Bitcoin seemed to stabilize around Christmas Eve around December 24th, but steadily decreased to a floor around $318, going back up to $330 and plummeting down to $310. As described in my last market analysis, I predicted this movement two weeks ago. People liquidating holdings for holiday cash, as shown by the massive sell-offs today.
Since the end of November, we have fallen from a price of around $380 and reached a price of $318.73 as of the time of writing. This is a 16.2% decrease in price in just a month, which averages out to a 4.05% decrease every week since the end of November. If you want to get especially particular, you will mostly be losing $2.19 every day you held.
Bitcoin is not the only to have suffered, with Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Darkcoin at taking massive sell-offs as well. Litecoins price has fallen to the sub $3 range, and Darkcoins has fallen below $2. Ripple even made a slight decrease as well, and volume has fallen as well too.
Ripple is still astounding, about three-quarters of the way to a one billion market cap. The only coin to have achieved this is Bitcoin, and would put Ripple on many people’s radar, especially big investors that are interested in Bitcoin as well.
Monero is my coin of the week as it experienced the most amount of movement, with a decent volume behind it.
With nearly $100k volume, Moneros price has appreciated by 52% this week alone, proving profitable for Monero holders. The reason I did not choose another coin that increased more on paper (like Marinecoin increasing by 150% in the last seven days) is that they were typically low volume. This is usually then a reliable sign of market manipulation, which is not an environment most investors thinking the long-term want to deal with when it comes to their money.
Another coin that has arose is Paycoin. Paycoin is a coin started by GAWMiners, a well-known cloud mining service with their trademark hashlets and mining services. Recently GAW introduced the hashstaker as well as Paycoin to stake coins without a local wallet.
From their website.
Hashstaker is the first cloud staking web wallet, because
Mining should be safe, secure and reliable. That’s what cryptocurrency stands for, after all. The people who support cryptocurrency the most should be the people who benefit from it first. That’s why we built the HashStaker: to give power back to the miners.
Anyone can stake Paycoin, but people with access to hashstakers have access to a Prime StakePool, which is analogous to a multipool.
With the release of Paycoin after its first funding round, is now released into the market and is currently at number three on CMC.
While the current price is significantly lower than the price in which it sold for at the presale (at $20 a Paycoin), Paycoin still has one of the highest market capitalizations for a recently launched cryptocurrency. In fact, it even bumped Litecoin down to number four on on the market capitalization list.
Even with tremendous success from the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl sponsored by Bitpay, Bitcoin price is still falling more and more every day. Some days are worse than other, but the general trend for the year has been a steady decline in price.
While adoption and awareness have increased, such as Microsoft adopting Bitcoin and the spike of changetip use after the Bitcoin Bowl.
With 2015 just around the corner, where does this leave us?