If the bulls were hoping for a jump start at the end of the week for a Bitcoin recovery, then they will be very disappointed in today’s performance.
After seemingly bouncing back up yesterday, price took a turn for the worse in the last 24 hours, with price hitting a hard low around USD 7,757 in late afternoon trading North America time. While recovering from there to a level now above USD 8,000 (CoinDesk, 1:15 pm UTC), there does not seem to be very much positive strength to point towards continued recovery over the weekend, but it’s all down to how Friday trading ends for the United States.
Price may not look good but let’s have a look at the news that Venezuela’s central bank is holding Bitcoin for some positive sentiment. According to Bloomberg, the South American country, whose flirtations with its own crypto Petro and its spiralling national currency have captured the headlines for over a year amid hyperinflation and debt, has a secret stash of Bitcoin and Ether.
Its international reserves, which are undisclosed, are reportedly going to include crypto, now that its national oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, is trying to send it to the central bank. Apparently, as the main source of revenue, the firm hopes to be able to pay its debt repayments and bills owed to international suppliers.
Four people claiming to have direct knowledge in the matter told Bloomberg that the central bank is now “studying proposals that would allow cryptocurrencies to be counted toward international reserves, now near a three-decade low at USD 7.9 billion”.
Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro finds his country increasingly isolated from the global financial system, with US sanctions against his country compounding a severe economic meltdown and hyperinflation in Venezuela. The state has been desperately looking for a way to circumvent these blocks. Petro was not widely accepted, and even denounced… but Bitcoin and Ether, as globally accepted currencies, could now be the solution.
It won’t be long before they could be forced to decide, though that news may never officially come to light through formal channels.
We now move to the next point of positive sentiment, examining fresh data that shows an all-time high of Bitcoin hash rate, just as the trends predicted, and just as we at BitcoinNews.com faithfully report. This is yet another debunking of the news that Bitcoin faced a 40% flash crash last week, blamed for triggering this current round of selling pressure on Bitcoin.
According to U Today, Friday marked the record setting measurement, with a new all-time high of 108 EH/s. This would have meant a doubling of a recovery had the mystery flash crash turned out to be true. Price has yet to react to this news, and has in fact shed even more, so this does also suggest that price in the short term does not exactly correlate with hash rate. In the long term, however, there is no mistaking the patterns that correlate!
Crypto commentator Dovey Wan notes, however that S9 mining equipment, which is the machine used by the majority of miners, will suffer an impact if price drops below USD 7,500. This could cause temporary drop in hash rate if these S9s switched off when they became unprofitable. Wan does say though, that this “is actually [sic] good thing for BTC”.
Pleas note S9 is still holding up majority of the hashrate now (only part of the machines have been upgraded, and M20s just shipped first few batches and S17 is not shipped yet)
We will see a cool-down of hashrate hype and which is actually good thing for $BTC
— Dovey “Rug The Fiat” Wan?? (@DoveyWan) September 26, 2019
We haven’t talked about Libra in a while, but we should probably pay attention to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg actually coming out to say that his crypto project Libra is facing a lot of issues. So much so, he now does not expect Libra to launch next year, as previously anticipated.
He told Nikkei Asian Review:
“Obviously we want to move forward at some point soon [and] not have this take many years to roll out. But right now I’m really focused on making sure that we do this well… A lot of people have had questions and concerns, and we’re committed to making sure that we work through all of those before moving forward.”
Libra developments are closely watched by crypto speculators, as they believe that acceptance of Facebook’s own crypto would spell an indirect endorsement for blockchain and crypto — and thus, Bitcoin.
Many crypto people believed that it was Libra’s unfortunate hurdles with regulators that was the cause for poor sentiment for the wider crypto market, but purists will actually claim a victory over centralized notions of a private crypto. They will say, why do we need Libra when we already have Bitcoin?
They have a point, we believe!
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