Category Archives: Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin Spikes to 2-Week High Above $54K: ETH Tops $1800 (Market Watch)

March 15, 2021 flippener

With bitcoin reaching a new 2-week high and ETH passing by $1,800, the crypto market cap has added $130 billion in a day.

Bitcoin’s market capitalization has reclaimed the coveted $1 trillion level after the asset surged by 8% to about $54,000. Most alternative coins are well in the green as well, and the entire market cap has expanded by $130 billion since yesterday’s low.

BTC Taps $54K
Following a few days of sideways trading and flirting with the $50,000 price tag, BTC has finally spiked well above that line. The bulls took charge during the latest drop to $49,000 as reported yesterday and drove the cryptocurrency north.

In the following hours, bitcoin added more than $4,000 of value and reached $54,500 (on Bitstamp). This became the asset’s highest price tag since February 22nd – just as the sharp retracement had started following the all-time high above $58,000.

Although it has retraced slightly since then, bitcoin is still up by about 8% in the past 24 hours. With its substantial increase, BTC’s market capitalization topped $1 trillion once again after a few weeks-long hiatus.

Interestingly, bitcoin’s gains came amid the turbulence on Wall Street. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq closed in the red on Monday, but the futures contracts painted gains in after-hours trading as Treasury yields fell from the recent highs.

A Sea of Green for the Alts
Most of the alternative coins have followed their leader in the past 24 hours with impressive gains. Ethereum leads the pack with an 8% increase. As a result, the second-largest cryptocurrency has reclaimed another milestone on its way up – $1,800.

Binance Coin and Ripple have added about 4% of value to $240 and $0.48, respectively. Cardano and Uniswap have painted minor increases, while Polkadot (5%) and Chainlink (9%) have gone above $35 and $31.

Even more impressive price increases are evident from lower- and mid-cap altcoins. Chiliz is the undisputed leader with a 100% surge since yesterday and 380% in the past seven days to $0.27.

On a 24-hour scale, Terra (27%), NEAR Protocol (25%), Quant (25%), Theta Fuel (22%), Hedera Hashgraph (20%), SwissBorg (17%), THETA (16%), Decentraland (16%), and UMA (15%) follow.

In total, the cumulative market capitalization of all cryptocurrency assets has surged from $1.540 trillion to $1.670 trillion in a day. Moreover, the market cap is up by $230 billion in the past five days.

Ethereum NFT of Burned Banksy Piece Sells for $380,000

March 14, 2021 flippener

An original Banksy piece that was recently burned by a group of crypto enthusiasts and tokenized as an NFT has sold for 228.69 ETH.

A group of crypto enthusiasts burned an original copy of Banksy’s “Morons” and listed the artwork in an NFT auction last week.
The NFT has sold for 228.69 ETH, worth over $380,000 at purchase.
The group said that they hoped to “inspire artists and explore a new medium of creative expression.”

Burned Banksy Gets Tokenized
An NFT of Banksy’s “Morons” has sold for 228.69 ETH, worth around $382,000 at purchase.

The original artwork was acquired by a group of crypto enthusiasts and burned on a live stream in Brooklyn last week. The purpose of the burning was to tokenize the piece as an NFT. The video’s host, who also burned the piece, said they hoped to “inspire artists and explore a new medium of creative expression.”

A bidder using the moniker GALAXY bought the NFT on OpenSea yesterday afternoon.

The piece depicts an auction for an art canvas that reads, “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit.” Banksy produced the piece in 2006, and prints were initially sold at $500 each.

A 2007 edition of the piece sold for $84,494.79 (£60,480) in a Sotheby’s auction last year.

Cryptocurrency Art Gallery: Litecoin, Ether, Ripple, Bitcoin and Namecoin (Image: Namecoin/Flickr)

The piece was acquired by members of Injective Protocol and SuperFarm, who reportedly paid around $100,000. It came with a Certificate of Authenticity from Pest Control, Banksy’s official authenticator.

It’s the first time a genuine Banksy piece has appeared on-chain, as the NFT trend continues to snowball.

By tokenizing “Morons” on Ethereum, the group said they hoped to make a point that the art could live on even after destroying the physical copy. GALAXY is now the provable owner of the piece, and the record of their purchase is immutable. As the token is fungible, no-one else will be able to claim ownership until they decide to sell.

NFTs and Art Merge
The Banksy item is only the latest in a series of massive drops across the NFT space, which has now seen several major musicians making an entry.

EDM superstar Steve Aoki released his first collection on Nifty Gateway over the weekend, raking in around $3.4 million in the process. Last week, 3LAU raised a record-breaking $11.7 million from tokenizing his “Ultraviolet” album.

Kings of Leon also became the first band to release their album as an NFT this weekend. The event attracted a significant amount of press attention from the mainstream media and music world. Over 489 ETH has been traded on the collection with 16 hours to go. With ETH trading at almost $1,700 today, the sale is a lucrative move for U.S rock artists.

But arguably the biggest NFT event so far is the release of Beeple’s “The First 5,000 Days.”

The digital artist’s piece is on sale at Christie’s, with bidding at $3.75 million. The auction closes Thursday.

The hefty price tags that some NFTs fetch have led some to criticize the space. Many argue that the six-figure valuations are unsustainable. It’s difficult to say whether the bubble is about to burst. Still, NFTs offer provable scarcity in a similar way to Bitcoin, whose meteoric rise has stunned doubters time and again over the last decade.

Bitcoin Marketcap Breaches $1 Trillion With New ATH of $53,756

March 7, 2021 flippener

Bitcoin breached the $53,000 price to register a new all-time high of $53,756 and also breached the $1 trillion market cap during the process.

The top cryptocurrency has been on a dream run since the last quarter of 2020 and has added nearly $40k to its price since the bull run began towards the end of October 2020.

The mammoth price rise has been aided with booming mainstream adoption by retail and institutions alike. While the 2017 bull run brought bitcoin the mainstream attention, the current bull run has seen Bitcoin gain widespread mainstream adoption from traditional financial institutions as well as fortune 500 companies.

Bitcoin price is slated to touch the 6-figure mark by the end of this year with price prediction varying from $100,000 to $220,000. Many analysts believe bitcoin is currently in a supercycle rather than just another bull run. The fact that Bitcoin has not only rose by 2.5X it’s 2017 high, unlike earlier the top cryptocurrency has maintained its gains. The previous bull runs came in bursts and lasted anywhere from few weeks to a couple of months, however, the current bull run is already in its 5th month.

Bitcoin price to hit $100,000, Anthony Scaramucci predicts

March 7, 2021 flippener

Anthony Scaramucci predicts Bitcoin price would hit $100,000 in 2021
Scaramucci believes forces of demand and supply will help Bitcoin

Former Goldman Sachs banker and chairman at SkyBridge Capital, Anthony Scaramucci, has predicted that before the end of 2021, Bitcoin price would hit $100,000. This is after previously warning investors of Bitcoin’s notorious volatility.

Image by 3D Animation Production Company from Pixabay

Scaramucci explained that the demand for Bitcoin has hiked lately. He also revealed that his firm’s investment in Bitcoin is over $500 million.

“We like it,” Scaramucci said in a “Squawk Box” interview. “We have over half a billion dollars in Bitcoin right now. And obviously, our Bitcoin fund started in December. It’s done quite well.”

Scaramucci Bitcoin Price prediction may be right

Bitcoin has already gained 70 percent since the new year began, rocketing to more than $51,000 per unit for the first time on Wednesday. The world’s biggest cryptocurrency also quadrupled last year.

A Wave of Giants Rushing to Invest in Bitcoin Could Derail the Stock Market

March 7, 2021 flippener

After Tesla announced it has invested USD 1.5bn in bitcoin and expects to start accepting the cryptocurrency as a payment for its electric vehicles in the near future, the bitcoin price went soaring. It went from around USD 39,400 to an all-time high of over USD 48,000 in less than 24 hours.

Image by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/jaydeep_-7740155/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=3089728">VIN JD</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=3089728">Pixabay</a> — Image by VIN JD from Pixabay

The price is now up by over 50% in the first six weeks of 2021. Led by Elon Musk, Tesla’s investment is obviously in profit already: depending on the exact day of the purchase, it is likely to be worth over USD 2bn, pointing to a paper profit of over USD 500m. To put that in context, when the electric car-maker made its first-ever annual net profit in 2020, it was just over USD 700m.

Tesla’s move into bitcoin comes on the back of a wave of institutional money invested in the leading cryptocurrency in recent months, plus numerous other companies putting it into their treasury reserves. With the world’s sixth most valuable company also saying it might buy and hold other digital assets “from time to time or long term”, it must be tempting for other major companies to do likewise. Since the Tesla announcement, Twitter finance director Ned Segal has already signalled that his company is considering such a move, while a research note from the Royal Bank of Canada has made a case for why it would benefit Apple.

The prospect of a bluechip invasion into bitcoin has caused much excitement among cryptocurrency investors. But if Tesla does trigger such a goldrush, there will also be some unsettling consequences.

Bitcoin to Surpass $20,000 ATH By Early 2021

October 28, 2020 flippener

After predicting a significant bull run for Bitcoin and calling it a “life raft,” Raoul Pal discussed several issues within sectors of the traditional financial world.

Bitcoin Cryptocurrency (Image: MaxPixel)

Former hedge fund manager and CEO of Real Vision, Raoul Pal, believes that the real impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is about to reach the financial markets. By outlining several upcoming cornerstones among traditional financial assets, he highlighted Bitcoin as the “life raft” in this situation.

Raoul Pal: Everything Has Changed

In a recent Twitter thread, the Wall Street veteran outlined the rapidly growing COVID-19 cases worldwide. The total number of infected has neared 45 million, while the death toll is almost 1,2 million.

Pal predicted that these rising numbers in Europe, the US, and Canada are about to “exert economic pressures and extinguish the Hope phase of reflation dreams.” He believes that the upcoming consequences will harm the economy even more than the early 2020 developments. A real economic recovery “will take more than a post-election stimulus in January.”

He continued by looking at several markets that have started to feel the adverse consequences and have fallen to long-term support levels. Those included the oil price, Spain’s benchmark stock market index – the IBEX 35, the EU Banks Index, the euro, the British pound, the US dollar, and more.

As such, he broached a few possible solutions – “you can buy bonds and dollars, or you can take the life raft – Bitcoin.”

“Or, to dampen the volatility of a risk-off event (we can and will see sharp BTC corrections), you can have all three for a near-perfect portfolio for this phase.” – Pal concluded.

The UK and US Clamping Down On Crypto Trading – It’s Not Yet A Big Deal

October 25, 2020 flippener

The sale and promotion of derivatives of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to amateur investors is being banned in the UK by the financial regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

It is a further blow to the burgeoning cryptocurrency market, coming soon after the US authorities indicted the owners of leading crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX for operating without being US-registered and allegedly failing to follow anti-money-laundering rules.

Forex Trading (Image: Sanandros/Wikimedia)

In view of recent findings from the University of Cambridge that most firms involved in crypto investments are still operating without a license, other operators are potentially vulnerable to indictments too.

It all sounds like bad news for anyone hoping that more investors will put money into cryptocurrencies. But on a closer inspection, I’m not so sure.

Drops and oceans?

The FCA is preventing retail investors from buying and selling the likes of cryptocurrency futures and options, which people often use as a way of hedging their bets on an underlying asset. For example, you might buy an option to sell a certain number of bitcoin at today’s price if the price falls by 10%, giving you an insurance policy in case the market moves against you.

The FCA said it was introducing the ban from January 6 because amateur investors were at risk of “sudden and unexpected losses”. The reasoning is that these people often don’t understand the market, there is lots of “market abuse and financial crime” in the sector, cryptocurrencies are very volatile and they are hard to value.

To stress, the ban is not being extended to professional traders or institutional firms like hedge funds, which have typically been allowed access to riskier financial products than the general population. It is about protecting people who might have been drawn to bitcoin thinking “it may be the currency of the future”, having “heard sensational news coverage about the rise and fall”. There are any number of splashy trading sites offering them quick and easy entry into this world, and YouTube influencers who enthusiastically encourage them to try complex trading.

Some 1.9 million people – around 4% of the adult population – own cryptocurrencies in the UK. Three-quarters have holdings worth less than GBP 1,000 (USD 1,305) and would certainly qualify as retail investors. We don’t know what proportion of UK investors use crypto derivatives, but we do know that the worldwide trade in these financial products was nearly a fifth of the total crypto market in 2019 (and has been growing rapidly in 2020).

Yet retail investors are probably not the main users of derivatives. Trading site eToro said earlier this year that maybe only a tenth of their retail investor spend was on this segment. And with most of the UK contingent using non-UK based exchanges, it’s easy enough to avoid FCA jurisdiction. The FCA says the ban could reduce annual losses and fees to investors by between GBP 19m and GBP 101m.

The ban also doesn’t make much difference at a worldwide level. The UK crypto market is small beer compared to global cryptocurrency holdings, which are worth around USD 400bn. You would not, therefore, have expected the FCA ban to have a material detrimental impact on the price of bitcoin or leading alternative coins like ethereum, and sure enough, it didn’t. In fact, it was widely expected by industry observers and had arguably already been priced in.

Bitcoin’s Price Booms to Highest Level Since June 2019

October 25, 2020 flippener

The largest cryptocurrency by market cap continued its upward spiral

Bitcoin’s price today hit highs of $13,329, according to metrics site CoinMarketCap. That’s Bitcoin’s highest price since last summer.

Bitcoin Price Chart (Image: NikonD300/MaxPixel)

Here’s the play-by-play: At 3:30 am UTC, Bitcoin’s price rose from $13,133 to hights of $13,329. The high lasted just two hours: at 5:44 am, Bitcoin’s price sunk like a stone to $12,996. Its current price is $12,961.

The last time Bitcoin’s price was this high was on June 26, 2019. Then, it peaked, ever so briefly, at $13,793, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Bitcoin maximalists’ victory today follows a particularly strong month for the largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

On October 6, Bitcoin’s price was around $10,600. But the price increased sharply this month to its peak today of $13,329. That’s an increase of about 25%.

Bitcoin’s price has thus more than tripled since that fateful day in the middle of March, when it momentarily crashed to just below $4,000 amid the market uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

HODL On: In Defense of Bitcoin’s Best Strategy

August 9, 2018 flippener 1 Comment

In 1987’s Black Monday stock market crash, Sam Walton, the world’s richest man, lost more than half a billion dollars in a few hours.

When reached for comment, Walton said, “It’s paper anyway. As far as I’m concerned we’re focusing totally on the company doing well and taking care of our customers.”

He didn’t care about dollars; he cared about his asset Wal-Mart, and he still owned that.

History of the #HODL

In bitcoin’s volatile and roller coaster past, “HODL” was the meme that bound the cryptocurrency community together. It stood for the proposition that we all believe in the future of bitcoin. It’s both funny and insightful.

Here is the original post by GameKyuubi on a Bitcoin Talk forum (spelling errors and profanity included):

I AM HODLING

I type d that tyitle twice because I knew it was wrong the first time. Still wrong. w/e. GF’s out at a lesbian bar, BTC crashing WHY AM I HOLDING? I’LL TELL YOU WHY. It’s because I’m a bad trader and I KNOW I’M A BAD TRADER. Yeah you good traders can spot the highs and the lows pit pat piffy wing wong wang just like that and make a millino bucks sure no problem bro. Likewise the weak hands are like OH NO IT’S GOING DOWN I’M GONNA SELL he he he and then they’re like OH GOD MY ASSHOLE when the SMART traders who KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY’RE DOING buy back in but you know what? I’m not part of that group. When the traders buy back in I’m already part of the market capital so GUESS WHO YOU’RE CHEATING day traders NOT ME~! Those taunt threads saying “OHH YOU SHOULD HAVE SOLD” YEAH NO SHIT. NO SHIT I SHOULD HAVE SOLD. I SHOULD HAVE SOLD MOMENTS BEFORE EVERY SELL AND BOUGHT MOMENTS BEFORE EVERY BUY BUT YOU KNOW WHAT NOT EVERYBODY IS AS COOL AS YOU. You only sell in a bear market if you are a good day trader or an illusioned noob. The people inbetween hold. In a zero-sum game such as this, traders can only take your money if you sell.

so i’ve had some whiskey

actually on the bottle it’s spelled whisky

w/e

sue me

(But only if it’s payable in BTC)

It was not about bitcoin versus bitcoin cash or 1,000 other cryptocurrencies. It was bitcoin vs. the world and we ALL embraced it.

It only took 11 minutes for this post to become a meme that became the rallying cry for the entire crypto world. We were all on the same rollercoaster ride and GameKyuubi, in the depths of his frustration, had (sort of) elegantly articulated both what it feels like and the best trading strategy for an asset this volatile.

Buy and HODL.

The Five Keys to Crypto Evolution

May 7, 2018 flippener

So the doomsayers were right all along. Crypto was nothing but a bubble and it finally burst.

Good.

Maybe you’re surprised to hear that coming from me, someone who’s dedicated more than a few words to the power of crypto to change the world. Did I suddenly have a change of heart? Did I jump on the Paul Krugman bandwagon and finally realize that Bitcoin is evil? Did I join the naysayers who laugh with glee every time the price drops and arrogantly shout that Bitcoin is going to zero?

Nope.

I say good because the circus has finally left town. The cameras have packed up and gone home. The reporters are losing interest. The story is finished.

And now the crypto community can get back to doing the hard work of building the future in peace and quiet.

I’ve always said the bubble would burst and in the long run it wouldn’t matter in the least. In retrospect I think Bitcoin getting to $20,000 so fast was the worst thing to ever happen to the community. For years, Bitcoin was nothing but Internet geek money and something to laugh at, but when Bitcoin’s price rocketed higher and higher, it suddenly became something else entirely:

A threat.

Bitcoin’s furious rise scared the hell out of banks and governments everywhere. Banks saw their business models crumbling as programmable money took the world by storm and governments feared they might lose their iron-fisted control of the money supply. Authoritarian regimes raced to crush it. Regulators came out in force. The press unleashed a torrent of articles filled with fear, uncertainty and doubt.

But now as Bitcoin’s price recedes the frenzy of ignorance and fear will die with it and the community can get back to work.

Bitcoin Investors UK

Category Archives: Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin Spikes to 2-Week High Above $54K: ETH Tops $1800 (Market Watch)

Ethereum NFT of Burned Banksy Piece Sells for $380,000

Bitcoin Marketcap Breaches $1 Trillion With New ATH of $53,756

Bitcoin price to hit $100,000, Anthony Scaramucci predicts

Scaramucci Bitcoin Price prediction may be right

A Wave of Giants Rushing to Invest in Bitcoin Could Derail the Stock Market

Bitcoin to Surpass $20,000 ATH By Early 2021

Raoul Pal: Everything Has Changed

The UK and US Clamping Down On Crypto Trading – It’s Not Yet A Big Deal

Drops and oceans?

Bitcoin’s Price Booms to Highest Level Since June 2019

HODL On: In Defense of Bitcoin’s Best Strategy

History of the #HODL

The Five Keys to Crypto Evolution

The leading Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency site for UK investors