Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin Move Higher After Unexpected Sell-off - News 5.20.2021
Can’t stop the crypto — despite negative mood earlier in the week surrounding Chinese regulators’ comments on the extent to which cryptocurrency integration should be allowed at some of China’s largest social media platforms and tech companies — there’s obviously a world outside of China, and American regulators seem to have given things the greenlight for now, provided enhanced reporting requirements are adopted by the industry… something the crypto industry seems to be very open to.
ETH chart via Google Finance; a lot of the growth in Ethereum has come in just the last year.
Earlier in the week, I had to upload my driver license, take a live photo of my face, confirm my mailing address all to buy a small (less than $1,000) amount of Bitcoin — and the bank kept asking me to re-verify my desire to buy crypto, to the point I gave up.
Anyone who tells you this rally is over is ignoring the fact that earlier in the week many like myself wanted to buy more, and were unable to. Some of the large exchanges were inaccessible at certain points, apparently overloaded from new people trying to buy low and weak hands trying to sell even lower … lol.
Not financial advice nor a guarantee of any kind but the media coverage of Bitcoin and its newer brainy cousin Ethereum has simply not been fair by any measure! Bitcoin was up something like 300% over the last year, then it corrects 30% or so in response to negative news out of China — which is a healthy thing to do, non-scams and non-Ponzis do tend to respond to negative regulatory news or rumors. Only scams and glaciers don’t move in response to sudden fear. And some say Bitcoin was overdue for a correction anyway; just a part of the larger bull cycle, if that’s what Bitcoin users are in.
The media’s skepticism toward Ethereum is even more pronounced: around this time last year, one Ether was hovering around US $200 apiece, and a little over a year later — $2,819 per Ether is somehow a tragedy?
They’re being dishonest. If Ether or Bitcoin were stocks, and of course they are not, these would be among the absolute most celebrated ones of the last year.
“But they have no intrinsic value.” Actually not true. A report came out that Ethereum is generating the ETH equivalent of something like $800 million per month right now in network fees. Developers and companies are using Ethereum exactly as it was marketed years ago: as a decentralized apps platform, hard to censor or knock offline since you’d have to knock the majority of the Ether nodes offline, a very expensive and technically difficult feat, if possible at all.
And as these developers, apps, fintech platforms, and companies use Ethereum for their various tailored purposes, while tapping into the shared currency and data transfer/data permanence features of Ethereum’s network, they have to spend Ether as fuel to do so. So, I mean, doesn’t get much more intrinsic than that.
Genius Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin built a censorship-proof alternative to the mainstream Internet, essentially, and if you want to build something popular on it, you’ll end up spending a lot of ETH to keep your contraption running smoothly. Like oil for the digital economy, in a sense.
Read my brand new book on the major cryptos and check out our online bookshelf of prior booklets and books, all of them available for instant download on the Amazon Kindle store!