Two days ago I mentioned a few crypto news items that I wanted to discuss.

Unfortunately, yesterday I became distracted by another topic (happens all the time - ask my wife!) and wrote about that instead. Today I am getting back to those crypto topics as promised.

From https://www.pexels.com/photo/art-blur-business-close-up-271402/

Crypto Snippets 2018 07 08 ⇐ (For Americans: this is how dates are supposed to be written!)

Ethereum - it's time for less talk and more action

How long have we been waiting for Ethereum to become PoS now? Too long. It's time that the most popular platform in crypto gets serious about its development timeline if it intends to hold onto that number 1 spot. (Keeping it warm for NEO 😉) This week a problem became apparent in the network as Gas prices charged up to unexpected levels. While things are now back to normal, when I checked yesterday Gas prices were still fairly high.

One would think that the CryptoKitties saga in December would have given Ethereum a wake-up call. Perhaps it didn't. I've participated in several ICOs on Ethereum and have seen the effects of a "Gas war". It's not pretty! Investors hike Gas prices up to the max that myetherwallet has to offer (and even beyond that - a trick which I must still learn how to do - if only out of interest). I've been in an ICO where people end up paying over 0.8 ETH in Gas alone!

Extracted from a CargoX email

This latest Gas price surge is being blamed on an exchange distributing lots of small amounts of tokens. That's not good for Ethereum... I know that many people seem to think that tps (Transactions Per Second) is the best metric by which to measure a cryptocurrency, especially a platform like Ethereum. Obviously this is incorrect, using tps to rate a platform is like rating a computer based on the size of it's Hard Drive alone: it's not completely useless as a measurement, only 95% useless. Having said that, Ethereum is an "old" platform and its maximum tps is way behind that of its more modern competitiors. It's crying out for a new version!

Ethereum you're complacent! If you want to hold onto that crown you have to work for it and stay in shape. I guess Buterin is far too young to remember the plot of "Rocky III"...

Tom Lee sticking to his Bitcoin price prediction

Tom Lee should enter my Bitcoin price prediction competition. His views on BTC price for the year are almost perfectly aligned with my own. He's maintaining that it will end the year between $22k - $25k. For those who don't know who Tom Lee is, he's a famous Wall Street strategist and the man behind the Bitcoin Misery Index, in which I am a firm believer. For the record, he's also predicted a $36k BTC price for the end of 2019 and a $91k BTC price by March 2020. I haven't done long-term BTC price predictions myself, but those do sound realistic to me.

Increasing mainstream legitimacy

Not a day goes by that I don't see news of another major financial role-player hopping aboard the crypto bandwagon. This week Bernstein analysts said that: "the cryptocurrency ecosystem is developing an alternative to Wall Street". They went on to say many other very positive things about crypto, read them here.

The main Swiss stock exchange "Six" took things a step further by announcing that they will open a fully regulated crypto exchange next year. I'm not going to go into the details, instead I will hand you over to the crypto-skilled Steemian @pandorasbox who has already blogged about it, and whose post originally alerted me to this piece of news. Read her post about Six here: https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@pandorasbox/swiss-stock-exchange-six-to-add-crypto-markets . Give her some votes, she writes really good posts!

Questionable TA continues

I often lament the number of make-it-show-what-I-want-it-to-show TA posts. I've blogged about poor TA on several occasions. This one caught my eye as yet another example: https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-price-declines-over-q2-for-first-time-on-record/ . A quote from the post:

"The above chart shows BTC has bounced off the key 75-week exponential moving average (EMA) (MA) support."

Seriously? What the hell makes the 75 week line so special? Is it Feng-Shui? Numerology? A psychic reading perhaps? Come on people! There is absolutely no reason why "75" should be more important than any other number! He could have said 76, or 83 or 100; but the 75 curve happens to fit his data, so that's the curve he chose to label as a "key" curve. He mentions it 5 times in his article! If that's the kind of TA you follow then you may as well go get yourself a crypto tarot reading. Read this to get some perspective on TA.

Hype coins

Anyone who has been in crypto for more than a few months will have spotted the hype trends. A random coin gets hype, way too much hype, flies up in price and then slowly sinks back down. EOS was the most recent of these (and one of the strongest). Before that it was Tron, before that it was Cardano and so on and so on. With the EOS mainnet launch hype now gone, EOS is slowly sinking it's way down the market cap position ladder.

This leaves place for the new kid in town: Tezos is here and armed with a platform of his own, he's intent on becoming the next big hype coin. Even after a big crash almost a week ago, Tezos is recovering fast and is now sitting at position 18. That's above VeChain, the king of crypto logistics and just below Binance, the king of crypto exchanges, which Tezos should soon overtake in terms of market cap!

Speaking of hype: how on Earth did Bitcoin Diamond get above Bitcoin Gold on CMC? I saw it as high as market cap position number 27 today, which I regard as "bona fide crazy".

I enjoy the freedom of crypto, but this hype behaviour really is insane!

Yours in crypto,
Bit Brain

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by Bit Brain

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