Year-end edition

Stocks have declined, but bitcoin has increased in the last week – around 18% since the writing of this article. Is the fund of the one year's tinsel market for the crypt finally arrived? Some tend to think this way, given that the record trade volume has flooded the markets in the last 72 hours, perhaps acting as a Christmas present for HODLers shot down everywhere. In the special Christmas edition of this week's Weekly Roundup, let's talk about how "crowd wisdom" was wrong when it came to predicting BTC prices by the end of the year, reviewing the lone winner in the first 100 coins by capitalization market, I tell you those who managed to beat the sad performance of BTC (there were not many), and go over some of the biggest losers – one of which is potentially responsible for dragging the rest of the market with it, and that you probably won being surprised to find out

Financial media experts lost big in 2018

During the first half of 2018, the testamentary analysts present in popular financial media such as CNBC were quite optimistic about the continued explosion of crypts over the moon and in the deepest regions of the solar system. It does not matter that the bitcoin had already increased by thousands of percent in the last year: the cryptocurrency would have taken the assault on the world and the blockchain revolution was going full force. What happened next, of course, was all that, given that the total value of the market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies currently stands at a mere 23% of his former self at the beginning of the year .

The maximum limit of the coin market is now only a part of its past. Source: coinmarketcap.com

Bitcoin is currently down 72% from 1 January^st, 2018, with many others altcoin down a lot, far beyond. However, this, of course, does not mean that the cryptocurrency movement was a failure by any effort of imagination, but it was caught in a bubble that sooner or later had to burst. For example, despite the tremendous downward movement that has characterized this year, the price of BTC has still increased 366% over the last 2 years, making it a far better investment than almost any stock or traditional asset classes in the same period.

For some reason, people expected even more bitcoin; perhaps out of greed, perhaps for other financial reasons, or perhaps because they sincerely believed that its price would continue to rise to the top forever. In the long run, it could still, but in the short run, there have been some very wrong, far too optimistic views that have been shouted to viewers every day on the financial media. In June, Coin Clarity he published an article about the four-year BTC price forecasts that we said we wanted to keep track of and how close to reality they were all at the end of the year. Whether surprisingly or not surprisingly, they were all completely wrong, and we will analyze them one by one now.

Prediction n. 1: $ 100 – Joseph Stiglitz (no more than -96.7%). The only bear in our group, the economist of the World Bank Stiglitz, warned of the pitfalls of the bitcoin in a January interview Bloomberg:

"My feeling is that when you set it up so you can not get involved in money laundering and all these (crimes), there will not be any bitcoin demands … By regulating the abuse, you will set it out of existence It exists because of abuse. "

Ouch. Hard words for the mother of all cryptocurrencies. Well, Stiglitz turned out to be even more wrong than those who had guessed the exact opposite and, to his credit, the bitcoin did not approach death in 2018. Some analysts see this as a result in itself, while others I'm still pessimistic, comparing it to a "digital lottery ticket for a dystopian future". Ideally, bitcoin will continue to grow and exist, finding a legitimate niche in the economy without its success being dependent on its utility for fraudulent or otherwise subtle activity.

Prediction 2: $ 20,000 – $ 25,000 – Tom Lee (out of + 77.5% – + 82%). In July, Tom Lee of Fundstrat Global Advisors told CNBC,

"Bitcoin has historically traded at 2.5 times its mining costs, but it may not be more than $ 20,000 by the end of the year at fair value."

Well, the bitcoin continued to lose value after that point, and in November it had reduced its estimate to (which was still very generous) $ 15,000. More recently, he had to give another official review for the record, saying a couple of weeks ago:

"Due to the intrinsic volatility of cryptography, we will cease to provide any period of time for the realization of fair value".

Ops. 3 wildly inaccurate price forecasts will prevent Lee from sitting in front of the CNBC cameras again in the future? We can only hope, but we can not provide any timetable for this realization.

Prediction 3: $ 50,000 – Arthur Hayes (off + 90%). Hayes is the CEO of the popular BitMEX exchange, which allows traders to take advantage of the leverage opportunities not normally offered by more traditional bitcoin exchanges. At the end of June, him told CNBC Fast money:

"… We are a positive ruling decision away (as) an ETF approved by the SEC, up to over $ 20,000 and even $ 50,000 by the end of the year."

To be honest with Hayes, the contingency of "positive regulatory decision" for his prediction has never been realized, and earlier in the same interview Hayes had said that BTC could see $ 3000 – $ 5,000 before continuing its upward trajectory, what really happened.

Prediction 4: $ 60,000 – Julian Hosp (off + 92.5%). Hosp, president and co-founder of Crypto Wallet and the start-up company of TenX cards, also expressed his prediction on CNBC at the beginning of July, playing extremely confident at the time:

"I have planned for 2018, we will see $ 5,000 and $ 60,000, so $ 5,000, we almost got hit, so let's see if we can make $ 60,000, I'm still pretty confident."

In a recent Tweet Hosp seems to have cut his estimate about 15 times, but he is still very optimistic about the future of bitcoin.

As embarrassing as these proclamations are, it is almost certain that a new batch of talking heads will be there again next year, demanding extraordinary highs (or lows) in the face of price movements that suggest the opposite, while the old group can only promise to try to do better.

The best and worst coins of the year

Interestingly, there was only 1 currency currently in the top 25 by market capitalization that managed to close the year (so far) with positive returns, namely Binance Coin (BNB), with a gain of 27% from 1 January^st, 2018. At the time of writing this article, BNB was ranked 15th in the list of coins by market capitalization, worth a whopping $ 844 million, making it by far the most successful Ethereum token ever launched. Even in a falling market, mega exchange Binance had a great year, recording record revenue and on track to exceed $ 1 billion in profits by the end of the year.

Only 1 coin in the top 100 recorded positive returns in 2018. Source: cryptocurrencychart.com

The reason for Binance's success? In addition to the fact that they earn on every trade, regardless of whether the market is rising or falling, they have a successful business model for an exchange: a user-friendly interface, a quick and comprehensive support team, Accessibility in over 90 countries, a minimum number of members requirements, and in addition to all this, have never been victims of major hacking (at the beginning of the year they offered a reward of $ 250k in the form of BNB to help find and condemn a hacker attempt).

The uses of the same BNB are threefold: the holders can use it to activate discounts on trading fees, can be loaded on a Visa debit card through their partnership with Monaco and can be used to purchase digital goods from the Uplive platform. Although the token does not allow its holders to do anything like keeping a percentage of profits from their company, Binance intends to buy back up to half of all BNB tokens in circulation and "burn" them, making the token poorer and potentially more valuable.

Only 4 other coins in the first 100 managed to overcome the 72% loss of BTC this year, and those were Maker (MKR) – down 49%, Aeternity (AE) – down 61%, Ripple (XRP) – down 62%, and EOS (EOS) – down 64%.

The biggest loser of the year in the top 100 – both literally and figuratively – was Bitcoin Cash (BCH), currently down 93% from the start of the year. BT Ver's BTC fork started in 2018, after leaving with BTC in the third quarter of 2017. After failing to find a niche in the cryptic user base of the world and having targeted in a tireless struggle for the legitimacy that lost part, Bitcoin Cash has found a new opponent to fight in November: himself.

In August, Bitcoin Cash's core development team (known as Bitcoin ABC) announced that it was planning to fork hard to expand its capabilities as a cryptocurrency. A well-funded and vocal opposition soon came up in response (known as Bitcoin SV), promising to fight a long and bloody "hash war" for the domination of the BCH trading symbol. November 15th^thThe Bitcoin Cash "Civil War" began, providing a great deal of drama and entertainment, which quickly turned into consternation for the cryptic community in general, when it soon became apparent that the two "generals" of each faction were dragging the & rsquo; whole market in their struggle for supremacy.

What may have begun as a legitimate contention was soon reduced to a schoolyard arguing over who was the legitimate owner of an expensive toy. Serious investors have completely lost confidence in the encrypted market and the prices of both fork results (BCH – which has maintained the symbol and BSV) have come to a mark. Even with a recent pump that saw BCH earn 40% in a few days, both combined currencies are still worth significantly less than the price of a 1 BCH fork. Probably BCH will take months to repair his reputation, and BSV will potentially need years to build them.

Other coins that complete the worst performance of the top 100 include Lisk (LSK) – down 92%, Dash (DASH) – down 92%, ICON (ICX) – down 93% and Qtum (QTUM) – in 95% decline.

All in all, it was a rather low year for the whole crypto (with Binance Coin being the only exception).

Also in the news

• One thing that has continued to grow in popularity in front of the bear market is the Bitcoin Lightning Network, which now has a capacity of 500 BTC and includes over 2,000 active channels. For those who did not know, Lightning Network is an off-chain bitcoin scaling solution that allows participants to process payments without having to immediately forward them to the blockchain.
• The former deputy and US presidential candidate, Ron Paul, is criticizing the Federal Reserve again after having recently raised interest rates by a quarter of a point. One of the most famous bitcoin political fans, Paul has called for the elimination of the Fed, reaffirming its long-held belief that the dynamics of the free market should drive interest rates.
• According to reports, the social media giant Facebook is developing a cryptocurrency for users of the messaging service WhatsApp Bloomberg in an article published on December 20th^th. It is believed that the currency will be used to facilitate app money transfers and will initially be directed to the remittance market in India. Citing the sources involved in the project, Bloomberg states that Facebook is developing a new type of stablecoin. Facebook is still processing the problems of its deployment, including the decision on which resource will support and hook up the stablecoin.
• Bitcoin is going boldly where it never happened: outer space. More specifically, the bitcoin blockchain is now transmitted across 5 different satellites to all major land masses (with the exception of Greenland and Antarctica). This means that, thanks to Blockstream bitcoin technicians, bitcoin users no longer need the Internet to send and receive BTC transactions and can send messages from one another from remote regions of the globe. The blockchain is continually updated and runs 24 hours a day, making it a giant step for bitcoins.

Adam Back and Samson Mow pose in the foreground of a blockchain satellite. Source: blockstream.com

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From all of us to Coin Clarity, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!