Crypto drop august 2018
Gox was the go-to service for handling transactions. But it was still early enough for people to believe that the blockchain system was still getting all the technical kinks out. This, once again, sent shockwaves through the community—but also had the unfortunate impact of normalizing these types of hacks for some people. At the end of and beginning of , more people—especially those in the mainstream finance world—were paying attention to bitcoin and cryptocurrency trading.
This happened right around the time that bitcoin slipped from its peak value, and it certainly seemed to accelerate its drop. Over the course of a few months, China, Japan, and South Korea all announced different measures to better regulate crypto-trading. The world was watching to see if this new technology would hit the mainstream—and government crackdowns following gigantic hacks helped poison the public perception.
While some financial institutions announced projects exploring blockchain-based solutions, many others balked. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, for instance, made multiple comments throughout the year expressing his general antipathy for cryptocurrency. One theory that the U. Justice Department is reportedly looking into is that the digital coin Tether which is supposedly pegged to the U.
This theory stems from an academic paper , which cast Tether in a very damning light. And it also led many to believe that the initial bitcoin craze was manufactured and destined to bust. This would be a path for more mainstream people in finance to dabble with blockchain; it would allow investors to dip their toes in bitcoin without owning the actual asset.
Not only that, but it would make bitcoin available on the most prominent financial markets. The U. Securities and Exchange Commission SEC , however, has yet to allow such a fund to exist—mostly because it is unable to monitor crypto-transactions in order to avoid market manipulation. The inability to get SEC approval really held back bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general.
Blockchains are decentralized, and democratic systems require buy-in from participants in order to keep the engines running. In , this became apparent with the DAO hack. But DAO users had to agree to this change, and there were dissenters. Though the hard fork was approved, it created two active blockchains with two different sets of rules.
Ultimately, this hack—coupled with the inability to deal with it—caused the DAO to end in This year we saw a similar fight break out—this time over bitcoin cash. This coin, mind you, is not bitcoin, though it is built on the same architecture. It was created by a group of miners who disagreed with some of the fundamentals of the initial bitcoin system, and so they forked a new blockchain and went their own way.
In terms of market capitalization, bitcoin cash has always been one of the top cryptocurrencies—in the ranks of Ethereum and XRP. Essentially, bitcoin cash developers had diverging views on the software update for the system, and so they decided to implement another hard fork. This created two new bitcoin cash sects. Internally, the fork caused a lot of strife; one of the most popular bitcoin alternatives was unable to reach a consensus, and instead had to create two different paths that would essentially go to war with each other.
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