Bitcoin Cash Is Making A Splash
Mati Greenspan | Nov 13, 2017 05:16AM ET
The action in the crypto markets over the weekend has been simply phenomenal. After the Segwit2X hard fork was called off last Thursday the crypto markets have been bouncing around like a kangaroo on steroids.
Most of the action has been centered around the new version of bitcoin known as Bitcoin Cash or BCH. eToro is very proud to announce that we have now added BCH to our platform for your trading and investment pleasure.
Please feel free to join the discussion or place a trade directly at: https://www.etoro.com/markets/bch
Today's Highlights
Bitcoin Cash - What Just happened?
The Silent and fast winner
Other things to watch
Please note: All data, figures & graphs are valid as of November 13th. All trading carries risk. Only risk capital you can afford to lose.
Market Overview
BCH is a rather new player on the Crypto-scene . It was created on August 1st as an alternative to BTC and has blocks that can hold up to 8 MB worth of transactions, whereas the original bitcoin is capped at 1 MB. Though Bitcoin Cash is very far from claiming bitcoin's title as "digital gold" it has made some strong advances over the weekend.
Some cryptocurrency miners discovered that for a few brief hours it was actually more profitable to mine BCH than BTC, which caused many of them to switch over.
In this graph, we can see that the mining power, also known has the hashrate, for BCH has now overcome that of BTC...
Even though mining profitability has now returned to its former status, many have still not switched back and there remains a very large backlog of unconfirmed transactions on the Bitcoin Blockchain.
122,000 transactions could take a while to work through so anybody sending bitcoin right now will either need to pay a higher fee or wait a bit longer for their transactions to be confirmed. However, I did see this number as high 176,000 at the height of the chaos.
The price action on bitcoin cash since Thursday has been insane. There are many conspiracies floating around the web that this has all been one extremely elaborate pump and dump. Of course, you don't need to dig deep to know that some of the biggest backers of this new coin are rather shady fellows indeed.
Get The News You Want
The price went from a steady $637 per coin all the way up to $2,500 in under 60 hours before giving most of it back.
Most of this value came directly from BTC, which is now showing a notable pullback from its all time highs just shy of $8,000. The first support of $5,500 (blue) has already been triggered. However, if this cash splash continues, we should see strong psychological support every $500, until we hit the yellow trend line.
The big winner on the side has been DASH coin. With all the drama on the main chain, Dash has been seeing some excitement as an already established internet payment method. After breaking out of its consolidation triangle a week ago, the price has seen its own explosion, stealing just a bit of the market cap from bitcoin itself.
What else?
The traditional stock markets seem to be on pause. After eight straight weeks with nothing but gains, we're now seeing some of the indexes registering losses. European markets fell about 0.5% on Friday and the Asian session this morning is giving rather mixed signals.
In Friday's update, we spoke about Oil. Prices have come off of their highs and West Texas Crude is now going for $56.75 a barrel. Coming into focus now is the OPEC meeting on November 30th. The price controlling cartel is doing their best to build up expectations for this meeting. At this point, they've done such a great job that it will prove difficult to deliver up to said expectations.
Also, tomorrow there will be a great gathering of global central bankers in Frankfurt. These type of meetings sometimes prove vital to understanding the long term trends, so of course, we'll have more on that in tomorrow's update.
Wishing you a very profitable week ahead!
@MatiGreenspan
eToro, Senior Market Analyst
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