Prices
A quiet holiday weekend for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
James Rubin
Bitcoin remained stable over the Christmas long weekend as investors largely ignored the crypto and macroeconomic uncertainties that have plagued the world in 2022.
The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization was recently traded at around $16,900.
This is around 24 hours ago, around closing on Friday when the market was closed for the holidays. Given the historic slowdown in business at the end of the year, BTC is likely to continue trending roughly the same through the end of the year.
“Bitcoin appears to find a home in the $16,000 to $17,000 zone,” wrote Edward Moya, senior market analyst at forex market maker Oanda, in an email.
Ether recently traded above $1,200, reflecting Bitcoin’s constancy over the past three days. The second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization simultaneously rose 0.5% from Sunday. Other major cryptocurrencies, which are colored green instead of red, have been flat recently.
XRP, the token of the open-source public blockchain Ledger XRP, was one of the biggest gainers above $0.36, up 5.4%. ADA, the token of the decentralized blockchain platform Cardano, and MATIC, the token of layer-2 platform Polygon, have recently risen by more than 2%.
Due to the holiday weekend, Monday’s U.S. equity markets were closed. They gradually increased on Friday after the most recent consumer sentiment poll from the University of Michigan revealed an increase in economic optimism.
Nevertheless, the S&P 500 has declined for three straight weeks despite having a significant technology component.
As a severe winter storm blasted across much of North America, causing temperatures to drop to record lows, U.S. miners shut down over the weekend. Between December 21 and December 24, according to data from BTC.com, the Bitcoin mining hash rate—a metric of computational power on the blockchain—fell by around 100 exahashes per second (EH/s), or 40%, to 156 EH/s. As of December 25, it had decreased to roughly 250 EH/s.
The court’s approval of a $37.5 million bankruptcy loan for bitcoin miner Core Scientific last week gave Oanda’s Moya hope. According to processing power, Core Scientific, one of the biggest miners in the world, agreed to a debt restructuring plan with some of its lenders.
Insights
Cryptocurrency Values Have Dropped, and That’s a Good Thing
Author: David Z. Morris
The collapse of cryptocurrency had very little to do with cryptocurrency, which is perhaps the most important point that the mainstream media has overlooked when reporting on the multiple collapses in the crypto field over the past year.
Cryptocurrency is the application of blockchain technology to build an uncensorable, freely accessible, immutable global shared ledger, usually a currency ledger. But almost all of the headline-grabbing crimes and failures of 2023 have been attempts to use financial engineering to translate the future value of these systems into current dollars.
Too often, monetary authorities have made big bets using the same kind of fragile, complex, interlocking leverage that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Other times they used open fraud – and they did it off-chain, with no rules or transparency.
It would have been more accurate to divert the real public interest in the currency to their various unsustainable games and regard them as followers and freeloaders. Like many areas of modern finance, the financial brothers were extractive rather than additive. They weren’t Master Builders, but they were a bunch of newly hatched vampire squids and little wannabe Goldman who desperately pushed underdeveloped blood funnels into things that smelled of gold.
