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Now that Bitcoin has managed to get China news out of the way, its price is comfortably hovering between $3900 and $4100 levels – a key resistance range. A breakout from here would look to find support at $4600.
China continues step up their efforts to crackdown Bitcoin exchanges – maybe even extending the ban to mining – according to a report by WSJ. Traders seem to have moved out of the country as other markets like Japan and South Korea take majority of the market share.
Scholastic has pulled up from the oversold region showing that buyers have regained control of Bitcoin price action. At the time of writing Bitcoin is trading at $4002 with majority of the trading happening in BTC/USD pair at Bitfinex – $230 million in the past 24 hours.
Top Stories from the Crypto World
1. Ethereum’s hard fork is now being tested
The first part of Ethereum’s long-awaited Metropolis upgrade, Byzantium, has officially launched on testnet. It was executed on Ropsten, the ethereum testing environment, and is expected to run for a few weeks of troubleshooting before the fork occurs on the main Ethereum blockchain.
This hard fork will move Ethereum’s protocol from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS).
A side note: BitTorrent creator, Bram Cohen, recently published a white paper on eco-friendly mining, which envisions to be an alternative to Bitcoin’s energy-intensive proof-of-work consensus method.
2. China’s Bitcoin exchange ban may extend to mining
According to a report by WSJ, Beijing officials told several bitcoin industry executives that peer-to-peer trading would not be tolerated during a closed-door meeting held last Friday. This contradicts earlier reports which suggested that regulators would allow OTC trading platforms.
Notably, most OTC brokers have already moved from Tencent to more anonymous apps like Telegram to continue Bitcoin trading.
As for mining, it is still speculative if the government will go after mining farms. Even though the exchange ban has plummeted China’s daily trade volumes to 7-10% of overall trading volume, the country still accounts for nearly 65% of the total Bitcoin hashrate.
ViaBTC CEO Haipo Yang puts it more bluntly:
“Technically, China can’t ban bitcoin traffic, we have our own sync network. But if China gov say mining is illegal, we are fucked.”
3. Julian Assange supports Bitcoin as a solution to Spanish financial oppression of Catalonia
A recent report from BBC News suggests that the Spanish government will seize control of the finances of the autonomous region of Catalonia within 48 hours, if they don’t stop the ‘illegal’ referendum vote regarding independence.
Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, quickly tweeted his support of the referendum and importance of Bitcoin in this regard. He said:
“Spanish intelligence repression of #Catalonia: What is to be done? #Crypto #ethereum #bitcoin #monero #censhorship #CatalonianReferendum”