This Week in Bitcoin: Half Full or Half Empty?

Doomsdayers out in force; Paul Krugman being Paul Krugman; Tether upto its usual tricks and the usual gamut of scams, schemes, and shakedowns. It’s been emotional. It’s been nerve-wracking. But it’s also been a total riot. Welcome to This Week in Bitcoin.

Also read: Trading Tip `The Wall´ – I Was Wrong

We’re All Gonna Make It

It’s too soon to say we’re out of the woods, but the blood-letting has at least been stemmed long enough for us to be able to glance at our portfolios once more. The past week in bitcoin has frequently felt like a titanic battle of good vs evil, or rather gloom vs cheer. Every glimmer of good news that’s emerged through the clouds has been drowned out by a sudden deluge of grim tidings. So far, evil seems to have had the upper hand, but like any good fairy tale, the forces of good will ultimately prevail. First though, there’s a white knuckle, heart-racing journey to endure laced with sporadic bursts of pain.

This week’s biggest stories haven’t always made for cheerful reading, but they’ve certainly been captivating, and have predictably been interpreted through the lens of the current mood. Facebook banning crypto ads, most would say, is surely for the best, as if there’s one thing the world doesn’t need more of it’s scammy ICOs preying on the gullible. Some media outlets portrayed this as further evidence of a crypto crackdown, and even suggested it was the reason for the market downturn. They were wrong, although quite what caused this week’s slump is a matter of some debate, which we’ll get to shortly.

Keep Calm and Hodl Hard

Even the most pessimistic of publications didn’t manage to portray Samsung’s entry into the ASIC mining business or Square launching its bitcoin buying service as anything but good news. South Korea bringing an end to anonymous cryptocurrency trading can also only be a good thing if the increased transparency helps settle regulators. These bullish stories were mostly drowned out however by the bearish news that Tether had severed ties with its auditor and been subpoenaed by U.S. regulators.

Depending on your outlook, several of this week’s ICOs were either a raging success or a total disappointment. If you successfully bought into The Bee Token or Dadi, for instance, you’re probably quite content. If you’re one of the hundreds of investors who got scammed by phishing emails purporting to be from these companies, however, this week has been a total disaster. It’s hard to keep track of the amount of ether that’s been stolen in this manner in the last seven days, but somewhere in the region of $3-4 million sounds about right once vegetables on the blockchain’s exit scam is factored in. It’ll keep happening until investors get smarter or ICOs find a way to eliminate these attack vectors. Stopping all email communication altogether would probably be a start.

File Under WTF

And now onto this week’s WTF stories. The whitepaper for Venezuela’s shitcoin – sorry, ERC20 token – arrived, and it didn’t disappoint. We wrote:

There’s something inescapably strange about reading a national government’s whitepaper which references Coinmarketcap and where talk of pre-sales and token emissions is bandied about.

Oh, and with each Petro token priced at the going rate for a barrel of oil, they’ll raise $5 billion if the Petro hits its hard cap. Beat that Telegram. Other oddities we reported on this week include Japan’s most popular chat app announcing plans to launch a cryptocurrency exchange and leaked docs which suggest the NSA are trying to crack the ring signature technology used in anonymous cryptos such as Monero. That one got the comments section warmed up.

Speaking of Monero, if there’s one thing a bear market’s good for it’s flushing out scamcoins. This week, ERC20 token Monero Gold (not affiliated with the real Monero) got rekt and so did Bitconnect imitator Davorcoin. There’s something strangely satisfying about watching a shitcoin plummet all the way to its rightful value of zero.

It’s Time We Talked About the Bitcoin Price

There’s a lot of ways this week’s market drama can be interpreted and a lot of reasons that can be attributed. In the lack of any sensible explanation, we might as well blame the moon again. It seems a more likely explanation than the unfounded rumors of India banning cryptocurrency. Strangely, there’s actually data to support the theory that market cycles are correlated with the movements of the moon. Look, there’s even a pretty chart and a PHD study on the phenomenon, so it must be true.

We’re not saying it was the super blue blood moon that appeared this week, but it was totally the moon. For all the pain the past semana has brought, let’s look on the bright side: bitcoin’s still up 729% since last February. Keep calm, hodl hard and everything will turn out just fine.

What was your favorite story from this week in bitcoin? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Coinmarketcap, and Stroax.

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