptocurrencies within the global market will need to prove their potential and justify their market valuations by obtaining actual active user bases and useful products. Otherwise, even in a bull market like the cryptocurrency market, another major correction is inevitable.
In late 2017, billionaire investor Mike Novogratz predicted the price of bitcoin to achieve the $40,000 mark and Ether to surpass $1,500. If the cryptocurrency market can recover to its previous levels before January 16, when bitcoin and Ethereum were at $14,000 and $1,300 respectively, the cryptocurrency market would be in a better position to initiate stronger rallies without weak hands and speculators.
Earlier this week, during an interview with QZ, Constantin Papadimitriou, president of Pundi X, stated that the adoption of bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies is rapidly increasing in India despite the government’s crackdown on the market. Consequently, the government has started to reconsider its policies and possibly regulate its cryptocurrency market, although no regulations have been finalized as of yet.
Increasing adoption of cryptocurrencies by large remittance markets like India and the Philippines will allow the global cryptocurrency market and blockchains within it to increase further in value. Major financial institutions such as Japan’s largest bank Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, better known as UFG, and South Korea’s second largest commercial bank Shinhan Bank have also started the development of cryptocurrency exchanges and wallet platforms.
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January 18, 2018 at 08:34AM
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The cryptocurrency market has continued to slump over the past 24 hours, as major cryptocurrencies including Ripple, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Cash recorded over 20 percent in daily losses.
Since January 15, the market valuation of cryptocurrencies declined from $700 billion to $500 billion within a 48-hour span. In the past few hours, the cryptocurrency market demonstrated some signs of recovery, as the market cap of all cryptocurrencies combined increased from $450 billion to $530 billion.
The claims that bitcoin slumped by a small margin while smaller cryptocurrencies plunged in value are evidently false, given that major cryptocurrencies recorded larger losses in value than small cryptocurrencies in the market.
Bitcoin did decline by a small margin in comparison to Ethereum, Ripple, and Bitcoin Cash, but it also decreased by more than 15 percent. Since December, bitcoin has dropped from $19,000 to $11,000.
It is also incorrect to justify the recent decline in the market valuation of cryptocurrencies to the trading ban fiasco in China and South Korea. The Chinese government banned cryptocurrency trading in September 2017. Today, the Chinese market has barely any volume to impact the global cryptocurrency market in any way.
I’ve read reports that China caused the recent #cryptocurrency market correction.
For those who have not had the chance to gain access to WI-FI since September 2017, China banned cryptocurrency trading 4 months ago. It has close to 0 volume. What impact does China have now?
— Joseph Young (@iamjosephyoung) January 16, 2018
Many investors are currently concerned about the state of the market because of the abrupt fall in the value of cryptocurrencies. But, the cryptocurrency market regularly experiences 20 to 30 percent corrections. For instance, when the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) and the Chinese authorities banned initial coin offering (ICO) along with cryptocurrency trading in September, the price of Ethereum declined by more than 30 percent.
Two months before that, Ethereum suffered over a 50 percent decline, from $360 to $134. Given the massive corrections Ethereum, bitcoin, and Bitcoin Cash have experienced over the past few months, the recent correction is not the biggest correction the market has suffered in the past year.
When the market valuation of cryptocurrencies in the market surpassed $500 billion in mid-December, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin stated that he is personally concerned with the valuation of most projects within the market.
He questioned whether the market and projects within it have done enough to justify the $500 billion market cap of the cryptocurrencies. While Buterin emphasized that cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Ethereum have definitely provided enough services to the general public and consumers, they have not done enough to justify their market caps.
“So total cryptocoin market cap just hit $0.5T today. But have we earned it? The answer to all of these questions is definitely not zero, and in some cases it’s quite significant. But not enough to say it’s $0.5T levels of significant. Not enough,” said Buterin, sharing a similar sentiment as other Ethereum co-founders including IOHK’s Charles Hoskinson.
A major correction is healthy for the market which has been overflowing with projects with no substance as of late. Blockchain projects with no products and users have gained multi-billion dollar valuations, solely with poorly drafted whitepapers.
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January 17, 2018 at 01:28AM
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Cryptocurrencies fix a fundamental flaw with the monetary system in the world today.
Our society has evolved into a debt-based society that looks at debt as a good thing. Credit reports show that you can pay your debts. It is seen as a bad thing if you have never carried debt because then how are we supposed to trust you?
Cryptocurrencies and the blockchain look to remove the need for these trust relationships, as the technology provides the trust layer that the transfer will happen and happen on time.
With super volatile prices in recent weeks, the question has been posed:
Well, we do not know because this huge increase is fundamentally different than the bubbles that have happened in the real estate and stock market over the last century.
It is different because Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, in general, is fundamentally different. Cryptocurrency creates a new medium of exchange that has a mathematically controlled volume. There is a limit on the number of bitcoins available at any one time and that volume increases over time with Bitcoin mining, but the sun will set on mining one day and no more Bitcoins will be created.
Bitcoin mining requires “Proof-of-Work” to create Bitcoin. When you mine Bitcoin you are brute force solving a double SHA-256 hash. The only way to solve this is through brute force and when you correctly solve it, you are given the block award of Bitcoin. This how Bitcoin is created and why it has value. There was energy input to create Bitcoin.
In contrast, paper money requires very little energy input to create. It is basically free money printing. Bitcoin is compared with gold fairly often, and it is a good comparison. Both require energy input to create and become a store of value once mined.
The primary driving factor of the recent recession was bad loans that were then bundled together and sold to each other under leveraged positions. If you don’t understand what all that means it is okay.
Basically, banks made loans to people that were too risky, and they knew it. Then they took those loans and packaged them together, selling them bundled to other banks as high-quality products (they weren’t). These terrible products were bought with leverage. Leverage is a loan so you can buy more of a product and get larger gains. Once you sell it you repay the leverage back and you are left with larger profits than without leverage.
The problem with using leverage to buy these bundled mortgage-backed securities was that they were garbage and were not going to appreciate in value. We all know what happened when everyone found out that the mortgage-backed securities were actually garbage…
Everyone started to sell and try and pull their money out. When that happens, all the banks try to recall their loans at the same time and no one has any liquidity to actually repay those loans resulting in a financial collapse.
Cryptocurrency is fundamentally different from what caused the Great Recession. Until recently, there were very few if any ways to use leverage to buy and sell cryptocurrencies. Many of the exchanges are starting to implement ways to use leverage for the purchase of cryptocurrencies, but it is not a large percentage of the market.
In comparison with the housing bubble, where nearly everything was leveraged, cryptocurrencies are primarily bought and sold with fiat money or assets that people/investors actually own. They are not leveraged loans allowing them to manipulate the marketplace.
Now, Bitcoin may be in a bubble, but the cryptocurrency as a whole will continue to rise into the foreseeable future. Bitcoin and its many competitors have to deal with scaling issues among others issues to stay viable. Bitcoin’s main issue currently is that the volume of transactions is going up and up and the transaction time is going up with it.
Originally the blockchain for Bitcoin was able to process a Bitcoin transaction in mere seconds, but now it can take hours or longer. This is still quick compared to the 2-5 days for bank transactions, so we do not have too much issue with it. However, other cryptocurrencies have faster networks, more frequent blocks (blocks are the bundles of transactions that are processed at one time), and better algorithms.
Bitcoin can overcome these issues if the developers can come to a consensus and move the technology forward, but there are other cryptocurrencies out there that can take up the reigns if not.
So, Bitcoin may be peaking out or may not, but others like Litecoin are ready to take its place as the go-to cryptocurrency.
Everything is out in the open for people to see. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, in general, are open-source projects based on the blockchain. This means that anybody has access to view the code to understand how it works. You can also view the entire ledger online. The power of the blockchain is that none of it is opaque. It is all open for mass inspection to verify its authenticity.The blockchain itself verifies authenticity for transactions which takes the human factor (read high cost and higher possibility of error) out of the equation. It allows the cost of transactions to lower because you no longer need a third party to verify the transaction that went to your bank in the first place.
Now you have a true peer-to-peer currency that is as good as cash that can be transmitted over distance and between cultures and countries.
The true disruptive power and the reason that it will eventually take over the world is the distributed ledger. The concept of the distributed ledger goes by most people without a thought, but it is the crux of the cryptocurrency movement.
The blockchain distributes the ledger (where all transactions are recorded) around the world on all computers connected to the blockchain. Some of the networks require all computers to store the entire ledger, but with continued inflation of the size of the ledger over time, most networks are moving towards partial storage of the ledger.
Because the ledger is distributed around the world, no one person or entity has control over it and it is available for all to see and verify.
In a traditional transaction with a vendor, you may swipe your credit card and “pay” them. Let’s look at what actually happens here:
Only at this point, have you truly paid for your item. Why do we need so many verifications when we are transferring money?
We verified that we wanted to transfer money to them while we were there.
All of the verification issues are fixed with cash transfers. You receive it and you are happy.
Now let’s look at cryptocurrency transactions:
That’s it. It is so much more streamlined. Cryptocurrencies take out all the middlemen of the financial industry, which allows money to move from place to place with much lower costs. That is the true power of the distributed ledger, speed and accuracy. You now have the efficiency of cash without the paper and over distance.
Cryptocurrencies will take over the world. There is no doubt about that. There have been very few revolutionary monetary ideas since money was first developed, but cryptocurrencies is one of them. Once the technical issues are all resolved in the coming years, I foresee it taking the place of traditional fiat money. Will the US Dollar still be around in 50 years? Who knows, but cryptocurrencies are here to stay.
So readers, what are your thoughts on cryptocurrency?
The past month of November was marked by numerous incidents and vulnerabilities in the field of security , and from ESET they have announced the most outstanding events that took place in that period.
Undoubtedly, the cryptocurrencies have been the main protagonists , since when registering historical highs the cybercriminals took advantage of to attack the electronic portfolios of the users.
Josep Albors, head of awareness and research at ESET Spain, explains that “if a cybercriminal detects that a user has one of these files used to store these electronic currencies, it is very likely that he will try to steal it in some way, such as accessing remotely to your system. ”
In addition, cybercriminals also turn to applications that are used as electronic portfoliosand cryptocurrency exchange services .
On the other hand, the executive also insists that “those web pages that undermine crypto currencies taking advantage of users’ resources without asking for their permission , are becoming a plague”.
Apart from the above, the ESET report mentions a variant of the Bankbot banking Trojan , which affected Android users and was hidden in applications such as flashlights to avoid suspicion.
Another very popular Android banking Trojan in November was the one identified as Android / TrojanDropper.Agent.BKY that tried to go unnoticed by installing its components in a modular way, in different phases.
In addition, around a million users fell into the false trap of a WhatsApp app that downloaded downloaded a second malicious application that was installed on the victim’s system without this suspecting anything.
Nor can we forget the discovery of a bug in the most recent version of MacOS High Sierra , which allowed access to the system as root, providing this user name and leaving the password space blank, pressing several times on the ” login”.
With regard to data theft, last month the data subtraction of 1.7 million users of the Imgurphoto sharing website was announced in an incident that took place in 2014.
From the ESET lab they also appreciated the presence at the top of the Google searches a fake version of Windows Movie Maker , which sought to get money from unsuspecting users.
Undoubtedly another relevant case was that of the popular streaming anime website Crunchyroll , which for a few hours was distributing malware among users who accessed their website and downloaded an alleged media player.
Finally, in Spain, the temporary deactivation of the digital signature incorporated in the National Identity Document was also news , when security breaches were discovered that allowed knowing the private key stored in the chip that carries this document.
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