Yesterday morning Bitcoin dropped from over $4000 to down around $3875.
Then in the afternoon, it dropped again, down to around $3640.
This morning, traders are left staring at a chart in which new lows went even lower within a span of 24 hours.
Bitcoin’s descent has been sudden – Yuval Gov at Cryptopotato who can always be counted on to provide solid technical analysis and insightful coverage, perhaps said it best:
“It’s incredible how gains of two weeks were gone in just 10 hours,” Gov wrote this morning. “Bulls Walk Up the Stairs-Bears Jump Out the Window.”
Gov also said that the drop could have been expected.
“As we mentioned, the sharp decline could be anticipated, by looking at the number of shorts versus longs. What led to a long-squeeze.”
That’s one way to describe why Bitcoin is languishing below $4000, but from a long-view intuitive market standpoint, you could say that it’s because there aren’t enough indicators of broader blockchain acceptance this year.
However, the year is still young and many commentators have called 2019 the year that things happen for crypto!
Keep in mind that if at any point in this year Bitcoin values go up over $5000 or $6000, then today’s value will be seen as a fire sale.
In other news, the drop of crypto currency runner-up Ethereum makes Bitcoin’s loss look like a minor abrasion.
By contrast, ETH, which was up around $150 yesterday and now stands at around $125, looks a lot like a paper doll cut off at the shoulders.
“The ETH/USD pair recently failed to break the $150-151 zone and a bearish trend line,” wrties Aayush Jindal at NewsBTC today, describing this disappointing performance. “It resulted in a sharp bearish reaction and the price declined below the $146 and $144 supports. Sellers gained control and pushed the price below the $130 level. There was even a close below the $130 level and the 100 hourly simple moving average. A low was formed near $122 and later the price started consolidating losses.”
In the longer term, analysts are expecting Ethereum Classic hard forks planned for later this month to change ETH pricing.
“The developers have figured out that the difficulty bomb programmed into Ethereum has caused the blocks to become extremely slow after a point, after which no more blocks can be mined,” explains a Jan. 8 article at Coinswitch.
“The developers have to hard fork periodically so that ETH keeps on getting updated with the latest technology. Ethereum has already experienced a split once, which led to hard fork over the loss of the development fund and some didn’t agree on reversing any transactions even if it was a hack, which led to the formation of ETC (Ethereum Classic). The Constantinople hard fork will implement few major changes related to improve Ethereum blockchain performance and mining rewards mentioned in Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs).”
Keep tracking both of these crypto prices throughout the day to see if there’s any correction.
