The price of Bitcoin is back over the $2,500 mark, following several days of concerns about whether the strong rally that’s been spanning for over a month now is finally over. After the USD price rapidly declined at the end of last week, it lead to high frequency on the trading market and selling trends, but things are now normalizing and the price is back up. However, judging by the current market signals, you might not want to take a break from watching your Bitcoins just yet.
In other interesting news, another regular Joe turned Bitcoin millionaire was revealed this week, but this time it’s an 18-year old called Erik Finman, rather than your more experienced techie. Namely, Finman entered the Bitcoin craze when he was just 12 after being gifted with $1,000 by his grandmother. He surprisingly chose to invest the money in Bitcoin and sold his first batch of BTC by the end of 2013 for a price of $100,000.
Finman, who decided to become a millionaire and avoid going to college, made a bet with his parents that if he succeeded his parents wouldn’t force him to, CNBC reports. After selling his first Bitcoins, he started an online education platform, which he later sold for 300 BTC. He now owns 403 in total, which per the current price amounts to over $1 million.
Sellers Show Up
During the past week since our last update, the price of Bitcoin saw some big fluctuations, even losing hundreds of dollars in value in the course of a single day. The lowest point was hit on Thursday night, when the price dropped to $2173.21, while currently it sits around $2,660.
Naturally, the price drops coincided with changes in market volume, which probably for the first time ever exceeded the 2 billion mark. But currently, the trading volume is on a slow rise and sits at $1,824,230,000, while the market cap is back to $4.4 billion.
Our market analysis shows that there’s selling pressure forming, which hasn’t happened in a long while, with the market signals split between buyers and sellers. Out of 12 oscillators, 5 are sending a selling signal, with 6 out of 12 moving averages following suit. The SMA 100 is still over the SMA 200, hinting at an upward trend, but the gap between the averages is narrowing so a break in the opposite direction could be in the making. So keep a close watch on any trend changes, especially by the end of week.
SegWit – An Official Scaling Solution
After a year of debating what’s the best solution for solving Bitcoin’s scalability problem and increase the blockchain block sizes, a consensus has been finally reached in the mining and business community to stand behind SegWit as the most appropriate answer to the problem.
If you remember from our past update, SegWit was a proposal to double the number of transactions per second by trimming out some of the data from each transaction or moving it out of the blockchain, thus keeping the currency more decentralized than with the Bitcoin Unlimited proposal, which reportedly would have given miners more influence over the cryptocurrency.
According to recent reports, 80% of the mining community is already voicing support through implementing lines of texts in each block mined, achieving the needed network hash rate to officially green-light the change. However, implementing SegWit won’t happen overnight, as the code is still in alpha stage, while the Beta code is scheduled for release by the end of June, with the final implementation rumored to come by July 31st.