This week saw the 500th anniversary of Magellan setting sail to circumnavigate the globe. So how is Bitcoin doing on its path to global domination?
Bitcoin Price: Another Net Positive Week
Bitcoin price started the week on a flyer, jumping 10% on Monday, and propelling it back towards the $12,000 mark. Year-to-date, this meant that bitcoin had outperformed stocks by a factor of ten. Further price increases on Tuesday pushed us back over $12k, albeit only briefly before a pullback to Monday’s levels.
Binance CEO, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), got bullish, tweeting ‘Don’t bet against Bitcoin’, prompting one Bitcoin whale to do just that. The whale offered to personally send CZ 10BTC if price didn’t drop back below $8k in August.
Bearishness aside, support held at $11,200 and BTC bounced back to trade at around $11.6k. Wednesday saw bitcoin poke its head even more briefly above the $12k level, and price continued to flirt with but not surpass this value on Thursday.
Some believed that the current rally was running out of steam, although others were still eyeing $12,400. If the price could just hold until the end of the week it would be the highest weekly close of 2019…
Sadly, a crash on Saturday has seen us trading around the $11.3k level ever since. Not the end to the week that we had hoped for, but still a healthy jump up from last week. And Tim Draper says that we will still be at $250k by the start of 2023, so long-term HODLers can rest easy.
Cryptocurrency In Court
A number of high-profile crypto-court-proceedings have seen movement this week. Must be something in the air.
Canadian instant-messaging company Kik, kicked (sorry) back against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), with a 130-page document refuting its allegations. Kik strongly implied that the SEC action against its 2017 ICO was just a publicity stunt. Of course, the SEC isn’t the only entity gaining publicity through the ongoing litigation.
A U.S. judge ruled that Coinbase must face negligence charges over its bodged launch of Bitcoin Cash trading. But whilst BCash buyers were given the green light to proceed with legal action, sellers had their claims dismissed. To be fair, ‘we want compensation because we missed the opportunity to seller BCH at artificially high prices’, was unlikely to garner much sympathy.
Finally, the end of the week gave us the first glimpse of Peter McCormack’s defense against Craig Wright‘s libel action. The essence was that calling Wright’s claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto fraudulent could not harm his reputation, as his reputation is already awful.
Oh, and arrests at Goldman Sachs over money laundering, made a mockery of U.S. Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin’s assertion that cash is not used for such illegal activities.
News In Brief
July saw BitMEX deliver the worst month in its history, as over half a billion dollars left the platform.
The Bitcoin SV blockchain temporarily split into three after a massive 210MB block was mined on the network.
Lightning Network almost doubled its node count and capacity in the first half of 2019.
The United Nations claimed that North Korea has accumulated $2 billion of cryptocurrency to fund weapons programs.
Binance issued a statement to deny that it had lost customer information in a hack on KYC data. Meanwhile, the hackers who stole more than 7,000 BTC from the exchange back in May, were reportedly trying to launder the coins through a mixer.
And Blockstream announced two new bitcoin mining services with an eye on improving decentralization in the field.
And Finally…
Chinese bitcoiners have found the perfect present for their version of Valentine’s Day. The number 520 in Chinese is pronounced similarly to ‘I love you’, so crypto whales have been sending loved ones a symbolic 520 BTC.
Because nothing says ‘I love you’ more than $6.1 million.
What do you think of this week’s Bitcoin news roundup? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below!