The big crypto currency boom may be over, but it remains an extremely exciting area of technology, full of exciting advancements and amazing opportunities. The days of overnight bitcoin millionaires might have passed for now but the impact of blockchain technology is here to stay – spearheading security improvement efforts across the globe. That said, there are still opportunities to make big money with cryptocurrencies, for example, you can now cash out your BTC, at various Sportsbooks, and it’s a great option to make your profits grow.
This year has been particularly interesting, due to the global economic impact of the Coronavirus pandemic. The market itself has a reputation for being volatile – just look at Bitcoin’s highs and lows over the last few years of its operation – and there’s so much tied up in the future of crypto, what it represents as an ideal, how it is achieved with technology, that keeping up with news can be a little bit difficult for the uninitiated. With that in mind, we’ve summed up three of the industry’s biggest headlines all in one place.
Investors prepare for a Christmas boost, Bitcoin finally passes $20,000
Market trends have indicated financial rallies from as early as the 1970’s, and many investors have predicted this usual uptrend will finally push Bitcoin over the $20,000 mark. Today, it finally managed it. It’s been languishing under there since early December, and the pattern has been harder to predict this year due to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic. Governments the world over have been flooding their economies with stimulus packages, which has probably been somewhat responsible for the steady climb so far.
Ethereum and Litecoin are also hoping for a boost – and though these crypto currencies don’t see as drastic an uptick as the granddaddy Bitcoin, investors are still waiting with baited breath. Ethereum has seen a huge increase this year, and is leading the way in the support of smart contracts. It’s not the biggest crypto growth we’ve seen this year, far from it – but the company has a lot of attention and investment from big players in the financial world. With all this in mind, the currency’s future looks bright indeed.
CEO of Coinbase warns of possible regulation rumours
Last month, Brian Armstrong – CEO of Coinbase – tweeted that he’d heard rumours that the United States Treasury Department may rush out crypto regulations before the end of Donald Trump’s presidency in January. “Last week we heard rumors that the U.S. Treasury and Secretary Mnuchin were planning to rush out some new regulation regarding self-hosted crypto wallets before the end of his term. I’m concerned that this would have unintended side effects, and wanted to share those concerns.”
Brian Armstrong goes into plenty of detail about the topic on his Twitter, and probably explains it all better than we could here – but the gist of it is that the government may be preparing to force financial institutions – like Coinbase – to verify identities of wallet owners, basically invalidating the important anonymity that many people have flocked to cryptocurrency for in the first place.
“Many crypto users are using their crypto with new types of applications online. Imagine if every time you wanted to upvote some content on Reddit or transfer an item in a game you were hit with a form asking you to verify a recipient.” Obviously this is a big deal – if America, the world’s largest economy, were to go ahead and force these regulations through, it could outright kill many of crypto’s emerging functionalities, and do a lot of damage to a very valuable market.
UK’s Financial Conduct Authority establishes temporary measures to allow firm trading to continue
The governing body was left with a huge backlog of registrations from the original January deadline, due in part to the same thing that’s been messing everything up this year – but today they have announced a list of firms that will be allowed to continue to operate temporarily whilst they work their way through the queue. There’s around ninety firms on the list. This basically allows existing crypto businesses to continue trading, pending FCA approval until the 9th of July, 2021 as long as they registered before December 15th.
In October, the sale of crypto products to retail customers was banned in the UK, with the watchdog stating that the volatility of crypto-related assets made them unsuitable for sale.
