Ethereum Price Weekly Analysis: ETH Could Suffer Losses Before Fresh Increase

ETH price traded below the key $139-140 resistance area for many sessions against the US Dollar.
The price is trading with a bearish bias and there could be a few downward spikes towards $125.
There is a key contracting triangle in place with resistance at $136 on the 4-hours chart of ETH/USD (data feed via Kraken).
The pair could trade higher, but as long as it is below $140, it is likely to dip towards $125 or $124.

Ethereum price is struggling to gain bullish momentum versus the US Dollar and bitcoin. ETH/USD could extend losses if it continues to trade below the $139-140 resistance area.

Ethereum Price Analysis

This past week, there were many attempts by ETH price to break the $139-140 resistance against the US Dollar. The ETH/USD pair failed to clear the $140 resistance and started trading in a range. However, most moves were bearish and the price declined below the $134 and $130 support levels. A new weekly low was formed at $127 and later the price recovered above the $130 level. There was even a break above the $135 level and the 100 simple moving average (4-hours).

Buyers pushed the price above the 23.6% Fib retracement level of the last decline from the $166 high to $127 low. However, the upside failed near the $137-138 zone. Later, the price dipped below the $135 level and the 100 simple moving average (4-hours). At the moment, there is a key contracting triangle in place with resistance at $136 on the 4-hours chart of ETH/USD. The pair could spike above the triangle resistance and revisit the $140 resistance area. Above $140, the next key resistance is near the $146 level. It represents the 50% Fib retracement level of the last decline from the $166 high to $127 low.

Having said that, a break above the $139 and $140 resistance levels won’t be easy. If there is a downside break, the price could decline below the last swing low at $127. The main support below $127 is near the $125 level, which acted as a solid resistance earlier. Below $125, the price could slide towards the $114 swing low in the near term.

The above chart indicates that ETH price is consolidating in a broad range below the $140 resistance. In the short term, there could be swing moves, but it seems like the price could revisit the $125 support level.

Technical Indicators

4 hours MACD – The MACD for ETH/USD is slowly gaining pace in the bearish zone.

4 hours RSI – The RSI for ETH/USD is currently moving higher towards the 50 level, with a positive angle.

Major Support Level – $125

Major Resistance Level – $139

Published at Sun, 03 Mar 2019 04:48:41 +0000

August 2, 2017

The Birth of BCH: The First Crazy Days of “Bitcoin Cash”

August 1 saw the birth of a brand-new cryptocurrency: “Bitcoin Cash,” sometimes referred to as “Bcash” and using the currency tickers “BCH” or “BCC.” bitcoin Cash shares a history with bitcoin, but yesterday it forked off to form its own blockchain and currency.

Here’s the story so far.

The Fork

bitcoin Cash, initially defined by the Bitcoin ABC software implementation, was set to fork on August 1 at 12:20 p.m. UTC. Though in reality, because of how bitcoin nodes measure time, the actual fork happened a little bit later.

Starting right when bitcoin block 478,558 was found around 12:35 p.m. UTC, bitcoin miners and bitcoin Cash miners started looking for a different kind of block, each following their own protocol. Unsurprisingly, a bitcoin miner was the first to find one, marking the first block that was rejected by all bitcoin Cash nodes. This effectively realized the “split,” even though no new bitcoin Cash block had yet been found.

Since there weren’t very many bitcoin Cash miners on a network that did maintain bitcoin’s mining difficulty requirements, this first BCH block did not come fast. It took almost six hours, at about 6:15 p.m. UTC, until Chinese mining pool ViaBTC found the first bitcoin Cash block. This, for many, made the “split” official.

At the time of writing, the fork seems to be more or less successful, depending on how “success” is defined in this context. While there were some concerns about the peer-to-peer network — bitcoin ABC nodes initially appeared unable to reach one another — these problems have seemed to resolve over time. And safety precautions like replay protection and wipeout protection seem to be enforced as well.

That said, infrastructure support for BCH is still very limited. Very few wallets and other bitcoin services have adopted the new cryptocurrency so far — this could of course change in the (near) future.

Hash Power Issues

The bigger problem is probably that hash power on the bitcoin Cash chain started out low and has remained low. As a result, confirmation times are extremely slow, often taking hours.

This should improve over time, especially because bitcoin Cash implemented a new difficulty algorithm designed to adjust back to normal faster. However, even with this algorithm, it could take weeks before blocks are found at typical ten-minute block intervals.

Additionally, this difficulty adjustment algorithm could incentivize odd miner behavior. It has been speculated, for example, that miners intentionally mined no blocks for over 12 hours today, as that would help them get back to normal faster. And, notably, similar incentives would exist even once difficulty readjusts to normal on the bitcoin Cash chain.

Market Behavior

As expected, price discovery has been very volatile during these first couple of days. And perhaps more importantly, price discovery is still very limited, for three reasons in particular.

First, as mentioned above, many bitcoin users are still having difficulties accessing their BCH because not many wallets support the new currency. And even if wallets do support it, accessing BCH requires users to give up some level of privacy, security, time and more.

Second, hardly any exchanges have enabled BCH deposits yet. With some exceptions, only users who held BTC on exchanges that credited users with BCH at the time of the fork were able to sell their BCH. All users who controlled their own private keys have had to wait or find someone to sell to themselves.

And third, because bitcoin Cash blocks are slow and the chain insecure, even when exchanges do allow BCH deposits, it can take hours if not days to credit an account.

At time of writing, HitBTC is the only cryptocurrency exchange that allows BCH deposits within a reasonable timeframe. As such, it’s arguably the first “real” BTC/BCH exchange. However, since HitBTC is not a very established name, many may still be hesitant to send their funds to this exchange. (Nor does bitcoin Magazine recommend that you do so.)

Despite all these factors, trading has started, and the market has seen some early price action. Since its launch, the BCH exchange rates on different trading platforms have bounced between some 0.05 BTC per BCH and 0.4 BTC per BCH.

Disclaimer: The author of this article received BCH and has not sold all of it yet.

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