Bitcoin Price Weekly Analysis – Can BTC/USD Hold $9,000?
Key Points
bitcoin price declined this past week and moved below the $10,000 level against the US Dollar.
There was a break below a major bullish trend line with support at $10,350 on the 4-hours chart of the BTC/USD pair (data feed from SimpleFX).
The pair must stay above the $9,300 and $9,000 support levels to avoid further declines in the near term.
bitcoin price is under pressure below the $10,000 level against the US Dollar. BTC/USD remains at a risk of more declines if the pair fails to hold the $9,000 support.
This past week, there was an increase in bearish pressure on bitcoin price from the against the US Dollar. The price started a downside move and traded below the $10,500 support level. There was also a break below the 23.6% Fib retracement level of the last wave from the $8,250 low to $11,650 high. Moreover, there was a break below a major bullish trend line with support at $10,350 on the 4-hours chart of the BTC/USD pair.
The pair traded towards the $9,400 support and declined below the 100 simple moving average (4-hours). More importantly, there was a break below the 50% Fib retracement level of the last wave from the $8,250 low to $11,650 high. It has opened the doors for more losses below $10,000. On the downside, the $9,350 support is holding losses and is preventing declines. Should there be a break below $9,350, the price below the $9,000 level. An intermediate support is near the 76.4% Fib retracement level of the last wave from the $8,250 low to $11,650 high.
On the upside, a break above the $10,000 resistance is needed for the price to move back in the bullish zone.
Looking at the technical indicators:
4-hours MACD – The MACD for BTC/USD is currently in the bearish zone.
4-hours RSI (Relative Strength Index) – The RSI is currently well below the 50 level.
Two cases for Segregated Witness (SegWit) activation via different channels are moving closer to reality this week for bitcoin. Meanwhile, Litecoin is getting closer to its own SW activation as its price is climbing to new highs.
Litecoin Hits 3-Year High
Despite not suffering the same teething problems as bitcoin, SegWit appears to have at Litecoin, with support moving over 58%. At 75%, SegWit will trigger, as it already has done for fellow altcoin asset .
Litecoin creator Charlie Lee has been a vocal proponent of SegWit, but not as a solution to block scaling, especially since Litecoin does not have any capacity issues.
“The main fix is transaction malleability, which would allow (LN) to be built on top of Litecoin,” he back in January.
Thanks for supporting Litecoin and signaling SegWit! It's clear that the market is in favor of it.
It appears traders have welcomed the news with Lee proclaiming the market gains as sign of support for SegWit activation. Litecoin price broke $9 USD on Monday, a value it hasn’t seen in three years.
SegWit2MB Could See Reality in December
Meanwhile, in bitcoin-land, implementation via 2-megabyte blocks, known as SegWit2MB, received support from ShapeShift CEO Erik Voorhees and subsequently from Andreas Antonopoulos.
At the same time, ex-BTCC COO Samson Mow has announced the winner of his coding competition to produce a “safe” method of introducing SegWit via a user-activated soft fork (UASF).
In a post on published Sunday, Voorhees announced that SegWit2MB had been formally proposed to bitcoin Core mailing list recipients.
Its proponents, bitcoin security consultant Sergio Lerner and RootStock, foresee a successfully accepted proposal coming into force December 14, 2017 – if it gains community support.
Balancing ‘Social’ and ‘Technical’
Lerner was first to say that it was neither a solution, nor a one-size-fits-all patch. Rather he referred to SegWit2MB as a “least common denominator.”
He explained:
Segwit2Mb is the project to merge into bitcoin a minimal patch that aims to untangle the current conflict between different political positions regarding segwit activation vs. an increase of the on-chain blockchain space through a standard block size increase.
Lerner added that the concept was hardly a new idea, and Voorhees commented that the “cost of conflict” meant that a “social” as well as a technical solution was badly needed.
“bitcoin is a technical project, absolutely. Yet it is a social project as well […] This current impasse is similarly both technical and social, and it continues at great cost,” he wrote.
Weighing up the proposal, Voorhees similarly touched on its use as a bridge between technical and social requirements of the community.
“SegWit2MB is the first reasonable compromise, considering the impasse’s technical and social aspects, actually put forth in code, based on well-known and studied fundamental components from bitcoin’s best engineers,” he concluded.
Andreas Antonopoulos agreed with Voorhees’ perspective on Twitter, describing SegWit2MB as a “political, not technical solution.”
“Segwit2MB is far from ideal but better than more scaling war,” he added.
Agreeing with Eric. Segwit2MB is far from ideal but better than more scaling war. A political, not tech solution.
Meanwhile, Mow announced on Twitter he was awarding 5.95 BTC to a coder named shaolinfry for his creation of Mow’s required “safe” method of activating SegWit via UASF.
Shaolinfry receipt of the money on Twitter, which was followed by another user sending 1 BTC as thanks for developing the potential activation solution.
As it stands now, SegWit activation is still well below the 95% threshold it needs to activate, which is why the UASF is becoming an increasingly popular idea in an effort to bypass the deadlock with miners.
Across the divide, Chain engineer Oleg Andreev added to that bitcoin’s capacity problems were something of a myth and that no block size increase was needed.
New bitcoin images on Photobucket THE HISTORY OF bitcoin AND LITECOIN THE HISTORY OF bitcoin AND LITECOIN – Pic_zpse62a9658.jpg First mentioned in 2008 by a developer using the pseudo-anonymous identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin, the […]
