The past 24 hours have been brutal for any Bitcoin holders. Price has dropped from $430 all the way down to the current price during the writing of this publication which is $365. The obvious reason for today’s and yesterday’s dumps is Mike Hearn’s announcement that he is leaving Bitcoin for better things. In a recent medium post, Mr. Hearn single handedly proclaimed bitcoin a failure and blamed the community.

Why has Bitcoin failed? It has failed because the community failed.

This has caused a chain reaction of panic dumping as the news spread, leading to a bloody Friday. I would like to note one interesting fact about the recent dumps. There is a video on reddit showing proof that R3 knew about Mike Hearn’s upcoming departure:

The important message to notice starts at 47:30 by Charlie Cooper – Managing Director at R3CEV:

“Mike Heard, who is one of the prominent core developers in the Bitcoin community who works for R3, um it will be in the New York Times any minute, has broken up with Bitcoin today. He said its a failed experiment.”

The video is taken form Beyond Bitcoin – Morning Webcast Session which was streamed live on January 14th. Shortly before the meeting on January 14th we saw an unexpected dump from $447 to $430 which is likely due to Mike Hearn selling his coins. Furthermore, the fact that Mike’s departure was picked up by New York Times that quickly AND the fact that the Medium article was so accusatory towards bitcoin and it’s community shows signs of potential market manipulation.

Let’s take Satoshi for example, he may as well think that Bitcoin is a failed experiment, but he left quietly without pointing fingers and accusing anybody. An old quote comes to mind:

“To destroy is easier than to create, and that is why so many people are ready to demonstrate against what they reject. But what would they say if one asked them what they wanted instead?” ― Ivan Klíma, Love and Garbage

It is easy to point out all that is wrong with Bitcoin. It is easy to claim that the end is near and that the network is going to fail. At the end of the day, Bitcoin’s market cap is still comfortably over $5 billion. Bitcoin is not a failed experiment, Bitcoin is going through growing pains which will be overcome one way or another.

Back to technical talk, QKN from tradingview has been the closes one so far to predict this price drop. According to his chart, using basic technical indicators the bullish trend seems to have come to an abrupt stop and the bears have taken over the building.

According to QKN, the next stop is $345. Whether the market will drop that low is up for speculation but one thing is for certain, current market conditions are very unstable so don’t make any trades based on emotion because chances are you will fall for a trap. If you are a bitcoin holder and you have lost some money today take a second to vote on how much you lost today, you can feel better knowing others lost much more.

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