CryptoGram_0017: January 18, 2018

Crypto Correction 2018, #ISITOVERYET?

It appears we have made it through the first correction of 2018 and it was a bloody as they usually are. BTC dropped from around 16,000 to about 9,000 and almost everything else fell at least 40% as well. A few things stood out of this to me:

1. The top five coins haven't changed. I understand BTC, ETH, and BCH being in the top 5, but ripple and Cardano i dont get. Neither one is really used for anything as far as I can tell. They literally just hype coins. (I think Cardano will do more in the future, but right now, they are pretty slim.

2. There is alot of hub bub about market manipulation by

• Korea
• Wall Street
  This I believe strongly. As long as a market can legally be manipulated by traders it will be. I do think the people responsible for basically attacking a bunch of hackers money may get a rude awakening outside of the law. I think sometimes people, especially financial people, who are used to working inside a strict regulatory box, forget that there are other consequences than legal ones and it may come back to bite them. Basically once the legal leashes are taken off of these Financiers, they suddenly start pulling all the insider type stunts they can think of. They believe that because the gov't (US or otherwise) wont stop them, no one will. Well, it occurs to me that most of these people are stepping into a world of people who understand the software that they are dealing with far better than they do, and this lack of knowledge in the area that they are attempting to manipulate may strike back.

Also, gov't agencies could be:
a. in on it, and manipulating the market right there with the other guys. I think there are many times that the left hand and right hand arent in perfect sync. Furthermore, i doubt its uncommon for them to work directly against each other. i.e. the right hand is writing regulations and raiding exchanges while the NSA tries to figure out how to hack BTC...
just sayin... ya know? Its the government after all.
or
b. GOV't is going to issue some hindsight regulation and indictments based on past actions and interpretations of law affecting current securities. Something like "well... you knew what you were doing was illegal because it is illegal in securities, and if you perform the Howie test on the asset you manipulated, you will discover that it is a security. Therefore, your going to jail... forever."

This is all speculation of course. They might all get away consequence free. Who really knows at this point.

Thanks for reading,
-libertyhound

State of the market:

For new readers:

Cryptogram is my personal journal of thoughts about cryptocurrencies and related topics.

Purpose of CryptoGram:

Currently in the crypto space it can be difficult to remember what you have discussed or been thinking from one week to the next. The rapid development of, and many changes in the space keep everyone on their toes. Now that I have been financially involved in the space for roughly a year, I realize that I would love to have my thoughts from 2017 written down somewhere. I believe having this information will help me stay focused, avoid repeating past mistakes, and hopefully help some other people, (anyone who decides to read this,) from making those same mistakes.

Briefly, I need a place to record my train of thought and that place will now be dubbed "CryptoGram"

My thoughts on the structure of this post are:

• About 500 words.
• Frequency of once a day to once a week.
• Each post will have a number and date.
• A snippet of top 5 cmc coins for price reference. (state of the market)
• I will always use these 5 tags, three of them will be:
  • bitcoin cryptocurrency ethereum
  • the other two will be topic specific