Comment of the Day @VentureCoinist:

South Korea Outlook

South Korea has been the center of the crypto universe over the past week and has had major impact on the market. A panic sell off was started when news broke, claiming that regulators were going to ban cryptocurrency trading.

However, over the following days, it was established that this was fake news and FUD. In reality, it was a press release that stated regulators were discussing cryptocurrencies and the effect of a possible ban.

Which is understandable considering the significant premiums in the overheated Korean markets. Unsurprisingly, government officials were caught trading on the news causing outrage at the hypocrisy.

Joseph Young summed up the likelihood of a South Korea cryptocurrency trading ban with this informative tweet:

With so much positive activity for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in South Korea, a flat out ban seems unlikely. The areas that will interest regulators and governments the most in years to come are likely to be money laundering and tax evasion. Both of these are not solved by outright banning but by improving exchange compliance.

CNBC Incompetence

CNBC has jumped head first into the cryptocurrency scene and unfortunately this has come with unprofessional coverage. The way they dealt with the Bitcoin Cash listing on Coinbase was irresponsible and implied investors would be wise to buy over $8,500 / BCH.

Since then, there have been other gems of stupidity; as the entire crypto market crashed last week there was just one crypto that was up in USD terms, of course it was Tether.

For those that don’t know, Tether is a USD proxy and is backed by a 1-to-1 reserve of USD held by Tether in the banking system. The entire point of USDT is to remain stable and pegged to the value of the dollar.

It linked to an article explaining the investability of Tether and celebrating it for being the only cryptocurrency not to take a loss…

BCash vs Bitcoin

Roger Ver is still trying to convince the market, world and anyone that will listen, that Bitcoin Cash (BCash) is the real Bitcoin. He has taken over the @Bitcoin Twitter channel and started posting non-factual FUD

The anti BCash sentiment really picked up after www.bitcoin.com made the default wallet download a Bitcoin Cash wallet. This has caused numerous new investors to lose their Bitcoin as they send it to the wrong address.

BCHPLUS is a fork of BCash and it implemented SegWit and Lightning. With the aim of trolling BCash and making it seem pointless to the new investor:

As the Forking trend started to emerge over the summer, it was thought that it could have a serious impact on Bitcoin by diluting its market share to alternative versions like BCash, Bitcoin Gold etc.

There was a initial boom in Bitcoin forks, with a peak in December 2017 with 12 forks. However it seems that investors’ appetite is not strong enough and these forks are no longer getting listed on exchanges.

Hopefully making this market a little less confusing than it already is.