Market Crash Continues | Hodler's Digest

Bitcoin didn't go to the moon this week, so China created an artificial one. So maybe it'll go there. Chinese engineers and scientists want to launch into space to light the city of Chengdu at night. Scheduled for 2020, ready for Tim Draper's price prediction of 250k in 2022. But for now, the market is bearish and it is truly a sign of the times when Hodlers ditch the Lambos for more modest vehicles. But don't get down. There are great deals to be had. Change the way you think about bears and above all, be smart. Also this week, the market crash continues. Bitcoin SV vs Bitcoin ABC KPMG cautiously bullish on crypto and Bitcoin's Billy the Kid, ladies and gentlemen. Hi, I'm Mike and this is your weekly Hodler's Digestion. Early this week, the crypto market suffered heavy losses. Bitcoin plummeted to lows not seen since October 2017, taking down all other major crypto tokens with it. Despite a brief recovery on Wednesday, the overall crypto market kept falling. Many are now wondering what could have caused such a sudden crash. How long will the bloodbath continue and how to survive it? In our special report, we asked Alex Tapscott, Anthony Pompliano and Tone Vaes about it. In case you missed the full report, you can find it the description bitcoin.

Does that Bitcoin constantly drops 80 or 90% to make sure people know what they're doing, that they understand why they're in bitcoin. And I think there were so many big buyers of bitcoin and they weren't buying it for the right reasons. They were buying it to make a quick buck and to be famous and to make money for their investors. And I think a lot of these people need to exit the market completely.

There's a high probability that bitcoin will continue to go down in value. We could see sub 4,000 somewhere in the like 3,500 $3,000 range. And then from the timing perspective, we think it goes into 2019, could go as long as till Q3 of 2019. And so if that happens, we're talking about another nine or 10 months possibly of this bear market until there's true blood in the street capitulation and people basically give up and leave the industry. I don't think we've hit the bottom.

We need to have people feel that there's value in these assets and be willing to buy them, not because of momentum or because of fomo but because they're actually valuing it on what the fundamental utility could be long term. I want to see that this technology is being used, that people are actually getting value out of it, and that the promise that a lot of people made is beginning to get fulfilled in the end. Ultimately, the thing about technology is that people generally tend to vastly overestimate its potential in the short term and then vastly under underestimate its potential in the long term.

My advice right now is if you were thinking of quitting your job and going into the bitcoin ecosystem, don't do it right now. Wait another year. Try to accumulate more fiat capital and if you see Bitcoin drop below that $3,000 range, start accumulating that bitcoin. This is not the time to panic. Sell. Don't ever panic. Sell and you're better off like waiting and selling at 5 or 6,000 at a little bit higher price Many people.

Pointed the finger at last week's controversial Bitcoin Cash hard fork as the probable cause of the market crash. The fork resulted in the creation of two separate coins, Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV, led respectively by nChain chief scientist Craig Wright and Bitcoin.com CEO Roger Ver. Following the fork, the two competing tokens engaged in a hash war for survival, which resulted in substantial losses for both projects as electricity costs to mine the coins far exceed their current value. Miners on both sides reportedly lost around 400k in the two days after the fork. However, at the moment, Bitcoin Cash EVC has the upper hand with significantly more blocks being mined and a longer proof of work chain than Bitcoin sv. Major crypto exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken listed Bitcoin Cash ABC as bch, thus acknowledging it as the legitimate successor of Bitcoin Cash. Despite adopting Bitcoin Cash as V on its platform, Kraken warned users that the token does not meet the platform's usual listing requirements and defined it as extremely high risk investment. In the face of all this, Craig Wright is not admitting defeat and is certain of an eventual victory. We reached out to Craig Wright for comment on the surrounding turmoil of his brainchild Bitcoin SV is currently facing.

We want to maintain Bitcoin as the original Bitcoin. In fact, we go back to what Bitcoin originally was. We want the original opcodes, we want no limit on scale, and we want effectively what was there in the beginning. We don't want the addition of new opcodes, and we don't want to try and make it some anonymous coin. What we're looking at is the original version of Bitcoin. We're having the original version, the original protocol scaled and the bugs, the issue sorted. That's it. Bitcoin is not about decentralization. It is not a Marxist experiment. It is not about that. It is about competition. If you have three miners all competing, you have pure competition. That is the entirety of what it's about. It is not about every person at home running a node. It was never about that. The whole idea is miners are supposed to be in data centers and these idiots just want to try and make a socialist coin and they want to have everyone involved and it's not going to work. There is not a single post satoshi post that is mentions decentralization ever. There is not a central it is about capital, pure and simple. It is about competitive systems. There's just no reason for it. There's no reason. Everyone needs to verify every transaction all the time. It's an anti corporate message. They're just going big bad companies, you can't trust them. But there's no world government, there's no one corporation. Corporations compete. We can keep doing this forever. We don't need. We can just keep at this rate and growing forever. Roger's saying he can do four. Next year we'll do 16, the year after that we'll do 32. We will grow faster than all of the hash rate from BTC and BCH combined and if he wants to keep up he will never ever make a cent. The difference is we don't care about exchange value, we care about use. We care about getting this out to businesses.

Crypto assets are a big deal according to major auditors kpmg. This week they offered some light at the end of a seemingly never ending dark tunnel of FUD and despair. They published a report that was critical, took crypto seriously and was cautiously bullish. Coinbase and Fundstrat contributed the report. Institutionalization of Crypto Assets is divided into four main the case for institutionalization of crypto assets, the challenges they face, KPMG's framework for them and crypto economics. We spoke with the report's main author Kiran Nagaraj about the future of crypto and why institutionalization and stablecoins might not be such dirty words.

The timing is interesting because yes, the price action has been fairly bearish and there is some general sort of views in the market that the market capitalization isn't necessarily the right measure to measure bearishness in the first place. I say that because when I look at the market and I kind of see the amount of activity that's happening, people building infrastructure, people building services, inclusive of ourselves. Right? Building a practice around crypto and you look at how much talent is flowing into the crypto space, those types of metrics aren't necessarily bearish. If anything, they're actually kind of going up. There's been a lot of new startups coming, there's been a lot of new players. I do think 2018 has been a great year in terms of building, building out infrastructure, services and other sort of support ecosystem for the crypto landscape. Ultimately it's about making crypto ubiquitous in sort of in commerce, in the economy, in the financial ecosystem. You know, one level deeper. What that means is I think it's going to require participation from you know, traditional financial services institutions, but also the emerging players. It becomes commonplace. That's ultimately what institutions institutionalization is all about. I do want to clarify one thing. I think sometimes this gets confused with centralizing control. That's not necessarily the answer. The focus here for institutionalization is to help facilitate, scale and increase the trust to drive that mass volume. I'm not going to take names, but there are certain versions and types of stable coins which have all kinds of problems about collateralization, a potential lack of reserves, etc.

Etc.

Assuming a couple of stablecoins actually get this right, I think that's a product evolution which will help the crypto market. And you know, who knows where this is going to go, right? Like I said, if there is a Fed coin, my personal view is then the need for a stablecoin could technically go away.

Finally, some good news from Cryptoland. The largest Swiss stock exchange6 released the world's first ETP or exchange traded product tracking multiple cryptocurrencies. The product's underlying Amon crypto basket index, developed by London based fintech company Amon, will be trading under the ticker hodl. Initially designed to trade the top five cryptocurrencies by market cap, the platform is currently listing Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and Litecoin. Bitcoin cash is temporarily suspended due to last week's hard fork. Amon's co founder and CEO David Heiny Rashwan explained the aim on ETP will give institutional investors restricted to investing only in securities exposure to cryptocurrencies. It will also provide access for retail investors that currently have no access to crypto exchanges due to local regulatory impediments. Many see the launch of the Swiss ETP as a sign of the Increasing trust of large institutional investors towards the cryptocurrency markets as well as an important step leading to, to the introduction of crypto ETFs in the U.S. however, regulators skepticism is still very high. Recently SEC rejected the proposal by the Winklevoss twins and eight more ETF applications because SEC thinks crypto market is not mature enough to handle this kind of product. We talked to Gunther De Bras, partner of the audit firm PwC Legal in Switzerland and crypto evangelist to give his own perspective on the issue.

If you want to access the market, if you want to trade the market rather than focus on any particular play within the market, I think it's, you know, it's a good representation of that and it's you know, straightforward in terms of accessing it through the listing by six. And it's a very reliable way to get in and out with the according liquidity. So we will have to see what the uptake will be. But I think it shows a move towards institutionalization which is, which is very important because you know, obviously you know, people had to go quite often through. Well, I don't, you know, want to be objective but some of the exchange setups and so forth involved were not exactly ideal. So by having six here at the table, which is one of the most prominent and most institutional setups you can get in the world, I think that's a good sign. We've seen some movement as well with the sec. But you know I have a lot of respect for the US regulator. I think they are very conscious in what they're doing and they're not one to be knee jerk reacting. So they will take considerate measures as and when they see inappropriate. The US has its way of doing it and it's their way of doing it and we have to respect that. And some participants in the market would hope for change, faster change, whatever, but I think we have to accept what it is.

From alleged victim to alleged villain, aka Bitcoin's Billy the Kid, aka 21 year old Nicholas Truglia. We first met Truglia back in September when he called the cops on his friends for allegedly torturing him in order to gain access to his over one million dollar Bitcoin fortune. Now it appears Truglia is on the other side of the law. He stands accused of hacking the smartphones of of some pretty major players in Silicon Valley and stealing their crypto. The scam in question is sim swapping. In total there were seven victims, but only one suffered the misfortune of actually losing funds. The victim in this case was Robert Ross, who had a total of $1 million stolen from his Coinbase and Gemini accounts. This was reportedly his life savings and his daughter's college fund.

And it's a devastating crime to have in this case. The victim lost his entire savings, and could happen to anybody at any time.

It might be the case that Ross does recover his life savings.

According to the DA, they recovered $300,000. We're always hoping to recover more. The suspect certainly knows where the rest of that money is, and we're hoping that he may do the right thing.

Bitcoin is, of course, pseudonymous, not anonymous. And a special task force was at hand when Truglia allegedly shifted the stolen crypto into his personal account. Truglia, who claims to have studied at Harvard, is currently being held at the Manhattan Detention Complex awaiting extradition to Santa Clara.

He's facing up to 20 years in prison. He is charged with 21 counts, seven separate victims. He's being charged with identity theft and network intrusion as to seven victims, and then grand theft as to one victim that he's accused of stealing a million dollars.

Ever the bombast, the Great Orange Hope announced that he can't imagine anyone else being Time magazine's Man of the Year. Hey, please comment below with who you think should be Times man or Woman of the Year in the crypto world. And as always, like subscribe and Hodl Cointelegraph. Like subscribe and Hodl. Sam.