It looks as if we may have a small shakeup in the world of cryptocurrency after all. For some reason, the Bitcoin price has been showing small signs of weakness, which could lead to a short-term downturn in the coming hours. Ever since Segregated Witness locked in, the price has lost some of its bullish momentum. Other currencies are quickly trying to climb the ranks, though, which could result in some intriguing changes.
Bitcoin Price Tanks a Bit Despite Good News
In the world of cryptocurrency trading, there is a saying that everyone should know by now. It goes as follows: buy the rumor, sell the news. This means that the price of a cryptocurrency — especially Bitcoin — is likely to go up when there is a lot of hype regarding upcoming news. When said news actually becomes official, people tend to sell their currency to the highest bidder. It is unclear why this is such a common cycle of events, although it has mainly to do with price manipulation and profit-taking, by the looks of things.
In this case, the Bitcoin hype hinged on seeing Segregated Witness getting locked in on the network. This effectively occurred last night, thanks to overwhelming support from nearly all mining pools. A lot of people anticipated that the lock-in would push the Bitcoin price up to US$4,000 and potentially even higher, but the opposite has happened. Even though we can’t speak of a massive and sudden price decline, it is evident that market sentiment has slowly changed in favor of a bearish attitude.
That isn’t entirely surprising, considering it will take another two weeks before Segregated Witness effectively activates on the network. A lot can happen in those two weeks, especially when considering how SegWit2x is still a “threat”. More specifically, the hard fork to increase the block size to 2MB could spawn a third Bitcoin blockchain capable of surviving on its own. The second blockchain was Bitcoin Cash, which disregarded SegWit altogether and simply went for a straight block size increase to 8MB.
As a result, the Bitcoin community now finds itself in a bit of an awkward situation. Nothing will happen in the next two weeks by the looks of things. After that date, we may very well see the new Bitcoin Core client released, which will effectively cut off SegWit2x clients from the network altogether. It is evident that the Core developers want nothing to do with this 2MB hard fork whatsoever. At that time, users and miners will need to side with either Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash, as pursuing their own blockchain would be less than ideal, to say the least.
All that uncertainty is starting to have an effect on the Bitcoin price as we speak. With a 4.12% decline in the past few hours, the future of the Bitcoin price is somewhat unclear. Reaching US$3,500 may still be possible, but it may very well drop below US$3,000 as well. There is enough conflicting information on the internet to send the market in either direction; that much is evident. If the Bitcoin price were to go down, there is no way to tell where it would end up. Speculators would like nothing more than to stock up on cheap bitcoins for obvious reasons.
All of the Bitcoin price speculation has an effect on other currencies as well. Ethereum has reached its highest value in weeks, whereas Bitcoin Cash appears headed toward US$300 again. IOTA has suddenly found itself among the top 7 cryptocurrencies thanks to an 11.85% gain, and NEO has recovered most of its lost value as well. Rest assured these rankings will fluctuate quite a bit in the coming hours. The bigger question, though, is just what will happen to the Bitcoin price.
