A man upped sticks, sold everything he had for Bitcoin and moved his family to a campsite after claiming that he is waiting for the next “boom” in cryptocurrencies.
Didi Taihuttu, 39, moved his family to a campsite outside of Venlo in the Netherlands, after putting his house on the market along with other possessions including his car, motorbike, children’s toys and other family consumables.
Bitcoin and Blockchain, the technology behind the currency, eliminates the need for a third party such as a bank or building society to approve payments, as a network of computers keeps a record of all transactions.
The Dutchman believes that the technology is transforming the role of banks in society – and that there is more to be made from the emerging currency.
Supported by strong volumes, bitcoin prices sprinted to a five-week high of $4,875 last night before the move ran out of steam.
Bitcoin keychains on circuit board (Image: BTC Keychain)
The bitcoin-U.S. dollar (BTC/USD) exchange rate spent 12 hours working hard to retake $4,800. However, at press time, bitcoin’s price had dropped to $4,770 – still up 12 percent in the last 24 hours. Week-on-week, the price is up 10 percent, while on a monthly basis, the cryptocurrency has seen 12 percent gains.
Indeed, despite the Chinese ban on ICOs as well as hints Russia may take new restrictive actions, bitcoin has been able to regain poise in a relatively short period of time. Less than a month ago, BTC had dropped to $2,980. As of now, bitcoin is only 4.8 percent short of its all-time high of $5,000 set in early September.
The stellar recovery could be attributed to an increased trading activity in Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong in the aftermath of Chinese crackdown. Speculation is also doing the rounds that fears of increasing ICO restrictions across the globe may have triggered a rotation of money out of ether and ethereum-based tokens and into bitcoin.
Currently, bitcoin looks set to revisit record highs.
Every time there is a crash in cryptocurrencies, the alarm bells ring out and panic often ensues.
People predict the end, see the bubble popping and sell off for a loss.
Bitcoin price chart (Image: geralt/Pixabay)
However, there is another way to look at it, and that is to see a significant drop as a buying opportunity and a chance to profit.
How to profit
There are a few ways to try and cash in on a sharp fall in price of cryptocurrencies. Some are more effective than others, and some more suitable for different types of crashes or currencies. It is up to the investor to decide.
There are five methods described below that can help turn a sickening crash into a chance to make more money than before.
A lot of these methods are well known, and almost cliched, but the real difficulty is not simply knowing them, it is being brave enough to enact them in the face of a collapsing market.
I love Cryptocurrency and am continually learning about it – but it can still surprise me. I have registered for a few airdrops but they usually only deliver small amounts of money.
eBTC logo
However, about a week ago I signed up for the eBTC airdrop. Having received an email that said I had successfully registered I didn’t think too much more about it.
This weekend, though, having read about it being traded I realised that it had a significant value. It took a bit of doing but eventually I was able to sell it. First I registered it on MyEtherWallet, then imported that to the EtherDelta exchange. There I sold it for Ether, and transferred that to my Bitfinex trading acccount where I was able to sell it for Bitcoin.
Bottom line – it gained me about £250 worth of Bitcoin. Not a bad outcome for a simple airdrop!
A group of Bitcoin companies plans to deploy a hard fork to double Bitcoin’s block weight limit to eight megabytes this November. Known as “SegWit2x,” this incompatible protocol change follows from the New York Agreement (NYA) and is embedded in the BTC1 software client.
SegWit2x is highly controversial. Most of Bitcoin’s development community, a number of other companies, some mining pools and — if public polls and futures markets are representative — a majority of users and the market are not on board with this hard fork. Some of them are even engaged in a sort of protest movement, under the banner “NO2X.”
For those who have not kept up with the debate, here’s an overview of the main arguments for and against the 2x hard fork part of SegWit2x.
The bitcoin-US dollar (BTC/USD) exchange rate is gaining altitude after the bearish Doji reversal seen earlier this week failed to keep the cryptocurrency below its 50-day moving average.
Bitcoin (Image: MichaelWuensch/Pixabay)
At press time, bitcoin is trading at $4,325; up 1.46 percent as per data from CoinMarketCap. The two-day sell-off ran out of steam earlier today at the low of $4,150. The subsequent rebound then gathered pace above the 50-day moving average of $4,187.
However, the rebound from the 50-day moving average support seen in the one hour indicates the fears over the event are overblown. So, is bitcoin set to fly high or is the rally a bull trap?
The price action analysis suggests the cryptocurrency is currently hovering in the no man’s land.
American tech billionaire investor and television personality Mark Cuban has recently claimed that he sees Bitcoin and its underlying Blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT) as the way of the future.
He also countered the various claims that the leading digital currency is not real and has no intrinsic value.
In an interview with Bloomberg, the renowned American businessman claimed that Bitcoin is just like the traditional stocks that investors can buy and sell.
“…it’s interesting because I think there are a lot of assets that have values based on just supply and demand. You know, most stocks, they don’t have any intrinsic value, no true ownership rights, no voting rights, you just have the ability to buy and sell those stocks. They’re like baseball cards and I think Bitcoin is the same thing…”
The price of monero is showing signs its recent slide may be over.
At press time, the monero-US dollar (XMR/USD) exchange rate was up slightly, rising from a low of $84.18 to $89.40 on the day’s trading. But, a closer look at the charts indicates the bump may be a telling sign the privacy-focused cryptocurrency could soon break its slump.
Monero Logo (Image: The Monero Project/Wikimedia)
Week-on-week, monero is down 4.3 percent, while month-on-month, the digital currency is nursing 29.3 percent loss. Launched in 2014, monero is an open-source cryptocurrency that uses innovative cryptography to obscure transactions.
In particular, today’s price is a sign bulls could be gaining an upper hand in the battle to defend the all-important 61.8% Fibonacci retracement level.
A key indicator in markets more broadly, it’s also the exact spot from which monero was able to rally from its July low to its record highs in late August. The 61.8% Fibonacci retracement level is now $80.91, while at the press time the cryptocurrency is trading at $89.40 levels; down 3.96 percent in the last 24 hours as per CoinMarketCap.
Looking ahead, price action analysis suggests that monero’s resilience could translate into bearish-to-bullish trend change.
The CEO of the world’s largest asset manager sees “huge opportunities” for cryptocurrencies – but argues that work needs to be done before they become more widely accepted.
Cryptocurrency Art Gallery: Litecoin, Ether, Ripple, Bitcoin and Namecoin (Image: Namecoin/Flickr)
In a new interview with Bloomberg TV, BlackRock chief Larry Fink said that he’s a “big believer”, but that the current market today is primarily focused on speculation. His comments come months after the firm’s chief strategist said that, to him, the cryptocurrency market charts at the time looked “pretty scary.”
Fink said in the interview:
“Related to cryptocurrencies, I’m a big believer in the potential of what a cryptocurrency can do. You see huge opportunities, but what we’re talking about today, it’s much more of a speculative platform, people are speculating on it.”
“We are in the process of developing a new operating system for the planet.”
The remark, issued by Barclays’ vice chairman of corporate banking, Jeremy Wilson, perhaps summed up the scope and tenor of discussion at the Blockchain for Finance conference yesterday. Held in Dublin, the event played host to participants more at home in suits than hoodies, though the mood was no less enthusiastic than if it was packed with developers.
Blockchain (Image: DavidStankiewicz/Wikipedia)
Leading off with a panel of C-Suite executives from large financial institutions, it was here Wilson issued his positioning statement, one that added to the outlooks of other panelists assembled to provide a top-down view of blockchain work originating in the financial sector.
However, if Wilson appeared awe-struck at the enormity of the promise of blockchain and distributed ledger applications, he was equally critical of the work the industry is doing to assess ethical and moral dimensions of the coming impact.
Emmanuel Aidoo, director of blockchain at Credit Suisse, also hinted at fragile complexities. He likened the integration of blockchain into financial processes to a game of Jenga – you pull out the blocks from the bottom and hope that the tower doesn’t crumble.
But while few details about live implementations were forthcoming, all participants mentioned specific projects their institutions had undertaken. And, in contrast to years past, Wilson wasn’t a lone voice on the panel remarking on the potential of what is to come when – not if – these projects come to fruition.
Hadley Stern, senior vice president of Fidelity Lab, told attendees:
“Asking us that is as if Tim Berners-Lee had just developed HTTP and you’re asking us if the internet will change the world.”
