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Bitcoin at the Races: Overall Market Cap of #1 Crypto Swells by Billions

Bitcoin at the races: overall market cap of #1 crypto swells by billions

Bitcoin at the Races: Overall Market Cap of #1 Crypto Swells by Billions

Bitcoin at the races: overall market cap of #1 crypto swells by billions

In case you haven’t been paying attention to the bitcoin price recently, the number one crypto asset is having an epic change of fortunes this year compared with 2018. After already surging more than 100 percent since its December 2018 low point, more than 10 billion dollars have been invested into bitcoin in the last 24 hours alone.

There appears to be something of a perfect storm occurring in the bitcoin market, with enough time since the epic crash of 2018 passing for positive news events to finally drive prices. But, is such a parabolic move to the upside healthy and sustainable?

bitcoin Up Over $2,500 in Just One Month

Erratic as ever, the bitcoin price continues to surge upwards. After a spectacular April and start of May, many market analysts had called for a reasonably large pullback. However, the bitcoin price isn’t done pumping just yet.

The current bitcoin price rally seems to lend support to those stating that the $3,200 was the ultimate low for the most popular crypto asset. Even Civic co-founder, Vinny Lingham has recently said he would become a “raging bull” if bitcoin could hold above the $6,200 level that many felt would serve as insurmountable resistance. Previously, Lingham had stated that he felt bitcoin price would fall once again unless it could hold above $6,200:

Despite being just days ago, the $6,200 level now feels far away as bitcoin continues to race towards $8,000. A likely cause of the continued buying is that the much-anticipated Bakkt crypto trading platform from the Intercontinental Exchange (owners of the New York Stock Exchange) now has a stated launch date.

The platform has been in the midst of legal wranglings as it seeks regulatory approval, and many in the industry see its successful launch as a green light for bitcoin and crypto from all-important organisations such as the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. The financial institution-facing platform that many have been excited for will apparently launch this July.

Another potential underlying factor for the sensational bitcoin price performance is the rumours from the Consensus 2019 conference that global online marketplace eBay is interested in crypto in some capacity. The company has a stand displaying the following seemingly pro-crypto banner at the event.

Some have speculated that the sign might be referring to forthcoming acceptance of certain digital coins from directly within eBay’s payment systems. However, others have stated that the company is most likely working with crypto payment processing company UTRUST to enable sellers to receive payments in fiat currency. Since the payments startup recently hired a former executive from both eBay and PayPal, it stands to reason that UTRUST would start out by using Sanja Kon’s business connections to its advantage.

Underlying these two news events is a market that is largely more optimistic about the future bitcoin price performance than in previous months. More analysts seem to get on board with the idea that the ultimate price bottom is in. With the bear market increasingly a distant memory, the time might finally be right for both retail and institutional investors to take up positions in bitcoin once again.

However, not everyone is convinced that “crypto winter” is over. Some, such as Lucid Investments’s Tyler Jenks remain convinced that $3,200 will be broken again to the downside. That said, all analysts seem to agree that the percentage chance that the bottom is in is constant increasing the higher the bitcoin price rises.

Meanwhile, other price analysts and traders were calling for a smaller pullback via Twitter, before upside momentum would overwhelm bearish sentiment and prices would climb once again.

With the bitcoin price action going as parabolic as it has done so suddenly, it’s difficult to not feel a little uneasy at these vast percentage gains day in, day out. The last time bitcoin price moved so dramatically upwards was at the tail end of 2017, and we all know what followed that…

Related Reading: If History Rhymes, Bitcoin (BTC) May Retrace To High-$5,000s

Featured Image from Shutterstock.

Published at Mon, 13 May 2019 16:30:49 +0000

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This New Tool Can Help Bitcoin Users Deal With Stuck Transactions

This New Tool Can Help Bitcoin Users Deal With Stuck Transactions

Samourai Wallet is becoming increasingly popular as a wallet that focuses on privacy and security for its users above all else, but a recent tool released by this wallet’s team of developers has a focus on user experience. The new app, called Bitcoin Afterburner, allows users of many different bitcoin wallets to boost transactions that have become stuck due to low fees.

The app works for transactions that have been sent or received, and it is compatible with all BIP 39 and BIP 44 wallets. Examples of compatible wallets include Mycelium, Blockchain.info, Airbitz and Electrum.

To get more details about bitcoin Afterburner and the concept of fee bumping in general, bitcoin Magazine reached out to the anonymous CEO of Samourai Wallet.

“Afterburner is one more example of how we are experimenting and developing ways of monetizing our business without resorting to accepting fiat or exposing our users to harmful KYC/AML collection,” said the CEO.

Samourai Wallet monetizes the bitcoin Afterburner app by adding a $5.99 fee for helping users with their stuck transactions. This fee is added to the child-pays-for-parent (CPFP) transaction that is used to bump the user’s bitcoin transaction fee. CPFP is a process by which the recipient of a transaction can spend the inputs of an unconfirmed transaction by using them in a new transaction that has a higher fee (and incentivizes miners to mine both transactions at once).

The full question and answer session with the CEO of Samourai Wallet can be read below.


bitcoin Magazine: Will fee bumping eventually become the norm on bitcoin?

Samourai Wallet: We believe that over time as legitimate transactions start to fill block space, and a fee market begins to mature, wallets that have implemented sophisticated fee management mechanisms such as fee bumping will provide their users with the most competitive transaction fees and confirmation times. The tech is there today, the challenge — and it isn’t a small challenge — is entirely UX. We’re working on this today while others are playing catch-up.

BM: Could you compare and contrast this app with the transaction accelerators offered by ViaBTC and BTC.com?

SW: The difference between the miner operated TX Accelerators is that Afterburner is not an off-chain 1-to-1 with a specific miner. Instead, Afterburner broadcasts a bitcoin transaction to all miners using the standard bitcoin p2p network. All the miners on the network compete for the new transaction with the higher fee, meaning it often works much quicker than the miner operated TX Accelerators. Afterburner was very much a defensive response to the miners who have been blocking SegWit activation and broadcasting empty blocks, some of those same miners are the ones who run the TX Accelerators.

BM: Is bitcoin Afterburner getting much use so far?

SW: Afterburner has a good number of installs, but not many paid ‘Boosts.’ A few days after we released Afterburner the transaction backlog that was driving up fees and confirmation times completely dried up. The fees required for next block confirmation dropped from 300 sat/b to 25 sat/b. Once the mempool gets saturated again, we will have a much better idea of the potential utility of the app.

BM: Why do you think more wallet providers don’t offer this sort of service?

SW: Many wallet providers — inexplicably the most well-funded ones are the most guilty — haven’t invested any time into proper fee estimation and management until very recently. A misguided industry-driven quest to make the bitcoin wallet for “grandma” resulted in an unusable bitcoin wallet for actual users. Samourai has focused from inception on actual bitcoin users first.

BM: Do you think this sort of fee bumping will eventually be free? Does Samourai Wallet offer fee bumping like this natively or do they need to use this separate app?

SW: Samourai Wallet provides the exact same functionality as Afterburner natively. Afterburner was designed to allow users of any other BIP 44 HD wallet to boost their stuck transaction using CPFP (Child-Pays-for-Parent) under the hood. Hopefully they move over to Samourai Wallet if they are satisfied with the service. In addition to CPFP-based boosting more advanced users may opt-in to RBF-based boosting which is also available in the wallet. Both options are available to Samourai Wallet users free of charge.

The post This New Tool Can Help Bitcoin Users Deal With Stuck Transactions appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.