First Mover: Privacy is Litecoin’s trump card like JPMorgan Touts Bitcoin

Litecoin (LTC), a nine-year cryptocurrency whose price returns have chronically underperformed the largest and best-known bitcoin in recent years, is making a leap to a new star: privacy.

The blockchain industry subsector of “privacy coins” – cryptocurrencies with embedded technology that protects identifying information from public view – is becoming one of the hottest purchases this year. One of the largest privacy coins, zcash (ZEC), which offers “secure transaction” functionality, has nearly tripled so far in 2020, while monero (XMR), which uses a technique called “ring signatures” to obscure data of sender and recipient, is doubled.

Litecoin founder Charlie Lee told CoinDesk in an interview that the project is now looking to adopt key privacy-enhancing features, which he considers increasingly attractive to cryptocurrency users. The improvements are already being tested and an upgrade to the main network is planned for next year. If the effort is successful, it could inject a jolt of enthusiasm into a project that has suffered from a lack of momentum in digital asset markets. Litecoin is up 21% this year after a 38% gain in 2019, which pales compared to bitcoin’s year-to-date 59% gain and a 94% increase last year.

“I want to make sure that users don’t have to worry about giving up their financial privacy by using litecoin,” Lee said. “Even if you’re not doing anything illegal, you don’t want people to know how much money you have or what your salary is.” – Daniel Cawrey
Learn more: In an effort to differentiate itself, Litecoin is moving towards privacy

Bitcoin is hovering around $ 11,400 at press time, having snapped a six-day winning trend with a 1% drop on Tuesday.

Notably, the cryptocurrency formed an “inside day” candle on Tuesday, breaking the immediate bullish technical outlook. Inner day candle occurs when the cryptocurrency is trading well within the previous day’s high and low and indicates a consolidation.

Therefore, Tuesday’s high of $ 11,567 is now the level to beat for the bulls. A break above that level would signal a continuation of the recent rally and open the door to resistances above $ 12,000.

Alternatively, accepting below Tuesday’s low of $ 11,314 would imply a bearish reversal and could produce deeper dips.

That said, on-chain metrics favor an ongoing rally. The seven-day average bitcoin hashrate or measure of processing power dedicated to the blockchain rose to a record high of 144.29 exa hashes per second (quintillion hashes per second) on Tuesday, surpassing the previous peak of 143.19 EH. / s observed on September 18, according to data source Glassnode.

It indicates high confidence of miners in the price outlook of the cryptocurrency. Miners operate largely in cash and liquidate their BTC holdings to fund the operations. As such, they are likely to devote more resources to the computer-intensive mining process if they are bullish on the price.

Read more: Bitcoin stable above $ 11,400 as Hashrate hits a new high

Bitcoin (BTC): The giant money manager Fidelity proposes bitcoin as an “alternative investment”.

Ether (ETH): The Ethereum (Eth 2.0) network update is expected shortly and could solve the scaling issues associated with its legacy platform.

JPMorgan calls Square’s $ 50M bitcoin investment “strong vote of confidence” for cryptocurrency (CoinDesk)

Bank of Russia seeks a limit on the amount of digital assets retail investors can purchase (CoinDesk)

Blockchain Could Give A $ 1.7T Boost To The Global Economy By 2030, Says PwC (CoinDesk) Report

New cVIX index tracks cryptocurrency market volatility (CoinDesk)

Blue Kirby Saga Shows DeFiers Are A Lot Of Trust, Until They Are (CoinDesk)

Coinbase chief compliance officer walks away while CEO’s “apolitical” position proves political (CoinDesk)

Nasdaq listed Marathon Patent partners with Beowulf Energy to co-locate bitcoin mining facility in Montana (CoinDesk)

The lesson from the third quarter is that cryptocurrencies are “still a retail dominated sector,” writes Joshua Frank of The TIE (eToro / The TIE)

BitMEX Charges Show Gone Are The Days When Innovators Could “Take An Apathetic Approach To Regulatory And Legal Compliance” (Arca)

Coin Metrics analysis maps BitMEX executives Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo and Samuel Reed to their respective withdrawal keys (Coin Metrics):

IMF’s Tobias Adrian sees risk of “sharp asset price adjustment or periodic periods of volatility” (IMF)

BlackRock’s Larry Fink sees the future with only 50% of office workers (Bloomberg)

Argentine president says government has no plans to devalue the country’s currency (Bloomberg)

Shenzhen China Tech Hub Plays Digital Yuan Pilot Program (SCMP)

Interest rate cuts in the US and elsewhere cause China to buy hitherto “unattractive” government bonds from Japan (CNBC)

Environmental, social and governance concerns could impact equity valuations, says Jeffrey Ubben of ValueAct (Reuters)