‘Is The Bottom In? Not Yet,’ According to BTC Price Analyst Willy Woo
bitcoin’s technical analysts have begun disagreeing about the future of the BTC price as the cryptocurrency sets three-week lows January 14.
Shirakashi: ‘Strong Case’ BTC Has Bottomed
In a and on Twitter, Renato Shirakashi and Woobull.com creator Willy Woo offered differing opinions about what the short-term had in store for BTC, debating whether BTC/USD 00 had set a definitive ‘bottom’ in its bear market.
The pair had reached $4250 earlier this month before a series of drops saw support around $4000 evaporate. At press time, BTC was trading around $3540, its lowest price since December 18.
Shirakashi, presenting a bullish case, voiced skepticism over warnings previously issued by traders such as Tone Vays. As Bitcoinist , Vays, who previously correctly called the BTC price drop to between $3000 and $3500, believes BTC/USD could touch just $1300 – or even lower.
“I have so much respect for Murad Mahmudov, David Puell, Willy Woo, Tone Vays but I have to respectfully disagree with them,” Shirakashi wrote.
I have a really strong case in hands that state: The BTC bottom is in.
A variety of technical indicators, including those developed by Mahmudov and Puell, support the view, he said.
Woo Cautions On Optimism
At the same time, Woo focused on on-chain volume volatility to suggest that BTC still had lower to go – less volatility is a prerequisite for price growth.
“Is the bottom in? Not yet,” he tweeted.
In order for the bottom to be in, the volume of coins changing hands becomes steady, currently it’s very erratic, synonymous with middle of the bear detox.
Is the bottom in? Not yet.
In order for the bottom to be in, the volume of coins changing hands becomes steady, currently it's very erratic, synonymous with middle of the bear detox. (In this chart I'm tracking the volatility of on-chain volume).
— Willy Woo (@woonomic)
Technical arguments broadly reflect wider industry opinion on price this year. Last week, Civic CEO Vinny Lingham he imagined BTC would trade sideways below $5000 for “one or two months” before making a decisive move, while others believe 2019 will see new all-time price highs.
Shirakashi likewise predicted a period of little activity before growth kicked in.
“The fact that I’m arguing that BTC has reached its bottom doesn’t mean I think that it’s going straight up,” he concluded.
In fact, I believe that we will be in a 3k~5k range for relatively long time, as demand starts to build up again (or some big event happens meanwhile). There will be a series of little tests the market will make to confirm this is a safe place.
Shirakashi also placed doubt on the concept of BTC bear cycles becoming longer each time.
What do you think about Willy Woo and Renato Shirakashi’s BTC price analyses? Let us know in the comments below!
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“There’s no such thing as a safe hard fork,” lead developer Thomas Voegtlin corrected an audience member at the conference in Paris last weekend. “I would recommend to have replay protection, of course,” he added.
Community support for SegWit2x, the bitcoin spearheaded by Barry Silbert’s, was virtually absent in Paris. Whenever the “2x” part of the was discussed in the French capital, speakers and visitors overwhelmingly considered it a risk to defend against — not a proposal to help succeed.
Electrum users, for example, will not blindly follow hash power in case of a chain-split, Voegtlin explained throughout his talk; instead, they’ll be able to choose which side of such a split they want to be on. And importantly, the lightweight wallet will implement security measures to prevent users from accidentally spending funds on both chains: “replay protection” that seems unlikely to be implemented on a protocol level if SegWit2x does fork off.
“We are ready,” Voegtlin said. “If [SegWit2x] doesn’t include replay protection, the fork detection we have in Electrum will be useful.”
the successful conference format, the French bitcoin community hosted the first edition of Breaking bitcoin two blocks from the Eiffel Tower last weekend. bitcoin developers, academics and other technical-minded Bitcoiners gathered for a diverse program, but with the common denominator being bitcoin’s security.
“For the past two years, the bitcoin community has been obsessing with scale and scalability,” Kevin Loaec, managing director at and co-organizer of the event, told bitcoin Magazine. “But I’m not so worried about scale, I’m worried about mining centralization, a lack of privacy and fungibility … these kinds of things. As an industry we need to recognize there are more challenges than just scalability; hopefully this conference reflects that.”
Whereas the first Scaling bitcoin conference two years ago was a very specific reaction to a looming block size limit increase hard fork — then put forth by — this wasn’t necessarily the motivation behind Breaking bitcoin. Yet, once again, a controversial hard fork is looming on the horizon. This time imbedded in the BTC1 implementation developed by co-founder Jeff Garzik, the New York Agreement’s SegWit2x is scheduled to increase bitcoin’s “base block size limit” to two megabytes by November — an incompatible protocol change that could split the bitcoin network in two.
And it did not take much to recognize how unpopular the proposal was in Paris. Perhaps most vividly, Italian bitcoin startup led a protest campaign by distributing NO2X stickers; the Twitter hashtag was proudly added as a piece of flair to the by now well-known Make bitcoin Great Again and UASF hats. And voices critical of the project — like Voegtlin and his call for replay protection — could consistently count on rounds of applause. From a technical perspective, the proposal is often considered — quite frankly — to be reckless.
“Unfortunately, SegWit2x […] was designed to effectively be as disruptive to the minority chain,” engineer and author James Hilliard said on stage during the miner panel.
SegWit2x: The Arguments
Arguments against the 2x hard fork are diverse.
Perhaps its biggest problem, SegWit2x currently lacks basic safety measures to prevent unsuspecting users from losing funds. This includes, most importantly, the aforementioned replay protection, but a new address format would be similarly helpful.
Additionally, the three-month lead time for this specific hard fork is considered extremely short — assuming the goal is to prevent a chain-split in the first place. “If you ask any of the developers, they will typically want to see 18 months or two years lead time, for something with as wide an impact on all the software and hardware out there as a hard fork,” co-founder and inventor Dr. Adam Back noted during a Q&A session.
And if the chain does split into different networks and currencies — one following the current bitcoin protocol and one adopting the hard fork — the question becomes which of the two gets to use the name “bitcoin.” So far, proponents of the SegWit2x hard fork have shown no willingness to pick a new name.
This branding issue, contributor and co-founder Eric Lombrozo pointed out, provides yet another point of controversy.
“My personal opinion is that whomever is proposing the change, the onus is on them to demonstrate widespread support,” Lombrozo said during his talk on protocol changes. “The people that want to keep status quo don’t need to show anything. It’s the people who want to change the stuff that actually need to demonstrate there is widespread support.”
And for now, not everyone is convinced that SegWit2x does indeed have this level of support — or anything close to it. While several large mining pools, as well as a significant number of companies, have signed on to the New York Agreement, this agreement was itself drafted without any feedback from bitcoin’s technical community nor — even more important — a reliable gauge of user sentiment.
And while some bitcoin companies claim to represent their customers, this is — once again — not taken for granted by everyone.
“One debate I want to draw attention to,” venture capitalist Alyse Killeen pointed out, “is the debate whether businesses speak for their users. I think this is probably a debate you would only see now in this space because it’s pretty well established that businesses outside of this space do not speak for users, but it’s a debate we still have in our community. Of course they don’t.”
NO2X
If Breaking bitcoin in Paris can be considered at all representative of SegWit2x’s community support — which, it should be noted, is not necessarily the case — the proposal will face an uphill battle to be widely accepted in November.
Indeed, some signatories of the agreement are not so sure about the hard fork anymore: and have publicly backed out of the agreement. And, during a mining panel in Paris, CIO Alex Petrov ever so slightly opened the door to potentially withdrawing support as well, if both the original and the 2x chain manage to survive.
In fact, it’s not just that contentious hard forks are considered a threat to be defended against by bitcoin’s technical community. It goes beyond that.
In the words of bitcoin developer Jimmy Song, at the conclusion of his opening talk of the event:
“What doesn’t kill bitcoin makes it stronger. And conferences like this prove that we’re getting better at this. We’re getting immunized to all these hard forks, and it’s creating a better bitcoin as a result, and that’s a very good thing. We’re securing against a lot of these attacks, and figuring out ways to mitigate these threats.”
