Daily TL;DR - January 2nd (One Stop Daily News Summary)

DAILY TL;DR W/ CHESLINK
JANUARY 1ST-5TH
January 2nd

1. BTC NEWS
2. IN OTHER NEWS

MARKETCAP ANALYSIS

Recap from 11/20
Market Cap: $243,311,416,536
24h Vol: $7,403,167,283
BTC Dominance: 56.2%

As of 12/11
Market Cap: $462,879,608,891
24h Vol: $25,098,117,991
BTC Dominance: 61.7%

As of 12/31
Market Cap: $592,941,301,681
24h Vol: $33,207,433,786
BTC Dominance: 38.0%

As of 1/2
Market Cap: $689,345,508,374
24h Vol: $41,942,917,374
BTC Dominance: 37.1%

BTC NEWS

Bitcoin Enters the Year Limp
• https://siliconangle.com/blog/2018/01/01/bitcoin-enters-new-year-not-bang-whimper/

In what was generally a slow day of trading, bitcoin dropped as much as 9 percent, to $13,440, as of 4 p.m. EST, with the price showing little movement since, sitting at $13,462 as of 10:15 p.m. Exchanges in Asia, which often lead the way in driving bitcoin’s price and where it’s no longer New Year’s Day, showed similar trends. Bitcoin’s price hardly moved, though exchanges in Japanand Thailand had bitcoin trading at around a $1,000 price premium when converting local currencies to U.S. dollars — not an untypical gap between exchanges.

The lull in frenzied bitcoin trading has also seen a reemergence of conspiracy theories as to why bitcoin’s price rose so rapidly in 2017. Investopedia reported that some believe the market may have been manipulated by North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

Bitcoin Inflated by Media… no really? What about these FUD posts?
• https://nypost.com/2018/01/01/beware-of-the-media-inflating-the-bitcoin-bubble/

Bitcoin has a market value of less than $300 billion — which sounds like a lot, but total global wealth is $280 trillion, according to Credit Suisse.

The minority of regular people dabbling in bitcoin think it’ll become a currency. They worry that the dollar, pound, euro and yen will fall victim to hyperinflation, as Western governments continually print more money.

Finally, it’s hard for regulators to crack down when the press encourages the mania. Leading financial pages — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times — have run multiple news articles describing bitcoin as a “currency,” either virtual, digital or crypto.

Disappointed Wallstreetianese
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/petertchir/2018/01/01/bitcoin-futures-fail-to-live-up-to-the-hype/#2344a3034052

What should concern Bitcoin Bulls the most is that most of that volume occurred on December 22nd - a bad day for Bitcoin. On the CME, Bitcoin started the day above $15,500 and plummeted to a low of $12,265. Bitcoin itself, according to Bloomberg 'flash crashed' to a low of $10,775 on that day and the CBOE contract traded to $11,300 - extreme divergence. The CBOE exhibited a 'normal' volume acceleration on a down day. It had 12,554 Jan. contracts trade that day while the CME had 2,374 Jan. contracts trade that day - triple and double the average volume, respectively.

bubble.com vs bubble.Bitcoin
• https://www.techtimes.news/schwab-strategist-dismisses-bitcoin-comparisons-to-dot-com-and-housing-bubbles/

Jeffrey Kleintop, Charles Schwab’s chief investment strategist, told Business Insider that if there is a bitcoin bubble, it is not like the dot-com and housing bubbles. If bitcoin prices fall, it will not be for the same reasons as the other bubbles since bitcoin is not yet embedded in the economy and the financial structure the way dot-com and housing stocks were. Any fallout in bitcoin prices would be reflective of developments unique to bitcoin.

Kleintop said 2018 will be a strong year for equity valuations, and the first year for back-to-back, broad economic growth in more than 10 years. The top 45 economies all are expected to grow next year, pointing to further earnings growth.

In 2017, earnings increased every month as stocks rose, he said. Yield curves are flattening slightly, Kleintop said, which is one area of concern for 2018. The yield curve could portend a recession in 2019 or thereafter.

Kim Jong Un Excellent Crypto Trader?
• https://www.investopedia.com/news/kim-jong-un-responsible-bitcoin-price-gains/

TechCrunch speculates that because of massive international sanctions which have been put in place to deter North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, the regime has historically found "side businesses" to gain additional funding. One of these could be cyber-piracy.

In this scenario, the regime gains access to digital currency holdings, work to pump up the prices of those assets, and then dispose of the coins to continue to finance its activities.

Through its actions – including the continued destabilization of international markets and the hacks of digital currency exchanges and traditional banks – the North Korean regime may be aiming to drive up the price of digital currencies so it can take advantage of the relative anonymity these investments (or illicit holdings, as the case may be) afford.

Bitcoin Crash? Bitcoin Burn.
• https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/29/bitcoin-fever-to-burn-out-in-spectacular-crash-david-stockman-warned.html

"It's basically a class of really stupid speculators who have convinced themselves that trees grow to the sky," he told CNBC's "Futures Now" last week. "It will burn out in a spectacular crash. All of these latter-day speculators will have their hands burned to a crisp, and they will learn the proper lesson."

Stockman blamed the Federal Reserve and central banks for creating the hype surrounding the stock and cryptocurrency markets. He argued that too much liquidity was pumped into the marketplace to deal with the 2008 global financial crisis — noting that not even regulators can improve the frothy situation.

"What we really need to do is not think these are regulator problems, but understand they're monetary problems," he said. "It's an irrational, overheated market like never before."
"Anytime Wall Street sees an opportunity to shear the sheep, and they see the sheep stampeding to the slaughter, they line up with some new gimmick to take advantage of the circumstances. That's all," he said.

"There is nothing that's being validated by the opening up of a futures market. It's just everybody trying to get on the train for the ride," he added.

IN OTHER NEWS

Bitmex Liquidates BCash… I mean… BCash
• https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/bitmex-liquidates-bitcoin-cash-holdings/

Recently, BitMex, one of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges, has liquidated all its users’ Bitcoin Cashholdings for Bitcoin.

In an official announcement, the exchange confirmed that it has successfully sold all of the Bitcoin Cash and has compensated users in Bitcoin in the ratio of 1 BCH to 0.1707 XBT.

NXT vs ARDR
• https://www.reddit.com/r/NXT/comments/7nkum1/difference_between_nxt_and_ardr_what_you_need_to/

So I know alot of people are wanting to know the answer to this question, and so was I when I first got into Jelurida tech (thats the company behind both blockchains in case you were wondering)

Here is so far the SIMPLEST way to explain the two for people to understand:
NXT is complete. They have worked on it for years and is build from the ground up as a certain type of code. It can be used and cloned very easily and when companies want to use NXT, there is literally no cost to using it for a self contained system (like the Austrian ID stuff that just started using NXT). You just basically get a copy of the blockchain and its not connected to any other chains.

Ardor on the other hand is like NXT , but on a completely separate code that is designed for CHILD chains rather than duplicate chains or side chains. (Side chains is what ETH is all about and all the ERC20 tokens that you see come out) Child chains are diffrent where they are not just wild west side chains, but they are directly tied to Ardor in security and other ways. They can be customized like NXT to have some or all the features of it, but it more expensive to start one.

So in reality both have uses still:
---If you want something for a project to build on that is really inexpensive and robust, and not so much for transactional purposes, you would use NXT.

---If you want something that is more customizable, transaction friendly, but costly, you would start a child chain on ARDR.

Siacoin Updates
• https://blog.sia.tech/sia-community-update-four-f274b99fca89

2017 has been quite a trip for Sia and our users. Twelve months ago, Siacoin had a market cap of $5 million USD, and a single coin was worth $.0002. You can read that out loud as two hundredths of a cent. Today those numbers are just shy of a billion (with a b) and about 3 cents, respectively.

On Sia v1.3.1 release: I’m not sure where to start. We’ve changed a lot of things under the hood. One of the first big goals for this release was stable contracting. This version is better about monitoring the health of your contracts. When hosts disappear, they get replaced quickly. If a contract starts to run low on funds, it gets renewed automatically. Money is allocated more intelligently between contracts, which allows you to use your allowance a lot more efficiently. It also means that you pay less in contract fees. We overhauled uploading, and the repair process.

This release has had an unprecedented number of community contributions. From bugfixes, to API extensions, to algorithmic help, we’ve been very excited to see the number of non-core-team pull requests grow. It’s a fantastic sign for the health of the network, and means that Sia continues to grow up and become independent from us.

Bank of England to Create Digital Currency
• https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/bank-england-%E2%80%8Eto-beat-bitcoin-rival-cryptocurrency-coming-%E2%80%8E%E2%80%8E2018%E2%80%8E/

The Bank of England has established a research unit to probe the possibility ‎of issuing a prototype cryptocurrency, which could serve as rivals to the likes ‎of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The central bank could clone or improve on bitcoin’s technology, but it may fail to duplicate the cryptocurrency’s established lead in adoption and ‎the large ecosystem of applications that have built up around it.‎

But if the BoE decides to go through with the idea of creating a Bitcoin-style currency, making it available to retail transactions, the new initiative ‎will ‎open the door to British citizens to keep their digital money with the central bank, dispensing with the need for a retail bank. The government-‎backed digital coin‎, which has already carried out initial work in some areas, ‎could facilitate a drastic change in the way financial ‎transactions are conducted, which then could happen in nanoseconds. ‎

Bank of Isreal to Create Digital Currency
• https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-cenbank-currency/israel-central-bank-mulls-issuing-digital-currency-for-faster-payments

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The Bank of Israel is examining issuing digital currency as a means of creating a faster payments system as well as reducing the amount of cash in the economy, a central bank source said on Sunday, though he stressed no decision had yet been made.

But the Israeli source said any digital currency introduced by the country’s central bank would be centralized, safe and abide by money laundering rules - in contrast to bitcoin and its peers, which are decentralized and whose value has often oscillated wildly.

Vitalik Consoles Worried Investors
• https://investfeededge.com/ethereum-founder-vitalik-buterin-changes-course-comments-leaving-cryptocurrency/

Buterin clarified on Thursday that he would keep working in the cryptocurrency world as long as the ecosystem is working towards “real social value,” even if there was still “price memes and stupid jokes.” He also wrote on Wednesday about his continued hope in the cryptocurrency community despite his grievances.

At just 23 years old, Buterin, who got a Thiel Fellowship at 20, recently saw his name on Bloomberg’s list of the 50 most influential people in 2017 alongside mainstays like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

What’s Hot in 2018
• https://venturebeat.com/2018/01/01/12-changes-that-could-shake-up-the-blockchain-world-in-2018/

The DAO market, currently led by companies like Aragon, Colony, District0x, and DAOStack — will soon have a few proof-of-concept DAOs running. It’ll be interesting to hear the metrics they report in terms of set up time, user base, types of activities/DAOs in operation, etc. These protocols have massive opportunity (as I wrote previously on VentureBeat), though the vision in this market may be way ahead of the tech.

I’m rooting for interoperability players — like Polkadot, Cosmos and new entrants like Lamden and Metronome — that will enable transactions and information exchanges between different blockchains. But I think it will be a while before they really get off the ground. In the long term, they’ll enable a multi-blockchain world. But in the short term, they’ll increase the load on key blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin and so won’t likely get much love from those communities just yet. I expect them to be a bit quiet for the time being. For more on this sector, see my earlier story.

Kik did the first reverse ICO; now YouNow is about to do one. I think we’ll see at least 15-20 more reverse ICOs in 2018. A “reverse ICO” is when an existing company decentralizes itself and issues tokens to its members to stimulate a circular economy. This is as opposed to a ICO from a brand new startup project. All this activity will require the services of a new type of professional — the tokenization consultant — so expect to see that role catch on in 2018, too. For more on reverse ICOs, see here.

Bots… Those Sons of Botches.
• https://www.investopedia.com/news/bot-activity-plays-major-role-cryptocurrency-price-swings/

Volatility that is already built into the market is only highlighted by bot activity. Venture Beat points to the crash of Neo, the "Chinese equivalent of ethereum" as one example. The token's price fell from $34 to $3.74 in mere seconds, then climbed back up to $34 just as quickly. Since then, flash crashes of this type have happened in other digital currencies as well.

Besides their hand in flash crashes, bots can also manipulate markets by artificially inflating a price. Human traders may be enticed to overpay for coins because of the activity of bots. The automated trading protocols can engage in a "pump-and-dump" scheme in just the same way as human traders; multiple bots buy up a low-priced currency in order to generate artificial interest in the coin, thereby pumping up its price.

Next, bots will sell off the asset when it reaches a high point. However, without new buyers entering the market, the price of the coin then falls quickly, and human investors are typically left holding a worthless currency for which they've overpaid.

Unfortunately, it's very difficult to detect bot activity without complicated analysis tools. Price momentum and volume can be indicators, however. Still, even if you're able to identify bot activity before it takes place, the unregulated nature of the digital currency market makes it difficult for human investors to do anything about it at this point.

Korean Ban? No, but Regulations ASAP
• https://www.coindesk.com/south-korea-sets-date-for-anonymous-crypto-trading-ban-report/

The proposal essentially strengthens "know-your-customer" rules already in existence for exchanges and banks, and will require cryptocurrency exchange users to connect a bank account with identifying information in order to deposit or withdraw funds.

Other regulations include strengthening anti-money laundering rules, as well as a ban on issuing new anonymous virtual accounts. The government's proposals could even go as far as shutting down cryptocurrency exchanges within the country.

Korean Reduced Fiat to Exchange Regulations
• http://m.news.naver.com/read.nhn?mode=LSD&sid1=001&oid=469&aid=0000266838

The financial authorities are pushing ahead with measures to prevent further investment by existing virtual money investors. New investors are not allowed to trade because of the suspension of issuance of virtual accounts at the end of last month, but existing investors are not constrained until the 20th, when the real-name system is implemented. As a result, existing investors will not be able to add additional funds from the 10th at the latest.

According to the Financial Services Agency on February 2, the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) is negotiating with local banks and major virtual money exchanges to issue virtual accounts to the Exchange. A financial official said, "In order to strengthen the account control of virtual money traders, the real name system is implemented. Unlike new investors, existing investors have no restrictions on additional investments." In the end, It is a constantly growing trend, so we need to stop it." The official added, "After cooperation with commercial banks and exchanges, we will implement measures to limit the investment of existing investors to the transfer of real names as soon as possible."

Stellar Mooning and Mobius to Follow
• https://medium.com/mobius-network/stellars-meteoric-rise-and-why-mobius-is-set-to-orbit-from-it-in-2018-27f49d0bb348

In 2017 Stellar grew by over 20,000% and in 2018 will easily rise to become a top three coin by market capitalization. Stellar’s meteoric rise is significant for Mobius because as the first major token built and announced on Stellar back in July 2017, it will greatly benefit from ecosystem network effects that will bolster mass adoption and growth of Mobius technology.

Stellar and Mobius are currently supplanting Ethereum’s market dominance through live and functioning faster, cheaper, and more secure high performance platforms.

Since Mobius is built on top of the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) and uses tiered Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) for Internet-level consensus, the costs of transacting on the network are exponentially cheaper. Mobius also allows for transactions to occur an order of magnitude faster because of the SCP, which means scalable and cheap use-cases on blockchain such as those Mobius is building are possible today.
Simply put, Ethereum and it’s ERC20 derivatives cannot run any real-world applications because the network can only process ~7 to ~14 transactions per second (TPS) and is at times charging $0.30 — $0.70 per transaction while only becoming more expensive due to network congestion.

This makes running consumer-facing applications and processing IoT data via the Mobius Proof of Stake Oracle Protocol (PSOP) feasible — you can even use our live DApp Store right now. IBM also realized Ethereum’s fundamental flaws and abandoned it for Stellar, a much more reliable long-term platform and partner.

Mobius also fully utilizes smart contracting capabilities without the massive attack surface present on Ethereum. This allows Mobius to build fast, cheap, secure, and scalable applications on blockchain today so small businesses and major enterprises can use Mobius technology without compromising on data security or worrying about existential threats to the entire system or their digital assets.

The rise of Stellar in 2018 will have powerful network effects and only drive adoption of Mobius in the ecosystem because we are built to scale, while already supporting numerous live apps today. Our scalable and secure use cases were something Jed McCaleb, the cofounder of Stellar, noticed when he joined our Advisory Board and became one of our earliest supporters and token buyers.