By 
Today, Bitcoin suffered a slight decline in price due to the South Korean government’s ban on domestic initial coin offerings (ICOs).
South Korean Financial Services Commision (FSC) officially announced its short-term plans of banning “all forms” of ICOs that are conducted by companies within South Korea. Although, local investors are still allowed to invest in foreign ICOs.
Bitcoin price started recovering very quickly, partly due to Japan. The country’s financial regulator authorized and licensed 11 cryptocurrency exchanges in Japan including BitFlyer, BitBank, Zaif, Quoine. Subsequently, Bitcoin price increased from $4050 to $4200 in no time.
That being said, uncertainty regarding the potential SegWit2x hard fork continues to weigh on the mid-term outlook of the bitcoin price. Support for Segwit2x is growing day by day. It’d be interesting to see how the markets react this in the coming weeks.
If Bitcoin gains momentum and is further strengthened, it will go beyond the $4,300 level. Its primary goal is growing up to $4,680, beyond which other maximums will likely be tested. As of now, the closest support level is about $4,050. The price is unlikely to go below $4,000 in the nearest future.
Top Stories from the Crypto World
1. South Korea becomes the second country to ban ICOs
South Korea announced a ban on Initial Coin Offerings on Friday, following China, which banned the practice earlier this month. The Financial Services Commission (FSC) said it will prohibit all forms of the blockchain funding method “regardless of technical terminology.”
Surprisingly, margin trading of virtual currencies will also be illegal following the ruling.
“There is a situation where money has been flooded into an unproductive and speculative direction,” said Kim Yong-beom, vice chairman of the commission.
Why it matters: In recent months, startups have raised tens, and sometimes hundreds, of millions of dollars by selling newly created virtual currencies. While some of these currencies could solve existing problems, most of them are there just to raise capital. What’s interesting here is that when China banned ICO’s, it took more than two weeks for markets to recover. In South Korea’s case, which is also a huge cryptocurrency market, markets managed to recover in less than a day.
2. US to focus on blockchain technology adoption
Trump administration has declared commitment to blockchain, declaring that it’s looking at optimizing the U.S government through blockchain use cases.
In the Data Transparency 2017 conference, two top Trump White House officials announced for the first time that U.S. policymakers are increasingly looking at crypto as a cornerstone of American tech strategies going forward.
3. Charlie Lee opposes Segwit2x
Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin, has been expressing concerns over the upcoming Segwit2x hard fork. Lee said:
“Miners and business cannot change Bitcoin without user consensus. So today, to show my disapproval, I’m adding [NO2X] to my name.”
Why it matters: Segwit2x was first proposed by Barry Silbert-led Digital Currency Group as a follow up solution to the Hong Kong agreement. The idea was to increase the block size to 2MB in order to solve scaling issues. Due to the lack of support from Bitcoin Core, the companies behind SegWit2x proposal hard forked Bitcoin to create their own version of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash.
There is no real need of another Bitcoin hard fork. It’s a bunch of centralized group of businesses trying to alter the Bitcoin protocol without the agreement of Bitcoin Core developers, the open-source development community, the industry, and users.
Segwit2x could potentially be a government takeover of Bitcoin, because a small group of corporations subject to full government financial regulations will have taken over the project. Avoiding it would likely be the best thing for Bitcoin, but then again – with the support of enough miners and developers, no one can really stop it from happening.
Here’s an extremely interesting medium article on the future Bitcoin fork(s).