What's going on with Bitcoin network fees and why SBD could ourperform STEEM in the short term

What's going on with Bitcoin? According to multiple reports the mempool is getting cleared up fast and 50 satoshis per byte transaction fees are the norm now!

_{Via Armin van Bitcoin}

Reports cite Segwit mass adoption, Lightning Network and bundling of micro-transactions by bigger parties/exchanges.

Lightning Network, you say? But isn't it still in heavy development phase? Apparently not, as the reddit user btc_throwaway1337 made a real purchase of physical goods using the Lightning Network. He claims it was fast, painless and free.

Along with his story you can find proof, that the transaction cost was $2.40. Note the transaction itself was fee-less, but there has to be a fee for creating that payment channel. Don't know the logic behind channels and Lightning Network? Hit up my recent post for regular earthlings here.

Seeing as that transaction cost $2.40 6 days ago, with 119 sts/byte, imagine it today with the empty mempool.

Catch up on the whole che-bang here on reddit

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Why could the price of SBD keep outperforming STEEMUSD?

In this article, we will only take a look at the technical analysis. As a daytrader, who has been baptized heavily in the markets, there have been several patterns that have a much higher probability of working and hitting their targets, than some others.

Head & Shoulder patterns, for example, are considered one of the most unreliable patterns of all time. Everybody sees them, everybody maps them and they fail most of the time.

_{Via chartpatterns.com}

But here comes the batman pattern to help us out. It's essentially nothing more than an unshapely H&S pattern, but it often seems to work as a continuation pattern as well in addition to working as a reversal pattern - opposed to H&S, which is mostly a reversal pattern. I still haven't made my conclusion about this, but this pattern almost always points higher. Let it be noted, that i have at least one misarable failure as well with this pattern. Le'ts see some examples:

But what almost always gets the price moving, are price compression patterns. Compression patterns are triangles, wedges, where price gets compressed into less and less space until it has nowhere else to go than explode out of it's range.

And here we get to the SBD chart

As you can see, the price of SBDUSD has been compressed into a wedge-like formation. We briafly discussed this with some our mates, for example @bulleth, but to be honest, i personally thought that we would compress even more. How do we measure the targets of wedge breakouts? Well, according to some Legendary traders (i'm looking at Dale Pinkert here), wedges almost always retrace 100%. Whoa! This would make the around 18 SBDUSD!

Quick review of some of my old charts tell this pattern with it's breakout has a high success rate of reaching it's target. The target is NOT often reached in an explosive manner, as the strength of the breakout fizzles away somewhere in the middle, but the direction is set and one can ultimately expect to see the price at previous visited area, ie 100% retrace - at 18 SBD.

Now how does this compare to the STEEMUSD price action?

Here it is - not a bad looking bull-flaggy formation. This chart pattern mostly leades to upwards breakout, but due to the not-so-compressed nature, the outbreak won't be anywhere near the explosiveness of wedge breakouts.

Why isn't the SBD peg to $1 holding? Don't know, don't care. As long as you keep posting that valuable content, you will have some SBD to exchange into STEEM.

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When you are done with the serious matters, lets end this day on happy mood note. Take a look at this beautifully visualized history of Bitcoin from 2019 - 2018, to start your day with something nice. Thanks, XalionIO, for linking. Via reddit