06
Feb

Bitcoin at $1,010; Venezuela Troubles Continue

The price of Bitcoin remained strong following the release of the NFP report on Friday, noting a near $10 increase since our last update. And just like many times before when the price reached this height, it suffered sporadic bursts of volatility which, at times, took it down and up by $10+. But judging from the current market stance, there’s little reason to be concerned about any major drops, for now.

In other interesting news from the Bitcoin world, an Anonymous group of hackers was reported to have taken down Freedom Hosting II – a hosting service that hosted over 10,000 dark-web websites, including ones involving Bitcoin escrow scams and ponzi schemes. The group of hackers claimed to be associated with the Anonymous group that was made popular through social media.

According to other reports, the group accessed FHII’s database very easily and weren’t intending to disable it. But upon seeing from the database that over 50% of the hosted sites were involved with child pornography, the group took down every site and wiped their database clean. They’ve left an auto-message to the company, (probably) joking that they would sell back the database data for 0.1 BTC.

Buyers Still Leading Market

Thanks to concerns about the US dollar in the face of important events, investors’ interest in Bitcoins saw an uptick in the past days, which the price accordingly reflected. As could be expected, there were some support tests during the weekend which took the price down to its lowest point of $997.70 on Saturday evening, only hours after it hit its 2017 peak of $1020.92.

Volume-wise, things haven’t changed much since our last update, except on Friday, when the volume doubled in size. Currently, the trading volume stays safely around $113,601,000, while the market cap is at $16.8 billion.

Our market analysis shows a strong buyer interest on both a short and long-term time frame. All 12 moving averages are in the buy zone, with 8 out of 12 technical oscillators signaling the same. However, the gap between the SMA100 and SMA 200 is also narrowing down and Stochastic is already in the overbought zone, so don’t take a break just yet.

At present, it seems that the price is headed for further consolidation with slower increases, should the current market winds persist. If they don’t, we might see a push back and test of the $1010 support.

Venezuela’s Largest Bitcoin Exchange Takes a Pause

In other news from the Bitcoin world, one of the biggest Venezuelan Bitcoin exchanges, Surbitcoin, have announced last Friday that they will be ceasing operations due to the revoking of their bank account  amidst a state crackdown on Bitcoin miners. The exchange has stopped providing services and advised users to turn to different exchanges while they take a 2 week pause to restore their operations.

The revoking of their bank account comes after a series of reports of the Venezuelan government cracking down on Bitcoin miners. Following a steep loss of value of the national currency, the Bolivar, the interest in Bitcoins in Venezuela rapidly increased, especially Bitcoin mining, which is supposedly very profitable due to the extremely cheap electricity in Venezuela.

However, it was that the rise of mining operations that forced the government to start making arrests in order to subdue the over-use of the already vastly exploited electricity network. And Surbitcoin’s account revoking is seen as a direct result of those actions, as it was most probably an effort to discourage mining by preventing BTC sales.

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