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According to data from CoinMetrics, a sell-off on Bitstamp led the market-wide plunge of Bitcoin (BTC). The top cryptocurrency by market capitalization dropped $150 within seconds on the exchange, well below the average market price at the time.

Researchers at CoinMetrics said:

Today's market drop was led by trade activity on Bitstamp, where Bitcoin's price dropped $150 in seconds, well below the rest of the market.

The price of Bitcoin drops lower on Bitstamp than other exchanges on July 10. Source: CoinMetrics

The sell-off on Bitstamp coincided with a sudden dump of BTC by miners. ByteTree shows miners sold 558 more BTC than they mined in the last 24 hours. This suggests that miners led the correction of Bitcoin on July 9, possibly trading on Bitstamp.

Miners are one of the two external sources of unmatched selling pressure on Bitcoin, as investor Willy Woo previously explained.

When miners begin to sell BTC and the market does not immediately absorb the selling pressure it can lead to an abrupt pullback. That is what likely happened on July 10 when the price of BTC dropped to around $9,100 from $9,400.

Throughout the past month, miners have been selling a modest amount of BTC regularly. But miners have always maintained a positive net inventory for over five straight weeks. In other words, miners have been selling less BTC than they mined since the start of June.

As miners started to sell a relatively large amount of Bitcoin for the first time in over a month, BTC saw a rapid, short-term price drop.

Miners sold off an unusually large amount of Bitcoin in the last 24 hours. Source: ByteTree

Although the sell-off primarily occurred on Bitstamp, the firms executive emphasized that it was not a flash crash. Hunter Merghart, head of U.S. operations at the exchange, said it was merely a normal market activity.

Merghart said:

Happy to see market moves analyzed but not sure a ~2% move should be called a flash crash. This is also how markets work, especially when an exchange doesn't act as a market maker. We let our clients try to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities, not ourselves.

Simply put, sellers on Bitstamp likely kickstarted the unexpected 2% price drop of Bitcoin followed by organic selling pressure from traders and clients on the exchange.

After the price of BTC dropped to around $9,110 across major exchanges, it rebounded quickly to above $9,200.

The swift rebound of Bitcoin might suggest that a sudden sell-off on Bitstamp possibly by miners triggered the drop. Based on the reaction of buyers in the $9,000 to $9,100 support area, the probability of a continued recovery of BTC price remains high.

If a one-off event caused a BTC drop to a level that presents significant liquidity for buyers, the probability of a strong reaction from bulls might increase.

Cryptocurrency trader Michael van de Poppe wrote:

Bitcoin is still holding support above the $9,000 barrier. A breakthrough further of $9,300 could lead toward $9,600. Essentially, anything between $8,500 and $10,500 is playground time for altcoins and that could last a few months longer.

In the near-term, traders generally consider the $9,300 level to be a strong area of resistance. A reclaim of $9,300 is likely to see a retest of the high-$9Ks, analysts say.

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This Exchange Crashed Bitcoin Price to $9K: Heres Why Thats Bullish - Cointelegraph

A Parisian street artist is receiving hundreds of dollars every day in bitcoin donations from his painting that speaks about fiat and money printing.

Pascal Boyarts latest mural, Confessions of a Red Jester, is a modern interpretation of the 1862 painting Staczyk by Polish romanticist painter Jan Matejko. The original depicts a lonely jester against a lively ball in the background.

Boyart said he has earned about 0.0514 bitcoin (BTC) or around $500 in the five days to July 10. Since 2017, the artist, famed for his practical graffiti frescoes, has received over 1.3 BTC or $12,100 in donations from various artworks. His website also accepts donations in ethereum, litecoin and monero.

The latest piece, which can be seen on Paris rue de Montmorency, features a QR code, together with a spray-painted Bitcoin logo and a wallet address, allowing for direct BTC donations from admirers.

Boyarts rendition takes the crypto-angle a step further, with fiat money littering the floor around the solemn jesters feet.

The French artists past work has examined the relationship between art and money. In an interview published on Medium in 2018, Boyart said that digital financial assets represent a type of freedom thats reminiscent of the early days of the internet.

He stated that bitcoins decentralization is a good thing for creativity, and, therefore, good as a means for facilitating donations. Boyart said the top cryptocurrency provides a more direct relation with the people who love art and more horizontality in the business of art.

What do you think about Boyart tying art to bitcoin? Let us know in the comments section below.

Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons

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'Fiat and Money Printing' Street Mural Earns $500 in Bitcoin Donations in Five Days | News - Bitcoin News

A recent article by a Cointelegraph Markets contributor proclaimed that Bitcoin is the new Apple, explaining just how Bitcoins (BTC) price could reach $60,000 by 2023: Bitcoin hangs near the chasm of the adoption curve, and its price looks similar to Apples stock in 2008 before it broke out with a 520% rally.

The technology adoption curve referenced was Everett Rogers famous diffusion of innovations model, published in 1962, which described the five stages through which technology becomes diffused i.e., goes mainstream: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards.

In 2008, manufacturer Apples United States smartphone penetration was stalled at about 11% and still waiting to cross the chasm, the gap between the early adopter stage and the early majority stages in the Rogers lexicon. Any technical innovation worth its salt needs to cross that threshold. Apples smartphone surmounted that chasm, of course: Usage exploded, and Apples share price soared into the ionosphere. Bitcoin may well be in a similar place today.

But this comparison, satisfying as it may be, raises some questions. Is BTC even a technology like radios, PCs, and smartphones or is it something different: unique, sui generis i.e., in a class by itself? Is BTCs global penetration really anywhere close to 11% its putative U.S. penetration rate? Also, while smartphone usage indubitably crossed the chasm more than a decade ago, how does one extrapolate BTCs future price from AAPLs share price? Shouldnt it be compared with smartphones price?

The resemblance between Bitcoin and Apple in terms of growth and adoption is indeed there, but in short, is it fair to compare Bitcoin to younger versions of tech giants like Apple?

Arvind Singhal, a professor of communication at the University of Texas at El Paso, whose academic research has focused on the diffusion of innovation, told Cointelegraph that Bitcoin did indeed seem singular: It has tremendous barriers to adoption for most individuals and operates in a space of multiple familiar currencies and that peculiarity would greatly influence its adoption.

Michel Rauchs, the head of Paradigma a consulting firm focusing on the digital assets sector and a former research affiliate for the cryptocurrency and blockchain research program at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance at the University of Cambridge, told Cointelegraph: Bitcoin is not a technology in itself, and any comparison [with traditional technologies] is misguided. He added: It is a social/economic system, a new monetary order that uses technology to represent its unit of accounts. Technology is just a secondary component, a means to an end.

Additionally, it may be important here to separate Bitcoin from the more generalized blockchain technology in which it partakes or risk misapplying Rogerss diffusion of innovation theory suggested Theophanis Stratopoulos, PwC Chair Associate Professor at the University of Waterloos School of Accounting and Finance, who further explained to Cointelegraph:

When decision-makers consider whether to implement blockchain in, lets say, their supply chain they develop expectations in terms of the cost of making the investment e.g., paying for the implementation of the software versus the benefits, such as increased revenues or cost savings. It is the difference in expectations among decision-makers that explains the adoption cycle that was observed by Rogers.

But Bitcoin does not behave the same way as other technologies typically adopted by firms like CRM systems, for instance. When it comes to Bitcoin, its the expected price that drives people to invest in Bitcoin. It is a matter of speculation, Stratopoulos continued, closer to a pyramid scheme than a capital expenditure. If I believe that more people will want to hold Bitcoin in the future, the price of the Bitcoin will rise. In a case like this, it makes sense for me to invest today rather than tomorrow.

Oliver von Landsberg-Sadie, the CEO and founder of the BCB Group a digital assets financial services group agreed that BTCs adoption cycle was anomalous, telling Cointelegraph: The reason Bitcoins adoption path has broken formation with established adoption curves is quite technical: In the short term, the more users there are, the less useful it is as a currency.

With more users, the Bitcoin network self-regulates by raising the network fees as the mem pool bulges up in busy periods and breathes out in quieter ones. But this makes Bitcoin less effective as a payments processing system. As von Landsberg-Sadie explained: When fees are high, no one is going to pay a $5 transaction fee on a $5 coffee.

Many technical solutions have been proposed to solve this dilemma, some in the form of forks, others like the Lightning Network project that makes use of a second layer, but none have truly stuck in the core Bitcoin protocol, which has been the slowest to evolve. The good news is that it is evolving, and the increase in off-chain transactions is reducing barriers, but all of this means one cant expect Bitcoin to follow a classic Rogers technical adoption curve, according to von Landsberg-Sadie.

When U.S. smartphone penetration stalled at around the 11% mark in December 2008, Apples share price became volatile three-month volatility stood at 92%, according to the July 6 Cointelegraph article. In June 2020, with BTC penetration at 11%, three-month volatility was at 64%, indeed also a very high figure.

But Stratopoulos was unimpressed. I would not compare Bitcoin to the performance of Apple or Amazon or any other high-tech company. Rogerss adoption cycle applies to innovations emerging technologies not to the price of stock. Kevin Dowd, a professor of finance and economics at Durham University in the United Kingdom, agreed, telling Cointelegraph:

Since BTC is a form of product, then the natural comparison is with Apples smartphone product. Apples share price might have risen strongly, but the better comparison is with the price of smartphones, which have not.

It is relatively easy to find correlations like between AAPL in 2008 and BTC in 2020, commented Stratopoulos. It does not mean that there is causation, or it could be just a spurious correlation.

What, then, can be said about Bitcoin adoption? If measured by awareness e.g., recognition of the term Bitcoin then it has already entered the mainstream, said Rauchs. A Blockchain Capital survey reported 89% awareness of Bitcoin in the U.S. as of Spring 2019. A U.K. Financial Conduct Authority survey conducted in December 2019, which was recently published, found that 73% have heard about crypto, compared to 58% in 2019.

As for BTC ownership, the Blockchain Capital survey reported: In total, 9% of the [U.S] population owns Bitcoin including 18% of those aged 1834 and 12% of those aged 3544. The firm originally reported 11% but that was later corrected. In the U.K. survey, by comparison, an estimated 3.86% of the general population currently own cryptocurrencies. This projects to approximately 1.9 million adults within the U.K. population (over 18) of roughly 50 million.

Rauchs finds the lower U.K. adoption estimate more realistic if generalizing; that is, he would peg crypto ownership at 3%5% of the global population, which also includes indirect ownership e.g., individuals participating in a pension fund that invests in Bitcoin. But this clearly means that all crypto is in the first half of the early adopter stage nowhere near the so-called chasm.

Its not much different for blockchain technology. Stratopoulos co-authored a paper on blockchain technology adoption exclusive of cryptocurrencies that concluded: Despite the recent hype, the current adoption rate is relatively low, and blockchain has not become mainstream yet.

Bitcoin clearly means different things to different people. Its most popular use today is as a store of value, while back in 2011, its principal use was as a payment method for gaming and other purposes, said Rauchs. Depending on its applications, different adoption curve scenarios are possible. For his part, Rauchs believes that BTCs most likely future usage will be as an alternative, non-sovereign store of value.

According to von Landsberg-Sadie, Bitcoins true adoption pattern will be more like a wave, oscillating higher at each cycle. In this view, the biggest bets are on the most extreme outcomes: Bitcoin will either ripple slowly out of relevance, or it will amplify meaningfully into the mainstream. My money is on the latter.

In sum, BTC following the same growth pattern as Apple sounds like a fun version of what may happen, but ultimately, one shouldnt quibble that it is not based on a statistically valid experiment, as Dowd reminded Cointelegraph. Still, according to several experts, it doesnt make sense to compare Bitcoin to traditional technologies because Bitcoin does not have the ability to create value either in the form of increasing revenues or reducing costs, as Stratopoulous noted. Moreover, global BTC penetration is arguably closer to 4% than to the 11% mark where smartphones stood in 2008, immediately before they went mainstream.

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Comparing Apple to Bitcoin? Crypto Occupies a Class of Its Own - Cointelegraph

A developer known for working on enhancing Bitcoin privacy has set his sights on a new project he hopes will massively improve how we keep our transactions private.

Chris Belcher, who also created the technical privacy market JoinMarket, is currently working on putting to the test CoinSwap, an idea first proposed by legendary Bitcoin developer Greg Maxwell in 2013. Belcher has been focusing on CoinSwap rather than JoinMarket because he thinks it will give users better privacy, he told CoinDesk.

Belcher recently received not just one, but two grants for his efforts, showing just how excited Bitcoiners are about the potential of the project.

Though the Bitcoin network arose from a privacy-minded movement, its privacy is actually pretty thin. Just take a look at any block explorer for a glimpse of how easy it is to pull up any transaction thats ever happened in Bitcoins history as well as the transactions associated history.

Right now, Bitcoin privacy is not very good at all. Anyone in the world can analyze the blockchain and then can find all sorts of information about users their balance, their history, who they transact with and in what amounts, when everything they spend, Belcher told CoinDesk in an interview.

Belcher argues that this is, in some ways, worse than the financial privacy we have in legacy systems today. The banking system, they know your transactions, but the general public doesnt. With Bitcoin it is the general public it is everyone that can see exactly what the user does, Belcher added.

He added its important to most people that this type of information isnt exposed to the whole world.

Financial privacy is good for human dignity, [for example], if you dont want your neighbors to see what charities you donate to or that type of thing, or if youre paid in bitcoin you dont want your employers to know what charities you donate to or what other activities youre involved in, Belcher added.

CoinJoins: today's Bitcoin privacy

CoinJoins (distinctive from CoinSwaps, which Belcher is putting to the test) are the privacy transactions that are most popular on Bitcoin today. CoinJoins give users good privacy and are becoming more popular. Thus far, they have been adopted in the Wasabi wallet, Samourai Wallet and JoinMarket.

A CoinJoin takes all inputs from several transactions by different users and mixes them into one big, collaborative transaction. This one big transaction then sends the bitcoins mixed from different addresses out to different addresses. Because no one can tell where the spent bitcoins originally came from, the scent of the trail is obfuscated and the participants in the CoinJoin gain better privacy.

But its not perfect. There are still ways for people analyzing the Bitcoin blockchain (namely blockchain analysis companies) to detect when and where bitcoins are being mixed.

For one thing, the transaction sizes of mixed coins are much bigger than normal transactions because they contain so many different inputs.

Also telling is the fact they have outputs that are all the same size. Equal output CoinJoins are very obvious. If someone sees them on the blockchain they can see that this kind of privacy protocol is happening, Belcher said.

Why are outputs the same size? If Bob sends 0.8 BTC into the CoinJoin transaction and Alice sends 0.187 BTC and Mary sends 1.2222 BTC, and the resulting outputs are exactly 0.8 BTC, 0.187 BTC and 1.2222 BTC respectively, that coincidence is pretty obvious to anyone who is looking.

In order to preserve privacy, a CoinJoin transaction usually splits the amount of bitcoin dispensed into even pieces, say 0.1 bitcoin. So, if Alice put in 0.3 bitcoin, she will receive three 0.1 pieces sent to three separate addresses that she controls.

Most transactions dont have a bunch of equal outputs like this. Thats why CoinJoins are easy to detect.

Indeed, there have been a few instances of cryptocurrency exchanges banning users who have evidently sent their bitcoin through such privacy services.

Theyll be suspicious. If theres someone analyzing the blockchain, theyll see this is a CoinJoin, so they know this person did that. And if they see another transaction, [by comparison] they can see that its not a CoinJoin, Belcher said.

CoinSwap: an invisibility cloak for transactions

CoinJoin and CoinSwap have similar names and they both help to preserve privacy, so its easy to confuse them. But theyre different, and Belcher argues CoinSwaps fixes many of the problems of some kinds of CoinJoins and is the next step for on-chain bitcoin privacy.

CoinSwaps can be made to look invisible, Belcher said. If done correctly, a CoinSwap transaction can look just like a vanilla bitcoin transaction.

In a CoinSwap, it looks like two separate people are sending completely separate transactions. But under the hood, something else completely is happening.

Two parties, say Alice and Bob, execute such a swap. In short, Alice sends some bitcoin to a CoinSwap address. Bob sends the same amount of bitcoin to a separate CoinSwap address.

If both send the right amount of money over, the coins are swapped. The coins Alice sent to the CoinSwap address are sent to a new address owned by Bob, and the coins Bob sent to his own CoinSwap address are sent to a new address owned by Alice.

'Teleporting' Coins

Under the hood, the CoinSwap address, which is responsible for this swapping, is much fancier than a normal bitcoin transaction. Its a multi-signature transaction, meaning it requires more than one person to sign off on it in order to send the transaction. Usually, these types of transactions stand out on the blockchain since they look different from normal bitcoin transactions. But by including ECDSA-2P cryptography, these multi-signature transactions can be made to look just like normal bitcoin transactions. This is very much Belchers plan.

With ECDSA-2P in place, Alice sends a CoinSwap to Bob and it just looks like just a normal transaction. But actually the coins have ended up somewhere else completely, Belcher said.

This component is important. If all of these transactions look the same, people who arent even using CoinSwaps are getting more privacy too. Theres no way to tell if any transaction is a CoinSwap transaction or a normal one, turning bitcoin chain analysis on its head.

Similar technology will expand to the Lightning Network as well, so blockchain watchers cant tell if any single transaction is a CoinSwap, a Lightning Network transaction or just a normal bitcoin transaction.

CoinSwap could be said to allow bitcoins to teleport undetectably to anywhere else on the blockchain, as a description of the technology on the Bitcoin Wiki puts it. For a deeper explanation, check out this post from JoinMarket developer Adam Gibson.

Thats not to say that CoinSwap is perfect, though. The problem with CoinSwap is that it is a much more complicated process to implement than CoinJoin.

'As decentralized as possible'

In his mountain of a post, Belcher describes how to turn the idea of CoinSwap into reality.

A key reason CoinSwaps havent taken off since Maxwell described them seven years ago is that theyre not as straightforward as CoinJoins. So, Belcher has his work cut out for him in implementing the complexity for the first time.

His first step was just thinking about the best way to do it, outlining a number of different design considerations in the article making up his plan of attack. For one, he plans to use the Rust programming language, since its potentially more secure than other languages.

I want to make it as decentralized as possible, so theres no central point of failure that can be switched off or censored, Belcher said. To meet this goal, he wants the whole thing to run over the privacy network Tor, which helps to shield IP addresses, which are kind of like a mailing address for a computer exposing where it is located.

I think thats quite necessary for privacy, he said.

Belcher outlines this and various other considerations in his proposal, such as routing and using PayJoin, yet another bitcoin privacy technology, alongside it. Now that his ideas are out in the public, people can comment and make suggestions.

The next step is actually implementing it. Belcher told CoinDesk he hopes to release a minimum viable product in the next six months.

Image: BallesStrob-4 by MathGoulet is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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CoinSwap and the Ongoing Effort to Make Bitcoin Privacy 'Invisible' - CoinDesk - CoinDesk

Bitcoin & Black America author Isaiah Jackson joined us on the latest episode of the new The Decrypt Daily podcast, discussing his book, the impact of COVID-19 on black and brown communities, and how he sees Bitcoin as a solution to address wealth inequality.

Released in July 2019, Bitcoin & Black America discusses the potential for Bitcoins impact on the black community amidst the digital transformation of money, plus it explains how business owners can accept cryptocurrency and highlights key black figures in the crypto space.

I'm a very solutions-based person, and one of the things I wanted to do was provide solutions and meet people where they are, Jackson explained to The Decrypt Daily host Matthew Aaron. A lot of times in the Bitcoin space, people are so smart that they're dumb. They know everything about everything, but they can't explain it to anybody, because they use way too many big words and jargon that nobody really cares about.

Plus, they forget they're talking to humans; humans always have their own interests at heart, he added. When you're talking about Bitcoin in general, nobody cares. Like, Alright, whatever. How does this affect me?

In addition to explaining some of his proposed solutions to increasing black wealth with Bitcoin and keeping that wealth within the community, Jackson digs into the potential for Bitcoin to help the black community create leverage and potentially break away from the current American financial system if needed.

The only two solutions I've seen since I've been alive have been money or violence. Violence is not the route that you want to go. You do want to protect yourself. So let's talk about the money, he said.

We as a community can come together and say, Hey, we will exit the system, and the trillions of dollars that we have basically helped create in this country will exit to Bitcoin. At the very least, you'll get taken seriously. And banks will have to change their practices. A lot of credit unions who are around they'll have to change their practices.

We definitely need something to protest with, he added. I think Bitcoin is the best peaceful protest.

Subscribe on iTunes to The Decrypt Daily to hear our full interview with Isaiah Jackson and continue to be informed about the latest happenings in cryptocurrency, blockchain, and decentralized tech.

The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.

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Black wealth must exit to Bitcoin, says author Isaiah Jackson - Decrypt