The Bitcoin price continues to astonish chart watchers as the bullish momentum is not over yet. With its price increasing to US$2,500 yesterday afternoon, many people wondered whether that price point would hold. Fast forward to today and the Bitcoin price hovers around US$2,700. It is evident the BIP91 lock-in has affected the price in a positive manner for the time being. If this momentum can be maintained, the Bitcoin price could easily hit US$3,000 in the next few days.
BIP91 Lock-in Generates Bitcoin Price Momentum
Bitcoin traders all over the world have been keeping a close eye on the BIP91 lock-in schedule. Considering how the lock-in required over 80% of the network’s hashing power to unite behind this solution, there were no guarantees that a consensus would be reached anytime soon. In a surprising turn of events, the vast majority of mining pools came together and signaled for BIP91 to secure that this scaling “solution” would be locked in place. Late last night, the threshold for locking in the BIP was met, and we currently stand in a grace period before the network will reject non-SegWit blocks.
Although there are people who don’t care about which scaling solution “wins” in the end, one cannot deny the impact this proposal has had on the overall community. After months of bickering and political shenanigans, the mining community finally agreed for once. Although not every mining pool signaled for locking in BIP91, there was plenty of hashpower in favor of this solution. As we’ve discussed before, BIP91 is designed to make SegWit2x and the upcoming user-activated soft fork compatible, rather than to cause a potential blockchain split.
Even before this threshold was met, the Bitcoin price had started showing signs of an upcoming bullish rally. We reported on the sudden price momentum yesterday, although one could not factor in the BIP91 lock-in at that point. Even though it appeared that reaching the required number of blocks would be a trivial matter, there is never a reason to get ahead of oneself. All it took would have been one major mining pool to suddenly stop signaling for BIP91 and the lock-in threshold would not have been met. Thankfully, those mind games were not present, for a change.
Now that the first hurdle has been passed successfully, the time has come to look toward the future. Activation of Segregated Witness on the Bitcoin network is only a matter of time by the look of things, even though nothing has been set in stone just yet. If and when Bitcoin scales, many speculators expect another bullish move upward where the Bitcoin price is concerned. It is not unlikely Bitcoin will test the US$3,000 mark again and possibly even reach US$3,500 over the coming weeks.
Right now, the Bitcoin price is hovering around US$2,700, which marks a 12% increase over the past 24 hours. It is remarkable how a glimmer of hope can cause the Bitcoin price to shoot up suddenly. This bullish price momentum is mainly fueled by the Bitfinex exchange, which has generated 11.35% of the 24-hour volume right now. Bithumb is still in second place, although their volume is US$100M lower than that of Bitfinex. It is quite nice to see fiat currency trading representing the top 3 trading markets for Bitcoin right now.
Maintaining this bullish Bitcoin price momentum will not be easy, though. It all depends on how quickly Segregated Witness can be activated on the network. Right now, that seems to be a matter of a week or two, yet things might change over the coming days. Segregated Witness will pave the way for the Lightning Network as well, which will introduce faster and cheaper Bitcoin transactions. The future is looking very bright for Bitcoin right now, assuming the community doesn’t fall apart in the next few weeks.
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