Tensions are running high in the face of the bitcoin hard fork scheduled for next week but the price is running higher. Cryptocurrency expert and eToro top Trader Jay Smith has outlined the entire debate for us in a single blog post. Jay has defined four specific groups of people are involved, what their incentives are, and how they are likely to respond once the fork happens.
Check out the full post: https://www.etoro.com/blog/markets/07112017/bitcoin2x-and-how-it-will-impact-the-cryptocurrency-markets/
Market Overview
It’s now been an entire year since Donald Trump was elected. Let’s take a look at how some of the markets have reacted to this new radical regime change in the world’s largest economy.
Stocks are up!! Way friggin up!!!
Huge gains include 21% on the S&P500, 28% for the Dow Jones, and an incredible 30% for the Nasdaq…
On the other side, we have the US Dollar which is down quite significantly.
There was indeed a run up from the election date until new years, which was followed by one of the strongest declines in recent history. In the last few months, there’s been a bit of a bounce. All in all, over the past year, the US Dollar is down about 3.5%.
What’s incredible here are the huge swings. As the world’s preferred reserve currency, it’s usually better that the Buck remain stable. However, as we can see from the chart above, from the highs (yellow circle) to the lows (blue circle) there was a total decline of 12%, which is certainly not ideal.
For the commodities, it may be more helpful to zoom out and see them in a more long-term context. So here are Gold and Oil since the beginning of 2013.
Both of the above experienced massive declines recently. Gold in 2013 and oil in 2014. For Gold the decline was more of a correction, after massive increases over the past few decades. For Oil, the declines came as the biggest oil producer pact known as OPEC broke apart and they stopped limiting supply as they have been for the past decades to keep the prices up.
For both of the commodities, there were some declines early on in the Presidency but the overall trend seems to be an upward one, which is well in line with the roaring stocks and the declining Dollar.
Frozen Ethereum
Yesterday, there was quite a stir in the crypto community. The news broke right as we were beginning a special webinar for our Platinum clients in eToro and so we had a great chance to see the reaction of the markets in real time. You can see the recording of that webinar at:
A company called ParityTech, which offers a secure Ether wallet service, had a security flaw that ended up compromising all of their client’s tokens.
All in all, about $300 Million worth of Ethereum is now frozen and seemingly unrecoverable. An innocent bystander, Polkadot.io was reported to be holding their entire ICO money about $90 Million in the ParityTech wallets.
The most outrageous thing about this attack is this conversation which happened on Parity’s page Gitter chatroom…
Apparently, a self proclaimed newbie to smart contracts found a flaw in Parity’s protocol and exploited it, instantly locking up all the money held in those wallets. This sudden world class hacker/bonehead didn’t even make a dime. A very poor payout for finding a secuirty flaw in a protocol designed for secuirty.
The price of Ethereum was little changed. Users are already quite immune to isolated security threats and understand that it was the website that got hacked and not the network. The amount of money frozen was enough to make some people cry, but only represents about 0.06% of the total ETH supply and so has not increased demand.
Overall, the price of Ethereum remains pleasantly stable. Over the past few months, it’s been consolidating into its average price of $300, right into the center of a very comfortable triangle formation…
