Bitcoin and Ethereum prices crashed, the sunset of cryptocurrency?

Over the past week, the Bitcoin price and Ethereum price went into a nosedive. The bitcoin prices crash below $2000 and the ethereum prices crash below $140 over the weekend in a broad based correction. Though the ethereum prices have since recovered to come back towards the $160, the bitcoin prices continue to trade below $2000.

These two cryptocurrencies have been making waves the world over in 2017, with punters/traders making big bets on more price increases.

Bitcoin continues to be plagued by uncertainty stemming from disagreements among the currency’s developers over how best to run the blockchain platform Bitcoin is traded on.

In one camp, developers want the transaction capability of the Bitcoin network to be significantly increased. The other side argue that maintaining a cap helps protect the security of the platform.
Meanwhile, Ethereum lost around 25% of its value of the weekend and a short time ago was trading at $155 after dipping below $140 overnight.

“It’s a market wide sell-off that is the result of >4 months of FOMO built on weak hands”, Andreas Antonopoulos, author of “Mastering Bitcoin” was cited as saying by CNBC.

However, Bitcoin is expected to undergo a series of significant and necessary changes to its underlying code. These changes will address concerns around its ability to transform the currency into a secure and anonymous payments system, capable of handling many more transactions every second – similar to Visa and Mastercard.

But given that Bitcoin is an open-source software, meaning that there is no central authority or owner of the system, deciding on and implementing the changes is not straightforward.

There has been a variety of reasons attributed to the fall. It includes the enw software upgrade in bitcoin which is due to release on August 1 and this has unnerved some of the investors who want to sell off as they are uncertain about the consequences of this upgrade.

Some point towards the rumors of a split in bitcoin. Some also point to general profit taking and correction after bitcoin and ethereum have risen so much over the last few months. Then there are the ICOs where various crypto based startups collect funds in ethereum and with several million collected by them over the last few weeks, they need to convert some part of them into USD and hence they are probably dumping them into the market.

“It could be people who are not comfortable in holding Bitcoin because of August 1st due date”, Andrea Medri of The Rock Trading was quoted as saying on CoinDesk.